Multireal (4 page)

Magan turned and gave Rey Gonerev an appraising look. She had
risen once again from her seat and was standing alongside the pilot
watching the formation. Gonerev should have been the type of volatile
element that Magan tried to suppress from the Council hierarchy.
Instead he had worked hard to put Rey Gonerev in the chief solicitor's
office, and it had taken him some time to realize why. It was precisely
because she refused to kiss ass, because she was not Len Borda's toady
and did not aspire to be Magan's either. Gonerev could always be
counted on to cut through bureaucratic and organizational hypocrisy
like a machete slicing through so many thin vines. It was no wonder
the pundits had nicknamed her "the Blade."

Ridgello had just received final status reports from the other four
hoverbird teams. "Perhaps we need to cover extremities and observe full zoning regulations," he said. Commander Papizon will signal us when
he's overridden the building's security and compression routines, and then it'll
be time to move.

"This man is not to be underestimated," Magan told the Blade.
"He is as sly as a snake."

"But-"

"Enough. The high executive has made his decision. My duty-and
yours-is to carry it out." Magan cut the 'Whisper channel with a curt swipe
of one hand, and even the Blade knew that further argument was useless.

Ridgello concluded his preoperational briefing with a question for
Magan Kai Lee. "South by southwest makes for a defensive maneuver,"
he said. Anything to add, Lieutenant?

Magan could feel the randomness algorithm hijack his thoughts and
twist them into unrecognizable shapes designed to sow confusion among
any eavesdropping enemy. "Keep pushing for higher ground, regardless
of any spiking temperatures," he said. "It's a tribute to your preparedness
that we have a robust strategy at all." He could imagine the same process
at work in reverse in each of the soldiers' heads, realigning and reassembling his gibberish into something more comprehensible. Remember that
the subject is expected to be unarmed, and lethal force will not be required. If we
encounter his apprentices, they are to be taken alive.

Silence ensued. Magan watched the drifting snowflakes and tried
to clear his mind. He could see the officers through the window of the
next hoverbird polishing their dartguns, choosing which canisters of
black code-laden needles to load. Rey Gonerev was making small talk
with the pilot in plain speech, as if deliberately flaunting her defiance
of military convention.

A little more than a month ago, Magan had never heard of this
man, this fiefcorper who was the object of their mission. He had come
from nowhere, really, a shameless entrepreneur who had clawed his way
out of the bear pit of bio/logic programming. Nobody was quite sure
how he had wormed his way into Margaret Surina's good graces, or how he had gained control of her MultiReal technology so quickly. Then he had showed up in Len Borda's chambers, mere hours ahead of a major product demo, looking to make a deal: the Council's protection from some group of assassins in black robes that had ambushed him on the streets of Shenandoah-protection from the black code swarming through his bloodstream even now like barracudas. In exchange: access to MultiReal.

The high executive had kept his word. He had raised his hand and sent three legions of his best troops scrambling for Andra Pradesh. The fiefcorper's product demo had gone off as planned.*
_link_

And what had the entrepreneur delivered in return? Nothing.

He had failed to show up for half a dozen scheduled meetings over the next week, leaving Magan and his underlings to sit alone in a series of conference rooms feeling foolish. Urgent messages and ConfidentialWhispers had disappeared into the void, unacknowledged and unanswered. Threats had gone unheeded.

Borda had responded to this charade with the subtlety of someone conducting an orchestra in a suit of armor. He had sent white-robed Council officers to shadow the man twenty-four hours a day, then had those officers parade before the man's windows with dartguns drawn. When that had failed to apply the appropriate pressure, he had ordered the troops to accept no excuses and firmly escort the man to the Council's administrative offices in Melbourne. Still the fiefcorp master managed to elude them. He would disappear for days at a time right under the officers' noses-nobody knew where or how.

