Safe House

4

About half an hour later she ran into her mother in the kitchen. Her mother was looking frazzled. Plainly she had had a difficult morning on the machine. “Any improvement?” Maj said.

“In their system? Some,” her mom said, leaning against the window, more or less as Laurent had, and looking out at the tomatoes. “I’ve got to get out there and pinch those things back,” she said, “or there are going to be eight hundred thousand tomatoes again this August. And I’ve made all the green tomato chutney I can stand.” She glanced down the hallway. “Don’t knock on his door, Muffin mine,” she said quickly. “He’s still sleeping.”

“I was just going to look,” said the plaintive little voice from down the hall.

“I know, sweetieMuf. Don’t. Just go down and read to your dinosaurs now.”

“They’re tired of reading.”

“Then tell them all about Niko’s cows, the ones with the buckets.”

“Oh,” said the Muffin, delighted, and ran off down the hall. Her room door shut.

Maj’s mother smiled. “She’s fascinated with him,” she said. “For which he’ll probably start being sorry when he wakes up. How is he, do you think?”

“Tired. And there’s other stuff going on.”

“Yes, his father…Daddy told you?”

“We had a word.”

“Yes.” Her mother looked suddenly more weary than she had. “I feel for him, poor kid, being thrown out into the world all alone like this all of a sudden…. I don’t think there’s any luggage coming, either. It seems that was just a ‘phantom record’ generated by whoever sent him, to keep him from looking abnormal. Nobody but a government courier gets on a spaceplane without any bags, and I think poor Laurent must just have been hustled straight out of the country without any, on the grounds that anyone with luggage would attract suspicion….”

“Yeah,” Maj said. “Well, his stuff came in from the warehouse…it’s there on the counter. But, Mom, should I send for some more stuff for him? He’s going to need more than just one pair of pants and a shirt. GearOnline has his template.”

Her mother nodded. “Sure, honey, that’s a good idea. You take care of it.” She gave Maj a cautionary look. “Try not to break the bank.”

“I won’t.”

Her mother looked out the window again. “I should get back to hammering on that system. But I’ve got to take a moment to do something about the aphids out there. Otherwise those nasty little suckers are going to pull those roses up by the roots and fly off with them, there are so many of them all over the bushes…Where’s the bug gun?”

“Under the sink,” said Maj. Her mother went over and opened the under-sink cupboard, hunting out the spray bottle which held the organic soap insecticide which was the only form of chemical warfare she allowed in her garden.

“Mom, you should really get something more effective,” Maj said as her mother went out. “Something systemic, so the bugs’ll bite the bushes and die of it.”

“Technofreak,” her mother said with good-natured scorn as the screen door banged closed behind her.

“Oh, yeah,” Maj said, amused.

She glanced up at the kitchen clock. Three o’clock already? It was only three hours to the battle. The thought brought chills. The hair stood up all over her. Food, she thought, and a fast review of our last maneuvers….

She was too jumpy, already, for a big meal. Maj rummaged around in the fridge for a bowl of microwave noodles, made herself some more tea, and settled at the table to slip back into her work space.

About a second later, it seemed, her bowl was empty, her tea was cold, and Laurent was looking at her from across the table, standing there in the middle of the kitchen and looking slightly bemused. “Maj?” he said. “I am sorry, you are virtual?”

“Huh? Not so it matters,” she said, surprised, for it had genuinely taken several moments for her to register him standing there. I’m as preoccupied as he was this morning, she thought. She glanced up at the clock. It was five-thirty. “Hey, your stuff’s there on the counter.” Maj looked at him carefully. “Are you okay?”

“I feel fine,” Laurent said. And indeed he looked fine, better than anyone had a right to who had just been through the day and a half he’d had. “This is it?”

“That package, yeah. Let me know if something doesn’t fit. The invoice says they have a pickup van in the area if we need to return anything…all we need to do is call. Meantime, what do you want to eat? We should have something before we go to the battle…you’ll be surprised how this kind of ‘fighting’ takes it out of you.”

“Oh.” He stood there in his “schoolboy” clothes and looked bemused. “Maybe a sandwich?”

“Every kind of cold cut on earth is in the fridge,” Maj said, getting up to put her tea in the microwave. “My brother is kind of a carnivore.” She grinned. “We really have to introduce you to him, if you’re ever awake at the same time. His hours have been a little weird lately…he has some kind of curling championship coming up.”

