From up ahead, two yellows appeared to be walking in line. They didn"t pay any attention to Chris as they marched toward the checkpoint.

I"m just a lowly blue to them, he thought as they tromped past him.

An impulse seized Chris and turned him around. He fell into place behind the two yellows. The two strode up to the checkpoint and the leader paused, most likely giving some kind of authorization with his link. Then they resumed, Chris in tow.

"Is the blue in your party?" said the turret voice through Chris"s link.

s.h.i.t.

The yellows turned around. They stared at him with their flat eye-plated helmets for what seemed like eternity. Then the leader shrugged.

"Yes. He"s with us."

Chris couldn"t believe it. It seemed that maybe the second yellow didn"t believe it either, because he turned to catch a glance at the leader. Then both yellows turned around and resumed their course. Chris followed. His heartbeat drummed in his chest. He"d taken a risk and it had paid off! Chris felt the thrill of progress on a long-intractable problem.

They entered a lab densely packed with equipment. His link received a list of services from the machines. Many of the services were described in highly technical jargon that he didn"t recognize. He couldn"t process it all at once. The yellows didn"t waver, keeping on their course. They reached the far door and left the lab without looking back.

It struck Chris that they may have purposefully avoided looking back at him. Or were they just too bored with this place to look around?

Chris stopped and downloaded some test results. Testing of what, he had no idea. He drowned in unfamiliar terminology. And he didn"t care too much; after all, they were bound to be doing a bunch of experiments out here away from the UNSF. Who knows what kind of stuff VG had dreamed up? Why did that yellow let me in here? Maybe it"s part of the game.

He spotted another door in the corner. He almost walked straight through it, but a warning came through his link.

"Warning. Now entering maintenance dock. All personnel working in the dock should don vacuum suits."

Chris saw red labels displayed on the wall around the door, and he knew this would be only one of half a dozen safety procedures. The computer would never open a dock to s.p.a.ce with an unprotected human inside it. He waived the safety check and manually actuated the door. He saw a wide empty floor beyond and stepped through into the dock.

"d.a.m.n."

The open vault shocked Chris. At least fifty meters of open air sprawled in each direction, more room than he"d seen since leaving Earth. Chris"s eyes immediately found a gray shape the size of a small house dominating the center. It reminded him of the engine of a bullet train. The sleek form had perhaps a dozen breaks dotted across its top surface. Banks of bright lights on long swivel arms glared down on several spots of the device.

Some kind of secret project, Chris thought. Suddenly, he doubted his theory about a challenge. Would he get in big trouble for seeing this? Chris turned his head in every direction, trying to get a full view of the bay from within his helmet. He felt like someone must be there who would discover him, but he didn"t see anyone.

He searched for camera bubbles on the walls and ceiling but didn"t spot any. If they existed, they had been miniaturized or camouflaged. He thought that sometimes they wanted you to see the cameras and sometimes they didn"t. But he knew his link would log his movements throughout the station. Anyone who wanted to check up on him could find out he"d been here. His presence might have already flagged a security robot.

Chris overcame the irrational urge to break away and run from the room. He stepped up to the smooth construct with tentative footsteps.

What the h.e.l.l is it? It could be anything. A deep s.p.a.ce fighter craft? The outside has to be a hull. This thing operates in the vacuum of s.p.a.ce. Am I overestimating this? It could be a simple exploration drone. But aren"t those much smaller unless they are destined for the deepest reaches of the solar system?

Chris walked back toward the door and paused to access the services through his link again. He downloaded several files he found here and there, trying to h.o.a.rd information for later. His link cache could hold a huge amount of information, but he concentrated on finding summaries and results rather than grabbing loads of data that wouldn"t mean anything to him.

Then Chris crept to a ma.s.sive metal door at the other side of the bay. He gave in to the instinct to move quietly and quickly. Beyond the door, he saw another security checkpoint, guarding the way out of the protected zone. He held his breath and walked past the turrets. The voice didn"t say anything. He knew that if they reviewed any security records that he"d be caught, but he still felt a primal urge to escape.

Chris found an atrium and sat down to contemplate what he"d found. Whatever it was, it had to be important to warrant a large empty section on a station millions of miles from Earth. He felt dread at what he"d done, going into the area, treating it like a game, but what if it wasn"t? Would they fire him and undo all his years at VG?

When he returned to his quarters, Cinmei greeted him immediately.

