The rain started at four a.m. By five past the hour, the torrent from the sky became a deluge, crashing onto streets that soon turned into lakes. Rico turned up the collar of his long black duster and walked down Treadwell to the brownstone at mid-block. Five razorguys stood beneath the awning there, three on the porch of the house, two on the sidewalk before it Two of the cutters held submachine guns barely concealed by their long, dark coats.
Rico was admitted at once, escorted through the house, then into the garden at the center of the house. Mr. Victor waited at the round transparex table in the middle of the garden. Tonight he wore a black smoking jacket and held a long fat cigar in one hand.
With a brief wave, he invited Rico to sit. "How are you, my friend?" he said. "I take it all is not well."
"You take it right," Rico replied. "Indeed, there are many who would agree," Mr. Victor said. "You have roused the giants from their slumber. The corps have sent their forces into the streets and there is ' much animosity being worked out, even as we speak. The great father of the Honjowara yakuza is particularly displeased at those who trespass on his territory. Fortunately, the metro police have seen fit to remain strictly neutral, by which I mean uninvolved. I think it is safe to say that by this time tomorrow, the giants will withdraw their forces from the streets. At least, their uniformed forces."
That much was good news. Rico had enough to worry about without having to consider the prospect of shock troops from Daisaka Security. Covert forces he could deal with. Probably.
"Before you say what you are here to say, let me tell you this," Mr. Victor continued. "I have word that several parties are keenly interested in hiring the team that made the run on Maas Intertech. Word is out that the run was very clean, very precise, incurring no loss of life. You have done your reputation a great service. In the future, I will be able to ask a considerably higher price for your services."
"Assuming we're still alive."
"Is that not always the assumption?"
The question was mostly rhetorical. Rico nodded understanding, then waited. Mr. Victor took a long drag on his cigar, then, with a look and gesture of the hand, he invited Rico to speak. "I need somebody to make contact with Prometheus Engineering."
"For what purpose, my friend?"
"Recruitment. I need to know if they got any interest in a certain individual."
"An individual whom you have recently met, perhaps?"
Rico nodded.
"This can be arranged," Mr. Victor said. "However, I feel I must ask what makes you desire such a thing. Have you encountered complications?"
"Serious complications."
Mr. Victor took another long drag on his cigar. "The job has turned out to be other than what it first seemed?"
"I don't know that."
"Perhaps you would care to explain."
Mr. Victor might have no contractual involvement in the job, but that did not mean he had no interest. He had directed Rico to L. Kahn. He had made the first contact. For a man like Mr. Victor, a man of honor, that was enough. That minimal involvement made him at least partly responsible for the job, in as far as it affected Rico and his team.
Rico spoke briefly of the complications. It came down to this: he'd been hired to pass Surikov on to L. Kahn. It looked like Surikov was bound for Fuchi Multitronics, but Prometheus Engineering was where he wanted to go.
"A difficult situation," Mr. Victor remarked. "Naturally, you are not content to simply give your man to L. Kahn."
"I ain't gonna force him into anything. I don't work that way."
"You made this clear to L. Kahn in the beginning."
The meeting back at Chimpira was clear in Rico's memory. "I told him I don't do snatches, and if the subject wasn't willing, the deal was off. He told me he don't accept refunds, that not completing the contract was a killing offense."
"Perhaps this is open to negotiation."
"I doubt it."
"As do I, but there is no percentage in placing you and the lives of your team hi further jeopardy until the facts are known. It is conceivable, is it not, that Prometheus Engineering is in fact the party behind the contract? In that event, there is every reason for you to complete the contract as arranged."
"Surikov's wife is supposed to be with Fuchi."
"Even so." Mr. Victor paused, smiling faintly. "You cannot assess the odds, my friend, until you know the facts. If you wish, I will arrange for you to discuss the situation with L. Kahn. Perhaps you can arrive at some mutually satisfactory solution."
Rico had serious doubts that any negotiating would help, but he had too many lives depending on him to refuse the suggestion. "That's a real generous offer," he said. "I owe you."
"On the contrary, my friend," Mr. Victor replied. "I owe you. I owe you a great deal."
The sword was black and it gleamed with the brilliant electron radiance of the matrix. It appeared in Piper's hand as if out of thin air and moved with the mercurial speed of thought.
The gray-armored warrior icon before her lifted its massive battle axe even as her sword slashed through the axe's shaft, and then whirled, finding a chink in the icon's armor and slicing through, piercing the icon, which dissolved into a cloud of fading silvery pixels.
