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down to the border, and the mesa’s smack in the middle of the footprints of four recon satellites. Mucho tight.”
    “And how are we supposed to get in?”
    “We aren’t. Mitchell’s coming out, on his own. We wait for him, pick him up, get his ass to Hosaka intact.” Conroy hooked a forefinger behind the open collar of his black shirt and drew out a length of black nylon cord, then a small black nylon envelope with a Velcro fastener. He opened it carefully and extracted an object, which he offered to Turner on his open palm. “Here. This is what he sent.”
    Turner put the gun down on the nearest table and took the thing from Conroy. It was like a swollen gray microsoft, one end routine neurojack, the other a strange, rounded formation unlike anything he’d seen. “What is it?”
    “It’s biosoft. Jaylene jacked it and said she thought it was output from an AI. It’s sort of a dossier on Mitchell, with a message to Hosaka tacked on the end. You better jack it yourself; you wanna get the picture fast . . .”
    Turner glanced up from the gray thing. “How’d it grab Jaylene?”
    “She said you better be lying down when you do it. She didn’t seem to like it much.”
     
    Machine dreams hold a special vertigo. Turner lay down on a virgin slab of green temperfoam in the makeshift dorm and jacked Mitchell’s dossier. It came on slow; he had time to close his eyes.
    Ten seconds later, his eyes were open. He clutched the green foam and fought his nausea. Again, he closed his eyes. . . . It came on, again, gradually, a flickering, nonlinear flood of fact and sensory data, a kind of narrative conveyed in surreal jump cuts and juxtapositions. It was vaguely like riding a roller coaster that phased in and out of existence at random, impossibly rapid intervals, changing altitude, attack, and direction with each pulse of nothingness, except that the shifts had nothing to do with any physical orientation,but rather with lightning alternations in paradigm and symbol system. The data had never been intended for human input.
    Eyes open, he pulled the thing from his socket and held it, his palm slick with sweat. It was like waking from a nightmare. Not a screamer, where impacted fears took on simple, terrible shapes, but the sort of dream, infinitely more disturbing, where everything is perfectly and horribly normal, and where everything is utterly wrong  . . .
    The intimacy of the thing was hideous. He fought down waves of raw transference, bringing all his will to bear on crushing a feeling that was akin to love, the obsessive tenderness a watcher comes to feel for the subject of prolonged surveillance. Days or hours later, he knew, the most minute details of Mitchell’s academic record might bob to the surface of his mind, or the name of a mistress, the scent of her heavy red hair in the sunlight through—
    He sat up quickly, the plastic soles of his shoes smacking the rusted deck. He still wore the parka, and the Smith & Wesson, in a side pocket, swung painfully against his hip.
    It would pass. Mitchell’s psychic odor would fade, as surely as the Spanish grammar in the lexicon evaporated after each use. What he had experienced was a Maas security dossier compiled by a sentient computer, nothing more. He replaced the biosoft in Conroy’s little black wallet, smoothed the Velcro seal with his thumb, and put the cord around his neck.
    He became aware of the sound of waves lapping the flanks of the rig.
    “Hey, boss,” someone said, from beyond the brown military blanket that screened the entrance to the dorm area, “Conroy says it’s time for you to inspect the troops, then you and him depart for other parts.” Oakey’s bearded face slid from behind the blanket. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t wake you up, right?”
    “I wasn’t sleeping,” Turner said, and stood, fingers reflexively kneading the skin around the implanted socket.
    “Too bad,” Oakey said. “I got derms’ll put you under all the way, one