Steel Rain by Nyx Smith Page A

secure the future.
    "This is where it happened," Freese says.
    The greenish haze infiltrates the scene. A whirling five-pointed star like the Matrix icon for the entire Fuchi private grid appears in the electron night just above Freese's iconic head. An oval portal rimmed in sizzling electric green rises out of the pavement of the exit ramp. Iconic sedans sent down the ramp pass through the sizzling oval and vanish into the black interior of the portal.
    Before Freese or his team can react, twenty million nuyen are gone.
    " What's happening ?" Freese shouts.
    Three of his deckers continue waving sedans down the ramp. They move like zombies, badly configured semi-autonomous knowbots, stilted, jerky, puppets on strings. Another ten million vanishes into the portal. Then Freese looks up.
    " Slag that fragger !" Freese shouts.
    One of his deckers draws a shimmering neon sidearm and opens fire on the whirling star above Freese's head. The bullets wink Sparky IC . The star spins into a blur. The bullets abruptly reverse direction and separate into a stream of whirling fragments. The decker screams. As the bullet fragments strike, his iconic body is immersed in a storm of sparking discharges like lightning flashes.
    Then he winks out.
    " Bucky , he's dead !" another decker shouts. " Jim's dead !"
    " This is impossible !" Freese shrieks.
    Three of the deckers direct an unbroken stream of sedans down the exit ramp and into the portal. Freese yanks an item from his police-style equipment belt. Trace and Burn! it winks. He fires a liquid stream at the whirling star and then suddenly he's screaming too and it's all going completely to shit.
    Freese slams through the walls of his temporary node and then Gordon's display screen goes blank.
    Gordon looks across his desk at Freese.
    "What the fuck happened?"
    Freese's face is gleaming with sweat. He looks considerably worse than a deckhead who's suffering from dump shock. He looks scared. "I'm not sure what happened."
    This is not an answer that Gordon likes. If someone offered to fling Freese out the nearest available window, Gordon would feel tempted. But that's purely an emotional response. He lights a fresh Platinum Select. "What's your theory?"
    "It's still evolving."
    Gordon leans back in his chair. He sips his coffee. "You tried to trace utility. You got dumped."
    Freese nods.
    "Your opposition used the Fuchi star for an icon. Internal Security?"
    Freese shakes his head. "There's no . . . there's no record of IntSec being involved. I checked."
    "Three of your deckers appeared to lose control of their icons."
    "We're not clear on exactly what happened with that."
    Gordon nods. "I'll tell you what happened. Somebody's got program code and talent as good as our best. What does that suggest?"
    Freese spends a while working that over, looking more anxious than before. "I'm not sure," he says finally. "I've been thinking about it. I don't think the hostile used program code that slipped out the back door. Nothing this hot ever slipped out."
    "Then what?"
    "Something new," Freese says. "The hostile scammed us. My temporary node turned green just before the attack. I think that was a deliberate effect. That's where the attack really started. I think what the hostile did was create a mirage. He superimposed his own code over the temporary node I constructed. A node within a node. Then, when I moved against him, I became in effect a decker intruding on a hostile node. He redirected my trace, and the redirect inserted tapeworm IC into the trace code. And the worm rode my signal right into my workstation CPU. I had to crash my workstation or the worm would've scrambled every pulse of hard memory I had."
    "Which tells us what?"
    Freese hesitates. "The slag's hot. His code is hot. His system, deck, whatever, is liquid fire. Hoi, I'm not even sure if what I just said is possible."
    "Did he come in through the Matrix?"
    "I got my team working on that. We're searching the archives for any indications.