As cold waters to a thirsty soul, so is good news from afar country -Proverbs 25:25 Alone in the dimness of a private office in the Mandala Technologies office building in the Boston sprawl, Miles Lanier, member of the Renraku Computer Systems Board of Directors and former Director of Internal Security for Fuchi Industrial Technologies, sat behind a desk rolling the slim datacord of the gleaming neural jack in his hand. It was quite late, and all of the regular employees had long gone home, leaving the hall outside silent and dark. As he turned the datacord over and over, Lanier thought about the strange turn of events that had brought him to where he was now. He had been a military man once, a master sharpshooter. That was in a time when the major factions of the world needed a lot of military people to settle their differences. Miles Lanier was the kind of man who specialized in troubleshooting, at first literally and later with more subtlety, but with no less precision than in his sniper days. He rose in the ranks to become an officer in the military and put his tactical skills to good use. Then the world changed and the military wasn't solving the problems of people of power and influence. A quieter approach was called for, so Lanier went into the business of "security," which was a softer name they used for military forces working for the megacorporations, the great powers of the world. He became Director of Internal Security for

Fuchi Industrial Electronics and prided himself on the efficiency with which his department was run. Fuchi's security was respected. Everyone knew the corporation wasn't to be trifled with. Lanier continued to do what he did before: find problems that were developing for his employer and eliminate them before they could become a serious threat. It was what he did best. Then the dragon changed everything. Lanier was never much of a believer in the idea that the return of magic to the world had re-written history. Certainly, the Awakening had put incredible power into the hands of people who previously had none, like the Native Americans and some of the other tribal peoples in the world. And they had used it against the governments that had formerly oppressed them. Used it to reclaim some of their lost land and lost heritage. There were magicians walking the streets, spirits appearing out of nothingness, and dragons flying in the skies, but Lanier believed the Awakening had changed very little in the end. Some land got shuffled and some borders redrawn. Some new professions were created and a few new security concerns were raised, but when the dust from the Awakening began to settle, the world was still run the same way it had always been. People, corporations, and governments with power did as they pleased to those without it, and people like Miles Lanier still found work taking care of the problems of those powerful entities. Things hadn't changed much, but only because there were people-beings-who played the game of power and control better than any mega-corporation or government ever imagined. Beings whose existence was a kind of chess game on a grand scale. Creatures like dragons. A dragon had used his vast wealth to buy his way onto the airwaves more than forty years ago, coming live into the living rooms of people all over the world. Somehow, nobody really questioned that a creature out of myth wanted more than anything to have his own trideo show broadcast into millions of homes. In fact, most people thought it was rather cute. It made a creature weighing tons, with a maw capable

of crushing and swallowing a man in one bite, into a cuddly media icon almost overnight. People began to lose their primal fear of a monster out of legend and consider him almost a member of the family. He must have been planning it for a very long time, Lanier thought as he watched the reflections off the desk lamp gleam from the chrome datalink. But, then, what is forty years to a creature who might have been… what? Hundreds? Thousands of years old? No one knew for sure. It was a brilliant strategy. The dragon-Dunkelzahn was his name, the kind of name a friendly dragon from a fairy tale might have-became the darling of the media and had a reputation as "the friendliest dragon in the world." He was the only one of his kind to actually deign to talk to the small, fragile creatures living around him, and he earned the trust of the people who saw him, or at least something very like it. The kind of trust people give to characters they see on their favorite tridshows. So when the dragon decided to apply for citizenship to the United Canadian American States and to move his vast lair to Prince Edward Island, who could possibly object? Who wouldn't want the coup of having the world's most famous and friendly dragon as one of their citizens? Not to mention his incredible wealth and influence. The UCAS government practically fell all over itself to grant Dunkelzahn citizenship. It was an election year, and a photo opportunity not to be missed: the President "shaking hands" with a gleaming, silver and blue-scaled dragon on the White House lawn. That was the setup move and still nobody saw the checkmate coming. When the election turned into the biggest political scandal of the century and everyone's faith in the government was shattered, who better to restore hope to a defeated and battered nation than a creature of magic and fantasy? When Dunkelzahn offered the impossible idea of a dragon running for the highest office in the UCAS, who wouldn't stop and think to himself for a moment, "why the frag not?" It was almost too easy, and Lanier had predicted from the moment the news of Dunkelzahn's candidacy broke that they would have to start renovating the White House, and he was right. The thing Lanier didn't see, that nobody foresaw, was what happened the night of Dunkelzahn's victory, when the dragon-in human guise-departed a party at the Watergate Hotel, stepped into his presidential limousine, and then vanished in a fiery explosion only blocks away from