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all on record, and you back it up,
and if we make a deal you give me a certified copy. You’ll pay me
five million credits in advance—five million, not two. You’ll cover
all my travel and com and medical expenses without question, you’ll
tell me everything I ask for, you won’t hold anything back, you’ll
give me complete access to all family and corporation records,
files, software, and personnel. You’ll get my brother Sebastian and
my father out of Nightside City and safely to Prometheus
immediately. In exchange, I’ll find your assassin and everyone
connected with her. You won’t interfere with the investigation, no
matter who or what I go after. Those are my terms. Take it or leave
it.”
    He sighed. “I’ll leave it, if you’re serious.
I can accept all that—if you make either the money or the rescue of
your relatives contingent upon your success.”
    “The money,” I said. “The five million bucks
when I deliver, not before.”
    “All of it,” he said.
    “All of it,” I agreed. “You’ll pay my
expenses, though.”
    “I will pay your travel expenses only within
the Eta Cass system, unless you can provide me with convincing
proof that you need to go elsewhere.”
    “Done.”
    “Recorded,” said the floater.
    I could live with it. I’d get ’Chan and our
father out, at least. And if I actually found the would-be
killer—well, five million is a lot of juice.
    I was going to give this an honest try,
anyway. If it didn’t run, well... I’d been broke before. And I’d
have ’Chan and my father out of Nightside City.
    “All right,” I said, “Now tell me all about
it. Someone tried to kill you?”
    He told me.
     

Chapter Four
    I had time to think it over on the ride back to
Alderstadt.
    It was not going to be an easy job. Nakada
himself had already done the easy stuff, and it hadn’t worked.
    The way it scrolled along was this: Someone
had turned the old man’s own personal com against him, in the
Nakada family compound itself. In his own bedroom, in fact. He had
been settling down for the night, about to jack in for a nice
little dreamscape, when he decided to double-check the program.
He’d already read out the schedule once, but on a whim, just a
lucky accident, he read it out again.
    It was wrong. Instead of a sensible,
conservative dream enhancer, the com was running a euthanasia
program. If he’d jacked in it would have quietly shut down his
autonomic nervous system. And when they found him in the morning it
could have been put down to wetware systems failure—old age
affecting the brain, his body just giving out on him.
    After all, he was two hundred and forty-one
years old, he said, and at that age no one was really surprised
when even healthy people didn’t happen to wake up.
    He’d shut the bedroom com off from the rest
of the household net immediately, of course, and used his personal
implants to analyze the programming. It was clever—the euthanasia
program was nested inside a worm that would control the entire unit
until he was dead, and would then shut itself down, turn control
back to the original program, and set markers so that the com’s own
everyday internal monitoring would wipe out all trace of the worm
and its contents, just as if it were an ordinary bit of gritware
that slipped in over the lines. The worm was started in the first
place by his regular check of the night’s dream schedule.
    If he hadn’t done the check over again after
the worm had been invoked, or if the programmer had set the worm to
hide its tracks even while it was actually running, he’d have gone
to sleep and never woken up. Sweet and simple.
    And it was on his own bedroom com. That com
was not on the planetwide nets. It wasn’t even on the internal
corporate nets that Nakada Enterprises ran. It was only hooked into
the family’s household net.
    So only family members could get at it—in
theory.
    In practice, both the old man and I knew
better than that. The household net