"Welcome back," she smiled. He half-smiled back inside his helmet, but his reaction to her was poisoned by his knowledge that it couldn"t be sincere.

"Thanks," he said. Cinmei helped him remove his helmet and the plastic cuira.s.s.

"Would you like ma.s.sage? The gear is heavy."

"Ah, uhm, sure."

Cinmei pointed to one side of the room. She walked ahead of him and touched an invisible panel. A white ma.s.sage cot slid out from the mirrored wall.

She has to use a touch control because she doesn"t have a link. Could I live like that? No. Surely, it would just be better to die, unless there was some hope of getting a link eventually.

Chris pulled off the rest of his gear and left it where it fell. He collapsed onto the white surface and immediately Cinmei"s hands began working on his back.

"How it go today?" she asked after a minute.

"Not good at first. But some good things came up later," he said. "Some weird things."

"What is weird? I mean ... what things?" she said, fl.u.s.tered with her poor English.

"I found a strange place today. A place I wasn"t supposed to find. Or ... maybe a place I was supposed to find, I"m not sure."

"What place?"

"I don"t really know. It"s a big hangar with some kind of s.p.a.cecraft, or missile or something. You haven"t heard anything?"

"No."

"You may have been there and forgotten. I noticed that some of the people coming out of there had forgotten what they"d seen. Or pretended to anyway."

"How is that?"

"I don"t know. Could be some gas or something. A security measure, maybe."

Cinmei remained silent.

"Well they may come for me anytime now. I wasn"t supposed to be there."

Cinmei ma.s.saged his shoulders for a few more seconds in silence.

"So you sneak around like spy? Very brave."

"Oh, not really," Chris said.

"You going to find out what the thing is ... the missile?"

"I hope so."

"How you find out what it is?"

"Hrm, I haven"t gotten that far yet."

A suspicion arose about her questions. Was Cinmei reporting on him? Chris decided to get a little insurance.

"I only do it because I think that"s what VG expects of me," he clarified. "I think this whole thing is a test, and I"m trying to get to the bottom of it."

"I sure you right," she said. "You are very smart. Must be, to come here."

"Thanks."

They finished the ma.s.sage in silence. Chris got up and started preparing himself for sleep using the VG toiletries. He wondered where his stuff was. Probably drifting through the cold depths of s.p.a.ce.

He considered Cinmei again. He found her beautiful and content. He envied her serenity and her ability to accept her role here so gracefully. An insistent need pestered him. Should he ask her to join him in the bedroom? If she served as his watchdog that could be a bad move. He struggled for a moment, and then decided to ask her politely. Surely, he wouldn"t be the first to explore the limits of her servitude in that direction.

He padded out to the edge of the carpet in the bedroom toward the marble floor of the central living area. A guilt offensive struggled to stop him, but he refused to consider it now that he"d set his idea in motion. He saw Cinmei across the room. He opened his mouth to speak, but something was wrong. She stared down at the wall, unmoving.

d.a.m.n.

Chris knew that look. Cinmei was focused on an internal interface. She had a link after all! She had to be reporting to VG at this very moment.

s.h.i.t.

Chris skittered back into the bedroom with a clumsy back step and whirl. His panicked retreat ended painfully when he smashed his toe against the bed.

"G.o.dd.a.m.n!" he yelled.

Cinmei appeared in a second.

"What wrong?" she asked.

"Argh, my ... toe," Chris muttered. "Ah, nothing, I smashed the h.e.l.l out of my toe, that"s all, no problem."

"It is broken?"

"No. No, it"s fine, thank you. I"ll see you tomorrow."

"Yes, good night."

Chris slipped into the lavish bed, but couldn"t sleep. He waited for VG security to arrive. He rummaged through the files he"d downloaded from the restricted area. He couldn"t make sense of most of it. They looked to be conducting tests on other materials unrelated to the missile-thing. It seemed impossible that he could have totally missed any information related to it.

After an hour, he decided security wasn"t going to show up. He started to think that meant he was on the right track after all. Now, excitement replaced the dread, and he still couldn"t sleep. Finally, he took a sleeping pill and drifted off while trying to figure out what he"d missed.

Six.

Aldriena searched for a glimpse of the kids below her through an opening in the leaves. She saw Verlerie clearly. Part of Dad"je danced in and out of her view. There had to be others in the group, but she couldn"t spot them from her perch in the tree. The Brazilian teenagers inevitably ventured outside at the end of the month, searching for stimulation in the face of their prematurely expended VR quotas. Most of the kids never had the discipline to budget their hours correctly.

