Safe House

8

Maj did not sleep well that night, and she was up unusually early, even for her. What surprised her somewhat, when she pulled on jeans and a T-shirt and meandered into the kitchen for her first cup of tea, was finding her father there before her. He wouldn’t normally have been up for another half hour or so — but here he was, nursing a cup of coffee, cold from the look of it, and wearing an extremely haggard expression.

“Daddy?” she said, starting to go over to the kettle…and then stopping. There was only one thing she could think of which would make him look so bleak. “Did you hear anything?”

He nodded. He looked down the hall first to see who might be there, and then said softly, “I got a call from James Winters about fifteen minutes ago. Their information-service people who listen to the media over there picked up an announcement on the morning news. They’ve arrested Armin Darenko.”

“Oh, no,” Maj said, and forgot about the kettle, and went to sit down at the table — her legs felt weak under her all of a sudden. “Oh, no, it’s not fair—”

“I don’t know that fairness comes into it,” her dad said, looking into the coffee, “but I feel terrible.”

“Oh, you’re not alone,” Maj said. She gulped. “What happens now?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. James didn’t seem to think there was a lot of chance of getting him away from them again. The country is so isolated and so tightly sealed…and just so paranoid…that new people can’t easily blend in. Operatives from any friendly force are very thin on the ground.”

“Will they—” Maj gulped again. It was odd how it was suddenly hard to think. “They’re going to try to do something to Laurent, now, aren’t they.”

“They may have it in mind,” her father said, “but I doubt they’ll get far. The house is being watched twenty-four hours a day, James tells me. Net Force, and others.”

Somehow Maj did not feel particularly relieved. It had seemed to her, though, that there had been rather more cars than usual parked around here the last couple of days. She was almost able to be slightly pleased with herself for having noticed that, even subliminally. Not that there had been people in the cars, either…but that did not mean that they could not have been wired for eighteen different kinds of surveillance.

She sat looking at the table for a moment, and at her hands, folded in front of her, and then looked up again at her father, who was staring unseeing at his coffee cup.

“Daddy,” she said, very slowly, “are you sure they haven’t found a way to do something to Laurent?”

Her father looked at her blankly.

“Is he still sick?”

“Uh, yes,” her father said. “I looked in to see if he wanted to go running…he said no, and turned over. He doesn’t look very well. And frankly, I don’t feel much like running myself, now.”

“Fine…but don’t you think it’s kind of a coincidence that this should have happened to him right now?”

Her father looked at her a little strangely. “Maj, you wouldn’t normally strike me as the conspiracy-theory type. There’s no evidence to support such a conclusion.”

“I know, but—” Maj shook her head. “Dad, he said he started to feel funny while he was online.”

Her father shook his head, too. “Good thing there’s no such thing as a genuine ‘Net virus,’” he said. “I’d hate to think what could happen if there was one. But whatever may be the matter with him, you can’t catch diseases on the Net.”

“That’s certainly what they tell us,” Maj said.

“By the way,” her father said, “James tells me that apparently someone tried to get into Laurent’s accounts the other night.”

Maj was horrified. “Did they?”

“Of course not. Those accounts are apparently on Net Force’s own servers, and they’ve got firewalls like the Great Wall of China. God Himself would have to call their sysop and ask her for a password.” He sighed. “All the same, I don’t like it. Leaving aside the matter of his father’s capture, they’re snooping around Laurent pretty actively…and Laurent is here.”

“This extra security, this surveillance…do you think it’s enough?”

“I think maybe the less said about that, the better,” her father said softly. “But I’m told we’re safe, honey.”

“It’s not us I’m worried about,” said Maj. “It’s Laurent.”

The look her father gave her was just slightly humorous, the first normal-looking expression he had produced in this conversation. “Fortunately,” he said, “I know what you meant by that. But my concerns are elsewhere, too. Your mother. You and Rick. The Muffin.”

Maj swallowed. The thought of someone from that country’s intelligence services coming here to try to get Laurent, and possibly hurting the Muffin instead — It was too horrifying to think about….

“And I always knew that this might happen,” her dad said. “So we just need to keep our eyes open, all of us. Except the Muf, whose composure I’m not going to disturb with all of this, for reasons you’ll understand. A six-year-old has enough to do, coping with the world we’re living in nowadays, without thinking that the bad people might actually come to her house and try to kidnap someone she reads to.”

He sighed. “And as for Laurent, I’m not sure this is exactly the best time to break this news to him, either.”

Maj flushed hot suddenly. “Daddy,” she said, “he’s not a child.”

“Uh, excuse me, O ancient of days…but he is a child.”

“You know what I mean! You were the first one to suggest that he was a little ‘older’ in the brain than usual. You can’t keep this from him. Someone’s going to have to tell him eventually!”

Her father rubbed his face. “Yes,” he said. “I agree with you. But not right this minute, all right?” He looked up at her then. “Besides…there’s always the possibility that something may happen.”

“‘Something’?” She looked at him.

