Net Force

16

The buzzer sounded and Tyrone Howard joined the exodus of students from first-period class into the dingy green halls of Eisenhower Middle School. Ahead of him, he saw Sean Hughes lumber into a guy from behind and shoulder him aside. The guy slammed into the lockers, hard. He recovered, turned, started to say something — then saw who had hit him and changed his mind.

This was a real good idea.

Tyrone slowed, to avoid getting too close. Hughes was an ox, pushing six feet tall and two hundred pounds, and at fifteen was two years older than most of his grade class. Hughes was a flicker screen who had flunked at least twice, not including summer school and private net teachers, and he got his kicks by bullying anybody who had more brains than he did — which was everybody in the school except MCMs — mentally challenged mainstreamers. And maybe a few of them were smarter, too. They had a name for Hughes, though nobody ever said it to his face.

"Essay is on a roll today, ain't he?"

Tyrone looked to his left and saw James Joseph Hatfield grinning at him.

"Essay" came from the initials S and A. Which came from "Sore Ass," which came from "Brontosaurus," which was what the computer set called Sean Hughes. Tyrone didn't know who had come up with the original nickname, but it was dead on. The guy had all the wit and grace of a big dino tanked on sleeping pills.

Jimmy Joe was a hillbilly from West Virginia, small, so white he was bright, with eyes so bad he had to wear thick glasses instead of contacts. He was also one of the best netriders in the whole school, and he held the record for completing the first ten levels of Black Mysts of Total Catastrophe fastest, not just in the school but anywhere. And he was Tyrone's best friend.

"Hey, Jimmy Joe. How's the flow?"

"Dee eff eff, Tyrone." This stood for DFT — data flowin' fine.

"Listen, I talked to Jay Gee. He needs our help."

"Jay Gee needs our help? Praw that."

"Nopraw," Tyrone said. "Somebody is poppin' strands."

"Tell me somethin' I don't compro, bro. Somebody is always poppin' strands."

"Yeah, affirm, but this is different. There's a C-l gram-mer looking to rass the whole web."

"Nofeek?"

"Nofeek."

Jimmy Joe shook his head. "Eyes up, rider. If Jay Gee can't grope him, how are we gonna do it?"

He had a point. Jay Gridley's reputation among the set was large.

"We got links he doesn't scan," Tyrone said. "We can backline, OHT, little feek like that."

"Yeah, yeah, nopraw pross that. I can blip the aolers. Induct-deduct fine lines, do the One Horse Towns. Build a scoop. We could seine minnows. I know a couple of hangers in CyberNation, they got some pretty good nets there. You think about joining? CyberNation, I mean."

"I think about what my dad would say if I tried," Tyrone said.

"I copy that. My old man would blow a major fuse, but it looks like the place to live. Then again, this is too warm, slip. Us, riding with Jay Gee."

"Yeah—"

Tyrone ran into a wall. Only it wasn't really a wall, it was Essay.

"Watch it, tits!"

Tyrone backed up two steps fast. He hadn't been paying attention. Essay must have forgotten where he was going and stopped to puzzle it out. Stupid. But maybe not as stupid as walking right into his back!

"Sorry!" Tyrone said.

"Yeah, you gonna be," Essay began. "I'm gonna mush you—!"

But before he could finish the threat, Belladonna Wright walked past, trailing the scent of some musky, sexy perfume.

Essay shifted his thinking from his big stupid head to his small stupid head. He turned to watch Bella — as did Tyrone — and she was something to see in her green microskirt and halter top, walking high on her cork slope-plats. A grade up and the best-looking girl in D.C. easy. Essay had as much chance getting next to her as he did flying to the moon by waving his big old arms, but that didn't stop him from looking — though that was all he would do. Bella was currently hardlinked with Herbie "Bonebreaker" LeMott, the captain of the Epitome High School wrestling team. He was a senior, and he made Essay look little. When Theo Hatcher had sneaked up behind Bella once and "accidentally" put his hand on her butt, Theo had spent six weeks with his arm in a blue fiberglass cast for his trouble, courtesy of LeMott. Bella could have any guy in school broken in half with two words into Bonebreaker's ear, and even Essay knew that.

Jimmy Joe grabbed one of Tyrone's arms and steered him back the way they came. "Ride, rider, ride! Time his brain clicks back on-line, we need to be scanning else-where!"

Tyrone understood — he definitely prossed that, nopraw at all. On some level, though, he was really pissed off. He wasn't ready to die, but sooner or later, he was going to have to do something about Essay.

What to do and how to do it — well, those were the problems.

Ruzhyo did not much care for television, though he sometimes watched the international news to see what mention there was of his homeland. CNN droned in the background as he fixed coffee in the small pot provided by the hotel. The coffee was prepackaged and stale, but it was better than nothing.

It had been yet another bad night for dreams. After managing to get back to sleep for an hour or two, he came awake and knew it was pointless to try again. He had known a man in the army once who, it was said, could sleep while eating a bowl of hot soup. Ruzhyo was not that good, but he had learned to survive on a minimum amount of rest when he had been a soldier, catching naps when he could; two hours was enough to fuel a day.

He took his coffee and went back to stare at the television.