“‘Curling’?”

“It’s too weird to explain with mere words. It involves shoving a hunk of rock around on a sheet of ice with brooms and a handle. I’ll show you later,” she said. “Go on, get changed.”

He disappeared down the hall. When he came back, Maj had decided that a sandwich wasn’t a bad idea and was rooting around in the “cool” cupboard where the bread was kept for a loaf of rye. She glanced up. “Hey,” she said, “that looks good on you.”

He grinned, that extremely charming smile that seemed to light up his whole face, partly by contrast. Laurent looked very sober a lot of the rest of the time, which, under the circumstances, Maj thought, was probably understandable. When he gets old enough, she thought, he’s going to need a stick to beat the girls off with, if he keeps that smile….

“So, here,” Maj said. “Baloney, mortadella, regular ham, Mom’s favorite smoked Virginia ham, which she will threaten our lives for eating, my father’s head cheese, white bread, pumpernickel, rye, mayo…”

“Mustard?” Laurent said.

“In the fridge.”

He went to get it. “It did not comment,” Laurent said, returning with it.

Maj smiled. “It’ll find something to say eventually. I should warn you, don’t leave its door open, or it’ll call you ‘Adrienne.’”

“Oh?”

“The Muffin likes to stand there and look in, pondering the mysteries of the universe.”

“Oh.” He started slathering mustard on some of the pumpernickel. “But her proper name is Adrienne….”

“She won’t answer to it. She decided some while back that Muffin is her name, and she won’t answer to Adrienne anymore.” Maj shrugged. “We’ll see if it lasts. She may change her mind in a few years when the other kids at school start ragging her about it.” She got a plate for her sandwich, then said, “Speaking of names…we’ll keep using Niko, huh? Just so she doesn’t get confused. But I know the story behind the cover story.”

He nodded, that somber expression in place again. “I am sorry,” Laurent said, “not to really be related to you.”

The pain in his voice, though he was trying hard to cover it over, was considerable. Maj shook her head. “While you’re here,” she said, “you are. So forget about it. But what do I call you in private? ‘Laurent’ seems awfully formal.”

“‘Lari’ is the short form, the — nickname?”

“Oh. ‘Larry’?”

“Close,” he said. “‘Larry,’” he said, a little slowly, as if it were a word in a foreign language — but then again, it was.

“It’s just a short form of ‘Lawrence.’ Your name, but the English version.”

“Okay. Larry.”

“Great,” Maj said. “Now at least I won’t have to shout at you and get no answer back all the time.”

Laurent grinned. “It must have seemed silly. But it is hard to remember you have a new name.” Then the grin fell off, as if he was remembering something that made him uncomfortable. “Larry is better.”

“Well, you’ll still have to remember around the Muffin.”

“I think I will manage. Is there another plate?” She handed him one, and he put his sandwich on it and cut it in half. “She will keep reminding me, I think….”

They went to sit down, and Maj rooted around in the fridge for her mother’s perpetual jug of iced tea and brought it to the table. For a while they sat and ate comfortably enough, not saying anything; but Maj suddenly became aware that Laurent was looking at her, and she raised her eyebrows.

“You look worried,” he said.

She opened her mouth to protest that she didn’t know what he was talking about…then laughed. “The battle,” Maj said. “I always get twitchy before these…”

“But it is virtual,” Laurent said, looking somewhat bemused.

“Well,” she said, “there’s virtual, and then there’s virtual. Look—” She pushed the plate away and got up. “We’ll be a little early, but there’s no harm in being the first ones into the hangar. Though wait half a second—”

She put her head out the back door and looked for her mother. She was crouched down behind some rosebushes, slaughtering aphids. “Mom,” she said, “my battle’s in a little while. I want to take L-Niko along, but I don’t want to sit at the table—”

“You use my machine, honey,” her mother said. “Niko can use the chair in the den. I don’t think Rick’s going to be back until well after you’re done.”

She let the door close. “My brother usually uses the den link,” Maj said. “Fortunately he’s out of the picture at the moment. Come on, finish that up and we’ll get you settled.”

A few minutes later they were both installed in separate rooms. Minutes after that they were in Maj’s work space. Laurent looked around appreciatively again. “Mine is nothing like so nice,” he said. “But maybe now it is over here, I can make some changes.”

“Your dad had your space cloned over here?”

