State of War

the Indonesian fighting art of silat. Now, all these long years later, she was still amazing.

She wore a ratty sweatshirt over a long batik skirt and rubber sandals, and looked about as scary as a stuffed teddy bear. A really old stuffed teddy bear. But if you bought that, you would find yourself in big trouble in a big hurry. One of the first rules of fighting was Never assume that what you see is what you get.

She punched, and Michaels did the block-punch-block-punch-elbow sequence, that pap-pap pap! timing, like two sixteenth notes followed by an eighth note for the first three moves.

She nodded. “Not so bad. But watch the low line, be sure the first punch comes from the hip and cuts the angle as it rises. Punch for me.”

He did, and despite the fact that she was old enough to be his grandmother, her response was so fast he wanted to shake his head. She could hit him three times before he could blink and, while he was standing there surprised, easily drop him onto the concrete with a sweep or heel-dragging beset. A perfect example of technique mastery over physical strength.

“Again,” she said.

Ten minutes later, he was picking himself up from the floor after she had put him there with an effortless little sweep when Toni came into the garage. She had Little Alex balanced on one hip and looked like a Polynesian princess in a sarong, her hair wrapped up in a towel. “Are you beating up on Guru again, Alex?”

“Oh, yeah, right. You ever hear what the U.S. cavalry said about what you were supposed to do if captured by the Lakota Sioux? Whatever happens, don’t let them give you to the women.”

“How droll. You have a call.”

She handed him his virgil — the acronym standing for Virtual Global Interface Link — the handy-dandy pocket electronic device that was phone, fax, GPS, homing beacon, credit card, computer line, and other things he hadn’t even thought about, including a spy device that told HQ where you were. That the call came in on the virgil meant it was important, since the device’s com was also scrambled as well as Net Force’s programmers could manage.

Speak of the devil…

The tiny screen was lit with Jay Gridley’s picture as Michaels took it from his wife.

“Jay.”

“Boss. I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”

“Just me getting my ass kicked.”

“Toni beating up on you again?”

“Guru.”

“Isn’t that embarrassing, Boss, getting thumped by a lady old enough to be your granny?”

Michaels grinned. “You’re welcome to drop by and stand in for me, if you’d like.”

“I’ll pass, thanks. I just called to update you on a couple of things. We got another e-mail virus making waves on the web. It’s just a filler — clog your system, dupe-and-send thing — nothing real nasty, but it’s got good coverage, so you’ll be hearing about it. From what I can tell, it’s a standard kid-hack kind of thing. No real damage, just counting coup. We should be able to backtrack the guy and nail him.”

“Okay.”

“The other thing is, we got a funny hit on one of our watchbots I thought you might want to know about.”

Michaels grinned again. “A ‘funny hit.’ Is that a computer geek technical term, Jay?” Net Force had been on a roll lately. Nobody had attacked them, and nothing major had hit the net or the web. Even hackers seemed to be taking the long hot summer off. Michaels knew better than to tempt fate by feeling smug, however. Every time he did that, something came along and Net Force got creamed.

“Are you making a crack about marriage dissolving my brain?” Jay asked.

“Not me. Not with my wife standing six feet away holding a squirming toddler she might throw at me.” He smiled at Toni as he said that, and waved and made a funny face at his son. He loved to see Little Alex smile.

Jay caught that on the virgil’s screen. “Um, right, Boss. Anyway, yeah, I can send it to your workstation. Nothing major.”

“Fire when ready, Gridley.”

Jay rolled his eyes. “Oh. Like I never heard that one before. Discom, Boss.”

Michaels shut the virgil off and went over to give his wife a kiss and a hug, and to hold his son for a moment. Then he would go see what Jay thought was important. At the least, it would keep him from getting thumped around by Granny Death here.

Let it be minor. But he knew in his heart that they were due a major blast.

* * *

Jay smiled and shook his head as he disconnected. He’d seen a lot of different sides of Alex Michaels over the years, but this goofy dad thing was a new one. He couldn’t help wondering what kind of father he would make.

He shook his head again and let those thoughts go. Fatherhood was for the future — if ever. Right now, he had a hacker to track.

He was working from home. After they got back from the honeymoon, he and Saji had moved to a larger place, one that allowed each of them to have a work space. At the moment, Saji was in her office, offering advice to an on-line class of students beginning the study of Buddhism. She’d be working for another hour, so he had plenty of time to do his own job.

The wirelessware he had at home was the same as what he used at Net Force HQ — the latest generations of haptic gear, including optics, otics, reekers, droolers, and weathermesh — so he had full sensory capability when he went on-line. He put on the gloves, the headset with its ear and nose plugs, and the eyecups, adjusting them so they were comfortable. He already wore the tight-fitting mesh suit.

The piece he had sent to Commander Michaels was but a tiny hint of something he knew — he knew—was much larger. But knowing it was not the same as finding it. Like the scenario he was about to dive into, there were a lot of submerged logs in the swamp, and while not all of them were alligators, you had to be very careful when you poked at them with a stick…

He grinned at the thought. “Scenario on,” he told his computer.

Bayou Baritaria, Louisiana

Jay cruised slowly through the murky waters of Bayou Baritaria, the air boat’s throttle nearly closed, watching carefully for submerged logs. Even without an underwater prop, hitting one at speed would be bad — not so much for the air boat as for him. Air boats were tough. The ³/₁₆“- thick 5086 marine aluminum that made up the boat’s flat hull was coated with an additional layer of a Teflon-based polymer, and would slide over pretty much anything, up to and including dry land. A land speed record had been set some time back in the late nineties with an air boat — on asphalt at over forty-seven miles an hour. Bad for the coating, but it worked.

However, hitting anything submerged at speed would put him in danger, in case the boat flipped, or spun toward one of the huge cypress trees that stood sentinel, gray Spanish moss draped thickly over their branches.

Only way to tell north on these trees would be to look for the dead Yankee.

Jay recalled a factoid he’d read somewhere, that all statues of southern Civil War generals faced north. They’d lost the war, but never really given up down here.

Beams of sunlight shone through the thick canopy of the swamp, touching here and there upon the murky waters, which, of course, teemed with water moccasins and leeches. The air had that dank, spoiled, rotting- vegetation odor that overlaid everything, a fecund, earthy stink. In the background he could hear the high-pitched whirring of cicadas.

A mosquito hummed by, and he swatted at it.

He grinned. Few took the time for VR details like that. That was the difference between a pro and amateurs: the little things.

His hot-rod air boat, a 560-horsepower V-8 engine with a 2:1 reduction gear, drove the six-bladed carbon- fiber propeller that pushed him along in the deep brownish green waters of the bayou. The flat bottom of the boat would let him float it in as little as an inch of water, and if he had to chase anything, he could be up to forty or fifty