Glasshouse

19. Longjump

SUBTLETY isn't going to get us very far at this point, so Janis orders up a delivery of sandwiches from a catering outfit working from the back of a cafe, and when the ladies' sewing circle and revolutionary command committee shows up, we lock the front door, hang out the CLOSED sign, and pile downstairs.

"We've got one day to organize this," says Janis. "Reeve, you want to summarize the situation?"

Heads turn. From their expressions, I don't think they were expecting me to be here. I smile. "This place—this polity—was originally designed as a glasshouse, a military prison. It works too well; the YFH cabal figured that a prison doesn't just keep people in , it keeps other people out . So they set it up as a research lab, what we're now seeing." She gestures at the shelves of box files on the back wall. "They're working on developing a new type of cognitive dictatorship, one spread via Curious Yellow, and they're breeding up a population of carriers for it. When we get to the end of the ‘experiment' time-scale they're planning on reintegrating everyone into general society—and using your children to spread it." I see Janis's hand move unconsciously to her stomach. "Do you want to help them?"

A mutter goes round the room, growing quickly: "No!"

"I'm glad to hear that," Janis says drily. "Now, this raises the question—what is to be done? Reeve and I have been working on an answer. Anyone want to guess?"

Sam sticks his hand up. "You're going to blow the longjump gate anchor frame," he says calmly, "stranding us teraklicks from the nearest other human polity. And then you're going to hunt the cabal down and shoot them, find their backup networks and offline them, then jump up and down on the smoking wreckage."

Janis smiles. "Not bad! Anyone else?"

El sticks her hand up. "Hold elections?"

Janis looks taken aback. "Something like that, I guess." She shrugs. "But that's getting a little ahead of ourselves, isn't it? What haven't I mentioned?"

I clear my throat. "We know where the longjump gate is. Which is good news and bad news."

"Why?" asks Helen. They're beginning to get involved, which is good, but could turn bad if Janis and I don't present them with a reasonable picture. They're not idiots, they must know that we wouldn't have brought them in on the cellar if the situation wasn't desperate.

"Reeve?" prompts Janis.

"Okay, here's the frame: We're on a MASucker that somehow got de-crewed during the censorship wars. At a guess, CY broke out during a scheduled crew shift change or something. Anyway, the polity we're in is actually a quilted patchwork of sectors spliced together by shortjump gates in all those road tunnels, but they're all in a single physical manifold aboard one ship rather than scattered across separate habs. That's why it was possible to turn it into a prison. There's only one longjump gate in or out of the MASucker, and it's stashed at one end of an armored pod on the outside of the hull with a shortjump gate at the other end of the tunnel—this is standard MASucker security, you understand. Someone outside could throw a nuke through at the ship and it would be expended outside the hull. Anyway, we first need to take and hold the shortjump gate leading to the longjump pod, then we need to trash the longjump pod.

"We need to sever communications between us and their base of operations in the surgeon-confessors' hall, then make sure everybody knows . Yourdon and Fiore have gotten away with running this existential dictatorship unopposed because they've got a sufficient proportion of us convinced that we're in line for a payback if we play along. Hanta gives them an ace in their hole. They don't need to worry about the payback; eventually she'll have time to just adjust everyone who drifts out of line. Once we're cut off from the outside, the cabal lose their backup and their social leverage, and we've got a straight fight. But if we don't succeed, they can just block the gates between parish sectors and mop us up in detail, one sector at a time."

I pause to lick my lips. "I spent some time on a MASucker before the war. The door to the longjump pod was stashed near the bridge, uh, the administrative block—which would correspond to either the cathedral or City Hall in the new structure Yourdon is assembling. I did some snooping around last week, and I found where Yourdon lives. He's got a suite up on the top floor of City Hall, with security up to the eyeballs—I didn't get in, but I poked around the lower levels—and it turns out that City Hall bears a remarkable resemblance to the Captain's Lodge on the MASucker I was aboard. In which case, the T-gate to the longjump pod will be on the top floor, in a secure suite adjacent to the captain's quarters."

I stop.