“My father took care of it last week, he said.” Laurent glanced around him. “But it is very empty compared to this. All these books in the shelves…these are real works somewhere else?”

“Reference stuff mostly. Encyclopedias, almanacs, links to the news services. I’ll show you how it’s done after I get back from school tomorrow. Meanwhile—”

She paused by the version of her desk that lived in the work space, and put her hand down on it. “Computer…”

“Wide awake, boss.”

“Open access to Cluster Rangers. I need a guest authorization.”

There was a pause. “Addition to account authorized,” said the computer. “Is the authorization intended for the party presently in your work space?”

“Yes.”

“Noted. Time limitations now apply to guest accounts. Fifty hours maximum.”

Maj rolled her eyes. This was more than enough time to get anyone she could think of addicted to the game…which was doubtless the designers’ intention. “Thank you,” she said. “Ready?”

“Ready now. Preferred area of ingress?”

“Hangar one.”

“Hangar one access ready.”

She went over to the door in the wall, opened it. “Come on in.”

Laurent followed her in. The other side of the door was now occupied by a huge empty space with a shiny concrete floor. The walls were a long way off and were also painted concrete with large tool closets and metal equipment shelving pushed up against them. From the corrugated metal ceiling hung lights so bright they almost hurt to look at, and in the middle of it all sat Maj’s Arbalest fighter.

It was a long, sharp-nosed black shape somewhat reminiscent of the old SR-71 Blackbird, but stubbier, and not so “flattened” in cross-section, and it was shiny mirror-black, not matte, for protection against light-weapons. The wings were swept back much more acutely, and the wing-roots were much broader, partly to support the weight of the “Crossbow” pumped laser cannons that hung under them on each side.

“This is yours?” Laurent breathed.

“Yup,” Maj said as they walked toward it. “Well, my group’s, anyway. The basic design, I mean. We’ve all made modifications to the design, here and there. But it’s not too bad.” She paused and just took a moment to admire it.

Laurent was walking around it with his mouth very satisfyingly open. Maj was pleased. Whatever else might be going on inside this new visitor, he plainly had taste.

“Suit,” she said to the air. Her space suit appeared on her — again one of the game’s standard suits, but customized with the Group of Seven’s black eight-ball patch (though the numeral was a seven instead) on the shoulders. It was similar to gee suits being used today by those pilots who insisted on flying their fighters “genuinely” rather than virtually, but it had much more attention paid to the insulation. Even fighter pilots do not normally have to worry about being dumped out of their craft in deep space, or having to wait there for pickup for prolonged periods.

“Games controller,” Maj said.

“Yes, ma’am,” said the game’s computer.

“Would you provide a suit for my guest, please?”

“Yes ma’am. Will he be participating in flight?”

“Flight, yes. Not fighting, though.”

“Control sequencing unchanged, then.”

“That’s right.”

“Next order.”

“On hold.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

A sudden squeak came from Laurent as he was heading around from the other side of the fighter. “Suit too tight?” Maj said.

“Uh, no, it just surprised me.”

She restrained herself from shaking her head and commenting on how much his home system plainly left to be desired. Costuming — changing body covering or, for that matter, body shape — was one of the most basic virtual utilities. If they won’t even let people dress up the way they want to—! “Well, no more serious surprises,” she said. “Come on, let’s get up into the cockpit. We’ve got a short jump to make before we take the long one.”

He hurried along beside here. “Where is this? I mean, where are we supposed to be?”

“It’s a hangar facility on Amrit, the third moon of the gas giant Dolorosa,” Maj said. “I don’t know how much that helps you. Come on, get in. The aft ladder is on the other side — walk underneath.”

She clambered up into the cockpit. “Let me know if that seat suits you,” she said. “The program should have fixed it.”

There was some clunking and bumping as Laurent wriggled himself into the number-two seat behind her. “It — is snug,” he said.

“Partly for protection against those high-G turns,” she said. “You’ll be glad of it later. Helmet,” she said.

Maj’s helmet appeared, a perfectly transparent dome that faired into her suit apparently seamlessly. It was solid plex. Maj knew other players who trusted the new force field helmets, but herself, she preferred something that didn’t need a power source, no matter how “guaranteed” the power sources were.

“But this is, well, virtual,” Laurent said, sounding a little dubious. “Do we really need these?”

