Ryan ignored the threat. "Whoever killed Dunkelzahn," he said, "is strong and cunning enough to have assassinated one of the most powerful creatures to ever have existed. Even if you do figure it out without getting yourself killed, how do you propose to bring the culprits to justice?"

Strapp smiled. "I have the UCAS military. And I suppose you and the Draco Foundation as well as about two hundred million angry UCAS citizens would also like to help?"

"You got it, chummer," Ryan said. "Count me in."

Alice was bored. Moody.

Tall buildings of concrete and mirrored glass reached up into a night sky around her, but there was no traffic on the street as she walked through Wonderland City. Street lamps illuminated the sidewalk, reflected in silver streaks that rose up the chrome windows of the buildings. But there were no people.

Only Alice, a gentle breeze, and the absolute silence of the vacant city. Wonderland City was her private little ultraviolet electronic universe. A personal section of the interconnected computer systems that spanned the world.

To herself, Alice appeared the way she had when she'd had a physical body. When her consciousness had inhabited a natural neural network called a human brain. Now her consciousness lived in… well, it spanned the Matrix really. Alice looked like a young woman, human, about twenty-five years old with shoulder-length blonde hair, fair skin, and blue eyes. She wore black jeans and a plain white halter top.

She took a drag on her cigarette and folded a section of Matrix space into her. The man in her mind's eye was standing naked in a grove of trees, his obese, naked body seemed to ripple and shake with the passing wind. Next to him, in a small clearing, a mad tea party was underway. The Mad Hatter and the March Hare sat at opposite ends of a large table.

Oh, the plans she had for Thomas Roxborough. Just thinking of them sent a delicious little shiver through her. Ryan Mercury had given her the access codes to Rox's system in Panama. It had tipped the balance so she could trap his consciousness in her virtual reality. A place where she made the rules.

Rox had designed the system in which she had been flatlined so many years ago. This was her revenge. She laughed, and the sound of her good humor rang through the dark city around her like a chuckle in the wind.

Roxborough looked around at the glen, and his sneer changed to a look of mild admiration. "Well, well. This certainly is impressive." He stretched out his hand and touched it to the March Hare's fur.

"I say! Keep your mitts to yourself, old man. Would you like some tea? Well, you can't have any." With that, the Hatter and the Hare quickly gathered up everything from the table and went into the small shack.

"Alice? I don't know where you are, but my compliments. This is the most solid code I've ever come across."

"Welcome to Wonderland, Rox."

Roxborough looked around the grove, trying to pin down the location of Alice's voice. Suddenly, he looked directly at Alice as she first made her wide grin, then her head, then her tail appear on the table top. She left everything in between transparent.

Roxborough smiled, showing wide, flat buck teeth. "Alice?"

"Yesss."

"I thought there might be more to it, Cat. The city up above is well done, but this… this, however, is simply delightful."

Alice's Cheshire grin widened into a vicious, predatory leer. "The city above is for the sane. You, Rox, are the most deluded case of megalomania it has ever been my displeasure to encounter. I thought you might feel right at home. However, you might be interested in knowing something. Lewis Carroll's Alice was very lucky. Wonderland is full of dangerous, deadly little surprises, and even a full-blown homicidal sociopath such as yourself could get into trouble very quickly."

Roxborough gave his toothy grin again. "Homicidal sociopath? My dear Alice, you're not still going on about that bygone Crash virus are you? You really should get some help for your obsessive behavior. Why don't you program yourself a nice little Freudian psychoanalyst? It would do wonders for your state of mind."

The disembodied tail began to twitch. "Rox, you are in a very precarious position at this moment. I suggest you cooperate."

Roxborough sat in the chair recently vacated by the Mad Hatter. "Cooperation is a wonderful thing, Cat. Makes the world go 'round, don't you know? But you've given me nothing to cooperate with. You make accusations and veiled threats, but you've failed to tell me just what you want."

Alice let the rest of her icon slowly take shape. "An admission of guilt would be a start."

Roxborough crossed his arms over his naked chest. "An admission of guilt for what? I've done nothing."

Alice pulled the Wonderland universe closer to her, jerking Roxborough out of the chair. "Don't toy with me, Rox. I know your system came to the aid of the Crash entity the day it flatlined my meat body, so an admission of attempted murder would be a good place to begin. We'll go from there."

Roxborough looked up at her, a glint in his rabbit-brown eyes. "My dear, you are tragically mistaken. I had nothing to do with the viral attack, and if you believe my system came to its aid, then I'm guessing there isn't anything I can say to dissuade you. However, it simply isn't true."

Alice smiled. "Okay, you won't confess. Still, you might be interested to know that the Crash entity was never destroyed by the Echo Mirage team. It was damaged and chased away. But it could still be out there, hiding somewhere. Learning and growing with each passing cycle. Getting smarter, faster, more deadly. I don't know where it is, but I intend to locate and destroy it."

Roxborough's knee suddenly gave out and he fell to the ground with a cry of anguish. "Alice!"

"It is beginning," she said. "You are reliving your disease." Several years ago, Roxborough had been struck with systemic lupus-a degenerative disease that had eventually forced him to live out the remainder of his life in a vat, connected to tubes and the Matrix. Ever since then, Roxborough had been obsessed with getting out of his vat and into a real body.

"Alice, I swear I had nothing to do with the Crash."

"I've pinned the origin of the virus to three possible hosts. Your system at Acquisition Technologies, Gossamer Threads, or the old NASA mainframes. Both Dunkelzahn, who owned Gossamer Threads before his death, and NASA lost a great many assets during the crash. You, however, only lost data pertaining to one corporation. That in itself points a lot of blame in your direction."

"Luck," said Roxborough, with a laugh. "Simple blind luck."

"That kind of luck doesn't exist."

Roxborough sobered, and for a second his eyes lit up. "For the most part, I would agree with you. And maybe even in this case as well. You want an admission? All right. I'll tell you what I know."

In the cityscape, Alice took a drag from her cigarette and waited.

Roxborough sat on the grass and rubbed his knee. "A long time back, I was attempting a buyout of a corporation that belonged to Dunkelzahn, though I didn't realize he owned it at the time. It looked like a ripe salvage project, dabbled a bit in code research and some minor hardware production. I saw what I thought was a lot of untapped potential. So I checked it out."

"Checked it out?"

"Yeah, I hired someone to hack into his system. Old terminology, I know, but this was before cyberdecks and ASIST technology. I wanted to see if I could find any tidbits of leverage when I presented the offer. The hacker went too deep and found something that scared me. Her system got fried, but she managed to salvage some of the downloaded data."

"Who was it?"