Ryland gave his brother the abbreviated version of Revelle Lucerne's story, finishing up just about the time they reached the north end of the arcade.

"So you need some e-work from me on the tap somebody's got on the lady's PDL, and Downtown info on who the players might be."

"As a starting point, at least."

"I see. Second part's easy; Falcone's is on Slashers turf. That's a mostly-Newman street gang; they go in for a lot of technoflash. The area used to be controlled by Hideki Takamura, but from what I hear he got taken out by 32nd WORKS before they belly-upped and the locals ended up picking up the pieces."

The hunters looked at him curiously.

"A gang?" Ryland asked. "Are they anyone special?" Back on Coral, some gangs were as good as criminal cartels, with operations that ran to multiple cities and business profiles that matched or exceeded those of traditional syndicates. But that was Coral, and it wasn't likely that such a gang could have gotten enough of its members in among the colonists to become a major factor.

The answer verified their thoughts.

"Nah, just a bunch of local street fighters. They basically take a percentage off the skin trade, chem-dealers, and wire merchants in the area, do the protection racket, and hire themselves out for strong-arm stuff. I figure they've got maybe three months before they either have to join up with a bigger fish or get eaten by one."

"That changes things, then," Ryland said. "Loose local control of the area means that the bar's probably not important in the way we thought."

"Not the ownership, you mean?" Lyon asked.

"Right. But the gang could be a lead. A beating and a knifing sound like 'strong-arm stuff' to me." He thought for a moment. "Kendric, was Justine's visit to her dealer a regular appointment?"

"No, 'cause she was trying to cut the wire, at least sometimes. She'd really stretch out her supply when she was, though she'd burn through 'em pretty fast otherwise." Wire merchants sold preprogrammed fantasy scenarios to their addicts, which would self-delete after a few plays. They were hard-coded to chips most of the time, to make it harder for a net-dancer to undo that part of the code. It wasn't impossible, but it required time and talent and was only one fantasy per program anyway, so the damage potential didn't cut too deeply into anyone's profits.

"So essentially, the people sending the message couldn't have known off the top of their heads to have someone waiting for Justine at that place and time."

"Surveillance," Lyon agreed. "The watcher saw her come out alone, called ahead, and had someone waiting for her."

"You haven't been home since then, have you?" Ryland asked.

"No way. I figured if they knew about me, they'd be watching to see if I was going along with their program."

"Which you already were figuring you weren't, because going to ground is a pretty big tip-off that you were at least thinking about not doing what they said. But maybe you're having second thoughts. Maybe you've decided this is too big, too risky for you, and there's no reason to stick out your neck for my sake."

"Hey, what the hell?" Kendric's temper flared. "What do you take me for?"

"A decoy, playing the part," Lyon said. "Which if he wasn't so impressed by his own cleverness, he'd have said outright."

"You take all the fun out of it."

She shrugged.

"A good partner keeps her allies' feet on the ground."

"So basically, I'm gonna go home, like I'd had second thoughts about playing it cute. And while I'm plopping my hind end in a chair, you're going to be seeing who's watching me do that."

Ryland smirked.

"Exactly. While we're doing that, Lyon, why don't you head over to Falcone's and lean on Justine's wire merchant? He'd either have seen the thugs or actually got warned off by them."

"All right, but shouldn't the jobs be reversed? I'm better at spotting surveillance since I'm not as vulnerable to camouflage and other tricks."

"Yes, but you're also better at intimidation, and by a considerable amount."

"Guy in a dress doesn't have a lot of street cred," Kendric agreed.

"At least not until he torches the first person who laughs," Lyon noted. Ryland was quite devastating in battle with his brutal waves of techniques. "But I see your point."

"The other good thing about going back to my res-unit is that I can get my hands on my equipment to get started on the e-side of things. Can't run without a track, right?" He described the wire merchant to Lyon.

"We'll touch base by simple-mail so we can agree when and where to reconnect or if we should follow up on anything else separately," Ryland told her. Lyon nodded.

"All right. And you two, try and keep an eye on each others' backs while I'm not there to do it for you."

The brothers looked at one another.

"She always such a worrywart?" Kendric asked, jerking a thumb towards Lyon.

"She can't help it. She's programmed that way."

"Men!"

~X X X~

Although she'd warned the organics to look out, it was Lyon herself who kept a close watch on her surroundings, diverting an added level of her processing power to threat analysis, fields of fire, and tracking and drawing conclusions about the Downtown denizens she moved among. From sleazers and gang members to beggars, wireheads, and addicts, everyone here had some reason, personal or external, why they were drawn to the slum rather than taking part in the ordinary life of Pioneer 2's society. From what she'd observed, it was hardly a phenomenon exclusive to Downtown. The dynamics of predator and prey, users and used, were in play among all levels of society, from soldiers and officials to traders, scientists, and, yes, hunters.

