The Deadliest Game

It did. Leif found himself looking at a series of stacked bar graphs. They were people’s server logs, compared by time. They were—

His mouth fell open as he looked at the last logs at the bottom of the stack: two sets, superimposed over one another, and the stars, which marked the timings of all the bounces there had been in the last few months, laid over them.

Leif’s throat seized. He couldn’t even swear. There were no words bad enough for what he saw there.

We were right. It was Lateran.

And Lateran is Wayland, too. And Wayland is “canned,” somehow. We’ve been hearing preprogrammed phrases….

Except last night. Now this is very interesting…and Wayland’s smile.

Where’s Megan?!

He didn’t have her voice com-code. They’d never needed it; all their contacts had been through the Net.

“Computer! Get Megan on chat.”

“She’s not available, Boss.”

“Log in to Sarxos. Look for her there.”

He waited through intolerable seconds while the machine logged in, while the logo and the copyright notices displayed. After a moment, his machine said, “Not there, Boss.”

He couldn’t find out when she’d last been there either, because he didn’t have the token. She had it.

With the weight of the information in front of him, the data that she now had — with the memory of their meeting last night with Wayland, the information that he now knew they had — and the fact that Leif couldn’t find her — it all came together, and suddenly Leif knew what had happened: what, if he was lucky, was just now happening.

Then he started to swear, calling first Megan, and then Wayland, things in Russian that would doubtless have sent his mother straight up the wall if she’d heard them. He was seized with the complete helplessness of being virtual when you desperately needed to be concrete: his total inability to be in Washington, right then, when he was actually stuck in New York.

Leif shouted at the computer, “James Winters! Net Force emergency! Immediate connect!”

A slightly bleary voice said, “Winters—”

Leif gasped for breath, and then shouted:

“HELP!”

She sent the e-mail, and she waited…and nothing happened. Some sensible person is still asleep at seven in the morning, she thought. Why not?

Finally, Megan gave up on waiting. It was getting late. She went upstairs and had her shower and got dressed, keeping as quiet as she could because her dad had plainly been up late, working in some other room besides the office, and had turned in. Her mom, as so often happened, was already gone. The brothers hadn’t stayed over last night — one had had med-surg nursing rounds early the next morning, and the other had been complaining about an impending final exam in a course called Advanced Stressed Concrete 302. They had both made themselves scarce after dinner.

She came down again, thought about another cup of tea, and decided against it. There was nothing happening at school today that would really be important…but that was no reason not to go. All her schoolwork was ready. The portable was charged up, all the necessary data solids carrying her reference texts were in her bag. And her ride’s horn sounded outside.

Megan grabbed the bag and the portable, dropped her keycard in her pocket, slapped the front door to lock- behind, and breezed out, heard the door clock closed and the lock set, tested it to make sure it was shut tight, turned—

— and simply found him there, standing in front of her, reaching out with something black in his hand.

Reflex saved Megan, nothing else. She flung herself off to one side as he grabbed for her, and threw her bag at him, knocking him back a little. Megan felt the subdued hiss and sizzle of a body-field deranger close by. One solid touch and her bioelectricity would go briefly crazy, enough to drop her where she stood, “shorted out.” The thing’s effective range was about four feet. Megan hit the ground rolling, rolled to her feet, got up, and danced away from the man across the front lawn, intent on keeping him far away from her. He dashed at her again, and again Megan backed off, though it really annoyed her to do so.

Half of her was scared out of her wits. The rest of her was absorbed in the business of the dance. Don’t let him close, stay out of range—and behind, in her brain, a leisurely running commentary seemed to be going on. Heard the horn, where’s your ride, that’s not the right car, same make, though, maybe even same year, how did he—

How long had he suspected that she and Leif were on his trail? How closely had he been watching them? Leif, she thought, why didn’t I—!

The man jumped at her again, not speaking. She almost wished that he would shout, would say something. About five-foot-nine, said another part of the mind, clinical: medium build, gray sweatshirt, jeans, black loafers, white socks — white socks?? Jeez — big nose. Mustache. Eyes — eyes—She couldn’t tell the color from here, and she wasn’t going to get close enough to find out. Big hands, very big hands: a face surprisingly slack and still for all the action they were going through, dancing around on the lawn at seven-forty-five in the morning, and why isn’t anyone noticing this, why aren’t the neighbors—?! Megan opened her mouth to scream as loudly as she could—

And then she realized that he had thrown away the deranger, and had something else in his hand, with which he was taking aim—

She never felt the blast from the sonic hit her. The next thing she knew, she was lying on the ground and couldn’t move a muscle in her body. All this was making something of a mockery of all the training she’d had, all the good advice from her self-defense instructor. Locked out of the house, nowhere to run, no time to get away, no time—

The man leaned over her, his face not quite expressionless — just somewhat annoyed at the trouble she had caused him — as he started to pick her up, haul her up to a vaguely seated position, preparatory, she knew, to him picking her up and putting her in that car to take her away. Never let an attacker take you anywhere, one of her self-defense instructors had said, in a tone more urgent than she could remember him ever having used before. The only reason someone wants to take you somewhere is to make you a hostage, or to rape or kill you in private. Make them do it in public, if they’re going to do it. It may be awful, but it’s better than being dead—

Do something, she said to her throat, her lungs. Scream! Big breath, now scream! But the big breath just would not come in, and the scream came out “huh, huh.” The scream was all in her head, only in her head, and Megan was briefly lost in a paroxysm of rage and fear, but only briefly because — this was strange — the scream was in the air over her head—

The man looked up, startled, at the dark shape dropping toward him like a stone from the sky. He glanced down at Megan again, his eyes just briefly narrowed with intent, and moved his hand—

— and then fell sideways, hard, next to her and partly on top of her. She heard the awful thick thud as his head hit the ground. It had been dry, the lawn was fairly brown and the ground was hard—

Megan fell back, staring straight up. She couldn’t turn her head, could only hear the scream of the engine, the ringing in her ears. And then could have broken right down and wept, though not with fear, of course not, with relief, at the sound of all the footsteps all around her, at the sight, just out of the corner of one eye, of the beautiful black Net Force craft with its gold stripe down the side, and the police craft landing behind it—

— and the sight of James Winters suddenly looming above her, and saying to the medical people, “She’s okay, thank God, she just took some sonic, come on, give her a hand. And as for him— ”

He looked down past the narrowing cone of vision that was all Megan had left at the moment. “Here’s our bouncer,” said Winters, in a voice fierce with anger and satisfaction. “Lock him up.”

It took several days for the excitement to die down. Megan spent a couple of them in the hospital — sonics are not something you just walk away from — and a third day talking to the police and to the Net Force people who