Ambasadora (Book 1 of Ambasadora) (32 page)

Acid pink and rich blue arabesque
loops scrolled along silver half-meter portals in the back wall. These were the
only lights in the expansive room, aside from the twinkling stars on the
walkway.

Ahead of them, at least thirty
people waited in a dark line. One woman lay on the floor, singing to herself. A
couple near the middle kissed and groped each other, much to the entertainment
of those around them. Just in front of Sean and Sara, a group of Lower Caste
kids argued with an attendant over the price of admission; they finally left
grumbling.

No nurseries or academies for
them,
Sean thought. They were probably better off.

“They’re so healthy,”
Sara said.

“Who?” Sean asked.

She gestured toward the children
hurling back foul-mouthed insults at the attendant. “Their skin is clear,
their cheeks rosy, and their muscle tone is better than any of my cousins their
age. Most of my family would have to get little tweaks to attain that kind of
look. Where do these kids get that kind of money?”

“They don’t. That’s just how
they are naturally,” Sean said.

“Did you ever have any
cosmetic alterations?” she asked.

“No.” He mused at her
naivete, but could forgive Sara for assuming everyone who was attractive owed
their looks to selective breeding or cosmetic enhancements. That’s how most
Uppers viewed the world. She was only now learning to see life from a different
perspective. “The diversity of genes among Lowers benefits them in a lot
of ways.”

“You’re a good example of
that,” she said.

Her last comment made him feel
like he’d given her the wrong impression. The Armadan traits he received from
his father benefited him just as much as everything his mother passed onto him.

A few meters away three sharp
beeps sounded from a portal whose round façade pulsed with an intense white
light. The portal and the tube it was attached to slid out from the wall. The
v-gamer inside convulsed, vomit splattered over his face and neck.

Attendants pulled the man out,
plunged a syringe of stims into his leg, and whisked him onto a gurney and
through a back hallway with practiced precision, not even bothering to tear the
eye mask from his face. A woman in coveralls raced to the tube and flushed it
with a pale green cleaner.

“He dialed up too high.
Worked himself into a seizure,” Sean said. “Then couldn’t
unplug.”

Sara covered her nose. “Are
you getting in one of those?”

“Not a chance.”

Another attendant appeared from a
hidden door on the wall to their right.

“Cryer?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“This way.”

Sean took Sara’s hand and led her
through the doorway. The pressure of her fingers around his made his arm
tingle. He found it hard to focus when she was near him. Once they got out of
this mess, he wouldn’t have to focus on anything but her.

The room looked like a miniature
of their skybox without the windows.

Sean waited for the attendant to
exit.

“This shouldn’t take more
than a few minutes,” Sean said. “Don’t worry if my arms and legs twitch.
It’s just reflexes.”

“You’re not going to come
out of this like that last guy, are you?”

Sean took her hand and kissed it;
that was a reflex, too. “If you knew how many times I’ve done this….”
Or knew how many times he’d died in the V-side.

The thought that this time could
bring real death entered his mind. He tried to dismiss it as a left-over bit of
paranoia, but knew it wasn’t. Ephemerata proved that sides had been chosen, and
Sean had ended up on the wrong one. He kissed Sara as though it might be their
last.

“Maybe you shouldn’t do
this,” she whispered, her forehead against his.

“I have to. We have to buy
our lives back.”

He lay on the bed before he
changed his mind. “I’ll be back before you know it.” He closed his
eyes, wishing he had his lenses to make the insertion easier. Instead, he had
to rely on an old implant behind his ocular nerve. He slowed his breathing and
stared at the blackness behind his lids. The seconds ticked by like they were
years, but Sean kept his meditation. As the coldness of insertion finally crept
into his mind, he was vaguely aware of Sara curling up next to him, her head on
his chest.

The watery lobby lapped at Zak’s
raft. He ignored the blue globes hovering around him and summoned a dark sky
through his programs. Stars appeared. The raft launched toward them, forcing a
feeling of inertia on his stomach.

Within seconds he was just
beneath the sky. This close the stars hung down as shimmering teardrops above
his head, each one a portal to a different world. An infinite universe.

