When you're tackling good security, though, wire helps. Helps, hell, it's essential. A com operates a zillion times faster than a human brain, but most coms are pretty dumb and need a human to tell them what to do when something new comes along. We humans build them that way on purpose, so they don't get uppity. When you're running on wire, if you're any good, you can come up with new stuff faster than any program can handle it, and you can usually get through, in, and out before a human on the other end can get his act together enough to stop you-or rather, to tell the com how to stop you. Sometimes, by the time the com realizes it's in trouble and tells a human you're there, you're gone.

But that's on wire. Try it by voice or codefield or keypad, and you can't give the orders fast enough to do anything, can't get information either in or out fast enough to do any good at all.

So I plugged in, making my brain into another interactive terminal on the com network, and there I was, perceiving the casino security systems as layered synesthetic tangles, and picking holes in them wherever I could and shooting in retrievers. I wasn't programming, really; I can't think that fast in machine language. I had interface software translating for me, so I was doing everything in analog, looking for flaws not by analyzing programs, but by studying the surfaces of those tangles, looking for any unevenness, anywhere that didn't feel tight and solid, and ramming the retrievers at whatever weak spots I found.

The retrievers were like sweet little buzzes. They went where I pointed them. If you've never been on wire, I can't explain it any better than that. If you have, you know what I mean.

I stayed away from anything really touchy, never went in too deep, and made sure that any retriever that didn't get out destroyed itself before it got nailed. I didn't want anyone analyzing the programming style; the stuff I was using came from one of the standard black market jobs, but it had been modified by a friend of mine and touched up a bit by me, so it might have been traceable.

The retrievers had the fifteen names as guides, of course, and when they got out-if they did-they showed either positive or negative. If it was negative, I erased them completely; if it was positive, I sent them back for storage.

Twenty minutes of that and I had watchdogs looking for me, I was exhausted and sweating, and I had a couple dozen retrievers tucked away. I pulled out, pulled the plug, and got myself a bulb of Coke III to suck on until the shaking stopped.

When I unplugged, my system went into high-security mode automatically, and I watched the screens to see if anyone was coming after me successfully.

Nobody was, or if they were they were eluding my own stuff. I figured they just weren't coming.

People pick at the casinos all the time, hoping to find some way to beat the odds, or bleed off a bit of the daily take, or turn up something juicy in the way of gossip, so the watchdogs are usually on short tethers; it's not worth pursuing every nibbler, especially when she might just be a decoy for someone else. I hadn't touched anything basic, so I figured I was out clean and safe. As long as I was alive the casinos would probably never even know I'd been there.

Of course, when I die, if the news reaches anyone on Epimetheus, the complete records of everything I ever did on my business com, legal, or otherwise, go to the city cops, both the port watch and the Trap crew, or whatever law enforcement there is at the time-maybe by then it'll be on Prometheus. That comes with a detective license in Nightside City; it's a requirement for the job. Try and duck it and you lose the license, or maybe worse.

You want to see real security? Check out the city's in-the-event-of-death files. The whole ITEOD system is semi-closed, supposed to be input only-though I already told you what I think of that. They don't count on that closure, though; they've got full-range security. Go at it on wire and you'll get a scream that'll rip your hearing up for weeks, even though it doesn't touch your external ears, and you'll hit a glare of white that'll bum you alive. It tastes of acid and stinks of burning corpses. You'll be blind and deaf, and you won't want to eat for a week when you unplug.

Yeah, I tried it once; of course I did. Who could resist?

I never even got close, but at least I didn't get caught; you can get yourself sent up for reconstruction if you tamper with ITEOD stuff.

The casinos are nothing by comparison. I could handle anything they threw at me, as long as I was careful, and I'd been careful. I read what my retrievers had brought me.

The nine casino names had all turned up, as I expected. I hadn't managed to tag any real names; that was in a lot deeper, behind at least one more layer of security than I wanted to tackle. They were all legitimate names, though -and they were all first registered at the New York. Bond James Bond S4S63 had also played the Starshine and the Excelsis, and Darby O'Gill 34 had spent a few nights at the Delights of Shanghai, and so on, but five of the nine had only played at the New York, and they'd all started there and played there more than anywhere else.

That was interesting.

Whoever was buying up the West End apparently had some connection with the New York.

I sat back and sipped my Coke and waited until the parasite pyramid finished up and reported back empty. My chair wiped off the sweat from my wire run and massaged my back, and the holoscreen on the far wall ran some contemplative scenery.

I still had two hours. Should I go down to the Trap and drop in at the New York?

No, I decided, not yet. First I wanted some background on the place.

I'd never spent much time in the New York, not when I worked in the Trap, not as a kid, not even when I ran wild for a year in my late teens. I was never that fond of sleaze, and when I live dangerously it's generally for some better reason than a cheap thrill. I lost plenty of credits in the Starshine Palace and the Excelsis and the three IRC joints, but I'd stayed out of most of the others. I'm not real big, after all-a hundred and forty-five centimeters, forty kilos, and most casinos don't like their customers armed, so I'd be in serious trouble if I got in a fight with someone who knew what he was doing.

This isn't cowardice, just caution. I mean, even unarmed, I can take out your standard drunken miner easily enough, but I can't handle them in groups, and I can't handle them if they're sober and know how to fight, and I can't handle them if I'm drunk or otherwise mentally or physically unsound, so I always did my drinking and carousing in places where the bouncers knew their job.

The New York wasn't quite up to my standards.

Which is not to say the place was a dump; the New York was not like Buddy's Lucky Night, a dive down on North Javadifar that no tourist had ever come out of alive and even the smarter miners avoided. No, the New York was a serious Trap casino, living mostly off the tourist trade- though some miners did play there, and you never saw miners in the Excelsis or the Luna Park. Nobody had ever been killed in the New York so far as I knew, not even temporarily, and nobody ever caught the house cheating, but it played up a fantasy image of dangerous, decadent Old New York, which is supposedly an ancient, corrupt city back on Earth, and I avoided it because some of the customers got a little vague about the line between fantasy and reality, and the management, by all accounts, was willing to let things get fairly rough before intervening. It helped the image they wanted.

I knew that image, but I didn't know much more than that, so I punched in some orders and read what came up on the screen.

The New York Townhouse Hotel and Gambling Hall was owned by the New York Games Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Nakada Enterprises, incorporated on Prometheus. I'd heard of Nakada, of course. Everybody had heard of the Nakada family. They weren't very active on Epimetheus, but they were sure as hell all over the rest of the Eta Cass system and probably every other inhabited planet I'd ever heard of, as well. They'd been one of the founding families on Prometheus.