"It's been an interesting twenty-four hours," she allowed at last. "Did you have a chance to work on the file I sent you?"

"Since your call, I have worked on nothing else, Sharon," he told her. She felt a twinge of guilt at that.

Any time he spent helping her was an hour he couldn't devote to his beloved cars, but this was important.

"Did you learn anything?"

Agarwal nodded. "First of all, I conclude that something very important, and very unusual-unheard of, I might say-has been happening in the corporate culture. For one thing, the activity on the stock exchange has been . . . abnormal, to say the least. Over the last two days, perhaps more, there has been a great deal of reshuffling of corporate affiliations. Megacorporations have been attempting hostile takeovers of smaller corps that had been, until now, considered off-limits because of their a.s.sociations with other megacorps. Do you understand the significance of that?"

After a moment's thought, Sly had to shake her head. "Not really," she admitted. "Economics isn't my strong suit."

He sighed. "Economics is everything in this world, Sharon, you should know that." He paused for a moment, re-ordering his thoughts. "All the major corporations walk something of a tightrope when it comes to compet.i.tion. Each megacorp is competing with every other corp for market share, for money it can extract from the market. Since the market is, in most sectors, mature, that means that we have a zero-sum game. Any gain by one corporation is a loss for a compet.i.tor, or compet.i.tors. Thus, success comes to the corporation that can compete best.

"Unfortunately, there is a downside to, shall we say, overzealous compet.i.tion. If one zaibatsu were to openly war on another, the aggressor might improve its market share considerably. But the chaos such major conflict would cause in the financial markets and elsewhere would mean that the potential market was reduced. As an a.n.a.logy, the aggressor corporation might get a bigger slice of the pie, but the pie would be made smaller by the disruption. On an absolute level, the aggressor's revenue would be diminished.

"That's why the megacorporations play by the rules of the Corporate Court and by the unwritten laws that all successful executives understand instinctively."

"But corps do pull raids on each other," Sly pointed out. "Frag, Agarwal, you did enough of them."

Agarwal chuckled. "So true," he agreed. "But the shadowruns that one corp commissions against another are small matters." He waved his hand airily, indicating the building around him. "Oh, not for the likes of me or you. But for a zaibatsu with annual revenue in the trillions of nuyen, our efforts are no more than a pinp.r.i.c.k to a dragon."

Sly digested that in silence for a moment. "Those 'unwritten laws' you're talking about," she said finally, "they're being broken? That's why those takeovers are important?"

"Exactly. Something has happened to spur the megacorps into more direct compet.i.tion. There are even reflections of this on the street. Have you noticed an increased presence of corporate security forces in the metroplex?"

"Not really," she said. "I guess my mind's been on other things."

"Yes, quite. And very understandable. My searches through the databases show that there are many people looking for you. my friend. Denizens of the shadows, informants, street ops, and the a.s.sets of several corporations."

That shook Sly. "Several?" she blurted. "Not just Yamatetsu?"

Agarwal's face grew serious. "Several," he repeated. "Granted, Yamatetsu seems at the forefront, but there are others. Aztechnology, Mitsuhama, Renraku, DPE, plus other smaller players. All are interested in learning your whereabouts." An edge of concern came into his voice. "I trust you are taking adequate precautions?"

She nodded distractedly. "I'm taking care of myself."

She paused for thought. "What's going down, Agarwal?"

"It seems like the prelude to a corp war," Agarwal intoned grimly, "an all-out corp war. Though I pray not, for the concept terrifies me."

"What's that got to do with me?"

"I could say, a lot, as it will affect everyone in Seattle. But I understand your meaning. My guess would be that one of the corporations-perhaps Yamatetsu, perhaps one of the others-has lost something. Something of immense value, not only to them but to all the other corporations in Seattle. Of so much value that they're willing to risk corporate war to get it for themselves.

"Further, I would suspect that the corporations have somehow decided that you have what they seek or know where it can be found." His voice was suddenly impersonal, totally noncommittal. "Would you have any idea about that, Sharon?"

