State of War

miles an hour in just a few seconds — faster, depending on the water conditions.

The air boat was a simple and effective design, invented over a hundred years ago by no less than Alexander Graham Bell. Apparently the inventor had used it as a test bed for early airplane engines, which had been the engine of choice for air boats until the 1990s, when the lower cost of maintenance for automobile engines made them the power plants of choice.

It tickled Jay that the great-granddaddy of modern networking, the first man to get to market with a telephone, had also invented the craft he’d chosen for his VR scenario.

It turned out that air boats were very ecofriendly as well — no submerged screw meant less disruption of the underwater ecosystem. In this case, the metaphor was extended to his investigation: Jay made significantly fewer ripples as he trolled for information.

Sure, he could be doing this the old-fashioned way, eyeballing a TFT monitor, a thin window separating him from the data, but who wanted to? The immediacy of all five senses gave him an edge — and Net Force’s chief VR jockey liked it that way.

Ahead he saw a brown lump in the water.

He reached down and adjusted the lever to the left of his seat, moved the twin foam-filled airfoil rudders that steered the boat. Like a leaf on a pond, the craft skated to the left slightly, just enough so that he would miss the target by a hair.

He glanced down — a submerged log. It wasn’t really a log, of course, but a packet of information sliding slowly along this section of the net.

The section of VR he was checking was an older one — one used for datastreams that didn’t take as much bandwidth — and data that sometimes wasn’t what it seemed to be.

It was a modern variation of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Purloined Letter: Instead of sending encrypted high-speed data, some of the newer data pirates — and other hackers — hid it in plain sight, risking slower transmission speeds in less observed areas. After all, who would ever suspect anyone of using such a slow section of net to transfer anything critical?

Well, Jay Gridley, for one. Keeping an open mind about everything kept you from getting caught short a lot of times.

He was following a trail he’d started a few days previous, when he’d been rechecking the terrorists of CyberNation. Net Force was being real vigilant with these folks, after what had happened the year before. So far, nothing major had come up.

Another shape drifted by, this time a little faster than the log.

This one was greener, and he could see eyes and nostrils poking above the water — an example of Alligator mississippiensis — the American alligator.

The data in that packet was obviously a little higher priority than the info in the log, given a measure of protection, and speeded up slightly. Around him, Jay could see more shapes in the water, some gators, some logs.

Another set of gator nostrils and eyes slid past the air boat. Jay looked at the space between the eyes and nostrils — about twelve inches, he figured.

Now there’s a big one.

It was an old gator hunter’s rule of thumb: The distance between the inside of the nostrils and the eyes in inches was the approximate size of the animal in feet. This one should be about twelve feet long.

But when he looked for the gator’s wake, it was wrong: Instead of a tail tip sloshing water ten to twelve feet behind the eyes and nostrils, it was way too short — only about two feet.

Well, well.

Had he been looking at a computer monitor, he would have just seen that the checksum for the data packet he was looking at didn’t match. In his experience, that didn’t happen with legitimate data. Somebody was trying to make a big thing look small.

Time for a closer look at Mr. Gator.

He reached for his ketch-all pole — an extended piece of stainless steel tubing with a steel noose at one end that could be used to snare dangerous animals — and turned the air boat to follow the gator. The creature must have been imbued with some form of simplified warning system, because as soon as he started tracking it, it sped up.

Fast. Much too fast for a gator, unless it was jet-powered.

Jay grinned. Looked like he was going to get a chance to use his boat after all.

He accelerated rapidly, the roar of horsepower shoving the air boat after the gator. It looked like the critter was making for a branch off the bayou, just ahead. Jay pushed the throttle harder, and cypress trees whipped past. A low-hanging section of Spanish moss smacked him in the face.

Sometimes, he was too good, maybe.

The gator was fast, but no match for his boat. As he got closer, Jay lowered the ketch-all so its noose was just ahead of the gator. At this speed he’d have to be quick, lest the water rip the pole out of his hand.

He dipped the loop into in the water and yanked on the loop that drew the steel rope taut. The pole pulled hard at his arms, and had the gator been as long as advertised, it would have been a very unpleasant experience. But, of course, it was only a shrimp, just as he had figured.

Right yet again. It was a burden, sometimes. People got to expecting it.

He killed the engine and unbuckled his seat belt before lowering the gator onto the deck of his boat.

The two-foot-long beast was most unhappy, it thrashed and smacked its tail against the tough aluminum, making a thunking sound. Jay hand-over-handed his way down the ketch-all. He reached down and squeezed its jaws shut — not difficult, as its more powerful muscles were designed to bite, not open its mouth — and slipped another noose over its snout, pulling it tight.

Gotcha.

What he’d actually done of course was rascal the address of the gator’s destination so that it came to him instead of going to its original destination. But a gator chase was much more exciting than that.

Jay flipped the gator and looked at its belly. No seams.

Nice work.

Well he had ways around that, too.

He took a small skinning knife and slit the belly of the gator open. Instead of warm guts, however, pages of information spilled out, only the top one damaged by his rapid opening of the gator. He glanced at the writing on the first page and grinned.

Well, well. Look at this. How interesting…

2

Net Force Shooting Range

Quantico, Virginia

General John Howard arrived with his son Tyrone. They stopped to talk to Gunny at the check-in station. He was a master sergeant, but he’d always be “Gunny” to the shooters who came here.

“General. And is this Tyrone? You’ve grown some since I saw you last.”

Tyrone, at that voice-breaking fifteen-year-old stage, smiled and nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said.

“You shooting rifle today, sir?” Gunny asked the general.

“No, the sidearm. Tyrone hasn’t had a chance to shoot the Medusa.”

“What load do you want?”

“Some nines, some.38 Special, a few.357s,” Howard said.

“Is your ring up to date, sir?”

Howard nodded. The electronic control ring he wore, that all Net Force and FBI active agents wore, controlled the firing of his personal weaponry. Well, except for the old Thompson submachine gun his grandfather had left him. He hadn’t wanted to screw around with that; it was a collectible item, probably worth more than his