In Idaho, some cult had gone into a barn and set it on fire, to free themselves from the flesh to join their god. Ruzhyo did not know how free they were, but the flesh was certainly well-done, to judge from the pictures.

In France, student demonstrators had attacked a police line outside a hotel where the French President was scheduled to speak. Nine of the demonstrators had been hospitalized with wounds from rubber bullets; two others had died from the same cause.

In India, a flood drowned two hundred people, uncounted sacred cows, and washed away several villages.

In Japan, an earthquake on the island of Kyushu had killed eighty-nine people in collapsing buildings and done major damage to the city of Kagoshima. During the quake, the new bullet train that spanned the island had also crashed when the ground in front of it dropped twenty feet, killing sixty and injuring more than three hundred.

Of Chechnya, CNN had nothing to say.

Ruzhyo sipped his bad coffee and shook his head. Just as well that there was no news of home, given how dreary it all seemed. The world was a dangerous place, full of misery. All over it, people would be lamenting the loss of loved ones this day, family or friends taken by accidents or illness or murder. During those few times when he had felt qualms about the work he did, all he had ever needed to do was watch the television, or read the newspapers, or just talk to someone. Life was full of woe. He was no more than a drop in a sea of misery. If he took a man out, what did it matter? If not him, something or somebody else would. In the end, it did not matter all that much, did it?

His com unit cheeped. He sipped the coffee and stared at the com. No, it did not matter. And just as well — more wetwork was surely about to be forthcoming.

Naked, save for a sweatband around her head, the Selkie sat at the small kitchen table and examined her cane.

She checked the wood for nicks and gouges. Every couple of months, she would take fine sandpaper and Watco satin-finish oil to the cane, to smooth and polish the already smooth hickory. It was hardwood, but it scratched easily, and she liked to have it gleaming. The manufacturer recommended mineral oil, but Watco gave a tougher finish. Smelled better, too.

It was a couple hours work to do it right, the sanding and finishing, but one of the first things she'd learned from her father was to take care of her tools so they wouldn't fail her when she needed them. The guys who made the wooden weapons did excellent work. She owned five of their canes in three different styles, as well as two sets of escrima sticks, and a custom-made pair of six-inch yawaras.

The cane she preferred for work in places where she did not carry a gun was the Custom Combat model. It was hickory, thirty-seven inches long, blond in color, with a round shaft a little over an inch in diameter; it had a large crook tipped by a flamingo-beak design. Hickory was best for the street, heavier than the walnut tournament models, more sturdy than the oak. The end of the curved hook — called the horn — was sharp and wicked enough to do some real damage. The ground end of the shaft was a dull and rounded point, innocuous-looking, and with the rubber tip in place, perfectly usable as a support cane. There was a series of decorative notches carved into the shaft just below the crook, designed to serve as a handgrip.

That cane was at home. The one she inspected at the moment, the Instructor's model, was almost identical to the Combat style, same length and diameter, but the crook was a hair wider and the horn was rounded instead of beaked. It looked a lot more like the cane an old lady should be using to hobble about with. It wouldn't do for some eagle-eyed cop to see that pointed horn and think: Why, Granny, what a sharp stick you have…

The weapon looked okay, so the Selkie left the kitchen and padded naked into the living room of her rental condo where she had set up her practice target. This was a section of an inch-and-a-half-diameter aluminum rod with a ringbolt on one end. The rod was wrapped in a pad of biogel, the same stuff they used to soften racing bike seats and the insteps of running shoes; the gel was then covered with a stretched sheet of chamois leather and held tightly in place with duct tape. It wasn't exactly the same as flesh over bone, but it was close enough for her purposes. At home, she had a wing chun training dummy set up with similar wrapping, so she could work the full range of angles, with weapons or feet and hands, but on the road, one had to make do.

She got a sudden mental image of herself trying to check a wing chun dummy in at an airport with her luggage, with the reaction that would bring, and grinned.

A thin nylon rope ran from the target's eyebolt through a second eye hook she'd screwed into a ceiling rafter; the other end of the line was tied to a doorknob. This way, she could adjust the target's height. Right now, it was at knee level. Knees were great targets for a stick — a broken knee put a big crimp in anybody's fighting style.

She moved within range of the target, took a couple of cleansing breaths and assumed her basic stance, cane in front of her, tip on the ground, both hands on the crook. She was aware she would look very interesting to a watcher were not all the curtains pulled closed: a naked woman standing with a cane in front of her crotch in the middle of a room empty except for something weird hanging from the ceiling. She grinned. She'd always liked working out nude, there was something so primal about it.

She cleared her mind. Wait. Wait…

She whipped the cane up from the floor in a short arc from her right, slid her right hand to mid-shaft to guide the strike, her left hand to the carved grip to power it.

The solid thunk of the wood into the padded bar felt very satisfying. A good hit.

She spun the cane, caught the target in the crook, pulled it toward herself, then pivoted the stick and hit the padding from the opposite side.

One more solid hit and the target stopped cold, no swing.

Yes!

She pulled the cane back, held it like a pool cue and thrust the tip forward. Hit the target high, knocked it back.

Yes.

It was just practice, but even so, the Selkie was in the zone — she was in the killing zone. And there was no place more exciting.