Involuntarily, Sly shot a glance at the sophisticated computer sitting on Agarwal's desk-the machine he'd have been using to decrypt the file she'd sent him. He saw the movement of her eyes, nodded gently to himself.

"Did you crack the encryption?" Sly was disgusted to hear a faint quiver in her voice.

"Have you kept current on the mathematical theories of data encryption?" Agarwal asked elliptically. "Some," she answered.

"Then you understand public key encryption?"

"A little. Enough to get by. That's what was used on the file?"

"In part. There are multiple levels, which leads me to believe that the file is something highly significant. The primary level of encryption uses the Milton paradigm and a seventy-five-bit key."

Sly pursed her lips, whistled soundlessly. "How fast's your computer?"

"On the close order of five hundred teraflops."

Five hundred teraflops. Five hundred trillion floatingpoint operations per second. A very fast machine. She closed her eyes, ran through the math in her mind. Then she cursed under her breath. "It's unbreakable, then," she p.r.o.nounced. "Even at five hundred teraflops, that machine's going to have to chew on it for a thousand years before it can break the code."

"Closer to fifteen thousand years," Agarwal corrected gently. "If I use simple brute-force computation. Are you aware of Eiji's research into recursive series?"

She shook her head, then said quickly, "Don't bother to explain it to me. Just cut to the chase."

He bowed his head with a smile. "As you wish. Eiji developed techniques that can be applied to public key encryption, and yield certain . . . short cuts."

"You can break it, then?"

"I believe so. It will take time-a day, maybe more- but significantly less than fifteen thousand years."

"And the other levels of encryption?"

He shrugged. "I doubt they would be anywhere near as complex as the primary level."

She nodded. A day, maybe a couple of days . . .

"What will you do in the interim?" he asked, echoing her own thoughts.

"Pull a fade," she answered immediately. "Keep my head down and wait." She paused. "Maybe do some digging on Yamatetsu, find out if there's anything in the Matrix ..." She saw his eyes widen in alarm, quickly rea.s.sured him. "I wouldn't ask you to do that, Agarwal, you know that. I'll find somebody else."

The tension melted from his face. "Yes," he said quietly, "yes, of course. Forgive my reaction, but ..."

"Nothing to forgive," she told him. "Remember who you're talking to."

He sighed. "Of course. I ... of course."

"Do you have the time to work on it now?"

Her friend nodded. "I've already put aside all my other projects. There will be no distractions."

"About payment ..."

He raised a hand to stop her. "If we are seeing the prelude to a corp war, averting it would be payment enough."

She nodded, reached out impulsively to squeeze his hand. Friends. Rare in the shadows, but more precious than anything else.

8.

2100 hours, November 13, 2053 Falcon shifted on the tattered vinyl couch, tried to find a position where the broken springs didn't poke into his back and ribs. Mission fragging impossible, he told himself with a snort. More fragging comfortable on the floor.

Regardless of how uncomfortable was the couch, he had to admit that he had slept on it. Fitful s.n.a.t.c.hes, but sleep nonetheless. His body still needed more after the long, tense night, but now that his mind was working again he knew he wouldn't be able to drop olf anymore. He looked at the clock on the gray wall. Only nine o'clock? It couldn't be, he'd only gotten here at about seven. . . .

Then he realized the clock was the old twelve-hour variety, not the twenty-four-hour style he was used to. That meant it was twenty-one hundred, halfway into another evening. He'd been asleep longer than he thought.

He swung his feet to the floor, rubbed at itchy eyes with the back of one hand while glancing around at the waiting room he'd staked out as his flop.

Pretty slotting lousy, he thought. Yellowing linoleum tile on the floor. (And what did that say about the age of the building? How long ago did people use linoleuml) Gyproc walls that might once have been white. The torture device disguised as a couch. A telecom with its screen broken and outgoing circuits disabled. Just charming. The air was sharp with an a.s.sortment of disturbing smells, mostly what Falcon cla.s.sified as "medical," but with an unhealthy underpinning of rot. I should have taken him to a real doctor, he berated himself for the dozenth time.

