"Where are you, Bob?" Dot asked.
"Just outside RamBus Terminal," Bob panted. He ducked as something flew past the vidwindow. "If I patch the drivers—" the Guardian caught a young boy, and tapped the child with his icon, "—they might be able to carry the patch into new sectors faster than I can."
"You always were smarter under pressure, Bob," Turbo said approvingly as he split-screened the call. "I've cleared the historic sector from the Nortbridge to the Principle Office. I'm gonna try and get in there."
"Good idea," Dot nodded. "Have either of you heard from Davic?"
Turbo paused, his eyes elsewhere. "Copland!" His keytool beeped, and threw a line out of the picture. There was a shriek, then an angry hissing. Turbo pulled on the line, reeling in his catch. "Davic hasn't checked in?"
"Punctuality was never his strong point," Bob said.
"Caen would have reminded him," Turbo countered, yanking the green-eyed sprite on the end of Copland's line into view.
"We've tried to raise them, but there's no answer," Dot said.
Turbo grunted, then rapped out an order as he transferred the patch file. "Bob, find Davic and get him out of whatever trouble he's in. I'll try to get the Principle Office back online. Dot, how are the keytools holding out?"
"I—I'm not sure, Turbo," Dot faltered. "Isa checked in, but no one here understands—"
"Play it back for me," Turbo commanded.
"Specky," Dot said.
"Yes, Ma'am!" The binome queued the file.
Squeals and a tattoo of clicks came over the Mainframe Command Central speakers. Turbo listened, his face grim. Bob's brown eyes went wide. Copland buzzed, and Glitch rattled.
"It's bad, isn't it?" Dot looked from one Guardian to another.
"Even keytools have their limits," Turbo said heavily. "Get moving, Bob."
"Yes, Sir," Bob answered without a trace of his usual humor.
Dot closed the vidwindow with a sigh.
"Report from System Gemini," one of Dot's staff said into the ensuing hush. "They've got the local medics patched. The system is stable now. Our team wants to know if they should pull out."
Dot nodded. "What's the nearest infected system?"
The binome checked a few monitors. "The teams in the Aurora Cluster have requested backup—Tuscany Node's still blocked—"
"Aurora's closer to Tuscany than Gemini," Dot said. "Get the Gemini team to Aurora, then pull a team out of Aurora, and tell them to rest up on the way to Tuscany. We've still got a long way to go."
Bob ran, dodging around cackling pedestrians and no small number of fistfights. He rushed down an alley and scrambled up a chain-link fence an instant before a pack of green-eyed dogs hit it, snarling and tearing at the mesh. The fence rattled and bucked under the assault. Bob jumped clear, and landed on the fire escape of the building beyond.
A scruffy figure wearing an enormous hat skidded into the alley on an overtaxed child's scooter. "There you are, you varmint! Hold still while I blast ya!"
"Glitch! Get us out of here!" Bob yelled as a barrage of shotgun shells tore into the fence, the building, and the ground.
Glitch beeped, and yanked its guardian into a Portal.
Bob landed on his feet an instant later, to the sound of a booming air horn. Bob yelped, and dove for the dubious safety of a row of phone booths beside the street. He slammed the door shut as the truck roared by, its horn going full blast. It tore through three red lights before careening into a park and out of sight.
"My mother always told me not to play in traffic," Bob commented. "Did you intend to land in the middle of a street, Glitch?"
Glitch made a rude noise, then clacked.
Bob sobered. "Is it that high everywhere?"
A beep.
Bob nodded. "All right. No more Portals until we can get the Principle Office back online." He leaned against the back of the booth. "Can you track Davic's protocol or Caen?"
Glitch chattered.
"Do the best you can, old friend. They should be somewhere in this sector."
The scan took several long nanos, punctuated by whistles of frustration from Glitch as signals broke up in the oscillating interference of an unstable system.
Bob used the time to slip out of the phone booth, and grab a few infectees. One burst out of a phone booth further down the row from Bob's, wearing a red cape and yelling, "Up, up, and away!" Bob wrapped the cape around the sprite's arms and patched him, then put him back in the phone booth to get him out of the way.
Bob's efforts were interrupted by the noisy arrival of Caen. Davic's keytool lashed itself around Bob's waist and yanked him into a Portal while Glitch was still shrilling its surprise.
The caped sprite in the open phone booth blinked as the Portal closed, then whistled. "Now that was a good exit."
Turbo charged into the central command room at the heart of the Supercomputer with a knot of patched staffers at his heels. He skidded to a halt and stared for an instant. "Didn't know you had so many relatives, Copland." Alarms shrilled and flashed on and off. There were keytools everywhere. Some sat on consoles, squeaking, buzzing, and clattering as they tried to manipulate controls made for sprites. Others zipped across the room on some errand or another. Most, however, were recognizable only as blocks of color in a slowly-rotating mass in the center of the room. Individuals broke off from the living sculpture and spun around the room, chattering, only to return and reconnect to the mass in another place.
Copland let out a stream of clicks and beeps, rising off its Guardian's gauntlet and diving right into the central structure of the keytool-mass.
"Copland!" Turbo started, then he turned to the sprites behind him. "They're losing control of the core; somebody's cracked the containment."
The staffers scurried.
"Confirmed! We've got uncontrolled voltage leaking into the system mains!"…"Core temperature at 137% of normal!"…"The cooling vents are blocked!"
Copland returned to its Guardian, and squealed at Turbo over the din of voices, keytool-chatter, and shrilling alarms.
Turbo's stagger went unnoticed, but his shocked question carried. "It what?"
Caen burst back into existence in what had been a street market. Now, it was a vandalized mess. Bob landed facedown in a cart full of somewhat overripe fruit. The cart, which had survived several minutes of hard use, collapsed under the Guardian's weight, sending Bob tumbling.
Caen chattered, trying to drag Bob to his feet.
"All right, all right, I'm up," Bob panted, wiping tomato juice out of his eyes. "Where's Davic, Caen?"
The keytool keened.
"What's happened, Caen? Is Davic hurt?"
"I'm not the one who's hurting," a growl answered from a shadowed doorway. "Don't think I'm gonna hurt after I'm through with you, either."
Bob turned as Caen shrieked.
Davic's eyes flashed bright green above a predatory grin as he shrugged off the shadows.