Miri shook her head. "No. That's an alternate path to the UP/Ex launcher."

"Look at my pdf, you fool. The map."

"I looked at my map, the one I cached this afternoon." Miri's smile was triumphant.

There was a two-second lag. Then the creature turned and looked almost straight at Miri. "I hate you, Miri Gu. You evil thing. Everything was going so well till you started meddling. I'll get you for this."

Then it was shouting. "Meantime, I'm gonna get you , Alfred. If I'm out of action, so are you! I'm blowing the whistle on you. I'm — "

The figure stopped moving. There was a moment of silence; then Robert heard a single word, faint and faraway:"… help."

And the creature vanished. Robert and Miri stared at each other. It was just the two of them, and the ranks of cabinets.

"Do you think he's really gone, Miri?"

"I… don't know."

Miri — > Robert: But if Smart-Aleck wasn't lying about everything, then this Alfred guy is still around. Aloud, her words were timid. "Maybe we should stay here and wait for the police."

"Okay."

Miri plunked herself down on the floor. She was very quiet for a moment, both publicly and privately. Robert set the packages down and stared off into the dark, looking this way and that. Supposedly there were no mon enemy robots. What could "Alfred" do with the fruit flies now? What couk the fellow do to Miri and Robert himself?

Miri — > Robert: Things don't sound the same.

Robert looked a question at her. Miri drew a golden arrow at right angles to the corridor they had arrived from.

Miri — > Robert: I kept track of everything I heard when I was following you. There's something new going on, most likely in the mouse arrays. Did you do anything over that way? She quietly came back to her feet.

Robert tapped at his keypad:

Robert — > Miri: Thts whr we put most of our eqt.

Miri's chin came up.

Miri –> Robert: The sounds are like what we heard here . Someone's packaging another shipment out.

29

Günberk and Keiko and Alfred each had their own analyst pools. Ten seconds ago those analysts had agreed: As an active threat, Rabbit was gone, both topside and in the operation's milnet. Dissent clusters hung around the opinion, but they were related to collateral-damage prediction.

Braun — > Mitsuri, Vaz: God willing, we've stopped the monster.

Mitsuri — > Braun, Vaz: And we have the inspection data we came for. Now it's time to get the hell out! She brought up a zoomed picture of the contingency tree. They were way out on a limb that led to full loss of deniability. And yet, until they knew for sure the results of their investigation, they needed the Americans kept ignorant.

Alfred presented his latest extraction schedule, the times padded just enough to cover his outshipment activities.

Mitsuri — > Braun, Vaz: Eight minutes! That much? Keiko still had things covered on the north side of the labs. And the views of the riot showed the Bollywood team still in place by the library… but that affair was descending into civil disorder, the sort of thing that brings a direct police response. Meshing Alfred back into the Bollywood people should be easy now; very soon it would be impossible.

Vaz — > Braun, Mitsuri: I'll trim every second I can, Keiko.

Mitsuri — > Braun, Vaz: You'd better! Five minutes is the most I can guarantee.

Alfred smiled at Keiko's impolitely constrained panic. She and Günberk would do their best. And in some ways, this chaos was helpful. Fooling Günberk and Keiko had always been Alfred's biggest problem. His outshipment would've been impossible if they weren't so distracted.

Two minutes passed. Three. His secret team had completed most of the fakery. They had updated the logs to satisfy both Alliance and future U.S. investigators. Now they were working with one small section of the Mus musculus arrays, his true animal model. Alfred hopped from viewpoint to viewpoint, swooping over cabinets that looked like office blocks in some bland, utilitarian city. He couldn't take more than a few of the mice, just a few of those conceived since the last update. His team had already shut down the in-progress experiments and started destruct operations. Now they detached the chosen arrays and began prepping them for launch. Other members of the team were already sending shipping cartridges to the pneumo port atop the cabinet. He could fit one twenty-by-thirty array… six hundred mice — into each cartridge.

Mitsuri –> Braun, Vaz: Alfred! The public net is failing.

Vaz swore and glanced at the topside analysis. This wasn't even close to Keiko's deadline.

Braun –> Mitsuri, Vaz: It's a full system failure. Mr. Rabbit has screwed us.

The analysts were boiling with contrary opinions. Failures like this happened a couple of times a year somewhere in the world, the price that civilization paid for complexity. But here there was a more sinister suspicion, that this failure was collateral damage from the revocation. Maybe Rabbit's riot magic depended on his commandeering the embedded computer systems of the public environment. Now that his certificates were revoked, there was a cascade of failures working through almost everything, just as fast as the certificates failed.

Mitsuri — > Braun, Vaz: Alfred! Clean up and get out!

The second and third cartridges would be ready in a moment. Alfred glanced at the UP/Ex status. The launcher was close to the MCog area. Most important, it was locally managed, unaffected by the crash outside. He entered a destination in Guatemala — and selected a launch vehicle that he'd emplaced some weeks before. It ought to be stealthy enough to get out of U.S. airspace.

Vaz — > Braun, Mitsuri: One minute. Can you give me that?

Mitsuri — > Braun, Vaz: I will try.

The topside analysts were hard into contingency planning and probability estimates. A thousand little changes were being made across the UCSD landscape, wherever the Indo-European operation had influence. The Bollywood presence would survive as long as any up there.

Alfred forced his attention back into the labs. The second cartridge was loading. The first cartridge was shooting down the pneumo, taking its little passengers to the launcher.

Alfred froze. The Gus were gone from the fruit-fly area. There was movement in another window, at the edge of the mice arrays. A girl and a man running toward the camera. They hadn't been fooled by the fruit flies.

Alfred leaned forward. Okay. One minute. What could his people cook up in that time?

Lena's wheelchair was no hiking machine. It did well enough on the asphalt, even going uphill; Xiu had to trot to keep up. But where the asphalt was carved by gullies, the chair had to walk. The going got very slow.

"Can you even see the road, Lena?" Her view-page was as dark as the natural view.

"No. I think someone has turned off the hillside. Side effect of the riot, maybe." She moved to the middle of the road. "Sst! They're still coming." She waved at Xiu to come forward. "How can we stop them? One way or another, we have to find out what's happening."

"Robert will see you."

"Damnation!" Lena dithered, caught in a dilemma.

"Go back to the side of the road. I can stop them more safely, anyway."

"Hmph," said Lena. But she retreated.

Xiu stood still for a moment. There were the distant sounds of the freeway. From over the hilltop there were noises that might have been chanting. But nearby was just insect sounds, the feel of air cooling in the night, the narrow roadway jumbled and rocky under her feet. She saw light sweep across the outcroppings above her.