A small, bitter victory over blaster IC. Piper released her sword, allowing it to vanish into the nothingness of inactive memory. The walls of the node around her pulsed red. The system, she knew, was going on active alert There was no point in even attempting to continue. She'd be lucky just to get out alive.
Now, from further up the corridor, came a pack of killer IC in the form of burning orange wolves. They charged, snarling, fangs flashing. Piper hurled a handful of gleaming black stars at the beasts, then turned and ran.
The race was on. Barrier IC like massive portals- glaring with electron fury-crashed down to block the corridor only milliseconds behind her. If she faltered, if she slowed her pace by even half a step she would be trapped, sealed into the consensual hallucination of the system construct and as good as dead.
She was in the Gauntlet, the maze of nodes and subsystems surrounding the mainframes of Fuchi's Manhattan cluster, which had been designed to protect its most vital elements. The CPUs lay at the cluster's heart, surrounded by data stores, immersed in the sea of subprocessors and slaves that served not only the cluster's data operations but the whole of the Fuchi complex, the Black Towers of Fuchi-town, located in lower Manhattan.
A blazing orange portal slammed down two steps ahead of her. She tugged a small fan from her sleeve, snapped it open and dove, thrusting the open fan out before her.
The portal parted like a ripe banana, splitting down the middle.
Jacking out was not an option. It was too late for that. In the time it would take her flesh and blood fingers to hit the Disconnect key or to wrench the datajack from her temple, she would be caught, traced, and brain-fried by nanosecond-swift IC.
In the next System Access Node waited a red and yellow clown. The icon for a smartframe or perhaps a Fuchi decker. Piper had met the clown icon before. The big sunflower on its chest fired acid IC. The big white custard pie in its hand worked like a trace and burn program. Piper hurled a handful of marbles. In mid-flight, the marbles swelled into silvery globes. As the clown moved to evade, the globes flew into orbit around it, immobilizing the icon with a dazzling storm of red and green program code.
The clown's blazing orange hair stood up on end.
I Piper slammed through the node and streaked out across the Manhattan telecommunications grid, free of the Fuchi cluster. The cluster's icon dominated the grid representing lower Manhattan, its form that of an enormous, five-pointed black star, slowly rotating, surmounted by a gigantic tower with five distinct facets, like the facets of a diamond. There was no more dangerous icon in the grid.
She fired herself into the electron-gridded darkness above, seeking the SAN to the regional grid. That led her to the Newark grid and back to where she had begun, and to her original fears and doubts.
Going up against Fuchi, even a subsidiary like Multitronics, was madness. It would make the run against Maas Intertech seem like a stroll through a sunlit meadow. Only a ramjamming neophyte would even consider it, and only because little baby deckers had no conception of the power contained in the Fuchi cluster. They thought sheer enthusiasm, combined with a knack for program code, would see them through anything. It didn't work that way. Piper knew. She had seen with her own electron-surrogate eyes what happened inside the Black Towers. She had heard the screams of deckers who tried to sleaze one too many Watchers or play smoke and mirrors with killer IC one too many times. She had breathed the malodorous fumes from a Mona Lisa jammer hit by so much lethal feedback that the decker's brain began to boil and pour out through her eyes.
If not for Rico, Piper wouldn't even have considered going up against Fuchi. Her lover left her no choice.
They had to do right, never mind that it might get them all killed. It wasn't enough to just turn and walk away, let Surikov do as he would. They had taken "responsibility" for Surikov. They had to see him safely to whatever corporate home he wanted. They had to make contact with the appropriate corporate agent. They had to cut a deal. And even that wasn't enough. They had to get Surikov's wife, too, or the man would remain a pawn of the megacorps.
A man with Rico's convictions didn't belong in the Sixth World. Piper only wished there was some finer' place where they could go, a place where doing right wouldn't get them killed.
Fuchi had developed the first desktop cyberdeck, the first neural interface. The corp had all but written the matrix out of whole code. Fuchi's advances in intrusion countermeasures had few rivals, and no real equals. Sleazing anything out of its cluster of mainframe computers was going to take miracle work. Surviving the run would require intervention by the gods.
A direct confrontation with the cluster's awesome mainframes would only get her killed. She had to find another way.
She shot herself into Saganville, the heart of the Newark grid. Here, the gleaming white pyramids of system constructs, thousands upon thousands of them, crammed the datalines and rose a thousand levels into the electron night. Amid this megalopolis of constructs, Piper found a particular network address and pushed her signal inside.
Her iconic self stepped into silent darkness. Scents like sulfur and methane wafted past her. A voice, immeasurably deep and resonant, like the. voice of a god, demanded, "WHO ARE YOU?"
Piper replied, "I am Arielle of Avalon."