Runaways

'Welcome to-'

'Abort start sequence, contact now, preset, Megan,' he said.

'Trying that connection for you now.'

And there she was, standing in front of that big fat planet Saturn. 'Megan, listen, I'm in-'

— and with a horrible sinking of his heart he realized that he wasn't looking at the live Megan, but her answering routine. '-can't come online right now, but please leave a canned message or virtmail, I'll get back to you-'

'Kill it,' he said to the booth, and the image of Megan whited out. 'Dial-'

It was awful. He was almost ready to name his home address-but not quite ready. Not even for this-

And then someone did bang on the door.

Burt gulped and did the one thing which he suspected the person outside had no idea he was likely to do, under the circumstances. 'Nine one one!' he shouted.

The emergency locks on the booth's door engaged.

'State the nature of your emergency!' said a dry female voice out of the whiteness.

'There's someone trying to kill me,' said Burt, 'and he's going to get away with it unless I talk to someone from Net Force right away!'

'Where are you, sir?'

'You know damn well where I am,' Burt said to the unseen voice, 'you've got this booth's Net address right in front of you right this minute, and if you don't let me talk to someone from Net Force in the next thirty seconds, I'm going to be dead shortly, and probably a lot of other people will, too, pretty soon, so get on it!'

'Connecting you,' said the voice, rather hastily.

Burt smiled rather grimly as the world blacked out around him and the hardware in the booth made the connection with his implant. Dad's voice again, he thought. Yet there were unquestionably some things that it was good for. Now he could only hope that those things would happen fast enough…

Megan blinked her implant off, sat there in the chair, and just let out a long breath. There was nothing more she could do, not for the moment. She had to just relax and let matters take their course. Relaxl she thought, amused at herself, for she was trembling all over with reaction. 'Yeah, right.'

She got up and stretched. 'Boy, could I use some tea,' she said, and headed down the hall; past the bathroom, where at least one of her brothers was having one of his legendary hour-long showers; past the den, where her dad was in the chair, talking to somebody; into the kitchen, where various Day-Glo water sports gear was draped over the kitchen chairs. Apparently Mike was thinking about going kayaking later today.

The doorbell rang.

'Oh, great,' Megan said, and went to answer the front door.

There was a man standing there, wearing a business suit-a shortish man, dark-haired, with one of those faces you would pass on the street and which would leave no impression. 'Megan O'Malley?' the man said.

Oh, no! said some part of Megan's mind, very loudly.

And she hit him. Right there, with full straight-armed extension, with the heel of the hand; right in the good spot, the spot where her martial arts instructor had strongly suggested she not hit anybody unless she really meant it, since the move actually veered a lot closer to unarmed combat than any martial arts move, and unarmed combat (unlike martial arts) is about having people not get up again after you hit them.

She heard the man's sternum crack. He fell backward down the stairs.

Oh, no, she thought, going no more than one step after him, and there falling into ready position, just in case he should try to get up again. But he showed no signs of doing any such thing. Oh, please don't let me have ruptured his pericardium, Megan thought, for that was always a danger when you played around with the sternum. Your opponent could bleed to death in a matter of a minute or so. Or bruised his liver-1

'Megan,' her father said, very calmly, from behind her. 'One step to the left please, dear.'

She turned. Her father was holding what was usually kept locked in its safe in the den, a firearm of truly monstrous proportions, to her mind anyway, and it was leveled at the man's head. Megan gratefully took one step to the left.

'Megan,' said Mike, coming around the corner of the house from the garage side at a dogtrot, holding a kayak oar with what looked like very unfriendly intent, 'you've gotta stop doing this stuff to the magazine salesmen. It's not their fault.'

'Megan,' Sean said, appearing behind her father with a towel wrapped around his middle and completely dripping wet, 'how're we supposed to beat up the people who beat you up if you won't let them beat you up first? We never get a chance to do the brother thing anymore.'

Megan stood there, breathing hard, and smiled.

'Your mother's going to be furious that she missed this,' Megan's father said mildly. 'As for you, sir, I suggest that you lie very still and try to keep the writhing to a minimum, as I or one of these extremely dangerous and uncontrolled youngsters might be forced to construe some sudden motion of yours as an aggressive action, and then to do something we'll all regret later. Though as a family we would certainly be sure to send flowers afterward. Megan, is this one of your threesome?'

'I don't think so. Net Force accounted for all of them,' Megan said. 'But he's nobody I do recognize, and why should anybody I don't know come here looking for me right this minute? But look, we'd better get him to the hospital-'

'Panic button's hit,' Sean said, pushing his wet hair out of his eyes. 'Let him lie there, the professionals'll handle it. Our legal liability is now limited. Dad, did he make an aggressive move just then?'

'Wishful thinking, son. Go put some clothes on. Response time is down to about a minute these days, the ambulance'11 be here soon enough. Ah-'

But it was not the ambulance. A big multipurpose vehicle with the Net Force stripe and logo came howling down the street and pulled up in front of the house, and even before it stopped, people with various kinds of armament even bigger than her dad's were piling out of it. They surrounded the man lying at the bottom of the steps, and shortly another Net Force van arrived, with an ambulance in tow. A stretcher was produced, and the man was transferred to it and thoughtfully restrained. The handcuffs were probably just an afterthought.

And within about five minutes the vans were all gone, leaving behind them just a quiet suburban street with about fifteen different neighbors standing out in their front lawns or on their front sidewalks, staring at Megan and her father and her brothers. 'We're going to hear about this from the neighborhood association again,' her father said wearily, turning to lock the handgun away again. 'They'll accuse us of lowering the property values around here.'

'Idiots,' Mike said, heading around the house again with his kayak oar over his shoulder. 'Megan's just making the world safe for democracy again.'

'Yeah,' said Sean, and took his dripping self back inside.

Megan stood there a moment more. 'Dad?' she called after him, as she followed him into the house. 'I take it back about the boys. They can live.'

'Oh, good,' her father said. 'Funeral expenses are getting so unreasonable lately'

Late that afternoon, in Megan's space, she and Leif met with James Winters. The news had come through a couple of hours ago that Burt had been picked up at Reagan International by a Net Force flying squad. The D. C. police had the man who had been hammering on the booth's door. They were holding him on attempted assault charges for the moment, confident that they would shortly have something much better to book him on.

'Well, first of all, the Gridleys have now left France for Germany,' James Winters said, sitting and admiring the view of Saturn in a chair which Megan had summoned out of the air for him, 'so I suppose we can all stop worrying about Mark being sent to Devil's Island after all. Though he may wish he'd availed himself of that opportunity after his mother gets through with him.' Winters's smile was dry.

'He won't be in too much trouble, will he?' Leif said.

Winters sighed and shook his head. 'He'll be all right. He's plainly being saved for bigger things.' He turned his attention to Megan. 'Which brings us to you, for whom it seems the same could be said. But it all links back, as you thought, to your friend Burt. The operative chasing him had a 'listener' of a kind we haven't seen before. Net booths are supposed to be shielded against such things, but there's always somebody out there coming up with something new' He sighed. 'He pulled Megan's Net address from the booth as Burt was dialing it. After that it was, as usual, all too simple for him to get your street address… What went on in the guy's head after that, I'm not sure. He may