• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The fetch was silent for a moment. ‘I should know.’

Her comrades were getting ready to move off again.

‘What are we going to do now?’ Janis whispered.

‘Next place you can find a comms port,’ the fetch said, ‘jack me in.’

She stared, seeing for the first time the shadowy, unreal quality of the image of the fetch, for all its apparent solidity. ‘What about Donovan’s viruses? Aren’t you vulnerable to them?’

‘Not any more,’ the fetch said. ‘The Kalashnikov firmware protected me from them in the first instance, and I have not been idle. We have a score to settle with Donovan.’

‘Oh yes,’ Janis said. She felt a murderous, barbarous, bloodthirsty joy. ‘Yes. We do.’

Two days later the chance came, in an office block with all its windows out but with its power still functioning, its communications intact. Her unit occupied and guarded it, and as soon as her watch was over, at sunset when she was supposed to be resting, she climbed up a few floors. Glass crunched underfoot in the corridors, sodden carpet squelched in the open-plan office. Desks, terminals, modems, ports. Postcards, notices, family holos and silly mottoes on the desks; revolting green moulds growing out of coffee mugs. Somewhere a fridge hummed, but it had long since lost its battle against decay. She lit a cigarette to smother the stink and spread her parka on a soggy swivel chair. She laid the gun in front of her on the desk, unspooled the cable thread and jacked in. A flicker of interface interference, then everything became clear.

Moh’s face appeared in her glades, drawn in lines of grey light on a darker background.

‘Ready?’

‘Yes.’

‘This is going to be scary. You don’t have to come along.’

‘I want to see it.’

‘OK. Remember, nothing can happen to you. Your mind is safe.’

She bared her teeth in the gloom, wondering if the mind in the machine could see her. Probably: a tiny camera lens was mounted on the desk screen.

‘I’ll take your word for it, gun.’

‘OK. Let’s go.’

It was as if he turned away, and she followed. Utter disorientation: a fall, a rush along corridors, out into open space, a virtual landscape of rocky hills and city blocks with all their windows dead. They moved like a stealth fighter, racing shadows.

A terribly narrow, suffocating, stretched-out space. The words fat pipe passed uncomprehended across the surface of her mind. The microseconds dragged on and on.

And then they were out – and inside something else, a huge space like the inside of a mind. Struggling to break through barriers, fighting for control.

Taking control. It came to her as a sensation in the muscles, as if she controlled many limbs, and in her mind, as if she saw with many eyes.

Eyes that scanned a sea, and other senses that reached into space with feathery fingers, and eyes that looked within at corridors and bulkheads and berths and holds and galleys.

And – concentrating now, focusing, zeroing in – she looked on a control room filled with screens and machines, servers and overhead rails with cranes and robot arms. Two men were in it, completely dwarfed by the machinery around them. One of the men – her view zoomed sickeningly close to his oblivious, horrible face – was the white Man In Black who’d come to her lab, who’d fought them in the service area. So this was where he’d ended up! After his entire organization had been smashed, disbanded, disgraced, datagated to hell and back, he’d hidden out, skulking here with…

The second man in the room was Donovan.

Almost, she found him hard to hate.

He looked up, startled as a crane clattered into motion. Before he could shout a warning, it happened.

It was not clear to Janis if it was a thing she did, a thing she willed, or something that happened while she watched, terrified and exultant, from behind other eyes.

The crane’s arm swung. Its manipulator caught the Man In Black by the skull and lifted him with a cranial crunch and a vertebral snap and slung him against a wall of screens that splintered and showered down on him