"What did she say?"

  "She said she'd think about it. She told me yesterday that she was still thinking about it. She works in a convenience store, Catie. The figure was about three times her year's salary. And she's by herself, don't forget, and she has a little girl to support."

  "I don't suppose he left her a Net address," Catie said.

  "He said he'd come back in a few days and see what she had to say." George looked at his move as if he was most dissatisfied with it. "He told her not to mention it to anyone, or there could be trouble. She told me...and now she's scared. But she would have been scared even if she hadn't told me, she said. And she's scared for her little girl, too, for Carmen. Karen's not stupid. She knows trouble when she sees it. She temporized...out of shock, I think. She was never in any doubt that she wanted nothing to do with the offer. But now she's afraid of what the guy might say if she tells him no."

  Catie swallowed. This was something that James Winters was definitely going to need to hear about. As long as no one notices them contacting her... But naturally Net Force would have ways to do that discreetly.

  She swallowed again. "I don't suppose that anyone else on the team's had anyone approach them that way," Catie said.

  George shook his head. "If they have, I haven't heard about it. Got another move?" he said.

  "I'm thinking about it." But strategizing her next move was actually buried behind four or five other, more immediate concerns at the moment.

  When she looked up, she found George looking at her again. It was another of those distressed expressions, though this time he was at least trying to hide it. To Catie, the effect was simply as if he now had NOT REALLY UPSET painted on his forehead...and suddenly she knew what the problem was, or thought she did.

  "Look, I--"

  "George," Catie said, sounding extremely severe and for the moment not caring, "it's not like that. You think you have a monopoly on 'not married, not dating, not gay, and no plans'?"

  He just kept looking at her. Then he sagged. "Uh," he said, "maybe I'm doing you an injustice. It's just that it's rare...and seems to be getting rarer...to find friendship, in my situation. Just plain friendship. Sorry."

  "Well," Catie said, and let it sink in for a moment. "All right. What are you going to do?"

  "I don't know," he said. "Tomorrow morning is the draw. The play-offs will start on Thursday at the soonest, maybe Friday. Karen's going to have to do something. I've got to find a way to protect my team...."

  "If there's anything I can do to help," Catie said after a moment, "let me know."

  George got up slowly, looking down at the chessboard again.

  "Call me when you have a move," he said. "I'll talk to you later."

  And he went through the door that had been standing waiting for him off to one side, in the air, and it closed behind him.

  Catie sat very still for some while, considering possible moves in two very different games.

  Chapter 6.

  She took the predictable amount of teasing about being late for dinner, and Hal punished her for this slight on her father's cooking by the most straightforward means possible--eating most of the lasagna and leaving Catie just enough for one serving, and nothing at all for seconds.

  When she complained, her father threw his hands up. "It's all I could do to get him to leave the pattern on the plates," he said. "At least there's some sauce left. Make some pasta."

  Normally a turn of events like this would have left Catie furious. Tonight, though, she simply made pasta, completely confusing Hal, who had been expecting--looking forward to, in fact--a far more explosive response. When Catie finished gobbling up her pasta and went straight back into the family room to use the Net machine, she heard Hal saying under his breath to her father, "You think she's coming down with something?"

  She ignored him, got straight back into her workspace, and got back to work reviewing Caldera. Several hours passed, at the end of which her brain was buzzing with commands and obscure syntaxes that she had never thought she'd need any time soon.

  But I need them now, she thought, getting up out of the Comfy Chair at last and picking up, from the floor beside the chair where she had left it, Mark's shining green key.

  She pulled down a window to check the schedule he had sent her of the maintenance schedule for the ISF server. Theoretically no one would be in there until tomorrow morning sometime--local time, anyway. That was the afternoon for her, since the server itself, and most of the techs who managed it, were on the West Coast. All the same, Catie was twitching as she held the key up. "Space?" she said.

  "You're gonna get in trou-bllle...you're gonna get in trou-blle...." her workspace manager sang, sounding entirely too gleeful about it.

  "Not nearly as much as Mark Gridley's gonna be in when all this is over," Catie said grimly. "He's gonna wish the Surete had kept him to play with. Listen, you, just open a door to get me into the ISF server. The specs for the gateway are all right here. Don't deviate, or I'll pull your wires out, tie them to the tree in the front yard, and chase you around it."

  "Uh," said her workspace manager. An open gateway popped into existence in front of Catie. Through it she could see darkness, with green lines drawn through it, running away to eternity....

  "Keep this open in case I need to leave in a hurry," Catie said.

  "I, for one, intend to disavow any knowledge of your actions," said her workspace manager helpfully.

  "You do that," Catie said, and stepped through the doorway into the dark of the spat-volume server's space.

  She spent her first few minutes there just standing, looking around her, listening, for any sense or sign that anyone else might be here. But Catie heard nothing, saw nothing, but the Cartesian grid running off in its single plane into the empty darkness. Finally she lifted the key and pushed it into the darkness.

  Obediently it cracked open before her to show her the keyhole. She turned it, and found herself, not standing in space this time, but floating inside the spat volume at the heart of the "space station."