Maj laughed. “You breathe a little vacuum, and you’ll find out whether you need it or not.”

“But we couldn’t really suffocate, or—”

“Yes, I know, it’s a game, but isn’t it more fun to play a game and pretend it’s not a game?” Maj said. “You ready? We should get going. Got yourself strapped in?”

It was the usual five-point harness, and as usual took a little doing for him to get all fastened in the first time. When Laurent was helmeted and secure, Maj said, “Hangar control…”

“Working,” said a drier, tinnier voice than the game controller’s.

“Evacuate the hangar.”

She powered up the Arbalest’s Morgenroth drivers while the air hissed out of the place. “I should warn you,” Maj said. “The game designer has built high-G resistance into the human stress parameters. Some of the things we may do later can look pretty scary. And don’t freak out if you see me doing something that can normally break a ship like this in two. It won’t. It’ll just look like it will.”

“Oh, well, then, I am reassured,” Laurent said. Maj was tempted to burst out laughing at his tone of voice, which suggested that reassurance was thinner on the ground in his mental environment than he would have liked.

“Hangar evacuated,” said the hangar control voice.

“Okay,” Maj said. “Here we go.”

She cut in the vectored locals and pushed the Arbalest up. The scream of the engines was perfectly audible. Looking in the mirrored canopy above her, Maj could see Laurent’s eyebrows go up, but he made no comment. “Crack the ceiling,” she told the hangar.

The center sections of the ceiling started to roll away from the centerline, with a last hiss as a little pressure equalization happened. Outside was not a perfect vacuum by any means. Amrit was a large enough moon to have kept some of the heavier gases, and as Maj eased in the locals they bobbed up into a cloud of them, above which some light source was dimly visible, like the moon above cloud.

“You wouldn’t like it out there,” Maj said to Laurent. “There’s a lot of swept-up methane in the atmosphere. Amrit is a ‘shepherd moon.’ Another good reason for a helmet, if something should go wrong with the ship. The stuff gets full of organic compounds after a while…and the stink! You wouldn’t want to know….”

“I can do without stink,” Laurent said, looking up and around with interest.

“Good. Here we go…”

She took the Arbalest straight up into the cloudy silvery dimness. Toward the zenith, that silveriness started to get stronger. “The moon?” Laurent said.

“Not quite…”

They burst up out of the cloud. Twelve degrees down from the zenith hung the source of the light. Laurent took a long, sudden breath and did not let it out.

Hanging there above the curve of Amrit’s atmosphere was the Cluster, in unimpeded view…and it was a view worth seeing. NGC 2057 was one of the so-called “Guardian Angel” globular star clusters soaring above and below the plane of the Milky Way galaxy — a gigantic spherical array of stars, radiating out like an explosion of multicolored jewels from a core where the stars were clustered together almost too tightly to make them out as separate entities. Many of them, too, were short-period variables, so that they visibly swelled and shrank as you looked at them, like live things breathing, burning sedately in blinding fire.

“This is the Seraphim Cluster,” Maj said. “A long time ago a very old, very wise species lived here — the Danir. They had science beyond anything we know…and they fought terrible wars with another species also native to the Cluster, an evil species that we know little about. They’re all gone, now. But an explorer found the Daniri science, and the living machines that were maintaining it, on the Heartworld of the cluster. The machines told the explorer to find others like him, the outcasts, the curious, the people who couldn’t leave well enough alone…the people who believed in standing up for the defenseless and trying to stop the bad things that happened all around them. They would be equipped with weapons that would make them invincible…if they used them properly. They would descend from the Cluster into the Galaxy with their new weapons and become the defenders of the right, facing down crime and evil wherever they found it. They would be hunted down by both the evildoers and by those who didn’t understand their mission…but if they persevered, they would triumph. They would become the Cluster Rangers.” She grinned at him. “Or we would. Some of us.”

“You mean, you pretend to be—”

Maj laughed softly, glanced up in the cockpit mirror. “While you’re in it, ‘pretending’ doesn’t describe it at all.” she said. “Your part of the Net isn’t very virtual, is it?”

Laurent’s look was wry. “I think,” he said, “the government doesn’t like the idea of people escaping from reality.”

Maj thought briefly of an ancient recorded interview she had seen with a writer who lived in the middle of the last century. What kind of people do you think are most concerned about other people escaping from reality? he had said. The jailers…She made a face.

“Typical. But look.”