It seemed to be a universal truth of the human (or newman or android) condition, and she wondered what it would take to get people to rally together and strive for a better life for all. The environmental deterioration on Coral, the trek to a new world, the sudden destruction of the Pioneer 1 settlement, none of these things had affected the usual business of greed, selfishness, and treachery. Maybe the extremist fringe was right that the only way to truly cleanse society was to blow the whole damn thing up and start over, a lunatic solution that ignored the fact the reason to cleanse society was for the good of the people in it.

That was a common problem with idealists, she'd noted. They fought so hard, devoted so much energy and thought to their cause that they ended up forgetting why the cause had existed in the first place. So did freedom fighters trying to throw off a tyrant's yoke become terrorists slaughtering everyone and religious movements bringing enlightenment turn into inquisitions slaughtering the infidel.

She flagged for later diagnostics the apparent link her mind had made between enhanced security perception and philosophical musings on social engineering, then set the train of thought aside as she approached the street corner.

The man Kendric had described as Eddy was there, under a light pole whose lamp had been blasted out by weapons fire. Unlike on planetside cities, where such lights would be extinguished by criminals seeking cover, the ambient light of the shipboard city made the act largely symbolic, vandalism as entertainment.

Eddy was human, tall and thin, with brown hair worn long to fall across the shoulders of his tan duster. The coat, in combination with his broad-brimmed hat ornamented by a band of beaten metal discs, suggested mystery, perhaps even magic. That was what the wire merchant was selling: a few moments of magic in among the dreary facts of existence. The fact that his magic was illusory, addictive, and ultimately destructive did not concern him.

He smiled as Lyon approached him, showing too many teeth.

"Hello, my fine lady. What may I do for you today?"

"You are Eddy?"

"That I am."

"I'm looking to make a purchase."

"I don't get many android customers." An android could hook up to a hotwire fantasy, but since they would experience the sensory input as data, they wouldn't suffer any of the effects of wireburn. However, there were relatively few who cared to bother, because they could also easily perceive all the differences between the programmed fantasy and reality, and almost always found the virtual world lacking.

"You came highly recommended."

"Did I, now? Mind if I ask by whom?"

"Justine Trent."

That did it. The flash of recognition in his eyes, but more than that the apprehension. He'd known his customers, but here he knew enough that something bad had gone down in connection with this one.

"Oh, good," Lyon said. "I don't need to waste my time with long-winded explanations."

He spun and bolted, rushing down the street. Lyon gave chase at once, running smoothly. One advantage of being an android, of course, was that she didn't have to worry about getting tired from continued effort or exercise, but while that was useful over the long haul she still pushed her speed. Eddy no doubt knew this warren like the back of his hand and could duck into some bolthole if she gave him a chance. He ducked down an alley, but she was going faster and dove at him in a flying tackle. Her shoulder crashed hard into his lower back, making him grunt in pain, and she closed her arms around him to make sure he was dragged down. Lyon got up first, fisting her grip in the back of his coat.

"Hey, wha's' all this?" muttered a bleary, sleep-drunk voice. A beggar in ragged clothes was curled up against the wall in a shelter made from a packing crate, and the noise of the collision had woken him up.

"I beg your pardon," Lyon said, "but this is a private conversation. Would you mind giving us a few moments alone?"

"Wha—? Hey, this is my—"

She handed him ten meseta.

"For the inconvenience."

"Okay, but don't you touch anything," the beggar said, pushing himself to his feet and scrambling off. Lyon couldn't help but smile at the encounter.

"Now, Eddy, about that conversation..."

She pulled him upright, but instead of giving in peacefully, he twisted his wrist, dropping a knife into his palm from a spring-loaded sheath kept up his sleeve. Eddy whirled, slashing out at the android's side, but although the non-Photon blade would do little more than scratch her armor, she didn't even allow it to connect, driving her elbow down hard into his forearm. He dropped the knife, and she kicked it skittering down the alley before hammering her knee up hard into his guts. Eddy gagged, and she grabbed him by the lapels and shoved him hard into the alley wall.

"That wasn't very nice. A girl might get to feeling unwanted with a reception like that."

"W—why are you after me? I didn't tell anybody anything!"

Ah, Lyon thought. He appears to be suffering from a misapprehension.

"I see. But you've realized already that there's only one way to insure that will remain so or else you wouldn't be running from me." She waited a pause to let that knowledge hit his conscious mind, confirming what his subconscious fear was telling him. "Luckily for you, silence is the last thing that I want from you."

The problem now, of course, was that if he was that afraid of whomever had told him to keep his mouth shut, he might be inclined to obey them. There were a number of ways to play it out to try and break down that resistance; she'd have to wait and see which direction to take things.