“Which of you is hiding the
intel dump?”

Zak reached up and combed his
fingers through the spongy constellations. They felt wet to the touch, but left
no moisture on his skin. Six separate sweeps revealed nothing. The coordinates
led to this sector; it had to be there.

Or he was screwed.

A buzzing in his left middle
finger alerted him he’d found the one he wanted. He pushed his finger into the
membrane. The teardrop stretched down and drew Zak into its protective bubble.
Then the sky shed its tear into the purple sea below.

There was no impact with the
water’s surface; the bubble’s velocity remained steady. Smaller aerated
bubbles, representing other users, rushed past Zak’s clear transport on all
sides, yet he heard nothing. A peace settled upon him as increasing pressure
squeezed the membrane tighter.

In the illuminated depths of this
vast sea, Zak monitored a shadow falling parallel with him. The bubbles
obscured its form, but he knew it was moving,
or swimming
, closer. Three
hundred meters, perhaps. It picked up speed. Zak calculated the rate of
acceleration with dormant programs.

One hundred twenty meters and
closing.

Ninety.

Maybe he really was screwed.

Thirty.

The shadow blackened the water in
its wake as it closed on Zak. His heart rate and blood pressure sky-rocketed.
He forced himself to remember this was just some architect’s game, an
over-the-top construction meant to inspire awe and fear in the user, but even
with his experience, too much of the V-side felt real. A shock rippled through him
as the shadow engulfed him.

Complete darkness. Silence. A
sucking noise from near his feet. The tickling probe of his idents. He held his
breath while waiting to clear fragger security programs. His fate was sealed,
as it were; if Ephemerata were wrong about his idents being linked to the dump
he’d be dead before he realized she was wrong.

The bubble burst.

Zak landed on his feet in a sunny
field of green and blue feathers. The ocean was nowhere to be seen.

The landscape stretched on in all
directions, no landmarks marred the downy meadow except for one droopy tree
thirty meters away. Zak moved in that direction, his booted feet kicking up
feathers along the way. Instead of settling back to the ground, they remained
suspended in the air just above his knees. There would be no covering his
trail, but he aimed to be in and out before another user arrived.

He slowed to a cautious crouch
walk when he noticed a circular object nestled in the tree’s black roots. If it
were a trap, someone went to great lengths to lure him here when they could
have disposed of him in the ocean lobby upon insertion. Still, he scanned the
horizon to be sure he was alone. He reached the tree and saw a ceramic pot
among the roots.

Zak tested the lid with a finger;
data streamed through him. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t think. Just had to let
the energy transfer continue. He willed himself to breathe, knowing his body
would respond in kind back at the v-game parlor. He believed Sara would pull
him out once she saw him in distress…if she could.

A pain stabbed behind his eyes
with the final information surge. Zak fell to his knees. Feathers shot into the
air around him and hovered there like a cloak. He pushed himself up by his
elbows, sorting out the muddling in his head. He recognized the tickle of the
intel dump in the back of his mind. He looked for the pot, but it was gone.

He got to his knees and waited
while the pain subsided and his disorientation cleared. A large hand reached
down to help him up. Cuzco pulled him to his feet and waited for him to speak.

“What are you doing
here?” Zak asked. The big guy was the last person Zak would have suspected
of stealing the data and letting him take the fall. “Why’d you set me up,
Cuzco?”

Cuzco let go of Zak’s arm and
flexed big fingers around a crafter. “I don’t know what you’re talking
about. I was just monitoring the trap we set. The trap that snared you like a
little bird.”

We?

“I’m here to find out who’s
messing with me.” Zak tried distracting Cuzco while he called up
compression programs. The only way he’d be able to transfer the dump to safe
storage in his hidden cache would be to zip the file. He’d decompress it and
sift through it when he wasn’t at the bad end of a weapon.

“I think you came here to
retrieve the data you stole.”

“You know that’s not right,
Cuzco.” Zak’s transfer was only a third complete. “I don’t know who
you are in the real world or even in this one, but I believe you’re a fragger
because the ideology fits.”