Janis stands up. "There you've got it, folks, so let's keep this simple. We all have invitations to the ceremony at City Hall the day after tomorrow. I propose that we go there. I've had the fab here"—she waves at the assembler—"turning out kits with shielded bags so you can carry them away without fear of surveillance. Reeve?"

I clear my throat. "Plan is, we take our kit along and cut loose as soon as Yourdon steps up to the front to address everyone. Team Green's job is to secure the hall, drop any armed support the bad guys have, and kill as many copies of Yourdon, Fiore, and Hanta as we can find. They'll have backups or multiples running live, but if we do everything fast , we can stop the instances in City Hall getting word out. Meanwhile, Team Yellow will go up to the captain's—the Bishop's—quarters and blow the longjump pod right off the side of the ship. Any questions?"

Hands go up.

"Okay, here's what we'll do. El, Bernice, Helen, Priss, Morgaine, Jill, you're all on Team Green with Janis, who's in overall charge. Sam, Greg, Martin, and Liz are Team Yellow with me. I'm in charge. Team Yellow, hang around, and I'll brief you. Team Green, eat your lunch, then go back to work—come back to the library individually this afternoon or tomorrow, and Janis will sort you out, back you up, and brief you."

There's more muttering from the back. Janis clears her throat. "One more thing. Operational security is paramount. If anyone says anything, we are all . . . not dead. Worse. Dr. Hanta has a full-capability brainfuck clinic running in the hospital. If you give any sign outside of this basement that you're involved in this plan, they'll shut down the shortjump gates, isolating you, and flood us with zombies until we run out of bullets and knives. Then they'll cart us away and turn us into happy, smiling slaves. Some of you may figure that's better than dying—all right, that's your personal choice. But if I think any of you is going to try to impose that choice on me by going to the priests, you will find that my personal choice is to shoot you dead first.

"If you don't want to be in on this, say so right now —or hang around upstairs and tell me when everyone else has gone. We've got an A-gate; we can just back you up and keep you on ice for the duration. There's no reason to be part of this if you're frightened. But if you don't explicitly opt out, then you're accepting my command, and I will expect total obedience on pain of death, until we've secured the ship."

Janis looks round at everyone, and her expression is harsh. For a moment Sanni is back, shining through her skin like a bright lamp through camouflage netting, frightening and feral. "Do you all understand?"

There's a chorus of yesses from around the room. Then one of the pregnant women at the back pipes up. "What are we waiting for? Let's roll!"

TIME rushes by, counting down to a point of tension that lies ahead.

We've got logistic problems. Having the A-gate in the library basement is wonderful—it's almost indispensable to what we're attempting to do—but there are limits on what it can churn out. No rare isotopes, so we can't simply nuke the longjump pod. Nor do we have the design templates for a tankbody or combat drones or much of anything beyond personal sidearms. You can't manufacture T-gates in an A-gate, so we've got to work without wormhole tech—that rules out Vorpal blades. Given time or immunity from surveillance we could probably work around those restrictions, but Janis says we've got a maximum feedstock mass flow of a hundred kilograms per hour. I suspect Fiore, or whoever decided to plant this thing in the library basement, throttled it deliberately to stop someone like me from turning it into an invasion platform. Their operational security is patchy after the manner of many overhasty and understaffed projects, but it's far from nonexistent.

In the end Janis tells me, "I'm going to leave it on overnight, building a brick of plasticized RDX along with detonators and some extra gun cartridges. We can put together about ten kilos over a six-hour run. That much high explosive is probably about as much energy as we can risk sucking without triggering an alarm somewhere. Do you think you can do the job on the longjump gate frame with that much?"

"Ten kilos?" I shake my head. "That's disappointing. That's really not good."

She shrugs. "You want to risk going technical on Yourdon, be my guest."

She's got a point. There's a very good chance that the bad guys will have planted trojans in some of the design templates for more complex weapons—anything much more sophisticated than handguns and raw chemical explosive will have interlocks and sensor systems that might slip past our vetting. The machine pistols she's run up are crude things, iron sights and mechanical triggers and no heads-up capability. They don't even have biometric interlocks to stop someone taking your own gun and shooting you with it. They're a step up from my crossbow project, but not a very high step. On the other hand, they've got no telltale electronics that Yourdon or Fiore might subvert.