  "Workspace manager..." Catie said.

  "Listening, visitor."

  "Please show me the schematic of the server software that I viewed when I was last here."

  The image of the spat volume around her faded away, leaving her standing on the Descartean plane again. But this time the server's software structure towered up in front of her once more, a skyscraper's worth of code, all represented once more as squiggles and bright colors and straight lines and wavy lines and spheres, like a spaghettiand-meatball dinner with aspirations to architecture. Catie heaved a big sigh. "All right," she said to herself, "time to start trying to figure this thing out...."

  She sat down on the green-lined "floor" and considered where to begin.

  Elsewhere, hidden away in the depths of virtuality in a dim blue-lit bar that might or might not have genuinely existed somewhere else, two men more thoroughly wrapped in shadows than ever sat on either side of one of the marble tables and studied it and their drinks, trying to avoid having to look at one another. Even here, wearing seemings, neither of them raised his voice above a whisper...though the anger in their whispers plainly indicated that both of them would have liked to shout.

  "...They shouldn't have scored at all! Next time--"

  "Forget next time for the moment! We're not done with last time. And they did score." Darjan was glaring at Heming. "What do I have to do to get through to you how important this is? You need to have these routines correctly implemented by Thursday, and the people handling them clued in about what needs to be done, or there's going to be more than just your ass on the line, my friend." The words were spoken in a way that had nothing friendly about it at all.

  "So we'll have them ratchet the response up a level or two."

  "Better make sure it's ratcheted up enough...."

  "Too much," said Heming hotly, "and it's going to start being obvious to the players. Then where will you be? You'll have an independent investigation breathing down your back before you know what's happened. Or worse still, Net Force will get involved. And then you, my friend, will find out what having your ass on the line really looks like." He watched Darjan for his response.

  Darjan just stretched his legs out and turned his glass around on the table a couple more times. "Get it handled," he said. "There are enough bucks being bet on Chicago at the moment that it has to be right. The gentlemen upstairs want plenty of point spread on this result."

  "Look, I told you, it's being handled right now. Correction has already been put in, and the techs are training on the 'twinned' server right now. They've even suckered some spatball players into helping them test the volume."

  "Are you crazy? If the ISF--"

  "One of the people who's been around to reassure them is ISF...or so they've been told. Our corporate connection."

  Darjan still looked uneasy. "If word of that gets out--"

  "It won't. Our connection has impressed on all his minor-league 'helpers' how important it is to keep the news about the new server quiet, so as not to spoil the big publicity push when 'the people funding it' make the announcement. But the testing has been going on for a couple of days now, and the players haven't noticed a thing. You can practically pull the ball out of their hands and they assume it was their fault somehow."

  Darjan mulled that over. "All right. I wouldn't mind seeing one of these test sessions."

  "I can set that up for you any time. They're testing this afternoon, in fact. You can be an invisible watcher."

  "All right." He took a drink of his virtual martini. "There hasn't been anyone messing around with the genuine ISF server, has there?"

  "No need. Their own people don't have any reason to be there now. Their own routine checks have all passed off without incident. And there's no reason we would put our own operatives in there, or anywhere near it, so close to the play-offs starting. There's no need for it anyway. The 'remote controls' from our mirror server are all installed and ready to go."

  "Then why didn't they work last time?" Darjan said. "Dammit, that should have been another clean win for Chicago. Is that damn team that inept?"

  Heming frowned. "They can't all know about the 'adjustment,'" Heming said. "Unfortunately, a lot of them are honest. The team captain's dropped some broad hints in the right ears, but that's all he can do without having their own coach on his case. What do you want him to do, take out an ad on CNNSI saying 'This is how the volume has been fixed so we can win?' All he can do is direct play toward situations that our monitor can use to best advantage. After that, it's still up to the team."

  Darjan breathed out, annoyed. "I suppose," he said. "Well, I've made a visit or so myself in the past few days to see what can be done about the 'honesty' issue from inside several of the teams. We'll see how those pay off."

  "And don't forget about those 'maintenance' visits I told you about," Heming said. "The installation of the conditional switching in the South Florida players' Net machines. We've got three in already. Some of these guys are fairly anxious to make sure their machines are serviced before the play-offs...they've been making it easy for us, and we should be able to get the whole team seen to before they play anybody. The eavesdropping buffers we're installing will telegraph the players' physical movements to our monitor handling the mirror server a half a second or so before they go to the real one, and give our own handling routines a chance to react to their plays before they even actually happen in the spot volume. Think of it as insurance. Whatever happens, it's a technology we can use elsewhere after these play-offs, in all kinds of sports."

  Darjan still didn't look entirely reassured. "Well...it had better just go right this time, Heming. Otherwise your people and my people are the ones that will take the heat...and you and Iare inevitably going to get singed. If not burnt to a crisp."

  Heming shook his head. "Look, I understand your concern, but it's handled. Come by this afternoon for the 'training session' and see."

  Darjan nodded, still frowning, and had another drink. Around the two of them, the shadows folded in close.