Two days ago, Len Borda's patience had reached its limit. He had called Magan Kai Lee to his chambers in the middle of the night, telling him to drop everything and bring the intractable fiefcorper back to the negotiating table, by force if necessary.

"In handcuffs?" Magan had asked.

"In chains," Borda had replied.

Lieutenant Lee had looked at that weathered face, that bald capstone of a head. The high executive had stared back at him with a gaze
of acid. Magan felt his fingertips flex involuntarily, yearning to take
hold of the dartgun holstered at his side and aim it at that caustic, lichlike countenance. Borda had merely sat there, defenseless but utterly
without fear. He knew that Magan would not break their agreement.

And Borda was right. In the end, Magan Kai Lee had done what
he was told. He had retreated back to his quarters, filing the impatience away in yet another mental side room that was full dangerously
close to bursting. He had called up Papizon, and the two of them had
sketched out this endeavor, with occasional input from the Blade. The
next forty-eight hours had been a haze of architectural blueprints,
supply requisitions, and scouting reports.

An incoming blip snapped Magan back to the now. It was time.

Go.

All at once, the Defense and Wellness Council hoverbirds blasted
into motion. They quickly shifted into single file as they sped toward
Shenandoah like a poison arrow, with Ridgello's hoverbird the barb
and Magan's VIP ship the fletchings.

Magan took a parting glance at the crossing of the two rivers. He
thought of the flow of illicit advertising and wondered what kind of
societal parasite would resort to such a scheme.

Natch, he thought, you brought this on yourself.

Five hoverbirds darted out from behind the Blue Ridge Mountains,
skirting close to the ground, where they blended in with the snow.
Traffic was a farce this early in the morning. The sun hung close to the
horizon, unsure of itself.

Papizon, what's your status? said Ridgello.

Even scrambled, the tactician's voice sounded serene and unhurried. Security is under Council control, he said. We're decompressing the
building now. Target apartment will be just inside the northwest entrance in
ninety seconds.

And Natch? asked the team leader.

We saw him enter the building last night at approximately ten o'clock local
time. He's been active in MindSpace ever since. There are human and data
agents watching every exit.

Magan and Gonerev exchanged looks of cautious optimism. So far,
so good. Let the Blade call the plan overkill; once they had the fiefcorp
master safely onboard a Council hoverbird en route to Melbourne, this
whole operation would be yesterday's lessons learned.

Rey Gonerev Joined Magan at the command console. The yellow
triangles were rapidly converging on a blinking red star. A sixth triangle hunkered down beneath the building in the pipes of the city's
underground transfer system. That would be Papizon and his technical
crew.

Magan switched the rear windows of the hoverbird to battlefield
display, blocking out the rapidly receding December landscape. Perspectives from six different soldiers filled the screens: here a man rubbing the barrel of his multi disruptor with a soft cloth, there a woman
stretching her calves and muttering about the cold. Following regulations, Magan flipped through each of the twenty-five officers in turn to
verify the connections. He found Ridgello calm and collected and not
the least bit nervous; operations like this were his gruel.

The hoverbirds zipped over a large hill and went into a steep, nosebleed descent behind a copse of trees. The pilot cut the inertial cush-
ioners to stifle the noise. Rey Gonerev grunted as her head bounced
against the low hoverbird ceiling, but Magan remained composed. He
thanked a thousand generations of Chinese heritage for making him
too short to worry about such obstructions.

They touched down in the snow with a soft thud. All five yellow
triangles were now clustered on a slope next to the blinking red star.

Seconds later, the doors whooshed open and the Defense and Wellness Council was on the move.

A disciplined sprint up a snow-covered slope, dartguns drawn. A
building that curved atop the next hill like a natural extension of the
landscape. Two dozen figures in white fatigues with muted yellow stars
edging through a small huddle of fir trees. The fog of heavy breath.

About ten meters up, a door opened and spat forth a middle-aged
woman holding a mug of steaming nitro. A black platform slid
beneath her feet in the blink of an eye to serve as balcony. She yawned,
stretched, cracked her knuckles.

