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By Root 431 0

on the screen, with a note indicating that more were on the way. The Ferret had been busy. Stephanie cracked open the first document, unlocking its encryption using the Ferret’s menu of code busters. After thirty seconds she was able to read what turned out to be a numbingly boring corporate memo. The second and third folders were stock market forecasts which she could have found in the New York Times. The fourth and fifth were reports about new environmental problems. Reluctantly, Stephanie binned them. She’d never find the time to fit in more reading. The sixth file was an odd piece of paperwork concerning a New York cop called McIlveen. A personnel file copied from the police database. Stephanie scanned through it quickly, chewing at a thumbnail. She set it aside to return to later.

When she opened the seventh file retrieved by the Ferret she struck gold.

It was a letter describing how the Butler Institute was in the process of buying some communications and research facilities in the Midwest. It sounded like a fairly impressive piece of corporate acquisition until you checked up on the Midwest stock and discovered it wasn’t exactly a business at all. It was more like the United States Air Force. Stephanie read the document twice, heart pounding a little as the caffeine entered her bloodstream.

She slipped a floppy disk into her computer and was making a copy of the letter when all hell broke loose.

The document seemed to be taking rather a long time to copy but that didn’t worry Stephanie at first. It meant only that somewhere in the network the Ferret had hit a rich seam of information and was in the process of dragging the goodies back to her. But then her screen locked completely.

For a full minute nothing happened. Now it wasn’t the coffee that was pushing up Stephanie’s heartbeat. She began to accept that her machine had crashed. Nothing was moving anywhere on the screen. This could be a major disaster. She could reset and reboot easily enough, but she didn’t know what side effects might be involved. In normal use the Ferret would come scampering back at the end of its hunt, licking its paws, closing every file behind it, relocking the disks and restoring the mainframes to exactly their original state so there’d be no traces of the nocturnal hunt. But what would happen if Stephanie rebooted now? Would people come in on Monday morning and find muddy ferret tracks all over their files? She bit her lip and hesitated. The only sound in the office was the whirring of the air conditioning and the hum of the fan which cooled her hard disk. Then she leaned forward and pressed the start‐up switch.

Nothing happened.

Stephanie hit it again. Still nothing.

It was bad enough if she couldn’t cover the Ferret’s tracks. But what would happen if she couldn’t even switch her machine off? It would be glowing like a beacon when everyone filed back in on Monday. Might as well just hang a sign around her neck saying, ‘I’m the one who did it.’

Stephanie thought about her blonde hair swinging and the twenty years it had taken to grow it. She thought about the small fingers of the boss’s child in her hand, and candy‐sick breath, and about how long it had taken her to pay for just the jacket of the Otomo suit.

Then she thought about what the Butler Institute might do to her if they found her probing their secrets.

Stephanie came to a decision. Boot up and take her chances. If the Ferret was gone from the network she’d quit for the evening. Take what she had and call it a day. She’d become greedy and it was a mistake. Sweat had burst under her arms, soaking the Hamnet silk. The coffee heaved uneasily in her stomach. Stephanie found herself making bargains with a god she hadn’t believed in since childhood.

Let the network be clean and I won’t push my luck again. I swear. Even let the Ferret be wiped out, corrupted during the crash so I can never use it again. Just let me get out without any traces this time.

Never again.

Just let me get out.

I swear.

She was reaching to pull the power plug when the screen came back to life.