Steel Rain by Nyx Smith

Special Administration? Evidence that will shortly be eradicated beyond any chance of recovery. "This is a record of the run?"
    "Yeah. Just the main bits."
    "You have records stored elsewhere?"
    "Uh, no." Freese shakes his head. "I figured I better be careful. Guano like this could cause trouble."
    Faintly, Gordon nods. "Good thinking."
    Freese smiles nervously.
    Gordon taps an optical key in the touch-sensitive top of his desk and an entire workstation console winks on. A display equipped with multiple displays and a full suite of data-ports rises out of the desktop. Gordon taps a few more optical keys and slides the chip from Freese into a port near the display's base. Another tap and the record file from Freese's chip begins executing.
    The first scene to appear is direct from the Fuchi private telecommunications grid—the floor of a narrow cavern formed by the cool jet cliffs of a pair of colossal datastores, soaring up infinitely tall into the black electron night. Between the two massive datastores burns the cobalt blue beam of a datastream, looking as hot as the interior of a nuclear furnace.
    "ID the stream," Gordon says.
    Freese replies, "Funds transactions between Fuchi Union Trust and Fuchi World Bank. An average of ten thousand transactions a second. And they're both on the Fuchi private grid."
    Simplifying the task of an intercept.
    On Gordon's display, five iconic figures now materialize beside the blazing data stream, Freese and his team of deckers. The sheer volume of the beam make the decker's icons seem puny and frail. Their iconic forms resemble construction workers: hard hats crowned by flashing blue strobes, blue-striped vests. All synchronized to match the blue of the datastream. They set out two lines of glowing blue traffic cones, and, between the two lines of cones, begin construction of a temporary node, a dataline junction that will vanish without a trace once the job is complete.
    It's a tactic they've used before. Gordon takes a drag from his Platinum Select and watches the milliseconds tick by on the counter at the top of his display screen. So far nothing unusual.
    Just down the datastream hovers a violet globe sizzling with red veins like the markings on a soccer ball. Probably Killer IC of sufficient strength to induce lethal feedback and fry the brain of any decker it attacks. Not a problem for Freese and his team unless they frag their Fuchi access codes or set off a system alert.
    Freese and his team open neon blue toolboxes. From the boxes they take jet black panels. They fit the panels together to form a large black box surrounding a section of the datastream. The box has two circular ports, allowing the datastream to pass untouched through the center of the box.
    Then they step through the walls of the box.
    And into a sculptured node.
    Freese and his deckers move into position on the verge of a vast virtual highway a thousand lanes wide and stretching off to infinity in both directions. Iconic sedans fill every lane, streaming along at a speed almost beyond comprehension. As each sedan approaches it flashes its value in nuyen. Freese and his deckers, now resembling police, pick out various sedans with jabbing fingers and wave them down a newly constructed exit ramp.
    Briefly, the exit ramp winks, Dataline To Secret Caribbean League Accounts . A counter in the exit ramp's pavement keeps a running tally: ten thousand nuyen, fifty thousand, a hundred and climbing. Freese's team is selective. The sedans they finger never total more than five digits in nuyen, never less than four. Nothing large enough to instigate an immediate alert, and that's all that matters.
    Someone somewhere will have to explain what happened to the missing funds, probably within a matter of hours. Not Gordon's problem. His problem is the Special Administration and Fuchi Americas' ruthless competition. If a VP in some banking subsidiary has to be sacrificed to the cause, it's a necessary expense. An investment to