He stood up, turned away from her. “Don’t ask me for details,” he said. “I can’t give them to you. But in the meantime, let’s just sit on this piece of information for a day or so and hope that it changes.”

He dumped the cold coffee out in the sink. “Mom will be here today,” he said. “You’ll be back before she and I have to go out again. Just keep an eye on things, and don’t get all panicky, all right?”

“I won’t panic,” she said. “I don’t usually.”

“I know you don’t,” her father said, and kissed her on the top of the head in passing; then went on down to the bedroom again to get dressed.

Maj sat there for a good while, with her chin propped on her enlaced fingers, and cursed the unfairness of the world. Then she too got up and got dressed to go to school.

The day was sheer hell. Maj could not keep her mind on anything. Her shattered concentration cost her many points on a math test for which she had had great hopes, having studied for the stupid thing for a good chunk of the last week — but Venn diagrams seemed strangely useless to her today. And it was Laurent’s father, more than anything else, whose case was on her mind. Laurent might be sick, but he was safe. His father was in that little bare room with a light trained on his face, now, by the bad guys — the “bad room” from all those old movies…and there was nothing that could be done about it. Think how you would feel if your dad were in that room…. Maj thought. Dad’s right. It’s too awful. Let Laurent wait awhile to find out…until he feels better, anyway.

But she knew…and she was not going to feel any better. It was all profoundly depressing. Maj dragged herself from class to class all day, causing a couple of her teachers to ask her what was the matter with her. She used the excuse that it was “something physiological,” which was vague enough to be true, since it was someone else’s physiology on her mind, but also served to make them stop asking her questions. When the last bell went, she tore out of the place and headed for the bus home. It was delayed, which drove her wild — but she waited for it, rode it the whole way, and then got off and forced herself not to run the last couple of blocks…because she was afraid of who might be watching.

It was five o’clock when she walked in the door. Her Mom met her there; she was in the process of getting ready to go out to her consultants’ meeting.

“Laurent’s still under the weather. It could very well be the flu,” her mother said, putting a loose-leaf full of printouts into her carry bag. “I gave him some more aspirin, and the antiviral. The fever came down a little. But he doesn’t have much appetite. It’s a good thing he’s not showing any sensitivity to light, or I’d be a lot more worried.”

That made Maj feel a little better. “Has Daddy been back yet?” Maj said.

“Been and gone,” her mom said, “just to pick up his suit. He’ll be back first, I bet.” It was a grumble.

“I don’t know, Mom….” Maj smiled a little.

“I gave the Muffin a little early dinner,” her mother said, picking up the big shoulder bag full of printouts and loose-leaf notebooks, and her portable Net machine with her consultancy-business files in it. “Let’s see…” She stopped in the front doorway to see if she needed anything else. “Nope, all together. These people are living in the information age, for pity’s sake, I don’t see why they insist on making me come out to their pestilent meetings when we could all sit comfortably in our homes and have them.”

“It’s a power trip,” Maj said. “They’re all relics…they’ll retire soon, I bet.”

“From your mouth to the Great Programmer’s ear,” Maj’s mother said. She kissed her daughter and said, “Lock up, now.” She glanced down the hall, toward Laurent’s room.

“I will,” Maj said.

Her mom pushed the door open. “Oh, and I forgot, there’s a letter from Auntie Elenya there for you….”

“A letter? Wow,” Maj said, as her mother pulled the door shut. “See you, Mom….”

The car revved up outside, whirred away. Maj threw the solenoid bolt on the front door and turned to the little table where the paper mail sat when it had come in. Sure enough, there was an airmail paper envelope — Maj picked it up, saw her name at the top of the typed address.

“How about that,” she said. The letter was postmarked WIEN — that was where they lived, she and Maj’s uncle, the Mad Cartographer. She tore it open, unfolded the thin airmail paper with pleasure. It was unusual to get paper mail from the relatives anymore, now that they were all online. Mostly it came in the form of postcards, they—

“Dear Madeline,” the first sheet said in English. “I have sent this note to you for my son. It seemed more likely to reach you without interference—”

Maj nearly dropped it — then took a breath, and started to fold it up again — then stopped herself and opened it once more. It was addressed to me, after all. He would have realized I would probably read at least some of it—

“—and I want to thank you and your family for agreeing to make him welcome. There is, however, some information which you and he will need to know now, since it may take me a short time before I am able to follow him—”

Maj read the letter and felt her hands starting to shake. She turned the page over, read the other side.

Then she went straight down the hall to Laurent’s room and knocked. “Nggh?” he said.

She opened the door and put her head in. “I’m sorry to bother you,” she said, “but you had better see this. And then we’re going to have to decide what to do….”

About ten minutes later Laurent was still sitting on the edge of the bed, looking profoundly uncomfortable…and not just because of his illness. Sluggish as he was, Laurent had started to read the letter for the third time, and then had stopped himself and laid it aside.

“They are inside me,” he said. He shook his head. “The only ones left from all his work. That last cup of tea…”

“Could be,” Maj said.