They had been making steady progress up and away from the cloudtops of Amrit as Maj talked. Now they were making for the terminator; and the light of Dolorosa’s primary, red-golden Hekse, started to grow behind the edges of the atmosphere, lines of blue-dominated spectrum showing there, growing brighter all the time. Maj smiled slightly, and kicked the drivers in, making for the light at increased speed. All around them, a faint soft shrilling was audible, almost musical, like tiny bells being rung at a great distance — a shivering, shining sound. But then they came over the edge, over the terminator, up into the light…

…and space was full of the sound. The system’s primary hung there, blazing, shining on the ship and on Amrit and on the huge peach-and-brick-banded curvature of Dolorosa, hanging at one o’clock; and the sound of the sun smote them full on, a huge profound booming sound, like a gong struck, but sounding many notes at once, all shivering, like the sound of the stars far away. It was of course the same sound, only made bearable here by immense distance — starsong, the game designer’s idea of the music of the spheres. Beyond the sun, and producing not that huge boom, but rather a much more tenuous, silvery sound, lay the galaxy. Much of it was obscured by interstellar dust, from this “height.” But the nearest arm, lying right across a third of the visible sky, shone fierce and clear — not the tender, delicate light you got from the rest of the Milky Way as seen from Earth on a clear night, but bright, definite, and immense. Best of all, though, you could hear its stars shining, a multifarious and splendid harmony across the terrible distance, and all around, silent, you could feel empty space listening.

“It is beautiful,” Laurent said very softly behind Maj.

“You got that in one,” Maj said. It was the sound, though, that had done it for her the first time — the game designer’s idea that, if you could hear explosions in space, well, what was the shining of a star but a very large, controlled, prolonged explosion? It had given her the shivers then, and it did so now. But there was no time to waste. The others would be meeting on the bigger moon, Jorkas, in a matter of minutes.

“I wish my father could see this….” Laurent said, very quietly.

“He will,” Maj said. “I’ll make sure of it.” It was all she could find to say immediately that wouldn’t sound soppy or artificial. That image of a man, alone, in a little, harshly lighted room with no windows, while someone with a gun and a nasty expression stood over him, had recurred to her a few times since she’d spoken to her father. It was probably born of seeing too many old movies. But Maj knew that, though the details of that kind of intimidation might have changed over the years, the mind-set had not. There were still plenty of people who didn’t mind hurting other people to get what they wanted. The thought of Laurent’s father being stuck in such a situation…or worse, her own…It made her shudder.

“Could I — is there any chance I could fly this?” Laurent said, in a very small voice.

Maj grinned at that, understanding the instant attraction. “Not tonight, Laurent. We’ve got business to take care of. For tonight, just sit still and enjoy the ride. But I have a sim built into my work space to practice on. Tomorrow you can fly all day, if you want, and get the feel of it. Who knows? We might need a new pilot one of these days, and I can’t see why the squadron would refuse a talented one….”

She kicked in the Morgenroths at full and made her way around the other side of Dolorosa. Just the far side of the gas giant’s terminator Maj found Jorkas sailing along toward them, seeming leisurely as always in this system where its less massive brothers and sisters mostly tore around their primary as if their tails were on fire. Maj made for the pole, where even at this distance she could see the big streetlight circle-and-7 that marked the Group’s base here.

Five minutes later they were settling into the “parking bay,” a circular force-fielded area that was otherwise open to space and the spectacular views of Dolorosa and the Cluster. Eight other Arbalests were there, the syncrete under them glowing softly in token that their engines were live and on standby; and their pilots stood in a small cluster, talking, occasionally waving an arm or two. A large spherical hologram hovered glowing over the ’crete to one side, mostly being ignored. One of the pilots was pacing back and forth, back and forth, with metronomic regularity.

“Shih Chin,” Maj said as she popped the canopy. “She always does that. She gets tense.”

“Will they mind that I’m here?” Laurent said.

Maj opened her mouth to say “no,” and then started to say “yes,” and then said, “I don’t care if they do. But I doubt they will, once they understand you’re just along for the ride. Just be friendly, and leave them to me.”

They walked across the syncrete toward the others. Heads turned as they came, and Kelly said, “Maj, who’s your copilot?”

“God,” Maj said, laughing, “if anybody. This is a passenger…he’s a cousin of mine, just in from Hungary. Niko, this is the Group of Seven.”

