The terrace was clear for the moment, but Sheila hesitated.

Hanson — > Night Crew: I don't like the straight run in. I think they have something planned.

"Yes! See!" Smale shouted aloud, and pointed them to views from above the library's entrance. Those cams showed spiderlike somethings guarding the final approach to the library doors. The creatures were so thick they almost hid the stone mosaic. Then the views went offline.

"Jeez, were those critters real?"

"… I think some of them were," said Sheila.

"Can't be. Even Electrical Engineering doesn't have that many robots. In this contest, we are the ones with mechanical superiority!"

But what if the enemy had bought a mob of hobby bots? If even half of those mechs were real —

Sheila paused, listening to advice that might be coming from anywhere on earth. Then she roared, "Into the trees!"

They gave a ragged shout. What came out of the synthetics was an answering roar, loud and baroque and totally Scoochi. They pounded off into the bushes southeast of the library. Virtual imagery faded into an artful blur that disguised the patchy network coverage.

The smaller mechs, the cleaners and sample carriers and tweezer bots, had little trouble with the mulchy ground cover. It was the forklifts that were the problem. They sank into the softness. Huynh ran around them, giving a push here and moving a stone there. The monsters slowly shuffled forward. It was not so different from some of the work he had to do down in the lab. But now was the time for some out-of-band complaining:

Huynh — > Hanson: This doesn't help, Sheila. The spider bots will just follow us here.

Hanson — > Huynh: Bear with me. This detour will work. Watch what I

A little yip of surprise came from Sheila's lips, and her sentence hung uncompleted. The virtual Scoochis blundered on for a pace or two, depending on their various latencies, but the GenGen night crew stumbled to an abrupt stop. Everybody milled around for a moment, images coalescing as they threaded routes out of the thicket.

But that was not the reason for the sudden stop. They were all staring at — a man and a rabbit. The first real, the second virtual. The two weren't exactly hiding; they were standing in a clearing. But there was brush all around, and until the Scoochis came stumbling in, there had been no camera viewpoint on this spot.

The rabbit was nothing special, a toonish chimera. It had a nicely impudent leer, you had to give it that.

Sheila the shima-ping hesitated a second, then took a couple of threatening steps toward the rabbit. "You're out of place."

The critter took a chomp out of its carrot and waggled an ear. "What's it to ya, Doc?"

"I'm not a doctor — yet," said the shima-ping.

The rabbit laughed. "In your dreams, then. I'm here to remind you that it's not just you and Hacek in collision tonight. There are other, greater powers at work." It wailed the last words and swept a carrot-clutching white-furred paw at the sky.

Huynh — > Night Crew: C'mon, Sheila, there are always bystanders.

Smale — > Night Crew: Stopping here just dilutes our reputation.

But Sheila ignored the objections. She sidled around the impudent rabbit and stepped close to the physically present human. That guy… looked aggressively normal: in his fifties, maybe Hispanic, dressed in dark work clothes. He was the perfect picture of UCSD faculty, though a bit overdressed. He was wearing, but very low-key, not even showing courtesy info. His eyes followed the shima-ping with a sure calmness that — now that Huynh noticed — was a little unnerving.

Then Huynh saw what Sheila was seeing. The stranger was projecting imagery. It was a subtle thing, the sort of far-lavender shades that you almost can't see. They were a mist that drifted up from the stranger's shoes and seemed even brighter as they flowed into the trees.

Hanson — > Night Crew: Switch to utility view.

GenGen's utility diagnostics were tricky to use outside of a lab, but they were much more sophisticated than what came with Epiphany outfits. In the utility view… you could see that this guy was heavily equipped. The lavender hinted at that, but now Huynh could see the scintillation of the high-rate laser links coming from the guy's clothes.

Without the lavender clue, they might never have noticed. Sometimes the highest form of showmanship is to pretend at unsuccessfully pretending to be innocuous.

Smale –> Night Crew: Hey! This guy — he's hooked into the Bollywood people here on campus.

They stared at each other with joyous surmise. This must be a genuine Bollywood mogul. Belief circles were the fuel that sustained the movie industry.

Hanson — > Night Crew: I told you, battling the Hacekeans would mean big recognition.

Booting Hacekean ass out of the library was more important than ever. "Onward!" shouted Hanson, now out loud and across all the world. "Down with Hacek! Down with the Librareome Menace!"

The virtuals and almost all the night crew continued on through the forest. Huynh stayed behind a few seconds, making sure that no queep or chirp was stuck in the leaves, making sure that the forklifts had enough space between the trees. And then they were all pounding along again.

"We want our floor space!"

"We want our library!"

"And most of all, we want our REAL books!"

Huynh did not expect that the spider bots would be caught by surprise. What did Sheila have up her shima-ping sleeve?

21

Alfred Vaz watched the departing crazies. Beside him, Rabbit swayed in time to their battle cries. For once, the critter seemed impressed by someone other than itself. Or maybe not. "Heh," it said, giving a little carroty salute. "I can't wait to see their faces when they discover who's fighting for the other side."

Vaz looked down at the furry ears. "Turn off your public presence." The goal was to not attract attention.

"You worry too much." But the rabbit took a last chomp and tossed the carrot green aside. This one vanished before it hit the ground. "Okay, Doc. I'm for your eyes only. What next?"

Vaz grunted and started off toward the south. In fact, he was more irritated than worried by Rabbit's impudence. If things went properly tonight, the Americans would not connect the operation with Rabbit, much less with the Indo-European Alliance. If the Americans started seriously looking, they would quickly pick out Alfred's role here — whether or not he and Rabbit were actually seen together. Keiko's people had worked out an elaborate decision program — a "contingency tree" — that described just what could still be denied and what could still be achieved in the face of various glitches. Twenty years ago, Alfred would have laughed at such automated planning, but no more. His secret analyst teams had developed his own contingency tree. It grew out from Keiko's, reaching all the way to ultimate worst cases — such as the unmasking of his YGBM project.

Alfred emerged from the densest part of the eucalyptus grove. All around him, his tiny bots unobtrusively kept pace. Every one was in violation of local law, containing not a single chip in thrall to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. While Vaz continued to play Bollywood exec through the public net, these devices provided him with his own network and countermeasures. There were places in the contingency tree where they could be very useful.

Meantime, a tiny stealthed aerobot followed along above, accepting his local network's traffic and flickering it at a thousand points in the westward sky. The energy in any pulse would be undetectable except to someone very alert and very close by, but the ensemble — correlated with the right time synch — should be visible to Keiko's antenna array out over the Pacific. It was their very own military net. That was the theory. In fact, Alfred had been out of touch for nearly three minutes. He knew Alice Gong was on watch tonight, probably as an analyst. He had launched his attack on her just before he lost milnet access. Very soon her surveillance duties would bring her to a lab file containing an innocuous moire pattern — only the pattern would not be innocuous for her. Has that happened yet ? Maybe he should snoop it out via the public net.