"Did you test the gun cartridges? Just in case?"

Janis nods. "Thunder stick go bang. No fear on that account."

"Well, at least something's going to work, then." I'd be happier if we could lay in a brace of stunguns, but since I'm not wearing Fiore anymore, that would be kind of difficult to arrange.

Janis looks at me. "Make or break time."

I breathe deeply. "When has it been any other way?"

"Ah, but. We had backups, didn't we?" Her shoulders are set defensively. "This time it's our last show. It isn't how I expected things to turn out."

"Me neither." I finish packing my bag and straighten up. "Do you think anyone will crack?"

"I hope not." She stares at the wall, eyes focused on some inner space. "I hope not." Her hand goes to her belly again. "There's a reason I recruited gravid females. It does things to your outlook. I've learned that much." Her eyes glisten. "It can go either way—peeps who're still role-playing their way through YFH in their head get angry and frightened, and those who've internalized it, who're getting ready to be mothers, get even angrier about what those brainfuckers are going to do to their children. Once you get through the fear and disbelief, you get to the anger. I don't think any of the pregnant females will crack, and you'll notice the males who were along all have partners who are involved."

"True." Janis—no, Sanni—is sharp as a knife. She knows what she's doing when it comes to organizing a covert operation cell. But if she's a knife, she's one with a brittle edge. "Sanni, can I ask you a question?"

"Sure." Her tone is relaxed but I see the little signs of tension, the wrinkles around her eyes. She knows why I used that name.

"What do you want to do after this?" I grasp for the right words: "We're about to lock ourselves down in this little bubble-polity like something out of the stone age, a generation ship . . . we're not going to be getting out of here for gigasecs, tens of gigs, at a minimum! I mean, not unless we go into suspension afterward. And I thought you, you'd be wanting to escape, to get out and warn everybody off. Break YFH from the outside. Instead, well, we've come up with a case for pulling down the escape tunnel on top of ourselves. What do you want to do afterward once we've cut ourselves off?"

Sanni looks at me as if I've sprouted a second head. "I want to retire." She glances round at the basement nervously. "This place is giving me the creeps; we ought to go home soon. Look, Reeve—Robin—this is where we belong. This is the glasshouse. It's where they sent the damaged ones after the war. The ones who need reprogramming, rehabilitation. Yourdon and Hanta and Fiore belong here—but don't you think maybe we belong here, too?" She looks haunted.

I think for a minute. "No, I don't think so." Then I force myself to add, "But I think I could grow to like it here if only we weren't under pressure from . . . them."

"That's what it was designed for. A rest home, a seductive retirement, balm for the tortured brow. Go on home to Sam." She walks toward the stairs without looking at me. "Think about what you've done, or what he did. I've got blood on my hands, and I know it." She's halfway up the stairs, and I have to move to keep up with her. "Don't you think that the world outside ought to be protected from people like us?"

At the top of the staircase I think of a reply. "Perhaps. And perhaps you're right, we did terrible things. But there was a war on, and it was necessary."

She takes a deep breath. "I wish I had your self-confidence."

I blink at her. My self-confidence? Until I found her frightened and alone here, I'd always thought Sanni was the confident one. But now the other conspirators have gone, she looks confused and a bit lost. "I can't afford doubts," I admit. "Because if I start doubting, I'll probably fall apart."

She produces a radiant smile, like first light over a test range. "Don't do that, Robin. I'm counting on you. You're all the army I need."

"Okay," I say. And then we go our separate ways.

I walk home, my mesh-lined bag slung over one shoulder. Today is not a day for a taxi ride, especially now that there's some risk of running into Ike. Everything seems particularly vivid for some reason, the grass greener and the sky bluer, and the scent of the flower beds outside the municipal buildings overwhelmingly sweet and strange. My skin feels as if I've picked up a massive electrostatic charge, hair follicles standing erect. I am alive , I realize. By this time tomorrow I might be dead, dead and gone forever because if we fail, the YFH cabal will still have the T-gate, and their coconspirators won't hesitate to delete whatever copies of us they have on file. I might be part of history, dry as dust, an object of study if there ever is another generation of historians.

