The other two technicians entered the room, one of them carrying a black plastic case containing the chips with recordings of Babel's interrogation and all of the other information gathered by Dr. Ferrera's instruments. He handed it to Lanier, who slipped the case into the inside pocket of his suit jacket, never taking the gun off Babel as Ferrera manually released the straps holding him to the chair. Babel slid slowly out of the chair and to his feet, wavering slightly as his cramped muscles protested movement after sitting still for so long. He had no idea how long Lanier and his people had held and interrogated him. He gently rubbed his sore wrists and silently willed the aches and fatigue away. It's only meat, he told himself. It's the mind that's important. "All right," Lanier said with a wave of the pistol. "Let's move." The two technicians went out the door first, followed by Babel, with Lanier and Dr. Ferrera coming behind. Lanier's gun was trained on Babel's back. The corridor outside the interrogation room was plain and unadorned, with pale gray walls broken by the occasional door along its length. Red emergency lights filled the corridor and gave everything a hellish cast as the alarm continued to sound throughout the building. The two technicians began moving toward the right, but Lanier's barked order stopped them in their tracks. "This way," he said, standing in the doorway. "The elevators can't be trusted if the computer system has been compromised. We'll take the stairs." As the small group began moving down the hall toward the stairway, Babel considered his options. Of the four people with him, Lanier appeared to be the only one who was armed. Babel had to assume they knew about his concealed body-blade, but it was still an effective weapon, provided they hadn't found some way to disable it. But Lanier had a gun, and even the small pistol would have enough stopping power to put Babel down if he was shot. Nor did he know the layout of the building well enough to escape even if he did manage to get away from Lanier and his people. There apparently was security elsewhere in the building, from what Lanier told the technicians. Reluctantly, Babel decided there was no means of escaping that wouldn't put his mission in jeopardy. He had to survive long enough to get back to Renraku to complete the mission that had sent him into the Rox, or more lives would be in danger. For now, that meant going along with Lanier and seeing where that took him. An opportunity to escape would present itself sooner or later. He just had to be on the alert for it so that when it came he could act. As the black-armored samurai stalked closer, Ariel triggered her combat utilities. Shining silvery armor covered in Celtic knot designs materialized to cover her icon's body, and a slender silver sword appeared in her hand. The samurai warrior came in fast, with a speed born of optical co-processors and combat algorithms. Ariel met the attack with her own blade, her deck's systems fighting the invasion of the foreign code as the ice sought a weakness, a chink in her armor it could exploit to get at the woman behind the electron image. Ariel thrust back at the ice, and it countered, clashing blades ringing in the hallucinatory world of the Matrix, a metaphor for a very real conflict going on between her cyberdeck and the computer system. Ariel was glad she'd been able to warn Hammer and the rest of the team about the alert before the ice jumped her, but she needed to deal with the samurai program as quickly as possible so she could be on hand to help out the team if they needed it. She also needed to get her hands on any data on their target still in the system. The samurai came in for another attack, shuffling forward with its sword held high, coming down in an overhead chop. Ariel jinked to the side and swung her blade. Sparks flew as the silver sword slashed across the samurai's armor. First blood! Ariel thought as the ice program fell back a bit before renewing its attack. It was no time to celebrate, however. Responding to the damage it had taken, the ice redoubled its attack and made a flurry of sword blows, looking to overwhelm the decker's defenses. Ariel managed to avoid them, but only barely. She couldn't keep this pace up for much longer, while the ice, tireless and inhuman, could keep going all day as long as the processing power was available to it. Ariel had to end this fight quickly, or it would be ended for her when a lethal charge of electricity fried her forebrain. Dodging to the left she set the ice up for another attack. It was risky, but the ice seemed to be focusing more of its effort on attacking her and less on defending itself. It didn't have the same instincts as a living being to protect its own existence. It could only follow its programming to destroy intruders. The ice operated within the parameters of the samurai warrior it appeared to be. Whoever the programmer was, he had obviously been a stickler for realism. So the samurai ice attacked much the way a real samurai would. Ariel thought she could use that. The ice saw the opening and went for it. It shuffled forward, sword raised high above its helmeted head, the edge of the blade gleaming in the reddish light inside the system. Ariel waited until the last moment and lunged forward, driving her silver sword into the chest of the ice construct to the hilt. A real sword would have been blunted by the samurai's armor, but Ariel's electron blade was not constrained by the rules of the physical world. Here in the Matrix it was like a magical sword, and it cut through the armor with ease. The samurai started to bring its razored blade down in a killing strike, but it froze in place, transfixed by the sword through its torso. The image hung there for a moment, frozen in time, then it de-rezzed, breaking up into the individual pixels that made it up and vanishing into nothingness in a shower of static, leaving no trace of its presence behind. Ariel breathed a sigh of relief and keyed her commlink to the rest of the Hammermen. "Yo, boss, you there?"

"Glad to have you back, Trouble," Hammer's voice surged back across the link. "What's your status?" "The immediate problem is handled for now. I'm going to try and get access to the security systems and our target data." "Good work. Lock out the elevators and all of the access from the floor our target is on. It looks like our birds are trying to fly the coop. We're on our way." "Copy that, Hammer." Ariel closed the channel and turned back on the swirling chaos that was the datastore. It didn't look like there was much to salvage from it. What the frag were they doing here to have created a mess like this? she thought. It looked like the datastore had been taken apart by some kind of virus, but not one like anything Ariel had ever seen. Whatever it is, it can do a lot of damage to high-security data systems quickly and efficiently. The ice tried to stop me, but it didn't stand much of a chance against this. If Fuchi's working on it, they just might have another crash virus on their hands.