grabbed the working bag she had kept ready out of old habit. Before leaving the room, she used the computer to log a 'do not disturb' order and a delayed order for a meal delivery with the palace household staff. It was a weak ruse, but it might buy a few minutes.
On her way to the outer precincts, she only paused once at a storeroom. The room was supposed to be secure, but she had penetrated better systems. She was in and out at the cost of only a few precious minutes, her bag stuffed with Sam's gear. There were ways to use the items as tracking links.
Just before she hit the outer, public section of the palace, she dropped her invisibility spell. There would be mages on watch at the boundary, and her concealment spell would only mark her as someone to be detained. To her relief, she found at the gate that her privileged status hadn't been revoked. The guards listened dutifully to her story about a trip to the southwest, and even offered her good wishes as she left the building.
She passed through the park surrounding the palace and entered the rail station without incident. Her good fortune held; a train was in the station. She slipped a certified credstick into the turnstile slot and dumped enough nuyen for a month's open pass. The gate opened and she made it to the platform in time to board just as the doors were closing.
By the time the train pulled into the main station in Dublin and she left the car to mingle with the city crowds, she had worked out the bones of her plan. Her first step was to contact her decker Jenny and arrange transport to England. As soon as she secured a little backup, she would intercept Samuel Verner. She was very sure she knew where he was headed.
Dodger had never felt so tired. He stared at the dataplug in his limp hand for a full minute before letting it drop to the idle cyberdeck. He was hungry and his muscles ached from hunching over the cyberdeck. His meat was failing under the strain. Running the Matrix steadily ground a decker down. Trying to do the work of a whole team of deckers changed the grinding wheel of exhaustion from carborundum to diamond grit. He was worn down.
The search for Sam and Hart had been a total bust. The Matrix offered no hints of any operation, and his checks on druid holdings gave no indication that they had anything to do with the sudden disappearance of his fellow runners. Willie had come up with zilch as • well. Even Herzog's street contacts had nothing, no matter what price was offered. No avenue Dodger had explored had yielded any information on the platinumhaired lady elf or the brown-bearded American shaman. Neither should have been able to hide for so long in the London sprawl.
Dodger was frustrated. Hart he could take or leave; something about her flashed a warning mode. But Sam… Dodger had gotten him into this mess and now his friend had vanished without a trace. His feelings of guilt were uncomfortable as much for their rarity as Robert N. Charrette for their strength. Those feelings were exaggerated every time he thought about how much time he was spending on the other problem.
The hunt on that issue had turned up only negative clues, but the puzzle drew him like a siren. Driven to look, and repelled at the same time, he haunted the Matrix searching for anything that might tell him more about the Artificial Intelligence that had called itself Morgan le Fay.
Dodger had visited with some of the best deckers in the Matrix, but they knew nothing. The rumor mill at Syberspace was empty. Or rather, it had been when he checked into the virtual club. It wouldn't be now. He knew that he would have started a whirlwind of speculation with his guarded questions. The habitues of the decker club were not stupida151nobody stupid could deck through the ice that armored that exclusive little Matrix hideout. His fellow Matrix runners would guess what he had hinted at and begin looking for themselves. Soon someone would know.
Or would they? Was the AI too good for mortal deckers? Could it hide in the Matrix in ways beyond any decker ability to detect? He wished he knew.
All he knew was that Renraku still had not announced the Artificial Intelligence's existence to the world. That meant that something in their program had fouled up. If they were sole owners of a functioning AI, they should be media-blitzing. The technological coup was worth too much.
Unless they were using it for shadowrunning. Could the rewards of applying it subversively be greater than the killing to be made on the open market? The AI had been present in the Hidden Circle's architecture. Dodger's investigations had revealed no significant connection between Renraku and the Circle. There were the usual minor connections between some of the
druids' corporations and the megacorp, but no more than could be expected in the interconnecting world of modern business. Renraku had contracts with the British government, but Dodger had been unable to detect any unusual activity or connections there, either. Normally, he would have assumed that everything was just too well hidden. But with the AI involved, he couldn't be sure. The Hidden Circle's antics just weren't Renraku's style.
So what was the AI doing in the Circle's architecture?
His first thought had been that Renraku might be moving against the Circle, too. Such criminals might attract the attention of a civic-minded megacorp. The publicity for squashing murders and terrorists was always worth a few points on the stock exchange. But the AI hadn't done anything to the Circle's system, and Renraku operations were quiet. The fragging local Red Samurai contingent had just been withdrawn for temporary assignment on the continent. Dodger's every runner sense screamed that Renraku wasn't involved. So who was running the AI? It wasn't the renegade druids. If they had that kind of Matrix power, Dodger would be a vegetable by now. The AI was just too much Matrix muscle.
For all its power, the AI was a riddle. It had found him in the Circle's architecture. How? It had even brought him a present. Why? Could it have been following him? Again, how and why? What in all the electron heavens and hells was going on?
Dodger had begun to think the only one with the answers was the AI itself. If he met it, he could ask. That was a concept that burned while it froze. When he was jacked in and experiencing the AI in the Matrix, he had no desire to stay in its presence. No rational desire, anyway. But an irrational attraction was there. He could no longer deny it. There weren't supposed to be emotions in the Matrix. The electron world had no pheromones to clog a man's brain and force animal reactions on a rational mind. When he stood under the electron skies, in the presence of the mirror woman with the ebony clothes, something called to him in a way he had never experienced before. At least not in the Matrix. He felt very afraid when he realized that the pull was too much like what he felt in Teresa's presence.
The meat and the mind, enemies ever.
So what was going on?
He was tired and confused and hungry. Knowing he wouldn't be able to deal with any problems if the meat collapsed on him, he rose shakily from his seat and stumbled across the squat toward the refrigerator. He hoped Willie had stocked the thing before she had relocated her base of operations.
He hadn't thought that was a good idea. Sam or Hart wouldn't know where they had gone, and leaving a message with a map was just as dangerous as staying put if the bad guys tracked them down. More dangerous; in a new base they'd feel safer than they were. She'd argued that splitting their reduced forces was dangerous, and been incensed that he refused to leave. But then, she'd already been smoking over the time he spent chasing his Ghost in the Machine instead of looking for Sam.
The refrigerator door didn't rattle when he opened it. Even as bleary as he was, he knew that wasn't a hopeful sign. The vegetable bin was empty save for a browning, wilted bunch of celery. The shelves held a few soggy pasteboard cartons sagging with the weight of their contents and a trio of bottles of Kanschlager fortified ale. The detrius of their patronage of the local food merchants he understood, but Willie's abandonment of some of her booze was a surprise. He picked up one of the bottles. He squinted his weary eyes at the label, but couldn't read the fine print. How the mighty have fallen from their lofty ideals. Alcohol was another sin of the flesh that dragged the mind from the clearer realms. Still, it would taste better than what they called water around here.
A sudden clatter from the doorway showed him just how strung out he was. He dropped the bottle. It shattered at his feet, spraying shards of plastic and sticky ale over his bare feet. A glance over his shoulder wiped such petty concerns out of his foggy brain.
Two men had entered the squat. The noise had come from the one clothed in dark garments. He had slipped on the remains of Dodger's last meal and grabbed the table where the cyberdeck and Willie's radio lay. The rattle of equipment had betrayed their entrance.
The second intruder was already halfway across the room. At first, Dodger thought he was a Shidhe because of the cut and material of his clothes, but the wild beard that spilled from the shadows of the hood dispelled that