the hotel, leaving nothing but a huge crater, a livid scar in the skin of the highway, to mark his passing. Maybe Dunkelzahn foresaw it, Lanier thought to himself. Or maybe there is someone better at playing the game than even a great dragon. Whatever the case, Dunkelzahn wasn't finished playing yet. Even though the dragon was dead, his treasure, his vast horde, still existed. His will was read to a stunned nation, and the legendary treasure of a dragon combined with a financial empire a corporate raider would envy was distributed to Dunkelzahn's beneficiaries, including Miles Lanier. Lanier had never dreamed of being a beneficiary of Dunkelzahn's will. He'd met the dragon only once, during his presidential campaign, a goodwill meeting on behalf of Fuchi. A remarkable conversationalist, Dunkelzahn had inquired after Lanier's background and seemed familiar with much of his work with Fuchi, much to Lanier's surprise. The whole time they talked, Lanier had the strange feeling that the great dragon could look straight into his mind and soul and read him like a book. It was a strange feeling of being exposed to Dunkelzahn's scrutiny. In his will, Dunkelzahn left Miles Lanier all of his stock in Renraku Computer Systems, enough to give Lanier a seat on the board of directors and increase his personal net worth by a billion nuyen. The day the will was read, Lanier packed up his office while Fuchi scrambled to change their security protocols-the protocols he had designed-before he could get out the door with them. He smiled faintly, recalling the chaos in the halls of Fuchi HQ over the announcement of his resignation. Lanier had been on the Renraku board for over a year, and they were only now beginning to believe he wasn't a plant from Fuchi, that the dragon's grand political schemes and fiery death weren't somehow all staged solely for the purpose of putting one man in a position to betray them, so great was their arrogance. Lanier didn't claim to understand Dunkelzahn's motivations any better than anyone else. Who could say why a creature like a dragon did anything? Lanier worked hard for Renraku and did what he did best. He got rid of Renraku's problems, large and small, with surgical precision and skill. He also got rid of people who opposed him with the same skill. It was a ruthlessness the other members of the board and Renraku's highest executives had learned to understand and respect. Lanier made sure of that. Now he sat in the chair his ambition and good fortune had made for him, thinking about his next move in the game. He wasn't looking forward to the conversation he needed to have, but there was no avoiding it, and time was of the essence. He let his breath out with a long sigh and slid the connector home into the dataport behind his ear, settling it there with a comfortable click. His headware immediately interfaced with the sophisticated communications system built into the desktop, and a virtual display superimposed itself on Lanier's vision, buttons and data-readouts floating in space in front of him. He reached out and manipulated the virtual controls to set up the isolation protocols for the commlink. His military days had taught him the importance of protecting communications. Especially when you're behind enemy lines, he thought with a grimace. Once he was satisfied that the scrambling and encryption systems were online, he waited. He didn't have to wait long before receiving the signal of an incoming call. He reached out and tapped the Receive button floating in space to his right and the call connected. There was a brief shower of static in his field of vision as the encryption systems kicked in and negotiated with each other back and forth over the fiber-optic line. Then an image shimmered into place on the opposite side of the desk from Lanier. The man who appeared, chair and all, was dressed in an immaculate, tailored suit from one of the finest designers in Paris. Lanier knew because he owned a couple of them himself. The visitor's short dark hair was swept back from a face with aristocratic European features, features Lanier remembered well. The imagery was perfect, down to the detail of the threads of his suit and the individual strands of hair. Lanier would have sworn the other man was actually in the room with him instead of being simply a virtual projection, but that came as no surprise. There was nobody in the world better at virtual-reality technology than Fuchi Industrial Electronics, and the image was as real as their tech could make it (which was "realer than reality," if you believed their ads). The man who sat across from Miles Lanier was Richard Villiers, CEO of that megacorporation. He was also Lanier's former boss and his good friend. "Hello, Richard," Lanier said with a genuine smile. "It's been a long time." Villiers nodded, but the smile he offered in return was only the ghost of one. Lanier could see that stress had worn heavily on his old friend. There was more gray in the dark hair, which Villiers did not bother to hide with cosmetic or magical treatments or even alterations to his virtual image. There were a few more lines around his eyes and mouth, and he looked tired. Lanier saw instantly that things at the highest level of Fuchi weren't going well. His ability to read Richard's mood and intent with nothing more than a glance was one of the things that had made Lanier so valuable to the Fuchi CEO, both as head of Internal Security and especially now. "Too long, Miles," Villiers returned, then he leaned forward in his chair and took on an air that was all business. There was no time for pleasantries. "Are we secure?" he asked. Lanier gave one of his trademark shrugs. "As secure as possible," he said. "With some of Renraku's capabilities, who can say?" Villiers gave a low "hrnmm" of agreement. "Do you have what we need?" he asked. Lanier leaned back a bit in his chair and rested his steepled fingers against his chin, a gesture some found arrogant, but which always gave him time to think and carefully plan his responses.