Everywhere? He looked down.
Naked as the proverbial, well, bad pun, jaybird.
He looked back up and to his right, and there was Rachel Lewis, also naked, walking in front of him. Her skin was slightly more tanned than she’d been in RW, but other than that, she looked exactly the same. Her figure, as seen from behind, more than delivered what her clothes had promised.
Whoa!
Most VR programmers tended to incorporate some aspect of fantasy in their avatars, particularly for a given scenario. When he played big-game hunter or 1930s pulp hero, Jay would amalgamate his own body’s features onto other bodies, becoming someone else, rather than just himself.
The fact that she apparently didn’t meant something. What, he didn’t know, but it was interesting. Very interesting.
She turned and laughed.
“Oh, sorry, Jay,” she said. “I’d forgotten the naked part—I usually run this one by myself.”
Her front was just as spectacular as her back. Tanned skin, kissed lightly by the sun, had resulted in a beautiful spatter of freckles that topped, um, a bunch of other, um, most attractive attributes he probably ought not to be thinking about.
Jay was struck yet again by how much she looked like her RW counterpart. No enhancements that he could see. As far as he could tell, this was her for real.
He swallowed, feeling even warmer. Cool off, Jay.
“No problem,” he said. “My wife Saji and I spent some time in Europe on a couple of clothing-optional beaches.”
Managed to work Saji’s name in there pretty good.
Still, he could feel himself starting to, ah, react to the sight of her, the surprise of it. Any second his avatar might begin registering his interest in a visible way.
Shit. Got to stop that.
She motioned for him to follow her, and turned, showing him her backside again as she started to walk.
Yes, that’s it. Keep looking the other way.
“I’ve found that this works pretty good for tracking data packets.”
He listened with half an ear as he reached up and tapped the side of his head. It felt slightly wrong, since he was not wearing VR goggles in the scenario, and he slid his hand along the earpiece to what he knew was the box under it. He felt the catch open and felt for the tiny dip switches inside. Back in college he’d played VR chicken with other students. It was a game of sensory overloads—who could last the longest listening to things like fingernails on blackboards, swimming in containers of beetles, or the like. Whoever showed the most reaction in the scenario would lose. He’d sometimes beat the system by learning how to disable the RW sensory interface while in VR.
Like now.
He counted over three switches and turned the next two off. Now he could see and feel everything in VR, but the system couldn’t read his nerve impulses.
Any excitement his body registered in RW wouldn’t show in VR.
He looked down, just to be sure.
There was that little brown mole, right there on his—Jesus! He was wearing his real body. How had she done that?
Lewis was still talking.
“The carrier waves are the people on the beach. My scenario shows them naked, so that I can see if they’re hiding anything.”
She must have used an old copy from the MIT lab, used an aging algorithm to extrapolate the rest. Pretty sharp, Lewis.
They reached a set of sunbathers on green reclining chairs. Lewis sat down on a chair nearby, motioning to Jay to do the same. She straddled the chair as she sat down, giving him something more to see.
“Take a look,” she said.
He realized she meant the couple next to them, and saw that there was a slight discoloration on the man’s body. And a bulge wiggling under the skin of his belly, like some implanted alien monster about to erupt.
The man stood up and walked away. Jay looked around.
If the scenario had him as a metaphor to a data pipe, anything he was carrying was data. Hidden data, in this case.
Nice.
“Clever,” he said to Lewis.
Jay and Rachel followed. Strains of brassy music with bass and guitar drifted across the beach. The music added to the scene, but there was no immediate explanation for it.
Jay looked at Lewis and raised his eyebrow. “That a five-five-five, Lewis?”
She grinned. “Nope—ahead on the right. Hell, I haven’t heard that term in years. Professor Barnhardt would be proud.”
Jay looked ahead. There it was—a radio on a piece of driftwood next to the beach bar.
Barnhardt had been a drama instructor who’d transferred to the VR department. There had been some controversy about that, since the old man had hardly had any programming experience. But he’d been smart.
His specialty was teaching the programmers how to be more real. He’d termed anything that threw you out of the VR illusion a “five-five-five”—taking the name from the fake phone number prefix used in movies and TV. Every time you see that, he’d say, you remember you’re looking through the third wall.
Her code was sharp, she’d figured out she had a leak on her own, and she created VR as good as—well, almost as good as—his own. He was impressed.
The man stopped at the beach bar. He looked behind him, saw them, and then jumped over a large piece of driftwood and ran.
Jay and Rachel hurried to catch up. Jay marveled at how well the TFU worked—he’d swear wind was rushing over his naked body, and he could feel parts of his body swinging.
When they reached the driftwood and looked on the other side, the man was gone.
Well.
It looked like this might take more trips to the beach. Jay looked over at Lewis and saw her looking at him.
He wondered if that was a good idea or not.
6
Alice’s Restaurant
University Park, Virginia
“You jivin’ me,” Jamal said.
Thorn smiled. “Nope. You get on the American team, I’ll cover your expenses to the World Games. Airfare, hotels, food, walking-around money.”
Jamal shook his head. “I appreciate it, but—why?”
