Cybernation

1

Net Force HQ

Quantico, Virginia

Alex Michaels, Commander of Net Force, swore softly at the empty computer screen on his desk. He picked up his phone and said, “Jay Gridley.”

The voxax circuit made the connection, but internal coms were pictureless. The voice on the other end said, “What? I’m kind of busy here!”

“Jay. What the hell is going on?”

“Oops. I didn’t check the ID sig, sorry, boss. We got problems.”

“Really? You think so?”

“I guess you wouldn’t be calling if you didn’t already know that.”

“What’s up?”

“I don’t know. Our main server is off-line, and all wireless external phone lines are bollixed. My virgil’s emergency circuit says there are outages like this everywhere, all over the country.”

“Great.”

“I’m trying to run it down, boss.”

“Don’t let me keep you. Call me back when you get something.”

Michaels put down the phone. Well, wasn’t this just peachy? A few minutes ago, he’d been patting himself on the back, telling himself how great things were going. Business had been slow, Net Force had been on top of computer crime like never before, even the director had called to congratulate him on how good a job they’d been doing. He should have known better than to feel good about this. It was as if while God was having his morning coffee, Michaels had strolled by, full of hubris and proud of himself, and bumped God’s elbow, sloshing hot coffee into His divine lap.

Oops.

Here, son, let me show you what goeth before a fall…

He should have known.

He was paying for it now. Because he knew that whatever the problem was with the net and phones, it was going to be Net Force’s responsibility. No question about it.

“Sir?” His secretary.

“Yes?”

“The director is on the intercom. Line one.”

Michaels nodded. Of course she was. He sighed and reached for the phone.

Helsinki, Finland

Jasmine Chance walked down the hall toward the office Roberto had cleared of furniture and made into a workout space. Music drifted out of Roberto’s makeshift gym, drums and the singsong twang of berimbau, an instrument that looked vaguely like an archery bow strung with a metal wire, and with a gourd attached to one end. Roberto had explained the workings of this device in much greater detail than Chance had ever wanted to know. The instrument was played by hitting the wire with a little stick while rattling a gourd filled with pebbles in the same hand, and the musician could alternate between two notes by touching the wire with a coin or not. Santos liked to have his players use a Krugerrand, gold giving the best tone, so he said. The simple rhythms produced were part and parcel of the acrobatic African/South American martial art of Capoeira that Roberto Santos — a black, Brazilian master of the dance who bore the title of Capoeirista Mestre—practiced for hours every day.

Chance stepped into the doorway just as Roberto leaped into the air and turned a back somersault, landed neatly on the balls of his feet, then dropped into a spraddle-legged posture, sweeping one foot along the floor in a broad half-circle. Only the palm sides of the hands and soles of the feet were ever supposed to touch the ground, he had told her, that was part of O Jogo, The Game. Capoeira was a fighting system developed by slaves, and while one school of history had it that it had been disguised as a dance so as to fool the white masters, Roberto had been quick to point out that such thinking was simplistic.

Most of what she knew of Capoeira she had learned from Roberto in bed, between bouts of an art at which she was an adept. Roberto was barely thirty years old. He was a decade younger than she was. He was handsome, had great stamina, and his body seemed chiseled from hard cocobolo wood. There was no fat on him at all. He had been a diamond in the rough when they had met. She had polished him and taught him how to be a skilled lover over the year of their association. He was coming along nicely.

Now, wearing only a pair of thin, calf-length red-and-white striped cotton pants, Roberto glowed with passion and sweat as he practiced his exercises. Though he preferred to be musically accompanied by three or four of his fellow game players — you had to learn to play the instruments as part of the dance — the music now was recorded. When he saw her arrive, he finished his sequence, then padded across the bare floor to the sound box and shut it off.

When he spoke, he had an accent, the soft liquid flow of Portuguese translating to his English, a rounding of hard consonants and lengthening of vowels.

“Ah, Missy. How goes the battle?”

She smiled, flashing perfect teeth — all marvels of expensive orthodontia, a thousand dollars a cap. “Keller says the first sortie went perfectly.”

Roberto picked a towel up from the floor and wiped the sweat from his face and shaved head. “Jackson, he’s a fine boy, can make them computers dance like nobody else.”

Chance smiled. That was true. Jackson Keller was a wizard with hardware and software, as good with those technical things as Roberto here was at bashing heads. CyberNation did not hire second-class talent for its key positions. There was much to be gained — or lost — in this game, and cutting corners on personnel would be short-sighted and stupid. When you were trying to create a virtual nation from nothing, to give it weight and substance, you had to do some very intricate things if you were going to pull it off. Having good help alone wasn’t sufficient. You needed the best. All of Chance’s people were just that — the best. And she wasn’t so bad herself, though her talents were somewhat harder to quantify. The higher-ups in CyberNation called her The Dragon Lady when they thought she couldn’t hear, and she took that as a compliment.

To Roberto, she said, “Yes, but this is the easy part. Scrambling software gets their attention, but they’ll fix that, and all it will cost will be some tired programmers and a few hours’ downtime. The next stage will be more difficult. If it gets to that.”

And of course, it would get to that soon enough — the nations of the world weren’t going to just roll over and give away anything, certainly not the kind of power CyberNation wanted for itself.

“You worry too much, Missy.” He grinned. “That part won’t be no harder than Jackson’s jogo, only different.”

“Good to see you haven’t lost your confidence, Roberto.”

“Ah, me, I ain’t lost nothin’.”

She closed the door and locked it. “Talk is cheap.”

He hooked his thumbs into the waistline of his pants and skinned them down, peeled them off, one foot, then the other, and tossed them to one side.

She laughed, and reached for her shirt buttons. “We’ll have to hurry,” she said. “We have to leave for the ship in an hour.”

“Only an hour?”

“We have to pack.”

“Let me show you how to pack,” he said.

She laughed again. Life was good.

Washington, D.C.

Somebody screamed bloody murder, jerking Toni from her half-doze into full alertness. She came off the couch and onto her feet and into a defensive stance, expecting to be attacked, before her brain got back on track.