He did not make the response a lot of them would have expected, which Maj suspected pleased them. The name “Group of Seven” was as much of a joke about its members’ wildly conflicting schedules as about anything else. If you could get as many as seven of them together in one place, it was an event, even when there were eleven of them total. Niko, though, just smiled at them. “Hello,” he said.

“This is Kelly,” Maj said, indicating the tall freckly red-head. “Shih Chin—” She stopped pacing just long enough to smile. “Sander—” Dark-haired Sander waved. “Chel, and Mairead—” Mairead shook her blazing red curls out of her eyes, grinned a little at Laurent. Chel, looking taller and broader than usual in the space suit, waved. “Bob—” He nodded to Laurent with a preoccupied look.

“And Robin and Del.”

“Hi,” Robin said, and Del bowed a little, idiosyncratically formal as always. Maj waggled her eyebrows at them, grinned, but didn’t say anything else, for she saw them a little more frequently than the others in the Group…since Robin and Del were also Net Force Explorers. Big, blocky Del was attached to the New York area, where his dad and mom both worked at a large law firm, and little slender Robin with her retropunk blue Mohawk was somewhere in one of the LA suburbs, living with a dad who worked for Rocketdyne. They had never met physically, but then lots of the Net Force Explorers hadn’t, their online meetings, by and large, being considered to be real enough to get by with. In any case, their status with Net Force wasn’t something that they went into a lot with the other members of the Group of Seven. Partly this was because having made it into the Net Force Explorers when so many people wanted to get in was something of a plum…and partly because it struck them all that bragging about it was not only unnecessary, but possibly unwise. Occasionally Net Force Explorers found themselves working together on projects which were not precisely public knowledge, and which were probably better staying that way. They preferred to keep the profile of that part of their involvement with the Explorers low. However, there was no rule that said they couldn’t have fun together “off duty”—if there was any such thing for three young people so thoroughly committed to the jobs they intended to have some day, and if there was any justice.

“Glad you could make it,” Bob said. “We’ve been going over strat-tac again…”

“And we are completely screwed,” Shih Chin muttered.

“We are not,” said Kelly. “Will you stop overreacting!”

There was a brief silence. “Nerves,” said Kelly, with some embarrassment.

“Yeah. Look, forget it.”

A mutter of agreement went round the group. “How long now?” Mairead said.

“Ten minutes to the positions filed with the master tactics computer.”

“Oh, I hate this part,” Del muttered. “Once we get up there and start shooting things, everything will be fine.”

“Assuming we last that long,” Kelly said.

“Hungarian, huh?” said Chel. “Well, Goulash, you’re in for a real show today…assuming we survive the first ten minutes.”

Maj opened her mouth to say something cutting to Chel, but Laurent grinned and said, “Goulash? I like goulash. And if you make it right, with the really hot paprika, it’s got a bite.” He bounced a little in the light gravity, still smiling. “Separates the men from the boys.”

“Paprika?” said Bob. “That’s right, it’s a kind of chile, isn’t it? My dad grows chiles, and he—”

“You can talk about your male macho chile-eating stuff later, for pity’s sake,” Maj said. “Niko, better have a look at the diagram, you’ll see what’s cooking….”

They went over to it, the others following by ones and twos. The hologram was mostly filled with the planet Didion, where the Arbalests would be fighting down and dirty in the atmosphere with many, many others.

“It’s a ‘built’ planet,” Maj said as Laurent walked around the hologram, peering at it. “It may look green…but everything about Didion is artificial. It’s constructed, from the core out…there are thousands of levels. It was the library for all this part of space once, until the Archon moved in and took things over. Now it’s been reamed out and stuffed full of weapons, killerbots, crawling code…you name it. Nasty place, and the nerve center for all the Archon’s operations in this part of space. But there’s a way down inside, and if we can once fight our way down to the surface and get in there—”

“And there, of course, is the problem,” Bob said. The “surface” of the planet on the hologram disappeared to reveal the way into the core — a complex and twisting path of conduits and tunnels.

“It’s a body, with a brain,” Maj said. “What it needs…is a lobotomy.”

“Icepicks R Us,” said Bob. The others groaned.

“Bob,” Shih Chin said with good-natured disgust, “you are so retro sometimes.”

“A lot of other groups are going to be trying to beat us to it,” Mairead said. “We intend to be first…or at least real close behind first.”