Laurent looked at her, somewhat unnerved. “Still,” he said. “My father made them. They would never hurt me.”

“If they were still running your father’s programming,” Maj said, very softly, “no. I do understand, now, why you looked so good, the first couple of days. The little monsters have been running around inside you, pulling the lactic acid molecules apart, keeping you healthy…”

“They do not seem to be doing that anymore,” he said. “Maybe they, too, are jet lagged?”

“What do you think the odds of that are?” Maj said. She swallowed. “Laurent…there’s one other piece of news that wasn’t in the letter.”

He looked at her, eyes wide at her tone of voice.

She told him about the arrest.

It was a good few moments before he spoke again. “Then they have been interrogating all the people he worked with,” Laurent said. “Anything they knew, the internal police now know. Or soon will.”

“Including,” Maj said, “I very strongly suspect, how to reprogram your little friends the microps. Laurent…I don’t think they’re your friends anymore. I would bet you serious money that the internal police or whatever were waiting for you to go online. And when you did — they reprogrammed them…and then told your father that if he didn’t come out from where he was hiding, they’d leave them running.”

Laurent looked stricken. Maj herself was fighting with a huge load of guilt which she would otherwise have wallowed in for a good while. Dad told me, Laurent’s dad told him, to keep him off the Net — why didn’t we take him seriously! Or seriously enough! But there was no time to waste on self-recrimination right now. They were going to have to do something.

“I think you are right,” he said. “That chill last night…”

“Yes. And now the problem is, where do we go from here? Because the next thing they’ll do, I bet, is try to get their hands on you. The prototypes, the only ones there are, are swimming around inside you…and no one else knows about it yet. Though they will in about five minutes — because once Net Force and the people over here know, not all Cluj’s horses and all Cluj’s men are going to be able to touch you.”

Laurent still had a fairly shocked look.

“But we need to get moving,” Maj said, “because Mom’s gone now, and Dad won’t be back, and I bet you money they’ll decide that this is a great time to make a move, while there’s no one home but the kids.”

“The kids—” He looked even more shocked. “The Muffin is here….”

That had been on Maj’s mind, too.

“I would not want anything to happen to the Muffin. She is special.”

“No argument there,” Maj said.

“Even if she does make me sit with her while she reads to dinosaurs with bad breath.”

That made Maj burst out laughing. She much needed a laugh, for she was starting to shake inside. “Look,” she said. “None of this is your fault. But we’ve got to move.”

“And do what?” Laurent said, sounding as helpless as Maj felt. “They are inside me. I do not know anything about them — not the important part, anyway, not anything about the codes that would stop them. I am sure that only my father and the government have those…and the government will not issue them unless—” He broke off.

For the first time Maj saw his face start to crumple toward tears. But he held them off. “I do not want to be a weapon,” he muttered. “But that is what they will use me for. That is what I am, Maj! They are using me for that right now. I will not let them use me that way! It would be better if I was—”

“Don’t say it,” Maj said. “It’s a lot too soon to start making decisions like that.” All the same, she was not going to there-there him or waste her time with other arguments. There was a toughness about this kid that made Maj suspect he would do something that desperate if he felt there was need…because he really did love his dad that much. “Besides,” she said, “they may not know what they’re dealing with here.”

“Which is what?”

“Which is us,” she said. “We’re plenty…so let’s move first. Get into your sweats, get into the den, get online.”

“Is that a good idea?” he said. “I am really sick. Things are starting to hurt, Maj….”

The thought immediately went through her mind — call an ambulance, get him to the hospital. She hesitated—

— then rejected it. The hospital would not be able to do anything. To get Laurent well, these little monsters needed to be deactivated. Then they needed to be removed. The hospital emergency room would be equipped for neither. Better to keep him safe here, Maj thought, and not let him out of my sight until someone from Net Force shows up.

And until then…there has to be a way to fight them…. But boy, this sure doesn’t match the nice evening we had planned. A peaceful evening with a few of the Group, out in the depths of—

And the idea came to her. It was not complete, but Maj had a few minutes for that yet. Broad strokes first, she thought, then fill in the detail—“Go on,” she said to Laurent. “Dress, get moving, we don’t have a lot of time!”

He got up and started rummaging around for his sweats. Maj ran for the machine in her Mom’s office, threw herself into the chair, lined up the implant, flung herself into her work space. “Red alert,” she said to the work space, and the intervention lighting in the big room came on all around her. It was atmosphere, nothing more, but it made her feel better. “Panic button call, James Winters!”

There was an intolerably long pause. “The party you are calling is not available,” the system said. “Please leave a message.”

“Where is he?!” Maj yelled.

“That information is private. If you have clearance of level 8 or better, please state your clearance number.”

“Never mind that.” She gulped. “Panic button call, Jay Gridley!”

“The party you are calling is not available. Please leave a message.”

