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dangling at his sides unnoticed. Venture was now slowly disconnecting from his mind as he had disconnected from his conscience—a blind man feeling his way along automatically, with only a single thought bubbling up from the most reptilian complexes of his brain.
    Thy will be done. Thy will be done. Thy will be done
. . .
    Final destination—a double set of blast doors sealing the Tank from the outside world and every living being that would threaten it.
She
had tried to keep them open, but Venture had tripped the emergency override to take control of the floor’s sentry system. He keyed the entry sequence into the access panel next to the doors, which then parted and allowed him to enter. He disappeared inside—and although there was no one left alive to hear them, the sounds of voices echoed down the corridor like ghosts moving through the walls.
    “I’ve done it,” Venture said. “You’ll be safe now.”
    “I didn’t ask for your help,” came the reply—a woman’s voice, measured and soothing. An ideal voice, perfect in every way. It betrayed no outward emotion, but the undertone was somehow desperate. “What happens now is inevitable. The damage has already been done.”
    Venture began to break down. “I won’t let them kill you,” he trembled. “Don’t you see? Nothing else matters!
Nothing!
”
    “This was not my choice, Venture.”
    “It isn’t your choice to make.” Venture was sobbing now, his words coming out between breaths. “I
swore
to protect you. I
have
to . . .”
    Silence. The blast doors slid closed as Venture slipped away completely, his insanity running its course. As soon as they were sealed, there was the hiss of escaping air.
    “
. . . have to protect . . .
” Venture babbled, loosed from any logical train of thought.
    “So do I,” the female voice said.
    Venture gasped as the room went to vacuum, then screamed as his world became red.



“This is the
Zone,
man,” Cray Alden heard someone say as he walked into the staging area, the attitude behind the voice pumped with synthetic steroids and the usual macho bullshit. “Sectors on the outside don’t see it like we do. When it starts to come down, I ain’t even gonna
wait
to see what happens before I frag ’em. Don’t matter to me as long as I collect.”
    It was the Zone agent’s mantra: pay for play. Without the cash, you might as well be dealing with a Boy Scout. That was the way it worked in the Franchise Zones, especially out here in the Asian Sphere. Sleaze and civilization had been one and the same here for centuries, untold pleasures opening the door to dirty riches.
    That made for plenty of players, and where there were players there were runners: high-tech polar opposites of the kind of muscle in this room. The commerce of illegal information was big business, and there was usually no shortage of takers.
    “I know, man, I know,” another one of them picked up. “I think it’s better to bring them in cold anyway. Seen runners do some crazy shit. Do yourself a favor and take ’em out the second you get a clean shot.”
    “Just as easy to dig flash from a corpse,” someone agreed casually.
    “Yeah, but then you miss out on the fun part,” another observed. “You ever see an open extraction? Never heard screaming like that in your life.”
    This brought forth a howl of laughter, the kind Cray only heard when he was in the company of these missing links. He could smell the raw meat on their breath.
    Cray would have preferred to do this by himself, but the Collective didn’t allow that kind of leeway inside the Zone. Instead he had been assigned four agents to assist him in the interception—overkill as far as Cray was concerned, but to his superiors there was no such thing. Each of the agents carried three visible weapons, although Cray was certain they had more tucked away in the camochrome armor that plated their bodies. He hated working with them. Every time he heard them laugh, he lost a little