While the bots were duking it out, something I registered in the back of my mind, I slowly circled my dance partner, as he circled me.

I was significantly faster than him, which was naturally a big advantage, but my buffer was mostly depleted. I could not sustain a hit anymore.

And unfortunately, without a surprise attack as I had managed against his partner, I would not be able to finish the fight in one attack.

Whatever defensive utilities he had would be enough to blunt even Excalibur. Not that I would be able to use Excalibur in the beginning. It was a decidedly short-range attack utility.

Yes, technically it should work at any distance, but here the subconscious link to the jack was the deciding factor. I simply could not make myself believe that the sword would work at firearm ranges.

At the same time, getting into a close fight with my opponent would decrease the time I would have to react, making it very dangerous at the moment. I needed the distance to keep evading.

Or interposing Aegis. The shield was, at the basic programming level a one-sided address randomizer. Whatever hit Aegis would land in some random address range, keeping my ports and my buffer unaffected.

Naturally, I had experimented with some fully enclosing shields. I had learned what most other hackers had learned as well. Something in our psyche does not believe in energy shields. The reason is probably that there were no energy shields in real-live.

Regardless of the reason, as far as I knew, only a handful of hackers had ever made it work, and from what I found out, every single one of them was in some way or another separated from reality.

I had equally tried to form it into some suite of armor. While it worked, my subconscious insisted that I was slow and clumsy in heavy armor. And made it stick. The best I had was something similar to the armored clothes I had made in reality. Which I was using.

It still was insufficient, hence the existence of Aegis. Virtually every single jack I knew of used a shield in one form or another for basically the same reason. The big difference was that as far as I knew Aegis was lengths above what was usually available. Even from somebody like me.

Just to make it clear, I did not sell my personal utilities. The utilities I sold were very good. Some of them were the best you could buy. But the moment I sold something, it got known. Somebody would decompile it, dissected it, look at the weaknesses, and create exploits.

That was the nature of the game. And I made sure that nobody would do that with my utilities.

I also had, under various aliases bought every available utility to do exactly that. As a side-effect, it made it possible for me to compare them to what I wrote myself. I was not better in every aspect, some stealth tools were a bit better than what I sold for example. But I had fiddled with my personal arsenal until they were superior to everything one could buy.

While I was observing my opponent, and ruminating on what attack utility to use, I had an epiphany.

The reason my ranged attack utilities were somewhat disappointing was my generally bad experience with firearms. I could barely control my thoroughly obsolete PDP after all. All my life, guns were something that others used.

But now, thanks to Mark, I had something I could actually trust, for the first time. Several days in the gun range VR had made me appreciate my new MH-7. Luckily I had the VR model of the gun in Precious storage.

I took one of my failed attempts to use Excalibur at a range, a rendition of my PDP, and replaced it with the MH-7 model. As it was, in essentially every other aspect Excalibur it needed only to convince my subconscious that it did indeed work.

It took only a few moments to get the new, yet unnamed utility ready. It was enough though for the other to make the first move.

He used something I could only describe as a ray gun, to shoot at me. While I was nearly twice his speed, he still surprised me, as I was distracted. I barely managed to bring up Aegis in time.

Not an auspicious start. But my new gun was ready, and I quickly lined up a shot, as Mark had trained me. Onehanded, but I had trained that as well.

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But he was not an idiot and had his shield at the ready. Surprisingly the shot broke through. I had honestly not expected that. It did negligible damage, as most of its code was spent into the shield, but it broke through.

Yes, it was only a mid-range Kawamoto shield, but even with Excalibur I usually needed two, sometimes three strikes to break through a shield. And Excalibur was top of the line.

That brought our fight to an instant halt, as both of us were simply stunned. While his run-off-the-mill avatar had a lack of facial animation, his whole posture screamed shock.

Then I understood. I believed. I believed with absolute certainty that this gun fired shots that would go through armor. Yes, I knew that heavy armor would withstand it. But it was the first weapon I ever had that could go through armor.

Somehow even my Excalibur, the most powerful direct combat utility I had ever written, was hampered by my subconscious. I knew without the shadow of a doubt that a shield was there to stop a sword.