“Tell him to call Maj Green immediately. This is an emergency. End call,” Maj said. She took a long breath, and tried to calm herself and sort out the sequence for what she was going to have to do.

Call Dad, scream for help. Good, but anyone could tap into a cell phone call these days, and she had no desire at all to advertise to Laurent’s dad’s enemies that she was on to them. Nonetheless, she had to tell her dad about this and get him to drop what he was doing and come help. Leave a message for Winters, let him know what you need and what you’re going to do. There must be someone’s desk that his urgent-tagged messages land on. Then yell for other help. Someone who can help me defend Laurent while the high-powered stuff is coming.

In the end she called her dad’s phone. As she was afraid, it was turned off. She left a message tagged MOST URGENT on it, telling him to come straight home. Then she called James Winters’s code again, got the same message, and this time left a detailed message a minute and a half long, tagged UTMOST URGENCY.

She stopped, then, took a breath. “Group of Seven call,” Maj said. “Del.”

“Working,” the machine said. A moment later there he was, sitting out in his backyard.

“You’re early,” Del said.

“Better than being late,” Maj said, somewhat grimly. “This is a Net Force Explorer problem, Del. Can you suit up and meet me in my space? Right now.”

He clambered out of the lawn lounge he was lying in.

“And do me a favor,” Maj said. “Get Robin, too. I’m a little pressed for time here.”

“This isn’t about the game?”

“Oh, it is,” she said, “but the stakes have been raised a little. We’re talking life and death here. The real thing, not the virtual type.”

Del stared at her. “Three minutes,” he said.

She broke out of virtuality, met Laurent in the hall. “Okay,” she said, “the ball’s rolling. I’m going to shut the house up. And if I have to, I’ll call the cops as well. I have no idea what they’ll make of it, but it’ll sure annoy anyone from your government who shows up thinking they’re going to take you for a ride in the next little while.”

“But how can this matter? If the microps—”

“We can’t stop them,” she said. “But maybe we can fight them. Look, Laurent, why are you arguing with me? If you get into the machine, it’ll at least cut your sensoria out of the loop, and you won’t feel sick.” Until you go unconscious. And how long will that be? Oh, God—!

“Fight them? With what?” he said, staggering a little.

“The power of geekery,” she said, “and the power of good. Better hope that’s enough. Get in there and get online!”

She put him in the implant chair in her dad’s den, pulling down the blinds and drawing the drapes. “I don’t want you to panic,” Maj said, “but I’m going to lock you in, okay? If they try anything—”

“All right,” he said.

“Meet me in my work space as soon as you get in. Get suited up. We’re going flying.”

She went around the house as calmly as she could, making sure all the windows were locked, all the doors shut, and pulling blinds and curtains closed everywhere. In her room the Muffin was sitting reading, for once. As Maj put her head in, the Muffin lifted a finger to her lips and said, “SSSSH. Laurent’s sick.”

“I know he is, honey,” Maj said. “I want you to come and be in mommy’s office with me.”

“Okay. Are you going online?”

“Yes, sweetie.”

“Okay.”

Maj escorted the little one into her mom’s office and made her comfortable on an old beanbag chair in the corner, which immediately began, in its traditional manner, leaking its little polystyrene “beans.”

“Dumb thing,” Maj muttered, shut the blinds, and drew the curtains in the office, and then went out to make the rest of the house secure, finishing by setting the alarm system. It would not stop anyone who was really intent on getting in…but it would slow them down, and time might start mattering a whole lot shortly. And it would automatically alert the local police if something disturbed the signal in any way.

She stood still there in the kitchen for a moment and thought. Nothing more she could do about the physical security, now. That was going to have to be the waiting part of this game. If she called the police now, she would only get in trouble for wasting their time. Who would believe her if she told them what was going on here? The local branch police station was only about five minutes away — that was close enough…she hoped. She had a panic button call set up in her work space with their name on it, too, as well as the auto-alert wired into the alarm system. She could shout for help any time she needed it.

Nothing to do now but get the battle organized. The main trouble was the medical expertise. If it had been the insides of a horse Maj had been dealing with, it would have been another story entirely. But you could not use veterinary science on people. The biology didn’t universally apply to humans. Not when it was something this delicate. Who do I know, who do I—

Charlie! Charlie Davis.

If he was around. Oh, please, let him be around….

She dived into her mom’s office again, locked the door. The Muffin was oblivious, still deep in the copy of Rewards and Fairies. Thank you, Rudyard, Maj thought, I owe you one…. She lined up the implant, plunged into her work space again. There stood Laurent, in his space suit, with his helmet under his arm. Physically he looked better, but she could see from his expression that he knew there was a lot wrong with him. “My thinking…feels kind of slow,” he said.

“It might,” she said. “But at least you aren’t in pain. Are you?”

He shook his head.

“Well, that’s something. Sit down. Hi, Del!”

“Robin’ll be here in a minute,” Del said, having just appeared from “nowhere,” suited up and ready to go. “Hi, Niko, how’s it shaking?”

“Shaking is the word,” Laurent said slowly.

