He was the only patient in the infirmary. Since a lot of the Net Force staff had opted for the long holiday, including, apparently, the medical staff, the place had an echoey feel to it.
'Sergeant Fernandez.'
'Lieutenant Winthrop.'
'I heard you got shot.'
'A scratch. I'm stuck here overnight, SOP, but I could go out dancing if they'd let me.'
She put the vase on the table next to the bed. 'You're just lying here, doing nothing? No books, no entcom?'
'The colonel was here, you just missed him. He turned the set off. I'm being punished.'
She raised her eyebrows. 'For being shot?'
He chuckled. 'No, even Howard's not that hard-assed.'
He told her about his computer class.
It was a funny story. When he was done, she laughed. 'Tough CO, isn't he?'
'Yeah. I really wanted to see how the middleweight wrestler was going to do against the light heavyweight.'
They both laughed.
'So, how are you doing?' Julio asked. 'I heard about the workstation business.'
'Oh, don't worry about that. I'll figure it out.'
'Any suspects?'
'At the top of my list? Jay Gridley. He doesn't like me. He thinks I slept my way into this job.'
'Seriously?'
'That he thinks I used my feminine wiles? Or that he planted the leak in my station? Yes to the former, no to the latter. We aren't buddies, but I respect his abilities. Though if you tell him I said so, I'll deny it.'
'Deny what?'
'He might keep stuff from me, but I don't think he's nasty — or stupid — enough to try to implicate me in a federal crime. After this assignment, I'm back with our unit, so I'm no threat to his position. And he has to know I'm going to figure out who did it. Just a matter of time.'
There was a moment of quiet when neither of them spoke.
'So how was it?' she asked. 'The sortie?'
'By the numbers,' he said. 'The bad guys weren't in our league. They were outsmarted, outmaneuvered, and outgunned. Only mistake we made was mine. I'd been awake, I wouldn't be spending the night here with my leg propped up and a draft on my butt. One of the yabbos hiding in a sensor nest had a few rounds of AP in her weapon. Fortunately, she was either rattled or a lousy shot. She cooked off most of a thirty-round stick and only nicked me one time. Guy with her was a better shooter, but he was using hardball and tracer, his ammo couldn't pierce the suits.'
'Too bad I missed it,' she said.
'You've been on a few field ops.'
'Nothing lately. The colonel thinks I'm more useful in front of a computer. Last time I was in the field, I was in the HQ tent thirty miles away from the action.'
'He's right,' Fernandez said. 'Grunts like me are a dime a dozen, but a computer genius is harder to replace.'
She smiled. 'I need to get back to work. Anything I can do for you?'
She saw him hesitate a second, and wondered if there would be an off-color remark. If he was looking for an opening, this was a good one.
He shook his head. 'No, ma'am, but thank you for asking. I'll catch up on my sleep. See you when I get out.' He flashed her a nice smile.
She resisted a sudden urge to lean over and kiss him. She was really beginning to like this guy.
'Later, Julio. We'll talk about computers when we get all this straightened out.'
'I'd like that. Thanks for stopping by.' Another hesitation, then: 'Jo.'
Jay Gridley had given up on the cowboy scenario because it felt too slow. True, speed in a scenario didn't translate to RT — real time — but if you were poking along on a horse when you felt like racing on a big Harley motorcycle, it made a subjective difference.
So now Jay turned to one of his favorite action heroes, borrowing from one of the early classic James Bond movies,
Over the landscape he flew, zipping through the air with the famous Bell Rocket Belt on his back.
Of course, in RW, the Bell device was not a belt at all, but a large and very heavy backpack. And it didn't have much of an operational range in RW either. Jay had done some research when designing his scenario. The original rocket belt was essentially nothing more than a pair of fuel tanks, some handlebars, a throttle, and a couple of rocket nozzles. How it worked was, hydrogen peroxide sprayed into a fine mesh, producing a very hot and hard steam that spewed from the rocket nozzles with a few hundred pounds of thrust. It was loud, dangerous, and you only had twenty-some seconds of lift, maybe thirty with the right fuel mixture and tuned nozzles, and that was it. You could lean in the direction you wanted to go, and later some maneuvering jets were added, but if you were a hundred feet up in the air when the gas ran out, you were going to fall and smash into the ground real hard.
A later version, the Tyler Belt, was a bit more efficient and gave a little more flight time, but the hops were still short and quick. A small jet-engine model that was theoretically capable of giving the wearer half an hour in the air had eventually been designed, but the U.S. military had claimed exclusive use of the new engine for its Cruise missiles.
So the personal backpack craft of science fiction just kind of fizzled out. The existing rocket belts wound up in museums or television commercials or movies, but that was it.
Jay's version of the rocket belt had a secret — but theoretically possible — fuel and a miniature jet engine that gave him an hour in the air and an automatic safety reserve to allow him to land when the fuel ran low. He could have given it infinite power in VR, of course, but that took some of the fun out of it. Realistic limits were better for the scenarios he created. Any fool could do fantasy; it took some skill to keep it believable.
Anyway, while it wasn't as fast as a jet or even his pedal-to-the-metal Viper, it was a real rush to fly along with the wind blowing in your face and ruffling your hair, to be able to leap tall buildings wearing the technological equivalent of seven league boots.
The way Jay figured it, if you couldn't have fun, why bother?
Right at the moment, Jay was zooming over the new sixteen-lane South China Causeway, from just outside Xianggang, Hong Kong, heading north to Jiulong, on the mainland, looking for Wong Electronics trucks. These were easy to spot from the air, given that they had bright orange roofs, each of which was numbered. In RW, without a VR scenario enabled, the 'trucks' were actually packets of binary information gathered and collated at nodes and squirted across the net. RW was just too boring.
Wong Electronics made some minor pieces of hardware, but they specialized in transmission software, readers and mailers, and certain kinds of security programs. Whoever had snuck into Winthrop's computer had erected a couple of firewalls and dug two deadfalls on his or her way out to cover his or her ass, and from the size and shape, even without the snipped-off ID codes, Jay knew the walls ‘n' falls were top-of-the-line Wongware.
If he could locate, then sneak a ride on a Wong truck and get into their database, maybe he could find out who had bought the firewalls and deadfalls. It would be a brute-force cruncher of a project, but he had access to the power. Maybe the breaker had gotten sloppy and left a trail he could follow.
Ah. There was one of the orange-roof trucks now, a couple hundred feet below and half a mile ahead. He'd just drop on down and stow away. Breaking a lock on one of the trucks' doors would be easier than taking his shoes off for a player of Jay's ability.
He throttled back on the belt's thrust and started to lose altitude. He would very much like to find out who had used Winthrop's computer before she did. It would be a loss of face she would hate, he'd be shiny as a new wetlight chip, and he would
Jay reached the rear of the truck, shucked off the jet pack, and got out his lock picks. It took him forty-five