But that was the last thing he could have done. Nightwalker was suffering from bullet wounds, and Falcon knew that by law the doctor would be forced to report the matter to Lone Star. Obviously, legal entanglements were the last thing the big Amerindian needed right now.

Then there was the problem of ident.i.ty. Falcon was willing to bet that, as far as the establishment was concerned, Nightwalker didn't have one. Like Falcon himself, he probably was one of the SINless-an individual who had no System Identification Number, the official ident.i.ty code by which the government, the medical system, and every other facet of society recognized its own. Had he taken Nightwalker to any hospital or to just about any licensed physician, the drek would have hit the fan as soon as the receptionist asked to see the runner's cred-stick with his SIN stored in its bubble memory.

And even if he'd managed to get around those two problems, there was the problem of credit. Runners didn't have health insurance, that was for fragging sure, and neither he nor Nightwalker had enough on their cred-sticks to pay emergency-room user fees.

So what did that leave? A free clinic, like the ones run by that touchy-feely Universal Brotherhood outfit. But there were problems with that idea, too. Falcon wasn't sure that they didn't buy into the same "gunshot wound, call the Star" drek as the real hospitals. And anyway, the ganger didn't think he could drag the fading Nightwalker all the three or four klicks to the nearest clinic.

The one option left was a street doc, a shadow cutter. At first Falcon thought he was fragged there, too. This wasn't his patch, and street docs didn't advertise in the public datanets.

But then he remembered hearing one of the First Nation "elder statesmen"-a tough-talking Haida who must have been at least nineteen-bragging about how he'd been st.i.tched up after a rumble by a shadow cutter who worked out of a defunct restaurant near Sixth and Blanchard. That was enough to get Falcon started, and a few cautious queries made of some squatters he'd almost tripped over helped him find the spot.

Just in fragging time, too, he thought, remembering how Nightwalker had looked when he'd finally dragged him into the shadow clinic. Another few blocks and he wouldn't have made it.

For a moment, his fear for the runner's life, pushed into the background temporarily by his faith in medical tech, rushed back. Was Nightwalker going to make it?

Then another question struck him. If he didn't, what did it matter? Nightwalker wasn't a chummer, he wasn't in First Nation. And he was so fragging old . . .

But he was a shadowrunner, and that had to count for something. A runner, and an Amerindian-even if he claimed not to have a tribe. And, most important, he'd trusted Falcon, depended on him for help. And that's why it matters, he told himself.

Falcon looked at the clock again. Twenty-one-ten. Fourteen hours since he'd dragged Nightwalker into the decrepit building. Thirteen since the doc had disappeared into the treatment room with him. Was she still operating, or st.i.tching, or whatever it was docs did? Or had Nightwalker croaked on the table, and she just wasn't telling him? He stood up, took a step toward the door into the treatment room. Stopped in doubt. He'd never been very good at waiting-particularly if he couldn't sleep through it.

As if on cue, the door opened and the doc walked out. She'd introduced herself as Doctor Mary Dacia, but Falcon knew the street had mangled her name to Doc Dicer. She was small and thin, with short-chopped red hair and big expressive eyes. Kinda cute, Falcon thought, particularly with those bodacious rockets. Or she would have been cute if she hadn't been so old-easily more than twice his age.

"You finished with him?" he asked.

Doc Dicer looked tired. She'd been wearing some semi-fashionable face paint when they'd arrived, but now she'd scrubbed it off, leaving her face pale and wan. She raised an eyebrow expressively. "I finished with him a while ago," she said in her throaty voice. "Looked out to see how you were going. You were catching zees big time."

"So how is he?"

The doc's expression became more serious. "As well as can be expected, which is not fragging very. I put everything back in the right places, made sure nothing too vital was missing, and patched all the bigger holes. If he wasn't so tough, he'd have flatlined hours ago, or as soon as I put him under, but he's lost a lot of blood. His heart's under major stress. I almost lost him when he had a cardiac arrest on the table." She looked at Falcon sharply. "Did you give him metamphetamines?"

Falcon swallowed hard. "Yeah, but he . . He cut off the justifications before they could get flowing. "Did they hurt him?"

Doc Dicer shrugged. "Can't say," she told him.

