Maj walked through the game booths, listening to the excited chatter of the gamers. She felt all wound up inside. It didn’t make sense for Heavener to be in the hotel, even though the woman didn’t know she’d been identified. But Maj knew she couldn’t have just gone to her room and waited.
Her foilpack vibrated in her pocket again. “Yes.”
Matt’s worried face filled the vidscreen. “I just got a patch in from Andy. He’s hacked into Heavener’s cyberguy’s systems. They’re tracking you on the hotel cameras. Get out of there. Go somewhere safe”
Anxiety filled Maj. Why is Heavener tracking me?
“Get moving,” Matt said. “I’m on my way.”
Struggling to keep from glancing around, Maj headed for the nearest door. Maybe they’ll think I’m meeting someone for breakfast.
She kept her steps unhurried but purposeful, weaving through the crowd. She didn’t look at the ceiling where the cameras were. But when she opened the door leading out of the convention center into the main hallway, she came face to face with Heavener.
The woman smiled cruelly, not a blond hair out of place. “Hello, Madeline,” she said. Three men stood behind her, blocking any chance of escape.
Seated in her veeyar workspace in her hotel room, Catie opened the comm-patch to Agent Roarke, Matt, Leif, and Megan, who were converging on the convention center.
“Heavener found Maj,” Catie said. She stared at the screen and tried to remain calm.
“Where?” Matt asked.
“At the main entrance on the north side,” Catie replied.
“I’m on my way,” Roarke snapped. “You kids stay back.”
Hooked into the hotel security system through the spycams from the gamers Andy and Mark had met, Catie watched as her friends ignored the agent’s orders. She knew they weren’t going to let one of their own down. But why would Heavener be after Maj? The woman’s profile doesn’t read like she’s into grudge matches. Catie sat and watched, feeding information to Captain Winters.
Andy monitored Mark’s progress through the Eisenhower Productions systems, marveling again at how his friend slipped through security like a greased eel. No one equaled the Squirt when it came to evading intruder programming.
Then Catie’s message about Maj’s situation came in. He opened a com-link to Catie. “Use Catie’s foilpack vibrator to send a message in Morse code. They can’t intercept that.” The programming wasn’t normally on most foilpacks, but Mark had recently added the option to theirs after a Net Force mission debrief. “Send the words Hocus Pocus.”
“Mark’s spoof program?” Catie asked. “Will it work with holoprojectors?”
“We’re going to find out,” Andy said, then relayed a message to Mark to let him know he was going to be gone for a moment. He reached up into the Net and launched himself at the Bessel Mid-Town Hotel. He stepped into the virtual world only a short distance behind Heavener and the three men with her. “Catie?”
“I sent the message.”
“Then here comes trouble,” Andy said. He accessed the programming that gave him holoform in the real world.
“Net Force knows about you, Heavener,” Maj said.
The woman’s smile only turned frostier. “Do they?”
“They know about the bleed-over effect in Peter’s game, too. They know you’re going to use the bleed-overs to access the computers of anyone who downloads the game.”
Heavener shrugged. “It seems a little late to stop that now. You even had your own little part to play in this. If your own veeyar hadn’t inadvertently picked up Griffen’s game, we wouldn’t have had to kidnap him.”
Maj felt relieved. Kidnapped was a long way from dead.
“And if we hadn’t kidnapped him, we would never have gotten the media coverage we did. Maybe I should have planned for that all along.”
“Don’t you mean D’Arnot Industries should have?” Maj asked.
The announcement took some of the smile from Heavener’s face.
“With kids and adults downloading the game onto computers owned by the government,” Maj continued, “the private business sector, and military installations, they could have used the bleed-over effect to hack into almost anything they wanted. Someone would have gotten suspicious, but even a few hours free access could have meant potential billions in earnings for D’Arnot Industries. They could have seized secrets, research and development, and military emplacement information to sell to terrorists across the world.”
“Bright kid,” Heavener rasped. “Too bad you’re a dead kid.” She took a small 9mm pistol from her pocket.
“I’m only telling you this,” Maj went on, “to let you know the game’s over. You lose.”
“Oh,” Heavener said, “there’s still time to take a few pieces off the board.” She raised the pistol.
Clad in his crashsuit, Mark eyed the heart of the Eisenhower Productions game engine. On the Net, linked through his perceptions and programming, it took on the form of a man-shaped mechanical dreadnought easily fifty times as large as he was.
The blank, featureless face turned toward him. Yellow lights glimmered where the eyes should have been. “Your access code, please.”
Mark offered the code he’d been given.
“Access denied,” the ponderous giant replied. It stretched out a hand, launching rockets immediately.
Closing his hand, Mark activated the crashsuit’s boostjets, throwing him from the path of the rockets. Another switch on his palm brought down the HUD system, giving him a 360-degree view around him. After thousands of hours logged into the crashsuit as well as the games he played, it all felt entirely natural.
Onscreen, he watched the five rockets pinwheel around and lock on to him again. His left glove contained the suit controls for the boostjets that fired from his boots, back, chest, and the top of his helmet. His right hand controlled the weapons array he had in the form of attack and defense programs he used in hacking.
Laser beams lanced from Mark’s fingers, swiftly targeting the rockets closing in on him. The rockets evaporated in a rush, shimmering, then gone. He spun around and launched himself at the game engine’s near-AI. He knew the systems alarms had to be ringing back in the real world and that he wouldn’t be alone with the game engine for long.
Only six minutes remained till Realm of the Bright Waters went online.
Andy stepped toward Heavener and her group, waving at Maj.
Maj’s eyes widened as she saw him.
“Hocus Pocus,” Andy mouthed slowly. He accessed another program from his own veeyar workspace and created a holo of an MP5 submachine gun from one of his training programs.
Maj gave a brief nod.
The movement alerted Heavener, who spun instantly and brought up the small pistol from her pocket. She grabbed Maj’s arm.
“Catch you international terrorists and industrial spies at a bad time?” Andy asked, raising the MP5. He squeezed the trigger and the ripsaw of autofire filled the hallway.
Heavener and her group dropped to the floor. Maj swept a hand across Heavener’s in a martial arts move that tore the woman’s grip from her arm.
Andy kept firing even when the ruby sights lit him up. Bullets hammered through his chest. He smiled. “Good shooting.”
“He’s a holo!” Heavener snarled, pushing herself up from the floor. “After the girl!”
Smiling, Andy accessed the spoof program Mark had written that they’d used in various games and hacking runs on the programs they’d been asked to test for flaws. He slammed it into the hotel’s holoprojector system, targeting Maj as she ran back inside the convention center.
Instantly, instead of one Maj fleeing through the crowd in the convention center, there were over a dozen. All of the holos were dressed exactly alike, and they ran in different directions, scattering through the crowd, crisscrossing each other’s tracks. In a heartbeat even Andy didn’t know which one was real.