Safe House

complain to, either, not without hurting her own position, for such complaints were likely to be taken as evidence of insufficient motivation, or (much worse) incipient treachery.

She sighed. “So what you’re telling me,” the major said, “is that all we can do is watch to see who picks the boy up at the Washington end. And if it’s the CIA, or Net Force, or some other government organization, then that’s the end of everything, is it?”

“Oh, no, Major. Even they get clumsy sometimes. One slip in their security is all we need.” She could hear him almost smiling a little on the other end of the link, and maybe he was right to do so. “And besides, his father has to try to follow shortly. The ‘collectors’ on that side themselves are likely to tip us off, just by whatever preparations they make. When the father does try to follow, we’ll catch him and squeeze him dry. He’ll certainly know where the boy was headed. Either way, we’ll have them both back in short order…or make them useless to the other side.”

“You’d better hope it works out that way,” the major said. “I want a report as soon as that plane comes down. Who picked him up, who they work for, where they take him. I want him taken back at the earliest opportunity. And, Taki — make a note — if anyone slips and kills him, they’ll be just as dead within hours. This isn’t just some schoolboy. We need him intact.”

“Ah,” said the voice on the other end. “Pressure…”

“Oh, certainly. What father likes to see his son’s fingernails pulled off with pliers in front of him?” said the major idly. “Though I doubt we’d have to do more than one or two. And if the boy turns out to be innocent, of course we’d compensate him afterward. The Government has to defend itself from spies and terrorists, but it doesn’t prey on innocent citizens.”

“Of course,” said the voice on the other end, rather hurriedly. “Will there be anything else, Major?”

“Just that report in two hours, or when the plane comes down, whichever comes sooner. See to it.”

He hurriedly clicked off. She put down the comm hand-piece at her end.

Innocent citizens, the major thought. Are there any?

Personally, she doubted it. It was just as well. It made her job easier.

She looked out the office door. None of her staff were stirring. “Come on,” she said, raising her voice, “look lively out there! Rosa, I want the schedules for the American Aerospace planes into Reagan and Dulles and BWI for the next six hours. With the ‘possible diversion’ variants. Check the weather to see if a diversion is likely at all. And get me the last list of our Washington assets—”

Out in the office she could hear them starting to bustle around again. She sat there for a few moments more in silence — a little slender blond-haired woman in uniform, her hair pulled back in the regulation twist, her hands folded, looking thoughtful. Ingrate, she was thinking again. A pity they need you alive.

Though, once they make sure we’ve got all your work complete, it’s not as if you’re likely to be that way for long….

2

For Maj, the previous evening had pretty much been routine. Maj’s mom and dad left at eight-thirty for the PTA dinner, with Maj’s mother bearing before her an astonishingly detailed and complete medieval castle rendered in sugar plate, right down (or up) to small spun-sugar banners flying from toothpicks fixed in the battlements. The Muffin went off to play in virtual space until bedtime, and Maj sat at the kitchen table for a good while, snacking on a pomegranate while going through her piled-up e-mail and occasionally looking out of her own work space through a “side door” she had installed into Muffin’s virtual “play area,” a large green woodland meadow which at the moment was populated by a number of deinonichuses, iguanas, and very small stegosaurs. In the middle of this pastoral landscape the Muffin was sitting on a large smooth rock and reading to the assorted saurians, very slowly, carefully sounding out the words. “…And the great serpent said, ‘What has brought thee to this island, little one? Speak quickly, and if thou dost not ac-quaint me with something I have not heard, or knew not before, thou shalt van-…vanish like a flame—’”

Maj smiled and turned her attention back to the electronic mail that “lay” all over the kitchen table, or bobbled around in the air in front of her in the form of various brightly colored three-dimensional icons. A lot of it was in the form of shiny black spheres about baseball-size, with the number 7 flashing inside it — mail from her friends in that wildly assorted loose association, the “Group of Seven.” There were actually a lot more than seven of them, now, but as a group they were too lazy to bother changing the number every time someone new joined. They had other things to think about — one of them, at the moment, being the new sim that presently had a lot of other people on the Net interested as well.

Maj and the other members of the Group had originally started getting together on a regular basis because they were all interested in designing their own “sims”—simulated realities, “playrooms” or “pocket universes” based in the Net, where you could lose an hour or a week engaged in conversation, or combat, with other people — a few of them or thousands. For a lucky few with the necessary talent and perseverance, it could become a career, an incredibly lucrative one, and some of the Group of Seven had this kind of future in mind for themselves. They designed sims and let the rest of the Group play with them, “test-driving” them and working out the kinks. It was “practicing for the real world” for these kids. Others, like Maj, just liked to play “inside” small custom-designed sims rather than the big glossy ones, which tended to be expensive.

But every now and then one came along that caused an unusual amount of interest. Cluster Rangers was one of these. It was a space sim — the latest of what, over the course of the life of the Net, had probably been thousands of space-oriented games, puzzles, and virtual environments. But there was something rather special about this one. It wasn’t just that Mihail Oranief, the sim designer, had taken incredible care over the details of it, which by itself was hardly unusual. It was a big, juicy, complex game, full of interesting solar systems, weird alien races, and interesting characters having interesting (and occasionally fatal) conflicts with one another.

Cluster Rangers had a couple of additional attractions that had seemed to drop out of a lot of space sims, or were never in them at all. For one thing, it was very interactive. Not just in the obvious sense, that you got into it and lived it for hours at a time. But Oranief had seen fit to release his “interface code,” the “modular” programming which would allow players to design their own spacecraft, space stations, even their own planets, and “plug them into” the Cluster Rangers universe.

This by itself was both a courtesy and a challenge — the sign of a very assured and confident programmer who was willing to let people come into his universe and make it better than even he had thought to. And that had powerfully attracted Maj and most of the rest of the Seven — all eleven of them. For some weeks now they had jointly been engaged in the design of a small squadron of fighter craft which would make their debut at the upcoming Battle of Didion, presently scheduled for tomorrow night.

All of them were determined to make a splash, and they had come up with what they considered the ultimate small fighter craft for exploiting the laws of science as the sim designer had laid them down. There were some big differences there from the average virtual universe. Light speed was much lower, and the human body could stand more G’s, but to Maj’s mind, the most amusing change was that, though vacuum there was vacuum, it also was allowed to conduct sound — and when you blew something up, you heard the BOOM! without breaking any rules. There were people who despised this warping of conventional physical reality as excessive whimsy. For her own part, Maj was willing to cut the sim designers a small amount of slack. She liked the booms.

But ship design was what was primarily occupying her and the rest of the Group at the moment. All these mails now piled up on Maj’s “desk” involved last-minute changes to the craft — suggestions and alterations, ideas picked up and immediately discarded, rude remarks about other people’s ideas (or one’s own), bad jokes, fits of nervousness or excitement, and various expressions of scorn, panic, or self-satisfaction. The Group had picked a side to align itself with in the Battle, had made some new friends and some new enemies, and was, Maj judged, pretty much ready to get out there now and go head-to-head with some of the Archon’s “Black Arrow” squadrons. Their own “Arbalest” ships were both effective and handsome — a point about which, considering the quality of the