“Two reasons, Jamal. One, I can afford it. Two, it’s not every day I get to sponsor a world-champion fencer.”
“I ain’t even got on the national team yet, Mr. Thorn, and you got me winnin’ the worlds?”
“Aim high, hit high,” Thorn said.
Jamal shook his head in wonder.
Thorn’s smile slipped into something more serious. “Look, Jamal,” he said. “Up until now, if you lost a big bout, you could just shrug and say, ‘Well, so what, I couldn’t have afforded to go anyhow.’ Now, you have to come up with another reason.”
Jamal looked at him for maybe five seconds without saying anything. “You a mind reader, too?”
“I grew up on a rez in Washington State, and we didn’t have any spare change lying around. ‘No money’ was my favorite excuse—until my grandfather went out and hustled enough from the tribe my senior year of high school to pay my way to the nationals.”
“You win?”
“Nope. Came in third in épée, fifth in foil, didn’t place in saber. Bronze wasn’t gold, but it might as well have been when I brought it home. No kid from our rez had ever won squat against a room full of white guys. That medal is still hanging in the trophy case outside the principal’s office.”
Jamal laughed. “They put a trophy case in my school, the whole thing would be gone the next morning, right down to the bolts holding it to the floor.”
“Yeah, yeah, your school is bad. You ever scalp a white man?”
Thorn kept his face deadpan, and for just a second, Jamal looked at him as if he was serious.
“Get out my face with that,” the young man said.
Thorn laughed. “Had you for just a second there, didn’t I?”
“No way.” But he grinned, too. “So, Mr. Thorn, what’s the deal with you and the fine sistah? You serious about getting marri
ed?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Salt and pepper. You gonna catch grief on both sides of the table.”
“It’s the twenty-first century, Jamal. Fifty, a hundred years from now, it is gonna be like Julian Huxley said, we’ll all be tea-colored, and the world will be better off for it.”
“Uh huh.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“I don’t think the world is as far down that road as you do.”
Thorn shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. Marissa is worth any amount of grief anybody else has got to offer. Screw ’em if they don’t like it.”
Now Jamal’s grin got real big. “That’s what a man says about his woman. You all right, Mr. T.”
Thorn grinned back. He hoped so.
U.S. Army Recon School
Fort Palaka, Hana, Maui, Hawaii
The Army base at Hana was brand-new, small, specialized, and nobody local much liked it being there. Some kind of land swap with the government was the only reason it was. It wasn’t enough that the tourists filled the narrow road leading to Hana so you never could get anywhere. Now there were soldiers clogging things up—that’s what a man paying attention at a local cafe would hear, and certainly Carruth was a man who paid attention. . . .
As he lay in the lush growth ten meters away from the still-shiny chain-link fence surrounding the base, Carruth wasn’t so sure this mission was worth the trip. Still, it was what Lewis wanted, and it was her command. On the one hand, she was a fine-looking woman and he’d love to get to know her better; on the other hand, she was a cold bitch and he didn’t doubt she would shoot a man just to watch him bleed. But for the moment, he was willing to go along with her, because if things went the way she planned, he was going to walk away with enough money to buy his own tropical island and stock it with as many good-looking women as he wanted. He could put up with a little ball-busting for that.
Carruth had only two men with him on this one—Hill and Stark—and they were backup. Carruth was the only guy going onto the base proper.
Into his LOSIR headset, he said, “Two minutes, mark.”
“Copy,” Hill came back.
“Affirmative,” Stark added.
The fence patrol guard, a PFC who must have done something to get on somebody’s shit detail, strolled by in front of Carruth’s position, M-16 slung over his shoulder, not even bothering to look at the fence most of the time. Once he was past here, it would be thirty minutes before he came back to this spot, and if Carruth wanted to bother to try and hide them, the doofus probably wouldn’t even notice the clipped links in the wire.
Speaking of which . . . On the two-minute mark, Carruth crawled to the fence, came up to a squat, and applied the wire-cutters to the links, snipping out just enough of a gap to slide through. This position was one of many that wasn’t covered by security cams, and was far enough away from anything so nobody but the perimeter guard would likely see you come through.
Once he was inside, Carruth moved fifty steps to the SSW, then altered his direction and did thirty-six more steps directly east.
This kept him out of any security cam’s view—so the intel said.
At that point, he started walking as if he owned the place. He was dressed in the uniform of the day, Army tropical, and wearing the insignia of a master sergeant. Anybody who saw him on a cam probably wouldn’t call out the MPs—they’d figure he belonged here.
His goal—another stupid one, far as he was concerned—was the enlisted soldiers’ mess hall, at the south end of the complex, a three-minute walk from his entry point. At ten-thirty hours, the place should be relatively empty—breakfast was long over and lunch wasn’t being plated yet.
The maps he’d studied and the photographs he’d memorized were accurate—he had no trouble recognizing his route to the target.
A few enlisted soldiers passed along the way, none close, and he offered a snappy salute to the one officer who came within range, a young lieutenant, who returned the salute and did not speak.
The hall lay just ahead.
