The Cypress Island was one of a dozen nightcruise boats tied up at the jetty; longer and slimmer than the ferries that plowed across the river from the city, it had a flat, open top deck with a bar in the center. Inside, the upper two passenger decks had transparent bulkheads, so that the restaurant and casino patrons could still have an excellent view of the jungle; only the third deck where the stage was installed had a normal hull. Mellanie walked along the short gangplank amid a gaggle of clubbers barely older than she was. Several of the boys gave her encouraging smiles, which she had to ignore. It was a shame; the kids here all looked terrific, taking a lot of care with what they wore and how they styled themselves.

She confirmed her ticket with the steward as she stepped on board. He took in her appearance with a fast expert glance. “Are you sure you want to be here?” he asked with a mildly concerned smile. “It gets a bit rowdy later on. Can be upsetting if you’re not used to it. The Galapagos will accept your ticket if you want, it’s the same company; they take out a nicer bunch of passengers.”

“I’ll be all right,” she said, practicing a high-pitched giggle. She was privately delighted by his reaction.

“Okay then.” He waved her on.

The first drink was free. She took an imported light beer from Munich and squeezed her way to the top-deck rail.

The Cypress Island cast off twenty minutes later. Out of the lee of the jetty, its engines pushed it against the swift current producing a pronounced rocking motion. The ride changed for the better two kilometers upriver when they turned into one of the hundreds of tributary rivers feeding the Logrosan. A cheer ran along the boat as the water settled down and Tridelta vanished around a curve behind them. The engine noise faded away to a quiet murmur.

On either side of the small tributary trees grew down to the water, with their tangle of exposed, bloated roots caging the crumbling soil of the bank. Despite the light twinkling from each leaf it was dark between the trees, giving the jungle a mysterious aura. Nothing moved on the land; Illuminatus had never evolved anything bigger than its insects.

“You’d think it would be full of Silfen.”

Mellanie turned to see one of the kids from the group on the gangplank standing beside her. “You would?”

“It’s their kind of place. I’m Dorian, by the way.”

She hesitated. “Saskia.” He was handsome enough, tall with a mild Oriental heritage in his features. Small scarlet OCtattoos ran around his neck, dragons and serpents chasing each other. Semiorganic fibers had been woven into his dark hair, sending beads of light flickering through his dainty Roman curls.

“Can I get you another beer, Saskia?”

Her inserts registered a transmission from him directed at the boat’s cybersphere node. It wouldn’t bother her normally, some boy bragging about pulling her to his friends back in the city. But the transmission was heavily encrypted. “Not just now, thanks.”

He tried to cover the hurt expression. “Sure. I’m on for the whole night.”

“I’ll remember.”

The message he’d sent bothered her. She still didn’t have the skill to decrypt it with her inserts, and she wasn’t carrying a handheld array, so she couldn’t work on it. For a moment she toyed with scanning him thoroughly just to see what kind of inserts he was carrying. Of course, if there was any serious wetwiring he’d detect the scan.

Why should he be wetwired? Heavens, I’m getting paranoid. So why don’t I scan him?

Dorian was back at the bar, smiling with his group of friends. Probably getting teased for getting the brush-off.

The tributary grew narrower, branching several times on both sides. Trees began to arch over the water, the tallest ones touching above midstream, their twigs starting to interlace. Cypress Island sailed on through a tunnel of coronal splendor.

Mellanie went down to the restaurant deck and helped herself to the buffet bar. It was dim inside, allowing the eaters to gaze out at the jungle. Her ticket didn’t qualify her for a table by the transparent walls, so she took her plate back up to the top deck, and sat on a bench in front of the bar, watching the intricate lacework of branches above the river. Some of the trees had a luminescence that verged toward ultraviolet, making her white top shine.

She stared down at the wool for a minute, not really registering what she was seeing. “Oh, sod it!” she muttered. Her platinum and purple virtual hand touched the SI’s icon.

“Hello, Mellanie.”

“There’s somebody on board I’m worried about. I need a message decrypted.”

“Very well.”

She’d been expecting to argue her case. The agreement caught her by surprise. She opened the file for the SI.

“Roughly translated, he said: Identity confirmed. It’s her.”

“Oh, God,” she gasped. Alessandra’s goons have caught up with me! She hunted around in a semipanic, but Dorian was nowhere to be seen on the top deck.

“Do you have any weapons with you?” the SI asked.

“No. What about your inserts? Is there anything that I can use to fight him off?”

“Not with any certainty. I might be able to load kaos software into his wetwiring, assuming he has some. Shall I alert the Tridelta police? They can have a helicopter with you in minutes.”

She glanced up at the radiant arch of light they were sailing under. “How would they get down to us?”

Her link with the unisphere ended.

Damnit! Not now. She sent a scrutineer package into the nearest onboard array to check what the problem was. The network management routines reported that the node was no longer drawing power; it had been damaged physically.

OUR CYBERSPHERE NODE IS SUFFERING A TEMPORARY FAULT, the bridge array sent on a general broadcast. PLEASE DO NOT BE ALARMED. A NEW CONNECTION WILL BE ESTABLISHED SOON. THE COMPANY MANAGEMENT WOULD LIKE TO APOLOGIZE FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE IN THE MEANTIME.

Mellanie started shaking as the text ran down her virtual vision. “Come back to me,” she whispered into the fluorescent night. “Come on, you got through to Randtown.” Some awful inner voice was saying that Randtown had never been this isolated from the planetary cybersphere; it had landlines, a network. This was a lone boat in the middle of a jungle on a planet with only one city.

She clenched her hands, and pressed them against her legs, forcing the shakes to stop. Think! I can’t beat him by myself. Waiting for the police wasn’t a serious option. She didn’t even know if the SI had called them. She brought her stilled hand up to her face, giving her arm a curious look. It’s still in there.

A fast scan around with her inserts revealed one of the boat’s arrays was installed behind the bar. Mellanie rushed over and ducked under the counter-top.

“Hey,” one of the barmen told her. “You can’t come back here.”

She flashed him a distracted smile as she ran her hand along the shelving. Scrabbling fingers found the array, tucked away behind boxes of snacks; it was a small one, used to handle the bar’s finances, but it had an i-spot. She pressed her palm against it. “Just one second,” she told the barman. “We’ll make out later.”

His jaw dropped. He didn’t know if she was joking or not.

Mellanie’s virtual hands activated a host of inserts, and fed in the code. The SIsubroutine decompressed, and flowed through the i-spot into the boat’s tiny net.

“Below optimum processing capacity available,” the SIsubroutine said. “I am operating in abridged mode. Why am I here?”

“I’m being stalked by a killer. He’s probably got weapons wetwiring.” She stood up and checked around again, half expecting Dorian to be coming for her. The barman moved up close. “Are you serious?” he asked in a low murmur.

“Hell yes, but later.” Mellanie backed out of the bar. She winked. “I’ll call you.”