“Computer! Virtcall to Charlie Davis. Tell him it’s urgent.”

“Working,” said the machine. It said nothing more for some moments.

“Oh, please be home,” Maj muttered. “You’re always home. Almost always.” It was a fair bet, for Charlie studied more than anyone she knew. Maj knew, from talking to a couple of the other Net Force Explorers, that it most probably had a lot to do with his ancient history as a ghetto kid. These days, after having been adopted by a doctor father and a nurse mother, he was relentless in his study of medicine, and—

Light flooded into her work space. And — oh, happy sight — there was Charlie down at his table in his own customary work space, an old eighteenth-century operating theater with circles of high desks all around it for people to watch while surgeons chopped other people’s legs off without anesthesia. The place would have given Maj the shudders if she had not understood it as an expression of Charlie’s essentially sardonic sense of humor. “Charlie!” she cried.

He looked up, slightly surprised. “I’m glad to see you, too,” he said.

She bounded down the stairs to where he sat, nearly tripping as she came down the last couple. “Charlie,” she said, “Oh, jeez, I need you, we need you, can you come? Please? Quick!”

He dropped the stylus with which he was scribbling on his desk and got up. “This a life-or-death thing?” he said, rather dryly. “I have a test tomorrow.”

“Yes!”

“Oh, well, then,” Charlie said, and immediately followed Maj up the stairs back into her space.

“Charlie, this is Niko. Oh, heck, that’s not his name, it’s Laurent.” They shook hands gravely. “And that’s Del, he’s a Net Force Explorer—”

They shook hands, too.

“Enough of the courtesies. Laurent,” Maj said, “has a problem….”

She described it in a hurry. Charlie’s eyes got wide when he started to realize what kind of thing the microps could do.

“Holy cow,” Del said. “But what can we do?”

“Fight them. Slow them down. Virtually.”

Del looked flabbergasted. Charlie, though, stood very still for a moment, then nodded. “To chase these things effectively, to interact with them at all, you would have to ‘map’ Laurent’s body details — human body details, anyway — onto whatever paradigm you were planning to use for the fighting.”

“Cluster Rangers,” Maj said.

Del looked at her, opened his mouth, shut it again. “Maj,” he said, “we’re simmers, but are we this good? Good enough to let someone’s life depend on it?”

“If we’re not now,” Maj said, “we’d better get to be, because we have to buy this boy some time. Del, have a little faith in yourself! We’ve been working with these programming modules for two months now. We’re all good at the language.”

“Some of us better than most,” Robin said, walking out of the air, that blue crest of hair nodding jauntily. “What’s the issue?”

“Miss Robin,” Charlie said, with a smile. “Didn’t know you were part of this crowd. Changes the tone of the whole affair.”

Robin high-fived him in a cheerful manner as she came over. Maj made a note to pump Robin about where she knew Charlie from, and what was making him grin in that particular way. “Interesting to see you here, too,” she said. “Maj, what’s the scoop?”

Maj hurriedly told Robin what she needed to know, and what they needed. “It’s an overmap,” Robin said, nodding. “Not straightforward, but when are they ever? Del, the Rangers custom module handler can deal with the details of the overmapping.” She grinned at Laurent. “For the time being, his body becomes the battleground. But we need a body map to conjoin with the Cluster Rangers’ programming protocols—”

“Just so happens,” Charlie said, “I have the New Gray’s Virtual Anatomy in my work space all the time. That be good enough?”

“What’s the resolution?” Robin said.

“Five microns. Ten max.”

“Close enough for jazz,” Del said. “Rangers runs at six-micron virtual grain—Gray’s is a little better than we need.”

“Can you get started on this right away?” Maj said. “We need to get out of here.”

“We can do better than that,” Robin said. “We can do it on the fly. I always keep the module manager in my cockpit for fine-tuning the Arbalest simulation in the microsecond pauses.”

Maj’s jaw dropped. “Do you mean to tell me you’ve been altering your sim’s characteristics while you’re using it?”

Del, too, was looking amazed. “I bow to the master,” he said, and put his helmet on. “If you can do that—”

“Hangar’s out that way,” Maj said, pointing at the appropriate door and causing her own suit to appear. “Laurent, you come along with me again. Charlie, you’d better sort yourself out one of these.”

He blinked, and did so.

“Charlie, you come with me,” Robin said. “They’re all two-seaters. I’ll guest you in, and you can sit behind me and give me advice until we’ve got this solution all properly geeked out.”

They all headed out into the hangars and started the jets warming up. It took a while getting Laurent up into the cockpit — he was slow, and Maj started worrying about exactly how long the effect of being virtual was going to continue to do him any good. But she kept that to herself. “Maj,” Del said on “intersuit radio” as they sealed up the cockpits, “where exactly were you planning to go hunting these bugs?”

“In Rangers space.”

“But, Maj, the bad guys know Laurent was there. If we go in there, they’ll try to get at him again.”