"You're...you're not..."

"I'm asking the questions here," she snapped. "Your job is to give answers about the attack on Justine Trent."

"I don't know anything! She hasn't made a buy from me in days!"

Lyon sighed.

"And yet you ran away at the mention of her name. Eddy, can you really be so dumb as to think anyone at all would believe you?" She paused again, then glared straight into his eyes. Most organics found the blank blue stare of her eye-lights to be unnerving in their cold, obviously inhuman look, and Eddy was no exception. He tried to look away, but she released his coat with one hand and cupped his chin to hold his head in place. "You get that one for free, because it was so pathetic," she said. "From now on, the lies are going to cost you."

"I...I don't know anything, I said. I wasn't even there!"

"Yes, Eddy, I know. But you were watching, weren't you? And you're afraid that someone knows it."

She let that sink in for half a tenth-beat.

"They warned you off your corner, didn't they? And they had either the rep or the muscle to get you to move it. But you hung around and watched, maybe from inside the bar, because you figured that it might give you an angle."

"I...I..."

"Only now, you're asking yourself all kinds of questions. You know Justine by name, so you know some of who she runs with. And you're wondering what made her a target for this kind of rough stuff. And the answers you're thinking up are starting to worry you, because they're out of your league. Rather than cut yourself in for a percentage, you think they'll cut you out. Am I doing all right so far?"

He didn't answer. She gave him a couple of forceful pats, not quite slaps, on the cheek.

"Eddy, this is where you speak up."

"Y-yeah..."

An affirmative answer. Admittedly, it was Lyon who'd done all the talking so far, but even so it was a good sign. He could lie and bluster all day if he was of a mind to and they wouldn't get anywhere, so this was definitely a step in the right direction.

"Good! See how easy that was? And now it's time for you to really earn your stripes. Who was it?"

He didn't say anything, a cold sweat starting to mar his face with its sheen.

"Come on, now, it's an easy question. Who warned you off the corner, and who attacked Justine? Names, descriptions, affiliations, I'll take it all. I'm a very curious girl."

"I can't! They'll kill me!" Eddy stammered.

She punched him in the stomach, then stepped back as he vomited up his breakfast all over the already-fouled pavement. Lyon straightened him up and pushed him back against the wall.

"Why does everyone always insist on doing everything the hard way?" she sighed. Still, some good had come of it. In stepping back from her face-to-face stance, she'd widened her field of perception and was therefore able to see the man and two women stepping into the mouth of the alley with weapons in hand.

"Well," she said brightly, "maybe your friends there can offer some explanations for you."

The sizzling sound of gunfire filled the alley.

~X X X~

Kendric Ryland felt the itch between his shoulder blades as he walked to the door of his residence unit. He hated the feeling. As a net-dancer, he was involved in illegal computer activities regularly, so he was used to covering his tracks, but that was different. That was about making sure his work couldn't be traced, that his electronic fingerprints weren't leading the milipol or a corporate security squad back at him. He wasn't used to being the target of physical surveillance, having to take special precautions with his meat body.

Working in Downtown and living on its fringes, of course, made one security-conscious by necessity. There were plenty of desperate people who might assault and rob a man who wasn't careful, to say nothing of gangs who got their kicks by roughing up or worse anyone who was too weak to resist or offended their eyes.

This wasn't the same.

This was organized pursuit. Eyes looking out for him. E-runners sifting through his datatrails. He wasn't peripheral to someone else's operation as a hired hand, but the personal focus of enemy action.

He was still furious at his brother for getting him into this, that anger seething just under the surface, but he also knew that it wasn't Donovan's fault. Years of frustration at the older brother who'd accompanied their successful father after the divorce, gotten the educational opportunities that had led him down the Force's path, didn't go away that easily. It was more of the same: life handed Donovan all the good things, while Kendric got dumped on, like all the bad luck allotted to the two of them had been shoved over to the younger brother. It was Kendric who'd had to watch his mother deteriorate from wireburn, watching a light habit that had been his father's impetus for ending the marriage and getting the magistrate to find heavily for him in the property settlement and alimony (despite his coldness and constant obsession with work being what had led her to seek solace in virtual fantasies in the first place) get worse and worse into full addiction.

The divorce had happened when Kendric was ten. By the time he was twelve, she could no longer hold a decent job. By the time he was fifteen, she was too far gone to even whore, a bedridden cripple. He'd had to scrape and scavenge to keep a roof over their heads, bring back food. A knack for computers that might have been the foundation for a decent career became a full-time job on the gray side. She'd died when he was sixteen and he'd signed up for Pioneer 2 a month later, hoping to put it all behind him in settling a new planet.