And if do somehow manage to survive, I'll be a prisoner here for the next three unenhanced lifetimes.

I have mixed emotions. When I went into combat before—what I remember of it—I didn't worry about dying. But I wasn't human, then. I was a regiment of tanks. The only way I could die would be if our side lost the entire war.

But I've got Sam, now. The thought of Sam's being in danger makes me cringe. The thought of both of us being at the mercy of the YFH cabal makes me a different kind of uneasy. Bend the neck, surrender, and it will be fine : That's the echo of her personal choice coming back to haunt me. I rejected her, didn't I? But she's part of me. Indivisible, inescapable. I can never escape from the knowledge that I surrendered—

Sanni has surrendered, I realize. Not to Yourdon and Fiore, but to the end of the war. She doesn't want to fight anymore; she wants to settle down and raise a family and be a small-town librarian. Janis is the real Sanni now, as real as she gets. The glasshouse may have been subverted and perverted by the plotters, but it's still working its psychological alchemy on us. Maybe that's what Sanni was talking about. We're none of us who or what we used to be, although our history remains indelible. I try to imagine what I must have looked like to the civilians aboard the habs we conquered through coup de main, and I find a blind spot. I know I must have terrified them, but inside the armor and behind the guns I was just me, wasn't I? But how were they to know? No matter. It's over, now. I've got to live with it, just the way we had to do it. It seemed necessary at the time: If you didn't want your memories to be censored by feral software, or worse, by unscrupulous opportunists who'd trojaned the worm, you had to fight. And once you take the decision to fight, you have to live with the consequences. That's the difference between us and Yourdon, Fiore, and Hanta. We're willing to harbor doubts, to let go; but they're still fighting to bring the war back to their enemies. To us.

These aren't good thoughts to be thinking. They're downright morbid, and I can live without them—but they won't leave me alone, so as I walk I try to fight back by swinging my bag and whistling a jolly tune. And I try to look at myself from the outside as I go. Here's a jolly librarian, outwardly a young woman in a summer dress, shoulder bag in hand, whistling as she walks home from a day at work. Invert the picture, though, and you see a dream-haunted ex-soldier, clutching a kitbag containing a machine pistol, slinking back to her billet for a final time before the—

Look, just stop, why don't you?

That's better.

When I get home, I stash the bag in the kitchen. The TV is going in the living room, so I shed my shoes and pad through.

"Sam."

He's on the sofa, curled up opposite the flickering screen as usual. He's holding a metal canister of beer. He glances at me as I come in.

"Sam." I join him on the sofa. After a moment I realize that he's not really watching the TV. Instead, his eyes are on the patio outside the glass doors at the end of the room. He breathes slowly, evenly, his chest rising and falling steadily. "Sam."

His eyes flicker toward me, and a moment later the corners of his mouth edge upward. "Been working late?"

"I walked." I pull my feet up. The soft cushions of the sofa swallow them. I lean sideways against him, letting my head fall against his shoulder. "I wanted to feel . . ."

"Connected."

"Yes, that's it, exactly." I can feel his pulse, and his breathing is profound, a stirring in the roots of my world. "I missed you."

"I missed you, too." A hand touches my cheek, moves up to brush hair back from my forehead.

At moments like this I hate being an unreconstructed human—an island of thinking jelly trapped in a bony carapace, endless milliseconds away from its lovers, forced to squeeze every meaning through a low-bandwidth speech channel. All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night. If I were half of who I used to be, and had my resources to hand—and if Sam, if Kay, wanted to—we could multiplex, and know each other a thousand times as deeply as this awkward serial humanity permits. There's a poignancy to knowing what we've lost, what we might have had together, which only makes me want him more strongly. I move uneasily and clutch at his waist. "What took you so long?"

"I'm running away." He finally turns his head to look at me sidelong. "From myself."

"Me too," Throwing caution to the wind: "Is that part of your problem? With being . . . this?"

"It's too close." He swallows. "To what they wanted me to be."

I don't ask who "they" were. "Do you want to escape? To leave the polity?"

He's silent for a long while. "I don't think so," he says eventually. "Because I'd have to go back to being what I want not to be, if that makes sense to you. Kay was a disguise, Reeve, a mask. A hollow woman. Not a real person."

