Deni bristled. What was this fragger trying to talk his sister into? Was he trying to get her hooked on BTL? But that was chips. You needed a chipjack for that. Not a data-jack. Datajacks were for computers…

"We're going to take a lot of people to the special place today," the kid told Pip. He glanced at the watch on his wrist. "In just a few seconds. Would you like to come too?"

Pip nodded. A smile lit her tiny face.

The kid handed her an electrode net and smiled as she strapped the array of sensors onto her head and plugged its fiber-optic cable into the deck on her lap.

No! Deni raged. Don't trust him, Pip! He flailed forward, but his astral body bounced back as it encountered Pip's aura. He whirled, reached out* tried to claw the thing off her head. But it was no fraggin' use. The hands of his astral body were thin as mist.

Pip closed her eyes. Her body relaxed into a slump.

Deni stared at the kid on the couch beside Pip, wanting to take the silly scarf around his throat and choke him with it.

The kid stood up and walked over to a telecom outlet. Seeing him pull a fiber-optic computer connection cable from it, Deni figured he was going to attach it to a cyberdeck. But instead the kid slotted the cable directly into the datajack in his skull. Carefully paying out the cable, the kid sat back down on the couch beside Pip. Then he too leaned back and closed his eyes.

A strange thing happened. The kid's aura went totally weird.

The weirdness began just above the kid's scalp. His aura turned a bright silver color over a point on his datajack, and then lines of energy suddenly sprayed out from this point. Tiny bolts of light, maybe as long as a monowhip stretched out straight, spiked out like roving spotlights, growing thinner and thinner the farther out from the kid's head they got, until they just disappeared. They smelled hot somehow, like electricity.

"I'm in the Matrix," the kid told Pip. "Can you see me?"

"Yes," Pip whispered. "It's beautiful here."

"Just wait," the kid said. "It'll get better."

Even through his rage, Deni knew this had to be a scam. There was no way that kid was in the Matrix. Deni knew enough tech to realize that you had to have a cyberdeck to jack into the virtual reality of the Matrix. You couldn't just slot a cable from a telecom outlet into your datajack. No deck, no dice.

But there was that weird aura…

Deni glanced at the kid's wristwatch and saw that it was blank-then remembered that abstract data like numbers couldn't be seen in astral space. Still, the time had to be somewhere just before ten a.m. He tried to figure where his chummer Alfie would be at this hour. If he could get her to buzz him out here on her bike they might arrive in time to save…

Pip let out a soft sigh. Then her body suddenly tensed, and her thin chest stopped moving. Was she still breathing? Oh frag. Was she alive?

Pip's chest rose… and slowly fell. She looked like a coma patient. Except that her limbs were rigid as death.

Drek. Deni had to do something. Fast.

He booted it on back to his meat bod, loping across Hell's Kitchen as fast as his dog legs would take him.

(18:46:12 WET)

Jackpoint: Amsterdam, Holland

Red Wraith dove for cover as the rumbling tank bore down on him. A nearby I/O port formed a perfect foxhole: a triangular-shaped "hole" in the military-green corrugated metal floor. The tank clattered closer, a monstrosity that dwarfed Red Wraith, towering over him like a mobile office block. Its matte-black treads were studded with chromed spikes, its body warted with rivets. Neon-red lasers beamed out from sensors on all sides of the metal beast, and its barrel and turret swung back and forth, seeking a target. In seconds it would find where Red Wraith had gone to ground, would crush him into a bloody pulp with its treads or blow him to pieces with its cannon…

The tank was just a Matrix construct-a metaphor for a computer program. Just as Red Wraith's persona icon, with its ghostlike body that ended in dripping red mist where the lower legs would normally be, was a virtual representation of the decker named Daniel Bogdanovich. But Red Wraith used the adrenaline rush the tank image gave him, let it spike his consciousness into hyper-awareness. He'd come so far to reach these personnel records…

He wasn't going to give up without a fight, even if it cost him his deck. Not when he was this close.

He used his cyberdeck's masking program to change the appearance of his on-line persona into a shimmering cloud of glittering silver confetti. With luck, the tank-shaped intrusion countermeasures program that was bearing down on him would mistake him for a stream of data, one of dozens that flowed back and forth across the inside of the octagonal box that represented the sub-processing unit he'd decked into. The false datastream created by the masking program would glitch up the actual data that was flowing into Red Wraith's "foxhole"-in the real world, the hardcopy printer that was connected to the port would hiccup and spew out a page or two of jumbled graphics. But with luck, the admin clerks at UCAS Seattle Command would lay the blame on a hardware glitch.

Red Wraith crouched lower in his foxhole as the tank rumbled closer. Crashing the IC wasn't an option. A stunt like that would trigger too many system alerts, and then he'd have hostile UCAS deckers to tangle with. Instead he had to find some way to subtly defeat the program.

As the tank loomed over his foxhole, Red Wraith could feel the walls and floor of the I/O port rumbling. Then the tank's tread sealed off the hole, plunging him into darkness, and Red Wraith was engulfed in the stench of hot exhaust and oil. Part of his mind acknowledged and appreciated the detail of the programming, noted the effectiveness of psyching out the target by overwhelming his senses with such oppressive detail. Another part of him responded with the fear the tank's designers had intended to induce. But the logical, methodical part of Red Wraith's mind- the part that had given him the steady hands and cool head to perform assassinations-was in control. Almost instinctively, he tucked away his fear and activated an analyze utility.

The utility appeared next to him in the customized iconography he'd given it: a trode-patch electrocardiograph monitor like those used in hospitals. Programming on the fly, Red Wraith modified its outer casing, shaping it into a gleaming chrome spike like those on the treads of the tank. Then he reached up and jammed it home. The trode patch on the wide end of the spike sampled the graphic imaging of the IC, then adhered firmly as it was incorporated into the tank's programming.

A series of pulsing red lines appeared in the darkness in front of Red Wraith as the utility began its analysis. He scanned them quickly as the tank rumbled clear of the I/O port, noting the oscillation of the sine wave and the frequency of the peaks on the baseline below it. The readouts told him not only what type of IC he was up against- blaster, an attack program that could send his cyberdeck's MPCP chips into meltdown on a successful hit-but also how tough the program would be to crack.

Diagnosis: tough. But not mega. And that puzzled Red Wraith. He'd decked into a military computer system containing confidential personnel datafiles; the IC here should have had ratings that were off the scale. Sure, the datafiles were merely the records of personnel who had "retired" from active service. They hardly contained anything that would be considered damaging to UCAS national security. Just addresses, medical records, next-of-kin forms. No active service records. But they should have been guarded more closely, just the same.

Hmm…

A sudden shift in perspective took Red Wraith by surprise. Suddenly he was lying on the "floor" of the system construct, looking across an expanse of corrugated metal at the glowing rectangular block of the datastore he'd been trying to access before the tank materialized. The I/O port he'd been hunkering down in was nowhere in sight.