"They stressed his cardiovascular system like you wouldn't believe, but maybe they stopped him from arresting earlier. Even money either way."

That let Falcon breathe a little easier. "Can I see him?"

He could see the doc mull that over for a moment. Then she nodded and led him into the treatment area.

Nightwalker looked almost small lying in the bed surrounded by high-tech monitoring equipment. His face was nearly the same color as the grimy walls and his closed eyes seemed sunken. He looks a hundred years old, Falcon thought. Prematurely aged. For an instant he thought about his mother, then forced the image away.

Falcon glanced around at the tiny "ward," which was only marginally bigger than the bed. The gray walls, the monitors, anywhere but at Nightwalker's face. Weak! he raged at himself. You're weak! He forced his eyes back to the Amerindian. This time the images of his mother didn't recur. He felt his breathing slow, his muscles relax.

Doc Dicer had been watching him, but quickly looked away when he shot her a glare. "When will he wake up?" he asked.

"I am awake." The runner's deep voice startled Falcon. "Just drifting, you know?" He opened his eyes, looked around. "Where is this?"

Quickly, Falcon brought him up to date.

Nightwalker looked at the street doc, then back at Falcon. "You did this for me, huh?"

Falcon nodded.

"Sure you did," the Amerindian said, almost to himself. "You had to. Runner's code of honor, right?"

Falcon knew that was all the thanks he'd ever get from Nightwalker. But it was plenty, better than the cliche words that were so easy to say. For the first time he felt that Nightwalker was accepting him, maybe not as an equal, but at least as a comrade. He nodded again, not trusting himself to speak.

"What time is it?" the runner asked. Falcon told him.

"Frag!" Nightwalker spat. "The second back-up meet's at twenty-two-thirty. Gotta move." He tried to sit up.

Doc Dicer put a hand on his chest, pushed him down. Falcon knew that the Amerindian could have thrown her across the room one-handed if he'd wanted to, but he obediently settled back again. His dark eyes were fixed on hers.

"You're not going anywhere," she told him sharply.

"I feel good enough," he answered. "This is something I've got to do." Gently but firmly, he took her hand, moved it off his chest. Falcon could see the doc's muscles tense as she tried to pull her hand from his grip, but she couldn't move it a millimeter.

"Look," she snapped, "maybe you don't hear too good, or maybe you got brain damage from anoxia when your heart stopped." She spoke slowly, with the kind of tone people reserve for congenital idiots. "Yes, you feel good. Because you're jazzed to the eyeb.a.l.l.s on painkillers, energizers, and don't-worries. If I take away the painkillers and the tranqs, you'll know just how bad you feel. If I take away the energizers, your heart'll stop just like that." She tried to snap her fingers but it didn't work.

She went on firmly, overriding his attempt to reply. "You haven't croaked-yet-because I happen to be d.a.m.n good at my job." She sighed. "You don't know how bad you're hurting," she said more quietly, "how bad the damage is. If you were a car, I'd say you were firing on only one cylinder, had only one gear-the rest are stripped-no brakes, doubtful steering, and three flat tires. Do you hear what I'm saying to you?

"You're alive. Now. If you stay here, I can keep you alive for a day or two for sure, maybe longer if we're both lucky. If you go to a hospital, a real hospital, they'll be able to put you back together properly, and odds are you'll live. But"-her voice grew harsh again-"if you think you're going to be able to walk out of here, forget it. You'll make it to the front door-maybe-before your heart stops, and that's only because you're a tough motherfragger." The diminutive doctor pulled her hand back from the big man's grip, and glared down at him.

Falcon watched as Nightwalker's eyes closed and his breathing slowed. Was he thinking? Deciding? Or maybe consigning his spirit to the totems . . .

After a few seconds, Nightwalker opened his eyes again, looked up at the street doc. Falcon saw those eyes were clear, untroubled-calm. The eyes of someone who'd made the big decision.

"I'm on energizers, right?" he asked gently. "What energizers? Turbo, right?" He named one of the designer drugs originally created for medical purposes but that had found an even bigger market on the streets.