Carruth circled to the back side of the place, where the Dumpsters were lined up. He opened the lid of the largest, using a handkerchief so as not to leave prints. He caught the spoiled-milk reek of food rotting in the steel bin. Phew! What a stench!
He removed the device from his pocket, started the timer, and dropped it onto a mass of overcooked scrambled eggs, splat.
The bomb was a simple composition device—RDX/PETN blended with dense wax and a little oil, a C-4 knockoff from India stabilized for hot climates, cheap and untraceable—at least nobody could trace it to him. The electronic timer was a throwaway quartz runner’s watch he’d bought at a Kmart, no prints anywhere, and if he built another one, he’d do it differently, so as not to leave a signature the bomb guys could read.
Ten minutes from now, the Dumpster was going to pop the lid and spew a goodly portion of its stinking contents into the air—the steel walls would almost surely hold, it wasn’t that big a boomer—and the result would be a nasty mess for some poor bastard on kitchen patrol to clean up. Come all this way to blow up a garbage can? Well, it was what Lewis wanted, and probably she had some reason, though he damn sure didn’t know what it was.
He turned and started to walk away. In ten minutes, he’d be halfway back to where they’d anchored the boat. By the time the Army figured out what happened—he wouldn’t put it past ’em to blame it on methane gas—he and Hill and Stark would have sailed away.
He grinned. Stupid Army wonks . . .
“Sergeant,” came a masculine, if somewhat high-pitched, voice.
Startled, Carruth turned. It was that shavetail second lieutenant he’d passed earlier, standing three meters behind him. A big mistake on his part. He should have been paying better attention. “Sir?”
“What is your unit, soldier?”
Carruth repressed the urge to sigh. Just his luck to run into a kid officer who apparently had a eye for faces and didn’t recognize Carruth’s.
“My unit, sir? I’m on loan from the 704th Chemical, Arden Hills, sir. USASOC. I just arrived this morning to teach a class in decontamination procedure.” He took a step toward the lieutenant.
The younger man—he couldn’t be more than twenty-two or -three—frowned. “I don’t recall seeing a posting about that.”
Carruth stole another step. “I wouldn’t know about that, sir. I just go where I’m told and do what they say. I have my orders right here.” He reached toward his pocket, as if to remove them.
The lieutenant waved that off. “What are you doing messing around back here with the garbage cans?”
“I got lost, sir. Saw some trash on the ground and picked it up.” He didn’t have time for this. The clock was ticking.
He was close enough now, but maybe it wouldn’t come to that. If this idiot would just leave it, he’d be on his way.
“Show me.”
“Sir?”
“The trash you picked up. I want to see it.”
Aw, shit. He had a problem. This conversation had gone on long enough so that buzz-cut here would remember him once the can went boom! and that was bad. Plus the fact that when he opened that Dumpster lid, that ED lying on the bed of yellow egg residue would stand out like a red flag.
“Yes, sir.” And with that, Carruth clocked the lieutenant, a short hammer-fist to the temple, putting his hip into the hit.
The lieutenant fell like his legs had vanished. He was out cold.
But he was gonna wake up in a few minutes and probably his memory would work just fine. That wasn’t gonna do.
Carruth picked the unconscious officer up, shouldered him, and carried him the Dumpster. He lifted the lid and dropped the lieutenant into the bin. Wiped the lid where he had touched it, then latched the top shut.
He walked away. Too bad for the soldier, but risk went with the job. Probably the explosion would kill him; at the least, it would mess him up enough that he wouldn’t be talking anytime soon.
/>
Better him than me . . .
Net Force HQ
Quantico, Virginia
Jay Gridley sat in Thorn’s office, looking, as he often did, like a teenager late for a date.
“You got the report on the base in Hawaii?” Thorn asked.
“I haven’t read it yet,” Jay answered. “It was in the spool when you called.”
“Somebody cut through the fence and blew up a Dumpster.”
Jay laughed. “Whoa. Big-time assault.”
“The bomber apparently decked a second lieutenant and put him into the garbage bin with the bomb.”
“Jeez. Kill him?”
“No. The trash somehow partially muted the blast. Blew out his eardrums, gave him a major concussion, ruptured spleen, collapsed lung, burns, and cuts. He’s in bad shape, but he’s still alive.”
“Poor bastard.”
“I’m expecting my phone to ring any second with an irate general on the line wanting to know what we have done toward catching these people. So—what have we done?”
“I’m grinding, Boss, you know how it goes. It’s like looking for one line of bad code in a million-line program—you don’t see it until you get to it.”
“I understand, Jay, but they won’t. Give me something. Anything.”
“The computer game is intricate and well built, so we’re dealing with a serious programmer, plus one smart enough to put it out there and then trash it without leaving an easy trail. I’m working with Captain Lewis at MILDAT, running down leads.”
Thorn nodded. “Whoever is doing this is trying to make a point. I don’t know what, but blowing up a Dumpster doesn’t have a lot of strategic value, any more than the raid in Oklahoma, where they knocked down an armory door, blew some windows out, and then turned around and left empty-handed. It looks to me like they are trying to show that they can get into these bases and do whatever they want.”
Jay said, “Selling keys to the candy store, maybe.”