Take her down, snapped the team leader.

Six pinpricks of light slid across the woman's torso. The dart-rifles
sang. The woman collapsed, ceramic mug of nitro tumbling after.

Magan watched from his ship as Ridgello's team zipped across the
snow and dashed through the building's northwest entrance. Rey
flipped a window to focus on one of the three soldiers ascending the
unconscious woman's balcony via magnetic cable. One of the officers
glanced back over his shoulder at the copse of fir trees, which looked
perfectly undisturbed. Ridgello was good. Magan felt confident that
nobody inside the building had noticed anything unusual.

The interior hallway was brightly lit. Ridgello's team flew down
the corridor, swift as ghosts, until they reached the first door on the
left. Two officers lined up on either side of the door, dartguns drawn
and needles loaded. Ridgello blasted the apartment security with a
Defense and Wellness Council priority override, and the door slid
open. A dozen troops swarmed into Natch's apartment.

Rey Gonerev let out a gasp.

The apartment was empty.

A half-eaten sandwich lay on the kitchen counter alongside a cold
mug of nitro that had obviously been untouched for hours, perhaps days. One of the viewscreens was broadcasting a spirited melee from a fencing
tournament on 49th Heaven. A triangular blob of code rotated inside a
MindSpace bubble in Natch's office with no hand there to rotate it. Even
more telling, however, was the absence of the ubiquitous shoulder pack
of bio/logic programming bars that fiefcorpers always kept within reach.

"You said he was here, Papizon," barked the Blade. "Where is he?"

A puzzled stammer came over the connection. "You mean, hehe's not there?"

"No, he fucking isn't."

"But the scope says ... There's still ... If Natch isn't there, then
who's working in MindSpace?"

Ridgello, the only one still using battle language: No sign of him,
Lieutenant.

The troops had relaxed their guard by now and were all casting
dazed looks at one another. One of them scratched his beefy head with
the barrel of his disruptor gun, against all weapons protocol. Officers
were poking through closets and peeking under tables on the off
chance that Natch might be cowering in some undiscovered corner. A
woman standing behind the workbench in Natch's office turned to face
one of the interior windows and was startled to read the text printed
there in bold letters:

Back in the hoverbird, Magan blanched. Rey Gonerev's face
showed some amalgam of disgust and amusement. The snake knew we
were coming, thought Magan. How could he possibly have known that?
Magan counted the people who had known the details of this operation
ahead of time on three fingers: the Blade, Papizon, himself. Not even
Ridgello had known what was going down until late last night.

The team leader had seen the text by now. Do you want to read this,
Lieutenant? he said.

Magan felt his mind downshifting, looking for a more acceptable
gear. The smart thing to do would be to ignore the message and get his
people out of there as fast as possible. But wasn't that what Natch was
expecting him to do? The message on the window was such a transparent
ploy to get Magan into the apartment that the fiefcorp master must be
counting on him to not take the bait. In which case ... shouldn't he do
the opposite? The lieutenant cursed silently. How difficult it was to use
logic on a creature whose entire nature rejected the concept.

Magan opened the supply chest at his knee, grabbed a canister of
black code darts, and snapped it onto the barrel of his dartgun. "You're
not going in there, are you?" said the Blade incredulously.

"Shit," replied the Council lieutenant, striding for the door of the
hoverbird. "I guess I am."

Within two minutes, he had made it up the hill to the tenement
building's northwest entrance. Magan was approaching middle age
and no longer possessed the feline agility of his younger troops, but he
still doubted that any of the building's occupants had seen him. Magan
glanced up at the balcony of the third-floor apartment, where the
officer standing guard confirmed his assessment with the okay signal.
Two other guards were escorting the unconscious woman back to her
bed, where she would wake up in a few hours with a splitting
headache. Even the dropped mug of nitro had disappeared back inside.