“First or nothing,” Chel said. “Death or glory.”

Laurent stood looking thoughtfully at the diagram — the globe, the involved way in to the heart of it, the “sensitive area” hidden at the heart. “This looks,” he said, “kind of familiar.”

There was a subdued chuckle from some of the others. “Yeah,” Shih Chin said. “It’s a reworking of an old archetype. There have been some additions to it, though. Take a look—”

They spent the next few minutes going over the worst of the boobytraps — as much to show them to Laurent as to remind themselves. “The worst things are the shipeaters,” Del said, pointing at the two separate places where the “eaters” were known to have been positioned in the main accesses. “They’re nothing small that you could shoot up. They’re jaws that come out of the walls — they are the walls, actually — and munch you up. Nasty.”

“If you just get shot up and die, you can at least reclaim the points inherent in your shipbuild in another round of the game,” Maj said to Laurent. “But if something completely destroys your ship and you can’t recover the material for salvage, you have to start over from scratch…buy your way back into the construction program and then sometimes wait a month or two before the resources are available to build your new ship….”

“Like real life,” Laurent said.

“All too much like it,” Kelly said.

From the direction of the buildings in their base complex, a klaxon began to sound. “That’s it, troops,” Shih Chin said, and with a look of great relief headed off toward her ship.

“Chinnn!!” Bob and Del and Mairead shouted after her.

“Oh…I forgot.” She came back to the rest of them.

“Ready?” Bob said, putting out a hand.

Shih Chin put her hand on top of Bob’s, and then one after another, the Group piled hands up on top of one another. “Oh, come on, Goulash,” Bob said to Laurent then, and shyly, Laurent put his hand on top of all of theirs.

“Seven for seven,” Bob said. “Or nine, or ten. However many we are. Yeah?”

“Yeah!” they all shouted.

“Now let’s go kick the Archon’s big green butt,” Shih Chin said, “and be back home in time for popcorn and a late movie.”

Everyone headed hurriedly for their fighters. Shortly Maj and Laurent were back in their seats, and all around them the scream of Morgenroths coming up to speed was becoming deafening. “This planet,” Laurent said, nearly shouting over the noise, “it is in this system?”

“Nope,” Maj said. “Fourteen light-years away.”

Laurent’s eyes widened as the nine ships lifted up and away from the surface of Jorkas together, in formation. “And we are going to get there in ten minutes?”

“In about a second and a half, actually,” Maj said, checking the readouts for the sizable part of the Arbalest’s computer which managed the squeezefield synchronization. “If we had a jump gate, it would be even faster. But that uses a lot of power, and the gate structure is vulnerable at either end to sabotage. However, we have enough ships to do it the other way.” She glanced around. The others were slowing down, preparing.

“What way?”

“Hang on,” she said, and meant it. The first time it was always a surprise….

“Ready, Seven?” Bob’s voice came down the ship’s comm.

“Ready!” Maj said. Seven other voices said, “Ready!”

“Synch starts—now!”

The squeezefield sequence cut in. Maj watched the guidance laser jump from craft to craft, knitting them together in a many-times reflected webwork of light. The hypermass augmentation sequence started—

And then the stars streaked in to collapse around them, molded themselves flaming to the shapes of the ships, pushed the ships and their pilots unbearably inward on themselves in a wave of spatially compressed light and a deafening scream of sound—

Everything vanished. And then the stars blazed out again, leaping back out to their proper positions, and leaving the formation of Arbalests falling toward the surface of the planet Didion….

Laurent was gasping. “You — you—!”

“You can either poke holes in the universe to get where you’re going,” Maj said, “which some people suspect is bad for its structure…or you can wrap it around you like a coat, go where you’re going, and then take the coat off again. It’s all the same coat. Everything in it touches everything else….”

That was as much theory as Maj intended to get into at the moment, for there was a lot to do, a lot of instruments to check and double-check in the next minute or so. The cockpit was filling up with nervous background chatter from the others as they did what Maj was doing — made sure the weapons were hot and loose, the Morgenroths answering properly. Below them, streaks of fire and puffs of smoke and long streamers of contrail in the upper and middle atmosphere told them that the Battle of Didion was already in progress, and heating up.

“Ready?” Bob said from his Arbalest, taking squad leadership and point this time out. He had devised the strategy they would be using on the way in, and therefore he got to die first if anything went wrong.