I snuggle closer to him. "I know you wanted to grow into her."

"Do you?" He raises an eyebrow.

"Look, why do you think I'm here?"

"Point." He looks momentarily rueful. "Do you want to leave?"

We're not really talking about staying or leaving, this is understood, but what he really means by that—"I thought I did," I admit, toying with the buttons on the front of his shirt. "Then Dr. Hanta sorted me out, and I realized that what I really wanted was somewhere to heal, somewhere to be me. Community. Peace." I get my hand inside his shirt, and his breath acquires a little hoarse edge that makes me squeeze my thighs together. "Love." I pause. "Not necessarily her way, mind you." His hand is stroking my hair. His other hand—"Do that some more."

"I'm afraid, Reeve."

"That makes two of us."

Later: "I want what you described."

I gasp. "Makes two. Of us. Oh."

"Love."

And we continue our conversation without words, using a language that no abhuman watcher AI can interpret—a language of touch and caress, as old as the human species. What we tell each other is simple. Don't be afraid, I love you. We say it urgently and emphatically, bodies shouting our mute encouragement. And in the dark of the night, when we reach for each other, I dare myself to admit that it might work out all right in the end.

We aren't bound to fail.

Are we?

BREAKFAST is an affair of quiet desperation. Over the coffee and toast I clear my throat and begin a carefully planned speech. "I need to go to the library before Church, Sam, I forgot my gloves."

"Really?" He looks up, worry lines crisscrossing his forehead.

I nod vigorously. "I can't go to Church without them, it wouldn't be decent." Decent is one of those keywords the watchers monitor. Gloves aren't actually a dress code infraction, but they're a good excuse.

"Okay, I suppose I'll have to come with you," he says, with all the enthusiasm of a condemned man facing the airlock. "We need to leave soon, don't we?"

"Yes, I'd better get my bag," I say.

"I have a new waistcoat to wear."

I raise an eyebrow. His clothing sense is even more artificial than my own. "It's upstairs," he explains. For a moment I think he's going to say something more, something compromising, but he manages to bottle it up in time. My stomach squirms queasily. "Take care, darling."

"Nothing can possibly go wrong," he says with studied irony. He rises and heads for the staircase to our bedroom. (Our bedroom. No more lonely nights.) My heart seems to catch an extra beat. Then it's time to clear up the detritus, put the plates in the dishwasher, and get my shoes on.

When Sam comes downstairs, he's dressed for Church—with a many-pocketed vest under his suit jacket, and, in his hand, the briefcase we packed yesterday. "Let's, uh, go," he says, and casts me a wan grin.

"Yup," I say, then check the clock and pick up my extra-large handbag. "Let's roll."

We arrive at the library around ten o'clock, and I let us in. The door to the cellar is already open. I reach into my bag as I go down the steps, conscious that if someone's blown the operation, then the bad guys could be waiting for me. But when I get to the bottom I find Janis.

"Hi, Janis," I say slightly nervously.

"Hi yourself." She lowers her gun. "Just checking."

"Indeed. Sam? Come on down." I turn back to Janis. "Still waiting for Greg, Martin, and Liz."

"Right." Janis gestures at a pile of grayish plastic bricks sitting on one of the chairs. "Sam? I think it'll work better if you carry these."

"Sure." Sam ambles over and picks up a brick. Squeezes it experimentally, then sniffs it. "Hmm, smells like success. Detonators?"

"On the sofa." I spot the stack of spare magazines and take a couple, then check they're loaded properly. "Where are the cogsets?" I ask.

"Coming." Janis waves at the A-gate. "We need to synchronize our watches, too."

"Okay." This isn't going to work too well without headsets and cognitive radio transceivers, but they're last on our list of items to assemble because they're too obvious. They're easier to sabotage than metal plumbing and chemical explosives, and a lot likelier to tripwire the alarms in the A-gate than a collection of antiques. If the radios don't work, our fallback is crude—mechanical wristwatches and a prearranged time to start shooting.

