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low black Snark crouched on the lawn, its twin rotors swinging quietly in whistling arcs, its twin turbines whispering through muffled exhausts.
     
Her father hesitated inside the glass door and then broke from the cover of the house and ran for the helicopter, tugging Linda after him. The men followed, moving out to flank them.
     
With her uncanny eyesight Linda could see in the night, could see the staring white face of her mother waiting inside the open side door of the chopper. She opened her mouth. Something was wrong. . . .
    A hand yanked Linda’s mother aside. A man stepped into the chopper door. Linda heard the cough of the gun muzzle and the simultaneous screech of enfilading fire from above and behind her, saw the fiery streaks of tracers overhead.
    She and her father had come half the distance from the house. The man in the chopper door was directing his fire not at Linda or her father but at the men who guarded them. There was at least one attacker on the roof of the house, at least one other in the trees. Caught in the crossfire–taken by surprise–the guards were falling.
Linda’s father had yanked her arm and sent her sprawling on the grass, diving and rolling after her.
    But she was up and on her feet again before he came to a stop– at the time she did not know she possessed the dense tissue knotted in her forebrain, but her separate persona, her new persona, who was watching this vivid dream, knew she possessed it; that knotted bit of brain kicked in to make the calculations and deductions; her right eye zoomed in on the man in the helicopter and saw his deliberate aim, tracked the trajectories from his automatic weapon, saw that he was carefully shooting around her, even at the risk of leaving himself exposed –and she crossed the final few meters of lawn, under the whistling rotor blades, in a lightning sprint. Inside the chopper her mother was screaming with open mouth, but the words emerged so slowly that Linda could not hear them. The gunman turned away from his work in what seemed like slow motion, comically shocked to see Linda rushing at him.
    His hesitation was his death. She caught him at the knees and knocked his weapon aside with a wristbreaking blow, and as he twisted in a vain attempt to avoid her, he put his head in the way of a bullet from one of the wounded guards and tumbled out of the chopper, lifeless. She had already memorized his appearance; now she could forget it.
    Linda thrust at the person who held her mother, not hesitating at all when she recognized the gray woman who had been her captor, but launching her fist like a piston into the woman’s eye and sending her reeling back against the fuselage wall, stunned.
“Linda, behind you!” her mother shouted.
    Linda spun and dived for the chopper’s cockpit. She could have been floating on the moon: the scene was a frozen tableau. The man in the left seat was half out of it, twisted toward her, swinging his arm toward her at the rate of one millimeter per century; the body that slumped out of the other seat was presumably that of the legitimate pilot. Linda–in case she should ever meet him again–dispassionately recorded the usurping pilot’s looks and the strange smell of him, half cologne, half adrenaline, noting calmly that she had seen him at least once before. Then she plucked the pistol–a .38 Colt Aetherweight with flash suppressor–out of his unwilling hand.
Time unfroze. She brought the pistol down with precisely aimed force against the side of his head, under his ear. He collapsed, and she yanked him out of his seat, pulling him bodily over the backrest.
    She moved with the grace and sureness of an acrobat, leaping into the seat, taking hold of the controls. She shoved the throttles forward; the turbines rose in pitch and the rotors accelerated. She twisted the pitch control, and the armored machine shuddered and rose half a meter from the ground. Expertly she let it spin where it hung on the axis of its own