"What kind is it?" Kellan asked, looking on both sides for a logo or brand name on the sleek casing. Jackie laughed.

"It's a custom build," she said. "Off-the-shelf is fine for newbies getting their start, but if you really want to run the Matrix, you need to know your deck inside and out. The best way to do that is build it yourself. This one has the casing of the old Cross Applied Technologies deck I started out with, but I've majorly upgraded most of the guts." She folded back the cyberdeck's protective case to reveal a sleek, flat alphanumeric keypad featuring a number of customized function keys. There was a slot along the side where a flatscreen rolled out, but Jackie didn't pull it out. The deck looked like a slim keyboard with slots for data chips and ports for plugging in peripherals, but no external display.

Jackie opened a side panel of the deck and unreeled a thin fiber-optic cable with a standard jack terminator, which she slid into the chrome jack at her temple. It nestled there with a faint snick, lying almost flush against her head. The cable trailed down the side of her face. Then she took the jack for Kellan's trode net and plugged it into a secondary port on the deck. She powered up the deck with a tap on the keypad. Kellan felt a faint tingle as the cyberdeck initialized and its simsense circuits established contact with her nervous system.

"The hitcher rig," Jackie said, gesturing toward the trode net, "will feed you the same signal as me. It's filtered a bit, but you'll see, hear and feel everything I do in the Matrix. You won't have any control, though, that's all me. You okay with that?"

Kellan nodded. "Good. We'll be able to talk through the interface, but no backseat driving, okay? I need to stay focused, so don't interrupt unless I talk to you first." Again, Kellan nodded in acknowledgment, feeling a knot of nervousness and excitement in her stomach..

"All right, then," Jackie said. "What we know right now is that Brickman, our Mr. Johnson, works for Knight Errant and that he had some reason of his own for setting up our little run on Ares. He also has some kind of deal going with Orion and the Ancients, which may have gone sour, from what you told me about their conversation."

"There's the Street Deacon, too," Kellan said. At Jackie's quizzical look, she went on. "There was something about his expression when he saw Brick-man, like he knew him or something, and didn't like him. I got the feeling it was mutual, but it's harder to tell with Brickman."

"Magical intuition?" Jackie asked with a raised eyebrow.

She shrugged. "I don't know. Call it a hunch."

"All right," the decker said. "So we've got Brickman, Orion and the Deacon, and something that might tie it all together. Sounds to me like Brickman is the center of all this, so we should check him out first. Since you already found something online, it's a good bet he's the most accessible, too. You ready to go?" Kellan nodded.

"Okay, get as comfortable as you can. This could take a little while." Kellan settled back against the padding on her side of the coffin, while Jackie did the same on the opposite side, their legs stretched out in the middle and the cyberdeck resting in Jackie's lap. Then Jackie tapped a key on the cyberdeck and the world vanished in a wash of silvery static.

Kellan fought down a surge of panic as she lost all sensation of her body for a moment. She was falling through an endless void of silent static. Then the chaos of static resolved itself into patterns and the world reformed around her in a different configuration.

Kellan found herself standing on a vast, dark plain under a night-black sky. Hovering overhead were constellations of orbiting neon shapes: cubes, spheres, stars, pillars and entire buildings floating there. Stretching off in all directions were glowing traceries of lines, with pulses of energy running along them at regular intervals. The horizon was a vast cityscape glowing against the darkness. Some of the structures were familiar-Kellan saw the Space Needle and the Aztechnology Pyramid-while others were completely alien, even impossible in the geography and physics of the ordinary world. They were in the depths of the Seattle Matrix.

"Still with me, Kellan?"

She started at the sound of Jackie's voice, seemingly coming out of nowhere.

"Yeah," she said, "yeah. Where are you?"

"Right here," the decker said with a laugh, and Kellan looked down to see one of her own hands waving. Then she realized: it wasn't her hand, it was Jackie's hand, or rather, the hand of Jackie's Matrix persona. The software in the cyberdeck created the illusion of a virtual world. It translated the information from the Matrix into neural impulses, sending them into the user's brain. That included the appearance of a "physical" self. It was like Kellan and Jackie were inhabiting the same virtual body, except Jackie was in control. Kellan was just along for the ride.

"Okay, hang on," Jackie said. She turned and stepped onto one of the glowing lines stretching toward the horizon.

It was like being on a roller coaster. Kellan felt as if she'd left her stomach behind as she suddenly zoomed along a silvery tunnel. Hundreds of other packets and bits of data flew back and forth in either direction, like a kind of digital rush hour. She changed direction, zooming this way and then that way.

Before Kellan even had a chance to get her bearings, it was over. The world snapped back into still focus and she stood out in front of a towering building. At least it looked like a building. The walls were of reddish stone, with inset windows of mirrored glass, tinted a coppery color.

"Welcome to the Ares Macrotechnology Seattle host system," Jackie said, imitating the stereotypical nasal monotone of a tour guide. "Ahead you'll see what passes for security at a secondary Ares site like this one."

Kellan could see the main doors of the building. Curled up on the wide stone landing in front of them was a massive black hound, as big as a troll. It had three heads, all lying on its folded paws, eyes closed. It was breathing slowly and deeply and appeared to be sleeping. Spiked iron collars around its necks were connected to a heavy chain bolted into the stone wall behind it.

"Standard Ares Cerberus ice," Jackie said. "Not terribly imaginative, but then, what can you expect?"

"Uh-huh," Kellan replied softly.

She'd heard of ice, decker slang for IC or Intrusion Countermeasures. Ice programs protected Matrix hosts from unauthorized intrusion, safeguarding the valuable data and systems within those hosts. Deckers specialized in finding various ways past ice to access that same data. The most sensitive data was protected by sophisticated ice. Most ice programs simply knocked a decker offline or denied her access to the host system, but Kellan knew there were ice programs that could trace a decker's location in the physical world, sending the information to the authorities or corporate security. Ice programs could damage a decker's cyberdeck, corrupting software or even frying the hardware. Then there was the legendary black ice, which could drive an intruder insane, or even kill a decker, inducing seizures or sending a lethal charge of electricity directly into the decker's brain. Kellan suddenly wished she'd asked Jackie how much protection the trode net afforded her.

"You don't have to whisper," the decker said in her mind. "It's not like anyone else can hear us."

"Oh, okay," Kellan said, somewhat sheepishly, in her normal tone of voice.

"Now; let's take care of Fido here." The slim, silvery-white hand of Jackie's persona reached out and plucked a large soup bone from the air with a flourish, like a magician producing a bouquet of flowers. She ran her other hand along its length and suddenly the bone split and there were three of them, held fanned between her hands.