“Maybe,” Maj said. “But I’m betting they’ve already done their worst as far as Laurent is concerned. It doesn’t make sense that they’d hold back — he’s too important to them. We can’t possibly run the modules on my home system, Del! There’s not nearly enough processing power! The Rangers system has more than enough to spare. And as long as the routines we use to hunt these things through Laurent’s body are successfully recast as Rangers plug-in modules, it’s all allowable. It should work — we’ve done enough programming in that system to have a good feel for it.”

Robin looked up from her work in the third cockpit down. “There’s one other problem, though. If the agents from the other side come in after us—”

“We know this space a whole lot better than they do,” Maj said. “We have the home field advantage. They’re bound to be scared. I don’t imagine that it will go down too well with their bosses if they fail. If I were them, I’d be concentrating on keeping my butt in one piece….”

“Ready?” Robin said after a moment. “I’m still working, but there’s no need for us to sit while this is going on. Let’s make tracks upward and see where the buggies are hiding.”

“There are your coordinates,” Charlic said from behind Robin. “The microps have all gone cortical. The program’s mapping the sulci now….”

“Nebula space,” Robin said. “The crossmapping is making it equate to the Beehive Nebula, guys….”

“Oh, no,” Maj said. That part of space was crawling with the Archon’s forces, as well as being thick with a particularly opaque and beautiful, but annoying, nebula. It was a perfect hiding place…and a very dangerous place to have a fight, since you could all too easily wind up shooting your buddies.

“The good fight is never easy,” Del said. The hangar finished evacuating — the stars blazed and sang overhead. “Seven for seven, guys!”

They rose into the unending night. A few minutes later, the synch lasers lanced out, knitting the three ships into a unit. Then the stars’ light crashed down on them, pressed them down to nothing and out the other side—

— into glowing cloud, a mass of ion-excited purple, green, and blue, eighteen light-years away. The three of them hung there in silence for a while, looking…

…and then saw them.

They were bugs.

The Cluster Rangers’ game equivalence mapping had taken the projected characteristics of the microps and matched them to the closest creatures in its own “vernacular.” Now Maj saw what she had quite frankly never cared to see up close — the legendary Substantives, the mindless, nonorganic scavengers left over from “another space, another time,” remnants of the dark and ancient race with whom the Cluster Rangers’ patron species had fought so many long and terrible wars. They were hunger — they ate, and that was all. Many-limbed, many-eyed, nearly immortal, the Substantives lived on energy in whatever form they could find…but they best loved the rubble of shattered planets, plenty of which had been left behind, over time, in their dark masters’ wake. Lacking that, they would eat anything — ships, space stations, light, power…even dust. That was what they were eating now — using invisible, custom-generated ramscoops to scoop up and devour the glowing dust of the nebula. They shone with it, and left trails of excreted parasitic light behind them, the only remnant of their feast.

“Euuuuuw,” Robin said softly.

“You got that in one,” Charlie said from behind her. “That’s the myelin sheathing that holds the brain cells together, people, and they’re glomming it up like there’s no tomorrow. This keeps up for very long, there won’t be a tomorrow for one of us.”

Maj was acutely aware of Laurent, behind her, looking out at this with astonishment and horror. “Let’s go get ’em, then,” she said.

The three fighters dived in. Maj, though, was already calculating odds, and beginning to despair. There were at least fifty of these things scattered around that she could see. Substantives had no weapons that she knew of other than brute strength and consuming anything that got in their way — but how representative were these of the true number of microps presently inside Laurent? Were there hundreds? Thousands? Millions? How many more of these were hiding in the nebula?

Del dived in and fired his pumped lasers at one of the Substantives, the closest. It squalled in fury and struck out at him with five or six of those awful clawed legs. “No effect,” he said. “Retuning—”

He tuned his lasers further into the blue, came back for another run, tried again. The Substantive lunged at him, just missing with more of those legs. Once again the lasers had no effect.

“Incorrect mapping,” Robin said, as her own Arbalest dived in. “Going to have to hack at this one, boys and girls. These things are resistant.”

“I thought they might have to be,” Maj said. “They probably have to cope with white blood cells and such to get their job done.”

“How were these things activated, Maj?” said Robin. “Net burst?”

“I think so.”

“Huh,” Robin said. “Well, if we can’t destroy them out-right, let’s try overriding them. They have to accept incoming communication. We may not be able to reprogram them — we don’t have the codes for it — but we can try overloading them—”

A moment’s pause. Then Robin came around hard and fired at another Substantive.

It stopped scooping up dust, listed over to one side, and began to drift.

“That’s it!” Del yelled. “Come on, guys!”

They went after the Substantives in earnest, hitting them one after another. One after another, they went down. But more and more of them came out of the Nebula. Maj started to worry, for her power conduits were beginning to complain. You could not run an Arbalest forever like this — you had to take it home and fuel it once in a while. And then there was the matter of—

“Uh-oh,” said Robin.

