Recently two more had joined him. Oleg usually stayed in the car. Constantine came late at night to replace one of the other two. It would be a good idea to cook some meat balls for them, you couldn't expect them to stay fit on all those pizza orders and rice cakes wrapped in synthetic seaweed.

The heart monitor beeped, its alarm disrupting her thoughts. On its screen, the neat curves gave way to sharp peaks and scary dips. Her son's heart missed another beat, and again, followed by a long pause. The monitor's anxious whine grew as the peaks straightened into a thin horizontal line. Come on now! Start beating! Hold on, son, keep on fighting!

An emergency call light blinked, summoning a Chronos resuscitation team. The hospital's remote operator hooked himself up to the resuscitation equipment that crowded around the headboard of the capsule. The day before, she'd had to sign a hospital waiver and pay for the VIP-class home care. Without that, they would have taken him away to some hospice where he'd have faded away like any other coma sufferer.

The operator sent the charge command to the defibrillator and activated the pulse generator. The sharp click of the jet injector startled her. An empty adrenaline cartridge rolled across the floor.

"Clear!"

Her son's body arced, convulsing. The autosampler methodically injected the contents of the first-aid container into the IV drip. On the monitor screen, the hospital doctor's face frowned, concerned.

"Clear!"

Whiffs of smoke rose from the capsule's sensitive electronic components. There had to be a cutoff system there that disabled any non-core hardware, but it didn't seem to have worked. Again the jet injector clicked, sending an empty atropine cartridge spinning across the parquet floor.

"Clear!"

The monitor was still whining when the corridor filled with the stomping of many feet. The Chronos men were the first to arrive.

Hope in her eyes, Anastasia Pavlovna looked up at the hospital doctor on the monitor screen. He turned away momentarily, then forced himself to answer her stare, shaking his head. Then the monitor blinked, the picture replaced by a list of the resuscitation procedures. The arriving ambulance crew took over from him. He switched off.

Half an hour later, Anastasia Pavlovna sat at the table, barely responsive, clutching some sedatives in one hand and an official pen with a built-in ID check in the other. She wasn't even looking at what she was signing: the death certificate, the ambulance crew report, the burial certificate that stated her son's body was to be laid to rest cryogenically. She was almost happy she couldn't see or hear much: the last thing she wanted to hear now was the squelching sounds of a machine that was pumping extra liquid out of her son's body, replacing it with cryoprotective solution.

A text ringtone made her jump. She froze. This was the tone she'd assigned to messages coming from her son's number.

Not yet knowing what she was doing, the mother looked up at the comms bracelet. She touched the screen, opening the incoming message. A wide smile lit up her face.

He's alive! My boy's alive! Oh, thank you, AlterWorld, thank you!

* * *

We were finishing our alcocreams when my chest seized up quite painfully. I winced, rubbing what had to be the heart area.

"Whassup?" the ever-observant Zena asked.

"Dunno. Feels like my heart's just played up."

Her eyebrows rose. "You're not going to become the first perma who popped his clogs from a heart attack, are you?"

"I hope not," I smiled back, concentrating on my body sensations. The pain seemed to have subsided, or was it my imagination? My nerves were like live wires with all the recent events, and the shock I'd received that morning could have well added its pound of flesh. I was surprised I wasn't hearing voices yet, let alone suffering phantom pains.

Her stare unfocused briefly, then she was back with us. "He'll see you in ten minutes. Are you ready?"

"Yes, ma'am!"

"Good. Freckles, finish your mojito and give Max a lift to the Guild. And you can show him to the office. He doesn't have much time."

"Sure," the female wizard mumbled, clinking her spoon as she scooped out the last of her soft-green poison of choice from the bowl.

In theory, virtual liquor didn't have intoxicating properties. But in practice... It could simply have been brain chemistry playing up; alternatively, the drink could trigger existing subconscious reflexes, but it was a fact noticed by many: the alcohol did affect you. Some more, others less, but no one was a hundred percent immune to its effect apart for some die-hard teetotalers and rehab rats whose subcortex didn't possess the necessary neural links.

That explained the fact that the girls were just tipsy enough to move to the next stage of the dating game, some quite prepared to skip it and move directly to the inevitable horizontal stage. Yeah, right. Bomba especially could use a strong male hand. The other girls weren't exactly beauty pageant material, either. Having said that, the time spent in AlterWorld had somehow changed my perception of beauty. To my eye they seemed quite cute even if a bit homely, though had I met their team in real life, I was guaranteed a few embarrassing moments complete with a pair of soiled pants and some early gray hair.

Freckles checked her bowl again and, finally convinced it was empty, sat back in her chair. She sent me an invitation to join the group, waited for the acceptance notification and announced with the intonations of the first man in space,

"Off we go!"

I had barely jumped to my feet when a micro port pulled us out of the café and onto the teleport pad opposite the mercs' Guild building.

"After you!" she motioned me into the main gates guarded by a pair of golems.

I forced the last mouthful of Elven beer down my suddenly constricted throat. I pulled the spoon—which could now be considered stolen, I suppose—out of my mouth, studied it in astonishment and hurled it aside. "Come on, then."

The VIP conference room was dripping with over-the-top luxury. Its walls were lined with tapestries depicting the mercs' exploits: the Nagafen raid, the week-long defense of the entrance to the Valley of Gold, and the storming of the Citadel of Gloom.

I sat in a comfortable leather chair. The Coordinator's powerful figure towered across the table opposite. Apparently, the corporate dress code that demanded all minor staff to wear Goblin guises didn't apply to him. Personally, I wasn't sure that a malicious snout with its finger-long fangs sticking out between black lips was a good working image to communicate to his VIP conferees. But judging by the fact that his green mug with its recognizable tattoo on one cheek kept recurring on some of the tapestries, the Coordinator hadn't always been a staff pen pusher. He must have come up through the ranks: his tough-guy appearance must have initially been generated for the battlefield, not office chitchat.

He gave ear to my request, his direct stare unsettling. Then he paused, thinking. He seemed to have made up his mind as he sat back in his chair and spoke,

"You see, dear Laith, there are several problems with your request to begin with. But let me start with a question. How are you going to hack the dome?"

That got me thinking. I really didn't want to expose my ability in front of all that crowd. At first I'd planned on using the Shadow of the Fallen One that guaranteed me some nominal anonymity. Very nominal, because even Snowie was quite capable of putting two and two together and sussing out the ability's proud owner. And I didn't want them to make me do their dirty work for them. But wait—there was a solution. Costly enough to make my inner greedy pig clutch at his heart, but a solution nonetheless.