Sam stuffs bricks of Composition-C into his vest pockets, squeezing them to fit. The vest bulges around his waist, as if he's suddenly put on weight, and when he pulls his jacket on it hangs open. What he's doing reminds me of something I once knew, something alarming, but I can't quite remember what. So I shake my head and go upstairs to wait behind the front desk.

A few minutes later Martin and Liz arrive together. I send them down to the basement. I'm getting worried when Greg appears. We're running short of time. It's 10:42 and the meeting is due to start in just a kilosec or so. "What kept you?" I ask.

"I feel rough," he admits. I think he's been drinking. "Couldn't sleep properly. Let's get this over with, huh?"

"Yeah." I point him at the cellar. "Gang's down there."

T minus ten minutes. The door opens, and Janis comes out. "Okay, I'm off to start the show in the auditorium," she tells me. A fey smile. "Good luck."

"You too." She leans forward, and I hug her briefly, then she's off, walking down the library path toward City Hall.

"Where's Sam?" I ask.

"Oh, he had something extra to do down there," Liz says, a trifle sniffily. "Last-minute nerves." A moment later he comes up the stairs. "Come on, Sam, want to miss the show?"

I open my mouth. "Time to move!"

Fragments of memory converge on a point in time:

Five of us, three males and two females, walking along the front of Main Street toward City Hall. All in our Church outfits, with subtle changes—Sam's vest, my shoes, Martin's bag. Discreet earbuds adding their hum to our left ears, flesh-toned pickups parallel to our jawlines. Businesslike.

"Merge with the crowd, then when they head for the auditorium doors, break left under the door labeled FIRE EXIT. Meet me on the other side."

Purpose. Tension. Beating heart, nervousness. A faint aroma of mineral oil on my fingertips. The usual heightened awareness.

Cohorts and parishes of regular citizens—inmates—are gathering on the front steps and in the open reception hall of the biggest building on Main Street. Some I recognize; most are anonymous.

Jen looms out of the crowd, smiling, converging on me. My guts freeze. "Reeve! Isn't it wonderful?"

"Yes, it is," I say, slightly too coldly because she stares at me, and her eyes narrow.

"Well, excuse me ," she says, and turns on her heel as if to walk away, then pauses. "I'd have thought you'd be celebrating."

"I am." I raise an eyebrow at her. "Are you?"

"Hah!" And with a contemptuous smirk, she wheels away and latches on to Chris's arm.

A cold sweat prickles up and down my spine—sheer relief, mostly—and I head toward the FIRE EXIT sign, which is conveniently close to the rest rooms. I pause for a second to glance around and check my watch (T minus three minutes) then lean on the emergency bar. The door scrapes open, and I step through into a concrete-lined stairwell.

Click. I glance round. Liz lowers her gun. I'm too slow today , I think hopelessly. I mute my mike. "Two minutes," I say, backing into the corner opposite her niche. She nods. I reach into my bag, pull out my gun, stuff the spare magazines into my pockets, and drop the bag. Click. That's me.

One minute. Sam and Greg and Martin, the latter looking slightly harried. I key my mike. "Follow me."

A couple of weeks ago, wearing Fiore's stolen flesh, I explored this complex—extremely cautiously, taking pains to be certain that Yourdon was occupied elsewhere at the time. The first floor contains the lobby and a big auditorium, plus a couple of things described on the building map as "courtrooms." The second floor, which we pass without stopping, is wall-to-wall office space. The third floor . . . well, I didn't spend much time there.

We reach the door and pause. "Zero," I say, tracking the sweep of my watch hand.

A second later there's a chime in my headset. "Go!" says Janis.

"Now."

Greg opens the door fast, and Martin and Liz duck through, then pronounce the bare-floored corridor clear. I lead us along it, then there's another door, and Greg forces the exit bar from our side. Carpet. A short, narrow passage. Yourdon must have left by now, surely? I rush forward and find myself in a boringly mundane living room, furnished in dark age fashion except for the smooth white bulge of an A-gate in one corner. "Here," I say. "Spread out."

We're not experts at house searches. Doubtless if there was armed resistance waiting for us, we'd be easy prey. But the house is empty. Three bedrooms, a living room, an office—there's a desk and an ancient computer terminal, and books—and a kitchen and bathroom and another room full of boxes. It's empty . Empty of personality as well as anachronisms like a longjump gate.

