Net Force Explorer. That means they know what kind of trouble they’re getting into. They won’t want any witnesses.”
“Wait,” Matt urged. “I’ve contacted the LAPD. They’re already en route. They can—”
Catie drove her feet hard against the roof of the exercise building, pushing away the numbing fear that made her arms and legs feel as if they’d been filled with lead.
Without hesitation, thinking of Maj’s safety hanging in the balance, Catie threw herself from the building’s edge, arching up high to reach the balcony above. The balcony railing thudded into her chest just below the level of her armpits. Her breath left her in a whoosh, but she hooked her elbows over the railing and pulled herself onto the balcony. She didn’t waste time trying to make a great landing on the balcony, just dropping into a loose sprawl that tangled her briefly in the legs of one of the lounge chairs. Gingerly she tried the balcony door but found it locked.
“Matt,” she whispered.
“Yeah. Just getting my breath back and trying to figure out how many ways there are to tell a friend how stupid she is.”
Catie swallowed hard. The post-adrenaline shakes hadn’t settled in yet. “Sound the fire alarm.”
There was only a slight pause. “Done.”
Alarms jangled inside Maj’s room, echoed by the other alarms of the other rooms. Catie yanked on the balcony door and swept the heavy curtains away. Maj was rising from the implant chair, her attention on the turning doorknob.
“Maj.”
Maj’s head whipped around, her eyes widening in surprise. “How did you get up here?”
“Don’t ask.” Catie took Maj’s hand and hustled her out to the balcony. “Worry about how we’re going to get down.”
Maj peered over the balcony. “Down doesn’t look fun.”
“We’re not going that far.” Catie levered her body over the railing, hung by her hands, then lowered herself down the bars till she was much closer to the balcony below. Her foot was only a couple feet short. Swinging forward, she forced her hands to release the railing. She fell.
Mark Gridley carefully watched the bearskin-clad warrior standing in the air outside Maj’s room at the Bessel Mid-Town Hotel.
“No talk,” the warrior roared in a deep voice. He moved the wickedly curved sword before him, catching glints from the neon lights around them.
“Who are you?” Mark demanded. Outwardly he remained calm, but he was angry that anyone would attack one of his friends.
The warrior didn’t answer. But the sword came to a dead stop, pointed directly at Mark. A bright blue laser beam spat from the curved point directly for Mark’s chest.
Mark lifted a hand, accessing one of the firewall security programs he had on file. A glowing green disk suddenly spread out from his palm till it was nearly two feet in diameter. The bright blue bolt impacted against the green shield, shattering it into myriad gleaming bits of programming the Net interpreted as energy patterns. They flamed out long before they hit the street below.
The warrior lashed out with the sword again, spinning off a bolo net made up of golden light.
In an eyeblink he was clad in the space suit he habitually wore while attempting to break code in programs his mom brought home from Net Force. He added a streamlined MMU backpack to the suit. Only this manned maneuvering unit was capable of Mach speeds. He triggered the controls in his glove, blasting straight up into the air.
The bearskin-clad warrior slashed again, spinning out a jagged double-spike of ruby lightning.
Mark pressed a hand out, summoning up another shield. The lightning bolt smashed into the shield. Instead of destroying it this time, the air around him suddenly caught fire, wreathing him in flames.
The virus probed at the suit’s weaknesses, finding none, but triggering one diagnostic check after another, effectively shutting Mark out of taking any active part in the Net. As soon as the automatic firewalls detected another tendril of the virus, they reacted, draining the suit’s resources.
Rendered nearly inoperative and floating in a stasis, Mark accessed a purge program. He unleashed it in a blaze of silver that burst through the suit’s seams. It also burned the virus out. In control of the suit again, sweating profusely as the on-board air-conditioning fought to make the environment livable again, he scanned the night sky.
The bearskin-clad warrior was gone.
Disgustedly, Mark pulled up his IM list and tagged Matt.
“Catie’s not going to make it.”
Matt gazed at the two-dee screen maintaining the vidphone link with Catie’s foilpack. He didn’t look at Megan O’Malley, who stood beside him in his veeyar. She’d been online with Catie when he’d gotten his call through. Megan was also en route to the game convention, but her plane had been delayed in Salt Lake City, so she’d used an inline chair at a cyber cafe in the airport. Megan was also a friend and an Explorer. She twirled a strand of her dark hair between her fingers — a nervous habit — and her brown eyes held worry.
“She’ll make it,” Matt said.
But they had no guarantee from the crazy view they had over the vidphone link. They caught occasional glimpses of the street below and the side of the Bessel Mid-Town Hotel as the foilpack swung on Catie’s wrist.
“IM message from Mark,” the computer voice announced. “Will you accept?”
“Yes.” Matt watched as a two-dee screen dawned in an orange sunburst. Mark, dressed in his space suit, stood framed in the screen.
“Lost him,” Mark said. “I’m going to stay here, see if I can pick up the trail.”
Matt nodded. “Be careful. The LAPD cyber unit is going to be all over that area, as well as the fire marshal’s office.”
“Maybe they’ll turn up this guy. I’m going to run some trace-backs on the address signatures Maj got.”
“Keep me updated.”
Mark broke the connection.
“I’ve got Captain Winters online,” Megan said. Captain James Winters was a Net Force commander and the direct liaison between Net Force proper and the Net Force Explorers. He was a good friend and confidant.
“Go,” Matt said. “Bring him up to speed on what we’ve got going on here.”
“Gone,” Megan said, fading from his veeyar and crossing the Net.
Matt watched the foilpack view, drawn by the feeling that only the worst could happen. Then Catie dropped, the two-dee image suddenly showing the street level rushing up.
“Parameters to hotel security systems have been breached,” the computer voice announced.
Breaking loose from the dread that held him, wondering how long Catie had been falling, Matt shoved a hand into the crack-code datastream that allowed him access to the hotel’s security system. It pulled him in at once, shooting him through a blinding tunnel of light.
He crashed through the flimsy defense the hotel security programming tried to erect after all the damage the hacker’s viruses had done in shutting down access to Maj’s room. A split nanosecond later and he stood inside Maj’s rented room, courtesy of the holoprojector entertainment center he’d been able to hack into.
Two of the four men inspected the inline chair while the other two raced for the balcony. Just beyond them, Maj leaned out and dropped over the balcony’s railing. All four men carried silencer-equipped pistols.
Wanting to buy Catie and Maj more time if they’d made the drop to the fourth floor, Matt took a deep breath and said, “Hey!”
The four men turned and raised their weapons automatically. One of the men nearest the implant chair stepped forward, putting the muzzle of his pistol less than a foot from Matt’s head. The man fired without hesitation, totally emotionless.
