What could the Greater Scooch-a-mout have in mind ? Huynh used his technician's view and his artist's. He looked out from Scoochi cams, from the aerobots above, even GenGen utilities. The best he could imagine was some pallid surprise, something to distract everyone from the promise that could not be kept.

As the battlefronts tightened around the library, point and counterpoint came from the opposing armies and together made a concerted rhythm. Music seeped into the shouting. After a few moments, every local voice was synched to the sound and everyone was swaying to the beat. It came louder and louder, and Huynh noticed that the amplifiers included police and fire-department equipment. Someone had committed real vandalism to make this even more spectacular.

It would be for nothing without some definite result.

In fact, the singing held together just a few more seconds. Then it faltered as nothing more happened, and no one could imagine anything more happening. But… there was another sound, a trembling vibration that crept up from the ground. Ten years ago, Timothy Huynh had felt something similar. The Rose Canyon earthquake.

Huynh freaked, dropping all the fantasy overlays. He stared out in panic with his own naked eyes. Real lights flashed back and forth, flickering across the faces of the thousands of real rioters, picking out the angular bodies of the larger mechs. Now there was no pillar of light from heaven. The library was occasionally lit, but more often a silhouette against the lights on the other side.

The trembling in the earth grew stronger. The walls and overhanging floors of the library seemed to shiver. The magnificent double pyramid that had survived the decades, that had survived the Rose Canyon quake — it was shaking, all the thousands of tons of real concrete.

In time to the rising music.

There were screams. Lots of people remembered Rose Canyon. But lots of others were taken by the spectacle — and their singing resumed and was picked up by the vision of the night and blasted out across the world.

The library swayed. Parts dipped; parts rose. It was not shaking as much as it was dancing. Not a bouncy riverdance. The building was dancing like a man with feet planted firmly in the ground. And Huynh realized there was no earthquake; somebody had hijacked the building's stabilization system. He had once read that a well-powered building could survive almost any quake short of a great crack opening up beneath it. But here that power was being turned upon itself.

The rhythmic swaying became more pronounced, twelve feet left and right, and up and down, with parts of the building shifting away and together. The shrugging, swaying dance of the overhanging floors shifted to the outlying pillars. There was a sound that might have been real and might have been ingenious invention. It might have been both. It was the sound of mountains being torn from their roots.

The pillars shifted and the library… walked. It was not as spectacular as fake imagery could be, but Huynh was seeing it with his naked eyes. In halting cadence, first one fifty-foot pillar and then another rose visibly from the ground, moved several yards in the direction of the Greater Scooch-a-mout, and descended with the sound of rock penetrating rock.

The rest of the building shifted with them, twisting on the utility core that was the library's central axis.

The Greater Scooch-a-mout stepped forward and embraced a corner of the nearest pillar. The music became triumphal. Cheering blasted across the world, wondering and still a bit frightened.

Hanson — > Night Crew: Hey is this an Event or is this an Event?

The Library had chosen.

25

Braun — > Mitsuri, Vaz: By damn! Homeland Security will respond to this. Has Mr. Rabbit gone mad?

Mitsuri — > Braun, Vaz: He claims his 'library dance' will only trigger FBI intervention, and all together give us more time.

Braun — > Mitsuri, Vaz: Okay. I have the complete dump from our inspection equipment. God willing, that's everything we need to prove what's been going on in these labs.

Alfred was already working through the exit checklist. He had fooled his friends, but… what of his attack on Alice Gong? If she was still functioning, it might not matter what he did.

"FBI requests clearance to take charge of the riot area."

"On what grounds?" Bob Gu spoke without looking away from the library. Even the unfudged video was remarkable. This was a 1900s concrete behemoth, originally as dumb as snot. Yet it had moved without collapsing.

"The grounds are the frank evidence of violation of federal law, namely — "A stream of legal references spewed across Bob's vision. "FBI argues that this is effectively an attack on a federal building."

Bob hesitated. There were criminal violations here, though UCSD had made no formal complaint. At this point, there was no watch-related service FBI could render; they would simply be law enforcement. The watch priority — his priority — was to snoop and swoop. Snoop, then swoop. What might this disorder be a cover for? He glanced at the bio-lab status. Still all green. Finally he replied, "Request denied. There is an ongoing Homeland Security investigation here. However, give the first layer of our analysis to San Diego Police and Rescue and the UCSD campus police. Be prepared to support emergency networking."

"Layer one to SDPD and campus police. Yes, sir."

Bob's eyes turned back to the library. It was still standing, but this was damn dangerous foolishness.

His analyst pool certainly thought so. In the last thirty seconds, the node structure had come close to turning inside out. For the moment, Alice let the engineers dominate. The text clouds were full of gibber about how the library "walk" had been accomplished and the dangers there might be for the people in and around it. USMC nodes were lodged deep in the discussions, his own people thoroughly caught up in the excitement. That was not acceptable.

Bob leaned forward and spoke: "All squads! Move to Launch Alert." The chances of an actual launch were still near zero, but this would get his people into their assault craft. More important, it got their attention. The USMC nodes moved away from all the speculation and into the tight coordination of marines in a launch prep. Bob stared at the distracted analyst pool for a moment more. Alice was already drawing them away from the library. The structural engineers were no longer the center of the tangle. The library had walked. So what might that be covering? His marines' duty was to guard against the deadliest grand surprises. For instance, were the bio labs still secure? What was going on in the rest of CONUS Southwest?

He turned and jogged out of his bunker, into the narrow tunnel that led to his own launcher. The analyst display followed along, hanging just to his right. Alice had grabbed another fifteen hundred analysts, more bio-science and drug research people.

The ceiling curved low at the end of the tunnel. His assault craft was a tiny vehicle, its design a compromise between time to target and the desire to make the local combat manager invisible. From the ingress tunnel all that was visible of it was the open hatch and a portion of the dead black fuselage. He settled into his place, but did not zip up.

What is Alice doing ? He watched the analyst pool grow, now larger than for most worldwide operations. But all the attention was on the bioscience labs around UCSD. True, the situation there was strange. Even though lab security was in the green, the staff was topside in the riot. That justified some attention, but it also made lab surveillance even easier. Damn ! Now Alice was stealing analysts tasked with cargo tracking throughout all of CONUS Southwest.