The voices filtered up to her aerie. At sixteen years, she ma.s.sed only forty-five kilos, barely enough to bend the scaly branch she balanced on. She strained to catch the conversation.

"Did you see that guy Volare? The water director"s kid from Europe. He"s so ... well, he"s jammin"!"

Verlerie smiled. "I"d snark him. Would you?"

Dad"je nodded. "Snark him? I"d do more than that!"

Laughter came from below, competing with the sound of rustling leaves. She lost track of the conversation for a moment.

"He"s waiting for Aldriena," Dad"je was saying. Aldriena couldn"t see whom Dad"je meant.

"Give it up," Verlerie said. "Aldriena won"t. She don"t."

"We snarked it out fine before," said Garnite. "Twice."

Garnite was a boy who tolerated Aldriena on occasion because of his own low social ranking. He had been nicer to her lately.

"Virtual doesn"t count. I mean for real. She don"t jack boys for real," Verlerie said.

Yavon"s voice joined the conversation. "Aldriena don"t jack girls for real either. Like Verl said, she just don"t."

"She"s only a j.a.p," another male voice said. "But I"d do it with her. Just to see what it"d be like."

More laughter.

"Yeah, me too! Why not?"

The hot trickle of a tear tickled her cheek. She swiped it away with her fingertips. They had all hated her when she and her father had moved here from j.a.pan as refugees. She always stood out and they had made her pay for it dozens of times.

At first, she had convinced herself that if she spoke their language, they would accept her. She had studied hard, brought her accent into line, and dressed to the Brazilian norm. She had tried her best to correct every aberration of her Asian behavior. It didn"t make any difference. They had still made her the b.u.t.t of their jokes, ignored her in line, and avoided her company.

Finally, when she saw that they wouldn"t accept her as an equal, she had reverted to previous course and embraced her differences. She stopped trying to hide her eyes behind long bangs of straight black hair and started speaking j.a.panese with her father again. Her rebellious side grew until she acted different simply to spite them.

She had not realized the other kids noticed she remained a grind virgin, although she had done it on the net a few times. She"d also had no idea that Garnite seemed interested in her as something more than a one-shot virtual partner. It sounded like a couple of the boys had noticed her transformation from a flat-chested tomboy into a sleek teenage girl with a few curves in the right places. The other girls in her cla.s.s with soft bodies and slow minds were little more than slugs, but Aldriena had stayed wiry and strong by spending as much time in the real world as the virtual ones.

So now the boys wanted her because she had grown into a beautiful woman? The corner of Aldriena"s tight set mouth twitched as more tears welled in her eyes. She swore she would learn to use their interest against them.

Aldriena watched the s.p.a.ce station approach through an external camera view piped into her link. She played a role even more tenuous than usual. She often watched while a computer controlled the landing sequence as she did now, but this time, it wasn"t even the Silvado"s computer. Her courier nestled in a cargo bay of a slow barge, bringing hydrogen from the outer solar system to the power-hungry station named Xanadu.

Black Core operatives on the station covered her approach. She didn"t want to attract the attention of the local authorities ... yet. They"d gone through such trouble to get her here in secret. A mix-up in the command and control center causing a delayed surveillance order. A convenient software glitch in the nearest deep s.p.a.ce radar pod. Now, a stealth insert into Xanadu, purchased at great cost from another corporation.

Yet, she visited solely to be seen. She begrudgingly gave her superiors credit this time-they had devised a skillful deception. She felt the barge docking at the central hub of the triple pinwheel of Xanadu. Wearing an ultralight vac suit, she exited the Silvado into a pressurized section of the barge. She followed the familiar ephemeral green line from her link through a maze of piping and tanks. Her hands and feet stuck to the floor and walls as necessary to keep her from drifting away in the absence of acceleration.

She entered a sterile room of red and white. A panel of manual valve controls lined one wall, and a bank of repair equipment dominated another. A dark-haired man waited for her there with a fat red suitcase opened up on the floor. He wore a blue maintenance worker"s uniform, a single-piece vac suit much thicker and stronger than Aldriena"s thin temporary one.

"Niachi," the man said. He looked at her with gentle eyes. She realized his face was perfect. Not a single errant strand wandered from his clean-cut hair. His skin stretched smooth and flawless across the pleasing lines of his face.