Sam looked to his fellow Renraku employees for support, Jiro’s eyes were locked on the body of his wife, and Crenshaw’s face was wholly noncommittal. As for the dead, they were offering no advice. He unbuckled his seatbelt and stood.

The cockpit stank as much of blood and feces as the cabin. Trying to ignore the blood that stained the pilot couch, Sam lowered himself into it. The Amerindian slid into the co-pilot’s seat.

“I am called Ghost Maker in some parts,” he said. “I may not be a pilot, but I know something about this stuff. Try anything and we will find ourselves relying only on the autopilot. Wakarimasu-ka?”

“I understand.”

“Good. Jack in and get us going.”

Sam slid the datacord from its nesting place in the control panel. He had never been given the limited-access familiarization exercises with the datajack that the doctor had recommended on the day after his operation. He was scared. He had heard how a rigger melded with his machine, becoming a brain to direct the body of the vehicle. He had also heard that some couldn’t handle the transition, losing their minds in communion with the soulless machine.

This machine was built strictly for rigger operation, a monument to the hubris so common among the pilots of powerful machinery. No one without a datajack could do more than request a destination and departure time from the autopilot. Hardly the way to make a fast getaway.

These brigands wanted Sam to jack in and override the decision-making functions of the autopilot. Without the special vehicle control implants that would link a pilot’s cortex to the operations of the machine, he could do little more than make decisions about direction, flight altitudes, and when to take off or land. The autopilot would still do the flying. Without him in the link, though, the Commuter would communicate with Seattle air traffic control, following some controller’s directives and restricting itself to well-defined flight paths and low-risk maneuvers and speeds. The invaders wanted him to make their escape easier, and they cared little what it might cost him.

Sam understood that this hookup would allow him access to only a limited selection of controls, but it still seemed a dangerous risk. Sensing the man beside him becoming impatient, however, he decided that not jacking in would soon become an even greater risk.

As Sam snugged the plug into the jack in his temple, pain flashed through his skull, but faded swiftly. Like an afterimage, dials and control information appeared in his mind, projected onto his optic nerve by the aircraft’s computer. He could shift his head and “see” different portions of the imaginary control panel. Spotting the help panel, he reached out toward it, mentally “pressing” the button. The computer fed him instructions on basic aircraft operation. The machine’s voice in his head was cold and alien, unlike the tones it gave through the speakers. The uncanny nature of his rapport with the Commuter unnerved him and the back of his skull began to ache.

Bullets pattered against the armored cockpit glass in a hasty rhythm seconded by the Amerindian’s urgent, “Get moving!”

Sam reached out to the control yoke. Whether it was real or a computer simulation, he no longer knew. He ordered the engines to rev, and pulled back. The counter-rotating blades of the Commuter’s twin engines spun faster, quickly creating enough lift for the craft to clear the pad. With the autopilot doing the real flying, Sam commanded the Commuter up into the night sky.

“Where to?” he asked Ghost Maker.

“North over the plex. For now.”

Sam complied.

They had been in flight for five minutes when Sam decided that the anti-aircraft missiles he had been expecting were not coming after all. The Elf was evidently as good as his word. Calling up the radar, Sam could find nothing that looked like pursuit. He was equally surprised at the lack of challenges from the Seattle Metroplex air traffic controllers. The Elf decker must have inserted a flight plan into their computers as well, concealing the hijacked shuttle VTOL among the normal traffic.

They were passing over a suburban residential district when Ghost Maker ordered Sam to extinguish the running lights and change course to head for the Redmond Barrens, that desolate sprawl of shanty towns and abandoned buildings. The autopilot attempted to turn the lights back on, but Sam overrode it.

As they headed across the district, the lights of the apartments and homes of corporate salarymen became rarer, replaced by the garish neon and corpse-gray glow of advertising tridscreens near the edge of the Barrens. Out beyond the commercial zone, the lights were few.

Sam watched the Amerindian scan the darkness below. He wondered if his captor had augmented eyes to go along with his reflexes. Most of the adventurers and museleboys who called themselves street samurai did. This Ghost Maker was certainly one of that breed.

“Lower,” Ghost commanded.

As Sam directed the Commuter to comply, the autopilot whined, “Altitude becoming dangerously low. Do you intend a landing?”

“Shut it up.”

Sam flipped the rocker switch to silence the cabin voice. “Are we landing?”

“Not yet. Head northeast.”

Sam adjusted the craft’s headings telling the autopilot that landing was not imminent and that the altitude was intentional.

They flew for another ten minutes, making several more course changes, some to avoid the burnt-out shells of buildings and others to satisfy some unknown whim of Ghost Maker. When the samurai finally gave the order to land, Sam was glad to engage the Commuter’s automatic landing routine. The long minutes of dodging the darkened hulks had worn him down to where, even had he been familiar with the aircraft, he would not have wished to land it manually.

“Damn it! Kill the lights," the samurai snapped as the autopilot engaged the landing lights.

Startled by the man’s vehemence, Sam complied, cancelling almost as quickly the Commuter’s complaints about safety and FAA regulations. The VTOL settled unevenly on a field of rubble, close by a row of boarded-up tenements. The samurai popped the jack from Sam’s head and urged him out of the pilot’s seat. Sam reached to cut the engines.

“Leave them.”

Sam shrugged and headed for the cabin. The others had already deplaned, leaving the interior empty save for the dead.

“Why can’t you just leave us alone?” he heard Jiro say. The response came from the Ork. “Let’s just call it a little insurance.”

The Renraku employees were hustled into one of the derelict buildings just as the Commuter lifted off again. From the doorless entryway, Sam watched as the VTOL went straight up until well clear of the low buildings, then turned south and shifted to horizontal flight mode. The Commuter climbed away into the sky, its dark bulk eclipsing the few stars that shone through the breaks in the cloud cover. A shadow ship, crewed by ghosts.