And then he'd found that his brother was on the same ship, a respected and successful hunter.

No, Kendric was old enough, smart enough to know Donovan wasn't to blame for any of it. The older Ryland hadn't made choices to put Kendric in danger or cause problems in his life. He knew that. But that knowledge didn't make any of it easy or comfortable to swallow.

And now, something as simple as walking into his own residence building was a hazard.

He took the elevator up to his floor and uncoded his lock, then went inside. Nothing seemed out of place; he tended to be disorderly and Justine, who only stayed over about a third of the time anyway, was scarcely better. Dirty laundry, remnants of take-out food, and bits and pieces of electronics were scattered about. Ironically, the disarray made it harder for someone to search the place without leaving traces; unless they were an android it was hard to remember which clothes were piled on the chair in what order, and even for one virtually impossible to get them back just so.

No, his res-unit hadn't been searched. Why would it? There was no suspicion Kendric knew anything about Donovan's job, no reason to think along those lines. A planted device was possible, though, a bug, maybe—or something nastier. He made a quick but careful inspection for explosives, checking out nooks and crannies where one might have been slipped. Only then did he fire up his electronics suite. A planted camera he figured he'd have found, and an audio bug, well, all he had to do was keep his mouth shut until Donovan or more likely Lyon could scan for it.

As for the computer, though, if the other side figured they could snoop him, well, they had another think coming.

It was there, all right, a trace program set to look at any attempt by his machine to access the net. It wasn't subtle, even allowing for the fact that he was specifically looking out for such a thing.

It made Kendric suspicious.

Was this really the caliber of the opposition? He was good, but he didn't delude himself into thinking that he was the Red Ring Rico of net-dancers. This program was way too clumsily crafted, especially when its target was known to have hacking skills. The crudest end of street work.

He suspected a trap. This program could be a Trojan horse, ready to explode, or a decoy to make him think he'd avoided the trace attempt while a better-hidden program lurked in wait.

Yes, he most definitely would be taking care. He began to investigate, probing cautiously. If it was a trap, it would no doubt be designed to engage when a standard stealth utility was put into effect, so he didn't try that just yet. Instead he carefully probed the trace code to make sure that's all it was, and only then walled it off, before expanding outwards in his search, looking for another layer to the espionage, a ghost indicating a second level of e-surveillance. He found nothing.

Nothing!

It didn't make any sense. Snooping programs like the one he'd found were fine for tagging civilians. It was good enough to fool generic, automatic security 'ware. But anyone who knew enough about him to know Donavan was his brother and Justine his girl would know that Kendric was an e-runner with some positive rep. This kind of trace was an insult to his skills!

Still confused and a touch annoyed, he broke the trace's shell and started to hack it, trying to find where it sent the data it was supposed to collect. This was a little harder than spotting it or concealing his activities from it, but not by much. That was when he got his second surprise.

It was a dead end.

The trace was designed to drop any information gathered as a file into a social node, a kind of online board. That could work as a "dead drop," where someone could come along and pick up the file later, but the problem was that that kind of thing was pointless. And there was no one snooping that location or with some kind of automatic alert to provide realtime feedback. It just didn't make sense. As an electronic surveillance technique, it served no purpose. Not only was it no threat and easy to avoid, if by some miracle it caught him, it wouldn't even cause him any trouble.

So why have it at all?

The question bothered him. Although young, he'd already learned a lesson that his brother and the hunters knew well: when enemy actions didn't seem to make sense, that usually meant the news was going to be very bad when all did become clear. Knowing that, he thought about it a little harder.

The trace was useless as e-surveillance. It wasn't a booby trap. That meant it could only be some kind of decoy. But there hadn't been anything lying in wait, either, no second level of electronic security unless it was way above his ability to detect—in which case no decoy would have been needed. The only thing the trace had cost him was time.

Time!

The answer came to him in a flash.

The trace program was a decoy. But it wasn't designed to set him up for further electronic warfare. Its purpose was exactly what it had accomplished: to make Kendric waste his time at the computer checking and double-checking until he'd probed its mysteries. The other side had known that he wouldn't be able to resist trying to solve the puzzle, because of simple self-preservation if curiosity didn't turn the trick on its own.

And all the while he'd been wasting time.

Time during which he wasn't doing anything important online—gathering information or sending it on to someone else.

Time which the people watching his res-unit—the surveillance he was here to flush, so he should have been more aware of it!—could use to move in to take him...or just take him out.

A decoy, yes, but not for the net, for the real world.

The whole picture crashed through his head in an instant, but not fast enough. On its heels came the hissing swish from behind Kendric of the residence unit's door opening.

~X X X~

A/N: Those who know my older fics at PSOworld will have caught the reference to Hideki Takamura's death in "Ghosts of the Past."