  Two hours later Catie was still staring at the server software construct, from about halfway up its height--she had moved the "floor" up to look more closely at the way the solids symbolizing the images of the spat volume were hooked into the Caldera command substructure--and wondering, from the pain in her head, whether she was coming down with a migraine. Probably not, she thought. Mom said Gramma always said she felt sick before one. And I don't feel sick...just stupid.

  She rubbed her eyes and stood up for the first time in an hour or so. I guess I have to admit that Mark's right. It's not the imagery that's at fault. I've looked at all the "canned" images in the routine, and all the code for the imagery that's created "on the fly." Nothing's wrong with the code. The problem has to be somewhere else.

  There's nothing else I can do but start looking at all the rest of this to see if I can turn anything up.

  But if the Net Force people haven't seen anything...what in the world makes me think that I'm going to? Just more overconfidence. She blushed at the thought of what she was going to say to James Winters when they debriefed at the end of all this. "Sorry, I bit off more than I could chew, I don't have a clue what's going wrong."...So much for my chances of ever actually getting a job working for this man, or his organization....

  Catie stood there with her arms folded for a while, realizing that she might be looking at the beginning of the death of a dream. And what else do I do with my life if Net Force doesn't want me? Catie thought, despondent. The time after high school, which had looked like a whole spectrum of new beginnings, now started to look like a dead end. I guess I can find some kind of entry-level job in advertising art, something simple, or--

  Then Catie shook her head, feeling angry and helpless for the moment, but not quite beaten yet. The future would take care of itself, but right now there were other things to think about. For one thing, I'm getting moody...it's blood sugar, probably. I need a break.

  "Workspace management," Catie said.

  "Listening, visitor."

  "Hold this imagery in nonreadable memory for me, locked to my voiceprint. When I return, reset it."

  "Done." The structure vanished.

  Catie pushed the key into the darkness, and the gateway into her own space opened up again. She stepped through gratefully and waved it shut behind her. Immediately she felt a little more relaxed. All the while she'd been there she couldn't get rid of the idea that someone from the ISF was going to pop out of nowhere and demand to know what she was doing there. Or--in her more paranoid moments--she imagined that one of the shadowy people who'd been tampering with the space in the first place might come across her. She shivered at the thought.

  Catie chucked the key onto the Comfy Chair, and yawned. She was going to have to turn in soon, but meantime there were still problems to handle before bedtime. She was going to have to get some kind of report together for James Winters, regarding what George had told her. There were a few odds and ends of schoolwork that she still needed to handle...nothing serious, fortunately. And as she looked over at the chessboard, she realized that she'd promised George another move, and for all she knew, he was sitting up waiting for it, glad to have something to distract him from the tensions surrounding the "lottery" draw in the morning...and other things.

  She looked over the chessboard, taking a moment to more closely examine George's last move, and the state of the board in general. It was getting crowded toward the center of the chessboard as the beginning of the "mid-game" settled in. A lot of pieces were set to attack a lot of other pieces...but neither of them had started the shin-kicking yet. It was as if George was waiting to see what Catie would do, whether she was going to become the "aggressor" in this game. Though he's already getting pretty aggressive himself, Catie thought, eyeing the way George had set his bishops up to control the diagonals. Still...why wait to let him start the carnage? I'm sure in a mood to start a little myself at the moment.

  George was presently using one of his knights to threaten a couple of Catie's pawns in a "knight fork," but one of her own pawns was advanced far enough to be a threat to the knight in turn. Her attention until now had been on developing other pieces of her own. Now she let out a long annoyed breath, thinking Why not? She moved the pawn over one square diagonally, taking George's knight, and picked it up and carried it off the board to set it down on one side. "Space?"

  "The final f--"

  "Don't say it," Catie said, grim. "Just don't...I'm not in the mood. Send him that move, and make it snappy."

  "Uh, yes, ma'am, right away, ma'am."

  Catie sat down in the Comfy Chair again and contemplated the chessboard...but she wasn't really seeing it, for having made her move, her mind had now immediately reverted to the earlier problem. All that code. But I have to find a way to look at it and see if I can turn something up. I can't get rid of the idea that the imaging calls are being manipulated in some way that we're not anticipating.

  And what human minds can devise...

  Yawning, she got up again, went offline, and got up out of the implant chair to go make herself some more pasta.

  Catie was up at about six the next morning. Her father was asleep, but she actually caught her mother in the kitchen, making one last cup of coffee before heading to work. "Got a project in the works, honey?" her mom said, stirring the coffee in her big British Museum mug as she made her way to the kitchen table, where the usual pile of books was waiting to be taken back to work.

  "Yup," Catie said.

  "The one I'm thinking of?"

  "Yup," Catie said. She started making tea for herself, not unaware of her mother's eyes on her.

  "Well," her mom said, "be careful." And she didn't say anything else, possibly perceiving that Catie wasn't worth much until she got some breakfast in her, and was going to be careful anyway. She finished her coffee in silence, taking just a few minutes to stand in front of the fridge and read the headlines from the Washington Post that were scrolling down the LivePad, then she picked up her books and her shoulderbag, kissed Catie, and headed out the door.