“What?” Maj said, looking all around her. It was a tone of voice she usually only heard from Robin when they were badly outnumbered.

“They’re moving again, Maj.”

She looked back, and felt like swearing. One of the Substantives that she had shot up with her returned cannons was indeed moving, struggling…coming back to life. Are we going to have to shoot all these things up again? We can’t! Our own power levels…

Nonetheless she turned around again, wondering how they were going to pull this out without having to go back to base and charge, then come back again. The damage to Laurent’s brain would only start all over again. And in the meantime, if the agents from his country should—

“Oh, dear me, no,” Del said.

That was not a tone of voice she cared to hear from Del, either. “What?”

“Black Arrows, guys,” said Del softly.

Maj looked up in momentary panic, which became more than momentary as she saw the black shapes with their red outlines streaking toward them — five of them. But what the—

She opened her mouth, closed it again. “They’re not real Arrows!” she said.

“What?”

“Look at how they’re moving!”

Del and Robin were quiet for a moment. Then Robin said, “They’re slow!”

“They’re from outside the game,” Maj said. “They’re the agents — the ones that activated the microps in Laurent!”

“And the poor dumb clucks aren’t running at multiple G’s,” Del crowed. “They don’t know how far the parameters of ships can be pushed in this game. They don’t know the rules!”

“Then let’s not show them right away,” Maj said. “If they think the normal rules of science obtain here…”

She could just hear the others grinning. “Maj, take point,” Del said, with great relish.

“You’re on,” she said, and reached with both arms into the fighting field, the “glove-box”-like force field which the pilot of an Arbalest fighter used to manipulate ship’s weapons.

The fight that followed was a sad one…for the Arrows.

Maj dived slowly in toward the first of their enemies, watched him react as best as he could…then threw her Arbalest around at 6 G’s and cobra’d, letting him pass her, shooting him up from behind. Elsewhere, Del and Robin were using similar tactics. Each took out one of the Arrows, then went for another.

Maj went for her second enemy vessel, diving close. She passed over the other, canopy to canopy, and got a glimpse of the pilot as she twisted away from the Arrow’s fire. A woman, she thought — blond, small. Her helmet hid her eyes, but not her mouth. She was smiling, a look of great enjoyment, and she dived up and around again toward Maj, firing—

I don’t like your looks, lady, Maj thought, and clenched her fists in the fighting field. The pumped lasers might have been little good against the Substantives, but they worked just fine against Black Arrows, as the Group had proved the other night. Maj’s lasers stitched out blinding from her Arbalest and carved a long line of light and hot metal down the side of the woman agent’s Arrow. The blond’s ship tumbled, but did not know how to handle it — turned, tried to limp away. Maj, though, was in no mood to let it go. She brought the Arbalest around in a turn so tight it would have broken the back of any lesser fighter, 6 G’s or better — the blood roared in her ears, but not as loud as her anger. This woman was one of the people who wanted to reduce Laurent’s brain to so much strawberry jam, one of the people who had made his young life so far hell, and would have done worse to him and the father for as much of their lives as they managed to hang on to after they were both dragged home.

Not a chance, lady, Maj thought. This was one of the people who had, even if only for a night, made her turn her home into a fortress and lock a guest up in the den. Who didn’t care who they hurt if it meant getting Laurent, and apparently dead or alive was good enough for this blond excuse for a human being.

Maj followed her hard, and turned, and turned again, and fired again. The Arrow fled, but Maj pursued — and the Arrow mis-twisted, and Maj found herself sitting, most serendipitously, right on its six.

She fired, and the Arrow blew itself to shreds. Wherever that agent was, in reality, she would not be bothering Laurent again for a little while, anyway. It took a while to get a new ship in this universe.

She rejoined the others. Robin was in the act of putting one last agent out of business, blowing his Arrow to smithereens at the end of a long lazy Immelmann turn that was pure insolence in space. A ragged cheer went up from them all at the end of that. But Maj looked with concern up into the cockpit mirror…and saw that Laurent had passed out.

“Trouble. We’ve got to knock those Substantives down again.”

“Can’t, Maj!” Robin said. “No power. Showing red.”

“We have to go back, Maj,” said Del.

“But we can’t!” Maj said.

“If we don’t,” Del said, “we are genuinely screwed—”

“But Laurent—!”

Then Maj caught the sudden movement. She swore softly and tumbled the Arbalest in y-axis.

And with no other warning, long slender arrows came lancing past and around them through the darkness of space. Not dark ones, though, not the Archon’s ships, but, beyond belief or hope, the white lances of the Cluster Rangers’ elite corps, the Pilum Squadrons, every one of them with an odd piece of nose art added — the Net Force insignia. The Pilums’ pulsecannon weaponry stitched all the space before them with white lines of irresistible fire, plastering the Substantives with pulsecannon bursts…and one after another the giant bugs went limp and still, not moving again.

“The codes have worked,” said one of the Pilum commanders. “I repeat, the codes work. Squadron, go in and clean them up!”