And my subconscious did the rest. Obviously from the purely technical perspective, Excalibur had the ability to go through a shield. Otherwise, the MH-7 could never have done that regardless of how much I believed it.

Look at that, you learn something new every day.

With this surprise, the outcome of this combat was a foregone conclusion.

All I had to do was keep my distance, defend with Aegis, and hit him with my weapon. It would probably take a few minutes to inflict enough damage, as the bleed-through was obviously low, but there was nothing he could do anymore.

After a dozen additional shots, I hit a bit of a snag. Apparently, my subconscious took the gun as the one Mark had made for me. Again, we both had some surprise, this time when the MH-7 only made a click instead of the satisfying boom I had learned to enjoy.

I had run out of ammo on an attack utility working from data. It should have been impossible, but there it was. Fortunately, the corpy was already badly damaged and failed to make use of the reprise. I have to confess it took me a few moments to realize what happened. And why.

Then I had to spawn a new, loaded magazine, the way my subconscious was acting, the loaded part was important, and then reload the gun. I was aware enough to spawn the extended 20-round magazine Mark had given me for training.

He managed to get another shot off at me, which I deflected before the rest of the fight was rather anticlimactic.

That did not mean my work was done of course. The fight between the bots was still in full swing at that time but took the chance to switch on the camera feed and observe the real world.

The first feeds were relatively reassuring. Half a dozen attackers had been eliminated by the defense system. But my elation did not remain for long. The feed of the corridor directly in front of the lab showed active fighting. Five enemy combatants were in a death struggle with my friends.

The defense system took shots at the intruders but to no avail. For one of them, the reason was immediately apparent. After all, the only weapons capable of defeating power armor were the railguns. The other four took me a bit longer. Then it ran cold down my spine. Cyberzombies!

Somebody used freaking Cyberzombies against us. Or more specifically, me. I was somewhat surprised that Kate was holding the four at bay, while Darren pushed the armored intruder back again and again.

Mark sat on the ground, leaning against the wall, cradling his right arm, and Justin was laying in a pool of blood. The situation was not good. I could see several small wounds on Kate, while Darren looked pretty exhausted.

I was thankful for the increased time the compression gave me, as I took a couple of minutes, virtual, to come to a conclusion.

Cyberzombies always had a kill switch. The paranoia inherent in the shadow wars made it impossible for the execs to trust the computers controlling the poor souls otherwise. That meant I had to find the controller. And fast.

Fortunately, with the way the local bandwidth was oversaturated by the HKs said controller had to be nearby. And as this kind of operation needed a certain amount of operational security I was betting that the hackers operated from the same place. The same network.

I had to follow the trail of the HKs back.

It was fortunate that the trail was rather pronounced and easy to follow. Considering that the corp had blanketed the whole area with their exclusive activity, I gave a flying feck about speed limits and traveled through the matrix at maximum speed.

The computer system I arrived at was, at least in the matrix, nothing exceptional. Yes, it sported a clear bias towards Christianity, but things like that usually only reflected the personal preferences of the person setting the system up.

Still, I carefully examined the neighborhood before I rushed in. Basically, I spammed sensor bots, without any regard for stealth. After all, there was all this free real estate, or bandwidth in this case, that the corpies had cleared. And before I let them use it again, I squatted all over it.

Next, I spawned a pack of Banshees to kill every single active bot in there, followed by a swarm of Sybils.

Sybils were the bots I used to inspect, categorize and copy large amounts of data.

In this case, I sent them out to get whatever information they could find.

Finally, I began to look for the control unit for the Cyberzombies. It took me longer than I wanted, but still faster than I expected, to find it, and it took me another few minutes to decipher the control schematics. I could have simply crashed the controller, and it would probably have been fine. But there was a risk that it only placed the Cyberzombies in autonomous mode, and make it impossible for me to stop them.

A risk I could not take.

But finally, I was ready and started to arm the kill switch, when I heard a booming voice from behind me:

“STOP AT ONCE, ABOMINATION!”