“All set, big B,” Maj said.

“Ready, Bob—”

“Let’s do it, already!”

“Seven for seven,” Bob said. “Go. Go. Go.”

Nine Arbalest fighters fell at ever-increasing speed toward the surface of Didion. From the backseat of one of them came a yell of pure and not entirely inappropriate joy, and in the front seat, the pilot smiled, settled one arm deep into the field that handled the firing controls, and got ready to show her houseguest a good time.

Six thousand miles away the major was sitting in business class on a domestic flight to Vienna, from which she would have to catch yet another flight to Zurich, the nearest spaceplane port. She much disliked having to pass through Switzerland, but at the moment it was unavoidable. Speed was of the essence, and she had other things than the wretched Swiss on her mind.

“He has not left the house, Major,” said the voice down the hushed and scrambled Net link she was using from the booth at the back of business class.

“Good. A small blessing, if nothing else. What are his hosts doing?”

“Having a quiet day at home, it would seem. The mother has been working in the garden. The father has been in the household Net mostly, not out in the public Nets at all. The daughter and the boy are in the Net as well.”

“In the boy’s accounts?”

“No. Though they could be at any time. His father had his son’s account information installed on a North American server.”

“Well, that should hardly be a problem for us. Break into the accounts. I want them completely searched.”

“Unfortunately,” said her contact, “the server is not the one to which they were originally moved. The new server is one which is used by several U.S. government agencies…and it is regrettably extremely well protected. We cannot get at it.”

She muttered something rude under her breath. “Well, at the very least I want the boy watched and listened to wherever he goes in the public Nets. He’s likely enough to drop some useful information where it can be heard.”

“But, Major, except for the Greens’ household Net, he has been nowhere except in a proprietary system — and that as a guest on the professor’s daughter’s account. And the proprietary systems routinely have top-flight filters which keep outside access limited to registered subscribers—”

“Well, subscribe!”

“We did. But it takes twenty-four hours to approve the credit. And besides, our country’s domains are blocked. We had to go in through a Transylvanian domain address, and for that we had to get the usual clearances—”

Bureaucracy, she thought in anguish and covered her face with one hand. It had its uses, but most of them rarely did her any good.

“Just do it,” the major said. “Once inside the proprietary system, you should find a fair amount of information about the girl — her habits, how often she uses the system, and so on. I want a complete report on that. Meanwhile, how is the search for the father doing?”

“There is good news there, Major. The techs working on one of his research associates have produced some results. They said he had gone north for holidays several times in the last year, even though as far as they knew, he had no family or friends up there. His excuse was that he had been fishing.”

“I daresay he had…though I think it more likely that the kind of fish we have in the lakes up there were not what he had in mind.”

“Perhaps not. He made some mention of the places he had gone. We are questioning people in those towns now…and one woman there says she thinks she saw him two days ago.”

The major smiled. “The increased surveillance at the borders may yet pay off. Increase the searches in the north, then…. Also, find out if any of our own people know anything about fishing.”

There was a silence at the other end. “Excuse me, Major?”

“You heard me. I want them kitted out with appropriate equipment and sent up north. Darenko may actually have been fishing. In fact, he may be doing it now. A capable fisherman can live for a good while in the countryside without needing to set foot in a town where anyone can see him….”

“Uh, yes, Major, I’ll take care of it.”

“Do so first thing in the morning. Then get into the Net and see what the boy is doing. I will have to be ready to move shortly when I get there…and I want as much information on hand as possible to guide me.”

“Yes, Major.”

“Now, what about the professor? You had leads you were still researching.”

The response sounded somewhat nervous. “He has ties to Net Force.”

Her breath hissed out. “We knew about that. His daughter is in the Net Force Explorers, after all.”

“No, Major. Closer ties than that.”

“I see. Can you be more specific?”

“No.”

“Is there anything else?”

“No.”

“I’d suggest I will contact you before I leave Zurich.”

She closed the connection down, took a moment to compose herself, and headed out into the cabin again. Twelve hours or so, she thought, and I will be there. And after that…we will go about the business of taking back what is rightfully ours.

The major settled herself in her comfortable seat again, smoothing down the handsome businesswoman’s skirt suit which was her “uniform” for this particular mission. Poor little Laurent, she thought. Enjoy yourself while you can. There will be little enough enjoyment for you when we get you home….