“From what I hear, you’re
sporting a new ideology.”

Three more portals deposited
Topper, Vishneu, and Ariel in a semi-circle around Zak.

Topper leveled a cender at Zak’s
chest.

“Traitor,” Vishneu
said.

“Get those out of my
face.” Zak grabbed Vishneu’s wrist and twisted the cender from his grasp.

Eighty percent uploaded.

Topper fired once, but the shot
went wild. The tip of Zak’s cender pressed into Topper’s reptilian neck.

“I’m not here for a
brawl,” Zak said. “We’ve got problems in the organization.”

“Like nodes who turn
traitor?” Vishneu asked.

“Not true.” Zak kept an
eye on Vishneu’s weapon.

A faint buzzing brushed a far
corner of Zak’s mind. The count stopped at ninety-six percent. Was it feedback?
The relentless traffic in v-game parlors often taxed the stream.

“You’re not responsible for
the intel dump, then?” Topper asked. “And you didn’t cause the
destruction on Tampa Three?”

“Even though your ident
signatures are all over it?” Cuzco added.

“Someone hacked my
signature.” The buzz in Zak’s mind oscillated.

“Impossible.” Cuzco was
still the most even-tempered of the group, but even his patience appeared to be
wearing thin.

“You know it can be
done.” Zak tried to concentrate, to think of the right thing to say, but
the buzzing interfered with his thoughts. A searcher program groped his mind.

Zak released tracing programs to
find the source. They were illegal in the V-side, but most everything he did
was illegal. Which was the only way he’d ever know about programs like tracers
and searchers.

Cuzco was speaking, but Zak
couldn’t hear him over the program’s buzz. The intensity told him the searcher
had to be local.

Who—

Zak fired three rounds into
Ariel’s head. Cuzco knocked the weapon from Zak’s hand. The others opened fire.
Zak called up his unplug codes, but Ariel had already locked him out. Zak’s
heart rate increased and his muscles twitched as his contingency threatened to
assassinate him. He stumbled to his feet and called upon an emergency weapons
program. As cender fire bit into his back, a dozen razor discs materialized
over his head and launched at his contingency.

Explosions blossomed around the
three assailants, buying Zak precious seconds to scan the data Ephemerata had
given him.

There!
Just as he had
hoped, she provided him with a lockpick.

Zak concentrated on unlocking his
codes amidst the onslaught of pain from cender and crafter blasts. He almost
had it. An interceptor program latched onto the lockpick, unraveling its code
at an alarming rate. Zak struggled to focus, to keep his head clear, working
just milliseconds ahead of the interceptor. The tracer reported back. It had
Ariel’s plug-in location. She was somewhere in Shocker’s.

His guard slipped at the
revelation. The weapon fire became too much for him. His torn and lifeless body
had nothing left.

He thought of Sara, out there
watching him die. He thought of her face and how she looked at him like no one
else ever had, how she felt in his arms. He’d been prepared to head to the
Otherside so many times before, but now felt cheated because he had her. A
searing white light burned into his vision and all he could hear was ringing.
As the world slipped away, he wondered if this what his brother and his father
saw as they died.

“Wake up!”

Sara shook Sean again, calling
his name in a panic.

His limbs twitched and sweat
poured down his face and chest, like he was in shock. Then his entire body
started to convulse. She didn’t know what to do, didn’t know the first thing
about the V-side, or how to get Sean out of it. When they had watched the
attendants carry that man out earlier, Sean mentioned something about not
unplugging in time. That meant she had to break his connection to the V-side.

She spotted a wireless station in
the wall. Ripping the cover away, revealed a mess of wires and an emergency
jack coiled up with its plastic-coated cord. If she cut the power, would that
work? Probably not, or the attendants would have done that for the man earlier.
She abandoned that idea and felt along the inside of Sean’s belt for stim
patches. Maybe she could pump enough adrenaline and stimulants into him that
he’d wake up. She found five patches and three injectors about the same size,
then caught the side of her finger on something sharp. At first she thought she
had accidentally triggered an injector, but instead, she pulled a thin razor
disc from its sheath on the inside of his belt.