All those long white shapes disappeared into the cloud. A cheer went up from Maj and Del and Robin and Charlie, and a kind of strangled hoot from Laurent. They all turned tail and made their way up and out of the nebula again—

— and came into clear view of the great arm of the Galaxy again, the light triumphant against the darkness one more time; and all the stars sang for joy.

One more Pilum came coasting down by them. “All right, you guys,” said its pilot; and Maj’s head snapped up in surprise, for she knew that voice. She peered across the darkness between them and saw James Winters riding right-hand seat in the Pilum’s forward-thrust lance, with a grim grin on his face.

“Captain Winters…”

“Commander Winters,” he said, “here, at least. You’re done for today, Maj. I relieve you.”

“I stand relieved,” Maj said, and smiled, and slumped in her seat with relief.

“Now get out of virtual,” he said, “and for heaven’s sake go disarm the alarm system and open the front door, because about eight black-and-whites and a paramedic team from Bethesda are sitting outside waiting for you and Laurent to finish your business here, and your mom and dad are being choppered in and will be there demanding details in about five minutes.”

She had never been so glad to get offline in her life.

It was days before the dust settled. Laurent spent many of them in the hospital, having cellular rehab work done on the brain tissue which had been damaged — fortunately, not as much of it as had been feared nor was any of it permanent thanks to Maj’s and Net Force’s intervention — and having the microps removed. They were a seven-day’s wonder at Bethesda, where they were taken for safekeeping until the man who could best manage them arrived.

Maj insisted on being there, at least at a distance. She saw the Swissair spaceplane land at Dulles, and after the cleanup teams got the leftover hydrazine out of the ship, she saw it tugged into the landing ramp — and she waited with James Winters and her father as the tall blond man with the coat that was too short for his long wrists came up the jetway toward them, having been instructed to bypass immigration. She saw her father and the tall man look at each other…and then rush together and hug like a couple of kids. That had been worth seeing.

They had taken him straight to the hospital and left him with the recovering Laurent, with a long story to tell, of which Maj heard at least the highlights. Parts of it, she realized, she was unlikely ever to hear, though her father probably knew about them. All James Winters would say was, “We have some friends in far places. Sometimes they’re in a position to step in and help us. This time was one of those times…and we got lucky. They were able to get Laurent’s dad away from the security forces just as they took him, and out to where he could phone us the disabling codes for the microps. Not a moment too soon…”

Other parts, which she did hear, gave Maj the shivers. “There’s the matter of the agent that Cluj’s people sent over to ‘recover’ Laurent,” Winters said. “Quite a nasty lady — we were glad to catch up with her. There are several incidents which have happened on U.S. soil that we are going to be happy to have the chance to take up with her at last. She’ll be here for a while.”

Maj grinned at that. The woman’s face had been one of those she disliked at first sight — it was good to know there had been reason for it.

“You thought it through, Maj,” Winters said to her, much later. “You thought it through, and you followed the hunch when it came to you — and the hunch bought the time that was needed for response by those equipped to respond. You can’t do much better than that. I’m proud of you.”

She said nothing, and simply walked along by him, basking in the praise.

“Now,” he said, “we’ll talk about why you didn’t call me earlier.” And he talked about that, earnestly, for about fifteen minutes, during all of which Maj’s ears burned so fiercely that she thought they might set her hair on fire.

Finally, though, her father, walking on the other side of James Winters, spoke up. “She would probably have called you the night before, Jim,” he said, “if I hadn’t talked her out of it.”

“True?”

“True.”

Winters simply looked at Maj’s father and shook his head. Her father shrugged. “I invoked Occam’s Razor,” he said. “Mea culpa.”

“Mmm,” Winters said. “Now that you remind me, I seem to remember having put Tabasco in your vodka once.”

“That was you?”

Winters nodded. “Another mistake. So we’ve made one apiece, now.”

“Can I have that in writing,” said Maj’s father, “and will you give it to my wife? At your earliest convenience.”

The men stood there grinning at each other.

“Where will Laurent and his dad go now?” Maj said after a moment.

Winters sighed. “It’s no surprise we have a protection program for witnesses and other assets,” he said. “I think we can fairly qualify Armin Darenko as an asset, since he has apparently invented one of the most useful surgical and therapeutic tools of this century. Wouldn’t be surprised if he gets the Nobel out of it. That will come later, though. Right now, since he shows no particular interest in returning to his native country”—and his smile went appropriately wintery—“we’ll ‘adopt’ him and Laurent, find a quiet place for them to settle where they won’t be bothered…and let them fade into the background.”

Maj smiled. “New identities…”

“I have a feeling your group may acquire a new member,” Winters said, “with a new name. A couple of your Net Force Explorers associates, of course, are likely to be privy to the information. But I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.”

“No,” Maj said, “I don’t think so, either.”

She smiled, hearing, in the back of her mind, the Galaxy singing; though not nearly as loudly, at the moment, as her pride.

Seven for seven, she thought. Or nine, or ten…

Whatever!