Dark Rivers of the Heart

unplugged, she wouldn't have been able to get into Mama. A thumbprint was required to get on-line.
        Danny hadn't designed the software, but he had seen a demonstration of it and had told her about it, as excited as a child who had been shown one of the best toys ever. Because her thumbprint was not one of the approved, the hardware would have been useless to her.
        Spencer came back the aisle, with Rocky padding along behind him, and Ellie glanced up from the VDT in surprise. "Shouldn't you be keeping a gun on the crew?"
        "I took their headsets away from them, so they can't use the radio.
        They don't have any weapons up there, and even if they had an arsenal, they might not use it. They're flyboys, not murderous thugs.
        But they think we are murderous thugs, insane murderous thugs, and they're nicely respectful."
        "Yeah, well, they also know we need them to fly this crate."
        As Ellie returned to her work on the computer, Spencer picked up the cellular phone that someone had abandoned on the last seat in the portside row. He sat across the aisle from her.
        "Well, see," he said, "they think I can fly this eggbeater if anything happens to them."
        "Can you?" she asked, without shifting her attention from the video display, keeping her fingers busy on the keys.
        "No. But when I was a Ranger, I learned a lot about choppers-mostly related to how you sabotage them, boobytrap them, and blow them up. I recognize all the flight instruments, know the names of them. I was real convincing. Fact is, they probably think the only reason I haven't already killed them is because I don't want to have to haul their bodies out of the cockpit and sit in their blood."
        "What if they lock the cockpit door?"
        "I broke the lock. And they don't have anything in there to wedge the door shut with."
        She said, "You're pretty good at this."
        "Aw, shucks, not really. What've you got there?"
        While Ellie worked, she told him about their good fortune.
        "Everything's coming up roses," he said with only a half-note of sarcasm. "What're you doing?"
        "Through Mama, I've up-linked to Earthguard, the E.P.A satellite they've been using to track us. I've gotten into the core of its operating program. All the way to the program-management level."
        He whistled in appreciation. "Look, even Mr. Rocky Dog is impressed."
        She glanced up and saw that Rocky wos grinning. His tail swished back and forth on the deck, thumping into the seats on both sides of the aisle.
        "You're going to screw up a hundred-million-dollar satellite, turn it into space junk?" Spencer asked.
        "Only for a while. Freeze it up for six hours. By then they won't have a clue where to look for us."
        "Ah, go ahead, have fun, screw it up permanently."
        "When the agency isn't using it for crap like this, it might actually do some beneficial work."
        "So you're a civic-minded individual after all."
        "Well, I was a Girl Scout once. It gets in your blood, like a disease."
        "Then you probably wouldn't want to go out with me tonight, spraypaint some graffiti on highway overpasses."
        "There!" she said, and tapped the ENTER key. She studied the data that came up on the screen and smiled. "Earthguard just shut down for a sixhour nap. They've lost us-except for radar tracking. Are you sure we're keeping due north and high enough for radar to pick us up, like I asked?"
        "The boys up front promised me."
        "Perfect."
        "What did you do before all this?" he asked.
        "Freelance software designer, specializing in video games."
        "You created video games?"
        "Yeah."
        "Well, of course, you did."
        "I'm serious. I did."
        "No, you missed my inflection," he said. "I meant, of course you did.
        It's obvious. And now you're in a real-life video game."
        "The way the world's going, everyone'll be living in one big video game eventually, and it's sure as hell not going to be a nice one, not'Super Mario Brothers' or anything that gentle. More like 'Mortal Kombat."
        "
        "Now that you've disabled a hundred-million-dollar satellite, what next?"
        As they had talked, Ellie had been focused on the VDT. She had retreated from Earthguard, back into Mama. She was calling up menus, one after the other, speed-reading them.