Gameprey

shivered through the Striper and wrapped it in flames.

Maj’s helmet beat against the seat as the Striper blew through the swirling mass of the fireball. Blue sky filled the horizon again, but flames stubbornly clung to the Striper. She triggered the fire-suppression systems.

Pressurized jets released fire-retardant foam, creating a sudden snowstorm across the wings. A layer of frozen, dirty gray chemicals replaced the flames. Unfortunately, they also knocked out her left engine.

“Flameout,” Maj warned, shutting down the other engine as they were yanked into a flat spin like the right wing had been nailed down. “I’ve got a dead stick.”

“We can stay or go.”

“Smart money says we bail.” Maj watched the view through the canopy change as they rolled over, totally out of control. But where she expected desert landscape below, there was now a huge forest that stretched out in all directions.

“Feeling lucky?”

“No.” Maj hooked a forefinger under the engine switches. “I’m feeling mad. If somebody hacked in here, I want to know why. Even if we logged back on after logging off, there’s no guarantees that the dragon and the guy riding him would still be here.”

“Guy riding the dragon?”

“Yeah. I saw him as we went over.”

“I didn’t see anyone.”

“If I get these engines to reignite,” Maj promised, “I’ll give you a close-up of the geekoid.” She gazed down at the forested lands below, close enough now to see the three large rivers that cut through them.

“If there is a guy on that dragon—”

“There is.” Maj waited for the Striper to finish flipping one more time. “And he’s crashing other people’s programs. The last time I checked, that was definitely illegal. Especially in my veeyar. Although this might not exactly be my veeyar anymore.”

“What?”

“That’s forest below, not desert. We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.”

“I’ve been so busy searching for the dragon I missed that.”

“Hang on.” Maj tripped the ignition switches. The jets flared white contrails suddenly, then she was shoved back into the formfit seat again and the joystick became responsive. “Yes.”

“I’ve got your dragon,” Matt said. “Heading two-four-three.”

Maj brought the Striper around to the right. She raked the sky with her gaze, noticing that it held different shadings. And two suns, one a red giant and the other a spot of blue slightly above it, were close to setting or rising to the south.

She surveyed the damage the dragon’s fireball had done to the Striper. The silver paint was blistered and peeling, black in some areas. Tiny cracks threaded through Plexiglas windows that could take a direct hit from a 7.62mm rifle bullet. She didn’t know if the jet could take another fireball.

She guided the Striper onto the dragon’s backtrail, overtaking the creature swiftly as the huge wings belled once more and seized the air currents. With a gentle touch she inverted the Striper, going upside down over the dragon’s broad back.

“I see him,” Matt said.

Even though she knew she’d briefly spotted the guy on the dragon’s back, Maj was relieved. And she was close enough now to see the surprised look that filled his face. But why, she wondered, would he look surprised? Hadn’t he crashed her system?

“It didn’t work. They’re still there.” Gaspar Latke studied the polished crystal ball in his huge three-fingered hand. The crystal ball showed the images of the great dragon and its rider, as well as the jet fighter.

“Try harder,” Andrea Heavener ordered.

Latke’s fear and frustration vibrated inside his chest. Even firmly entrenched into the veeyar, he could feel his heart hammering back in the implant chair back in the office Heavener had gotten for them. He had a hard time concentrating on anything while remembering how vulnerable his flesh-and-blood body was lying in that chair only a few feet from that woman.

Heavener was a special operative for D’Arnot Industries. She worked in the real world, though, and stayed out of the Net as much as possible.

“I’m coming out.” Latke straightened, standing thirty feet tall inside the veeyar. He was basically man- shaped, but the differences between him and anything human were substantial.

Bright crimson skin stretched tight over a hard-muscled body that was nearly as wide as it was tall. The legs bent the wrong way, structured like a four-footed animal’s so the knees bent backward. The feet only held three toes, but they were prehensile and had shiny black talons instead of nails. A loincloth girded his hips, holding a massive double-bitted war ax. His head was triangular in overall shape, possessing two curved horns and a gash of a mouth filled with serrated teeth. The white-feathered wings folded neatly across his back looked incongruous, too delicate for the misshapen body.

The proxy he’d chosen was native to the veeyar environment. He was a tera’lanth, one of the evil creatures in the realm who opposed the great dragon and its rider.

“Why are you coming out?” Heavener asked.

“I want to try to trace the two people inside Peter’s veeyar.” Gaspar strode to the center of Murof’s Cavern, glancing up at the walls where nearly a hundred other tera’lanth clung to stalactites like bats. They watched him with predatory slitted yellow eyes. If they knew he was an impostor, he knew they’d try to rip him limb from limb.

“You can do it from inside there,” Heavener said.

“No,” Gaspar said calmly. She’s a killer, he reminded himself. She doesn’t know that much about the Net or computer systems. “Whatever I do inside here can be traced by Peter if he checks later. And with that jet suddenly appearing out of nowhere, you can bet he’s going to check. This is his veeyar, not mine.”

“I want this handled quickly.” The cool, crisp voice didn’t change audibly, but Gaspar recognized the threat in the words.

When he’d first met her, Gaspar had been with two friends in a small bar in Hamburg, Germany. Heavener had walked up out of the night, said, “Gaspar Latke,” and he’d turned to her, grinning slightly because she was a pretty woman, and his two hacker buddies were immediately envious of the attention. Then she’d taken out a small pistol and shot them both. Her voice hadn’t even changed when she stepped over the bodies and yanked him up from the floor by the collar. “Come with me,” she’d said in perfect German. That had been eight months ago, when he’d been seventeen, yet it already seemed like a lifetime.

Inside the veeyar, Gaspar closed his eyes, concentrating till he could see the icons of his own veeyar appear before him. Disconnection from the Net felt different to different people. Gaspar felt the familiar chill breeze flow through his body, then he opened his eyes in the lineup chair.

He pushed his skinny frame from the implant chair and stood in the dark room. He experienced a moment of disorientation as gravity kicked in. He spent so much time online that his own body felt alien to him despite the isometric stimulation built into the implant chair. The feeling wasn’t new, so he quickly adjusted and plodded toward the other implant chair in the room. The first implant chair was specially dedicated to Peter Griffen’s systems, hidden so well that Peter had never known he was there.

“Hurry,” Heavener commanded.

“I am.”

Heavener stood in a corner, comfortably wreathed in shadows. She was slender and barely over five feet tall. Her platinum blond hair was cut short and spiky, colored with two distinct red and blue stripes that ran from her left temple to the bottom of her hairline. Silver earring strands glittered, catching the green light from the computer consoles. Her skin was pale, almost to the point of albinism. Contacts covered her eyes, giving them a crescent shape and an amber color that belonged on a hungry cat. She wore tight black leather pants and a black sleeveless top. Her black leather biker’s jacket lay over the back of a nearby chair.

Gaspar made himself breathe. When he got really tense around Heavener, he forgot. He settled down in the implant chair, and the interior shrank around his slight form. He was maybe an inch or two taller than Heavener, still