private business sector, and military installations, they could have used the bleed-over effect to hack into almost anything they wanted. Someone would have gotten suspicious, but even a few hours free access could have meant potential billions in earnings for D’Arnot Industries. They could have seized secrets, research and development, and military emplacement information to sell to terrorists across the world.”
“Bright kid,” Heavener rasped. “Too bad you’re a dead kid.” She took a small 9mm pistol from her pocket.
“I’m only telling you this,” Maj went on, “to let you know the game’s over. You lose.”
“Oh,” Heavener said, “there’s still time to take a few pieces off the board.” She raised the pistol.
Clad in his crashsuit, Mark eyed the heart of the Eisenhower Productions game engine. On the Net, linked through his perceptions and programming, it took on the form of a man-shaped mechanical dreadnought easily fifty times as large as he was.
The blank, featureless face turned toward him. Yellow lights glimmered where the eyes should have been. “Your access code, please.”
Mark offered the code he’d been given.
“Access denied,” the ponderous giant replied. It stretched out a hand, launching rockets immediately.
Closing his hand, Mark activated the crashsuit’s boostjets, throwing him from the path of the rockets. Another switch on his palm brought down the HUD system, giving him a 360-degree view around him. After thousands of hours logged into the crashsuit as well as the games he played, it all felt entirely natural.
Onscreen, he watched the five rockets pinwheel around and lock on to him again. His left glove contained the suit controls for the boostjets that fired from his boots, back, chest, and the top of his helmet. His right hand controlled the weapons array he had in the form of attack and defense programs he used in hacking.
Laser beams lanced from Mark’s fingers, swiftly targeting the rockets closing in on him. The rockets evaporated in a rush, shimmering, then gone. He spun around and launched himself at the game engine’s near-AI. He knew the systems alarms had to be ringing back in the real world and that he wouldn’t be alone with the game engine for long.
Only six minutes remained till Realm of the Bright Waters went online.
Andy stepped toward Heavener and her group, waving at Maj.
Maj’s eyes widened as she saw him.
“Hocus Pocus,” Andy mouthed slowly. He accessed another program from his own veeyar workspace and created a holo of an MP5 submachine gun from one of his training programs.
Maj gave a brief nod.
The movement alerted Heavener, who spun instantly and brought up the small pistol from her pocket. She grabbed Maj’s arm.
“Catch you international terrorists and industrial spies at a bad time?” Andy asked, raising the MP5. He squeezed the trigger and the ripsaw of autofire filled the hallway.
Heavener and her group dropped to the floor. Maj swept a hand across Heavener’s in a martial arts move that tore the woman’s grip from her arm.
Andy kept firing even when the ruby sights lit him up. Bullets hammered through his chest. He smiled. “Good shooting.”
“He’s a holo!” Heavener snarled, pushing herself up from the floor. “After the girl!”
Smiling, Andy accessed the spoof program Mark had written that they’d used in various games and hacking runs on the programs they’d been asked to test for flaws. He slammed it into the hotel’s holoprojector system, targeting Maj as she ran back inside the convention center.
Instantly, instead of one Maj fleeing through the crowd in the convention center, there were over a dozen. All of the holos were dressed exactly alike, and they ran in different directions, scattering through the crowd, crisscrossing each other’s tracks. In a heartbeat even Andy didn’t know which one was real.
Andy dropped back onto the Net, knowing Mark had begun the final attack on the game engine. He scanned the screens that appeared in front of him, noting the arrival of eight security personnel in space-bound fast-attack craft.
He opened the comm-link to Mark. “Are you ready to rock and roll, buddy?”
Maj ran through the convention crowd, bumping into people and throwing apologies over her shoulder. She streaked for the other side of the center, knowing Matt, Roarke, Leif, and Megan were on their way.
A young man stepped around one of the booths too late for her to stop. She slammed into him, taking them both to the ground. Her martial arts reflexes made her roll instinctively. She got to her feet as the guy stayed there and groaned.
Other convention attendees opened a path before her, shouting out warnings.
Glancing to the side, Maj spotted one of her holo-induced doppelgangers running
Heavener and her men charged through the convention center, roughly shoving aside anyone who got in their way.
Maj opened her foilpack and punched a quick dial number. “Catie, where are Holmes’s police teams?”
“Investigating a break-in alarm at your hotel room,” Catie replied. “I’m trying to get through to Holmes now to call them off.”
Maj ran toward the nearest door. Before she reached it, a man burst through with a pistol leveled at her chest.
With Andy at his back, Mark turned his attention to the search engine, jetting straight for it. The HUD relayed the information about the eight security programmers streaking toward him, overtaking him quickly because this was their home ground. The home team always had the advantage because their programming interfaced more directly and more quickly than someone breaking in.
“Andy,” Mark called calmly.
“I’ve got your back, buddy.”
In the next instant Mark’s HUD picked up Andy’s arrival. Since he didn’t have to worry about stealth anymore, and he could use Mark’s signal from inside the program to transport to, Andy arrived in a spacetank copied from a Space Marines game. The spacetank was an armored nightmare, fully stocked with weapons. Lasers cut through the virtual world as it locked on to targets and fired.
Three of the attacking security personnel vaporized immediately, thrown off-line by the savage attack.
“Boo-yeeaahh!” Andy cheered. “And we’re rolling up a score.”
Less than two minutes remained until game launch. Even if Captain Winters overrode the Net and had a warning issued by Net Force, a lot of gamers would ignore the warning and download the files anyway, thinking it was a prank by jealous gamers who didn’t have the game pack, or an attack by rival gaming companies. It had happened in the past.
He initiated a systems diagnostic using the access code he’d been given, hoping to find a weak link that would allow him into the gargantuan game engine before him. Lasers flashed from the thing’s eyes as it sought to protect itself.
Mark evaded the lasers as Andy blasted another security man out of the loop, checking over the program’s codes. Surely there was a feed coming in from somewhere. He fired two disruptive virus programs in the form of thermal nukes, but they glanced off the search engine’s armored body like a flat stone on water.
The diagnostics flashed on the HUD, stripping away the mechanical body the search engine inhabited.
“I’m hit,” Andy called out.
The system defenders were down to three, but Andy’s spacetank hadn’t gone unscathed. Internal gyro problems had developed, a visual interpretation of the defense coding attacking his intrusion into the system.
A bright green blip flared into life on Mark’s HUD. It dawned at the tip of one of the search engine dreadnought’s fingers. Mark tapped out a search-and-identify program. “I’ve got the weak point,” he told Andy. “There’s a satellite feed coming in from the Balkans that Net Force broke into a couple weeks ago for black-market software trafficking that hasn’t been changed. The story never made HoloNet, so D’Arnot Industries wouldn’t know about it. I can get in through there.”
“Go,” Andy called. “I’m on a full-fledged crash-and-burn here.” His spacetank remained barely viable, breaking