"What now?" asks Sam.

"We check out front." I walk up to the front door of the apartment, then Greg squeezes past me and unlocks it. He pulls it open and steps out, then I follow to see where we are, and the ground leaps up and whacks me across the knees with a concussive jolt too deep to call a noise.

"Panic one," Janis says in my ear, a prearranged code for Team Green. That was a bomb , I think dizzily.

There's a click behind me, then a scream of pain. I whip round and that saves my life because the short burst of gunfire hammers past me and catches Liz instead, bullets slapping into her body as she spins round. I keep turning and drop to one knee, then fire a continuous burst that empties the magazine and nearly sprains my wrists.

"* * *," says Janis, in my ringing ears.

"Repeat." I'm staring at Greg. What used to be Greg. Someone behind me is making horrible sounds. I think it's Liz. "We have a code red, two down."

"I said, Panic two," says Janis. "They've got a Vorpal—"

Pink noise fills my ears, and her voice breaks up: cognitive radios meet heuristic jamming. "Come on!" I yell at Sam, who's bending over Liz. "Follow me!"

We're on a landing at the top of the stairs. Yourdon's apartment covers one side of the building, but on the other side—there's a door. I dash toward it, reloading on the go. Greg tried to kill me , I realize. Which means he warned them. So . . .

I pause at one side of the door and wave Sam to the other. Then I brace myself and unload the entire clip through it at waist height.

While my ears are ringing, and I'm fumbling the next magazine into place, Sam kicks the door in and quickly shoots the police zombie slumped against the side of the corridor in the head. (That one was still moving, hand creeping toward the shotgun lying in the floor; the two bodies behind it aren't even twitching.) Seeing how efficiently Sam steps in gives me a momentary chill of recognition. No hesitation. Behind us, Liz is still moaning, and Martin won't be good for anything. "What is this place?" I ask aloud.

"More offices." Sam kicks a door open and duck-walks through it. "Modern offices." I follow him. The next door is more substantial, opening onto a glass-fronted balcony above a room with open floor space, an office-sized assembler at one side, and a row of glassy doors . . . "Is that what I think it is?"

Bingo. "Gates," I say. "A switch hub. How do we get down—"

"Hello, Reeve," says my earpiece, in a voice that sets my teeth on edge. "This isn't going to work, you know."

Where did Fiore get a headset from? Greg? Or have they captured one of Team Green?

Sam looks as if someone's poleaxed him. His jaw is literally gaping. Too late I realize he's on the same chatline.

"You've lost, Reeve," Fiore adds conversationally. I can hear noises in the background. "We know about your plot. There are guards outside the switch chamber, and if you get past them and make it to the longjump pod, you'll die—there's an active laser fence in there. I'm most disappointed in you, but we can still work something out if you put down your popguns and surrender."

I touch my index finger to my lips and wait until Sam nods at me, to show he's got the message. Then I walk toward the door onto the staircase leading down into the switch chamber and its bank of shortjump gates.

I don't want Sam to see how sick I feel.

"You don't know shit, Fiore," I say lightly.

"Yes I do." He sounds smug. "Greg's unfortunate death makes further concealment irrelevant. Bluntly, you've failed. You can't—"

I rip my earbud out and throw it away, frantically miming at Sam to do likewise. He pulls it out of his ear and stares at it. As he's about to toss it there's a dual bang. He doubles over as a thin reddish mist sprays from his left finger and thumb, retching with pain.

"Sam!" I yell at him. He cradles his damaged hand, panting. "Sam! We've only got a few seconds! Fiore can't stop us, or he'd already be up here! Sanni's got him pinned down! We've got to blow the longjump pod before he gets away! Give me your jacket!"

"No choice—" He takes a shuddering breath and shakes his head. "Reeve."

I place my gun at my feet and take him by the shoulders. "What is it, love?"

A moment of awful tenderness, as I see the pain in his eyes. "I'm sorry," he says brokenly. "I couldn't be what you wanted."

"What—"

And his good fist, still wrapped around the butt of his gun, whacks me across the back of my head, propelling me straight into a pit of darkness from which I only emerge when it's far too late.