Tilde stood very still as the samurai warrior advanced towards her. His blade flashed blue, catching the glow from streetlights outside. It was raining and dark on the street. Silent and dark in the lobby.

Her heart was pounding. Mouth dry. He was almost on top of her, wielding that deadly-looking sword. He didn’t look pleased and Tilde could hardly blame him. She shouldn’t have been in here – not this close to the vault. And especially not outside banking hours. She’d racked her brains for every Japanese word she knew – and it hadn’t taken long. Now she tried again, combining her apology with a low bow. ‘Sumimasen.’

The samurai was still coming, so close now that she could almost see the cloud-like grinding marks on his long blade. She didn’t stand a chance, couldn’t hope to beat him in a swordfight – even if she’d had a sword.

Which she didn’t.

One last throw. ‘Gomendasai.’

The warrior was unmoved by her apology. And moving fast. Time to go. Get out of there while she was still in one piece.

Tilde tapped the sides of her cyber-goggles and was instantly back in the dingy basement of the Hardwire Café. She breathed deeply, thinking through what she’d learnt from her recent experience.

First, the Post Office Savings Bank of Japan had one hell of a firewall.

Secondly, she really needed to go back to her Japanese classes.

Thirdly – and probably most importantly – she needed to upload some sword-fighting software before she attempted another hack at the bank’s computer.

The Hardwire on Park was pretty empty. This suited Tilde as she didn’t feel much like company. However, she would have been the first to admit that her desire for solitude might have had something to do with her head-crushing hangover.

The only other occupants of the basement were clustered in a far corner, whispering together. Just hackers and ’space monkeys – all of whom had mysteriously failed to obtain paid employment despite the current labour shortage. Tilde reckoned some of them were barely over school-leaving age. The rest were definitely under it.

She guessed the kids in the corner were talking about her, swapping stories they’d heard or read on the Web. How she’d once been a bodyguard and how she’d given up that extremely lucrative profession to hack ’space instead. She’d seen them look up as she’d strolled in. Seen them check out her black ‘soft’ jacket. The jacket that housed an integrated – and completely illegal – computer linked to a pair of fancy blue mirror shades – the absolute cutting edge of cybergear.

Tilde Slash was cool. In fact, she was the coolest person in the place – if she was any judge.

The kids’ stories were all nonsense, of course. At the impossibly old age of twenty-five, she’d given up the job she referred to as ‘babysitting’ with no regrets. The hours were miserable and the pay terrible, not to mention the company she’d had to keep. She’d sworn she’d never go back to it. Slash, however, was a great street name. And she wasn’t going to give that up in a hurry.

A shout from the corner of the room distracted her. She looked up, half-annoyed, to see the kids pointing to an enormous viewing screen that covered one whole wall of the café. It was broadcasting an image to similar screens in Hardwires across the world.

The image was of her. The silvery-pink hair and ski-slope nose could belong to no one else. But Tilde checked the screen tag anyway. Yep, it was Bristol. It was her. No wonder the kids were hooting. The screens were just a cheap advertisement for Hardwires. But it was fame all the same – for all of twenty seconds.

Tilde didn’t really need fame – she already had notoriety. But she kept watching until the view changed to another customer – a geeky kid in Lisbon. Wondered idly what people had seen when they looked at her.

Just as she knew she was cool, the young woman knew she wasn’t good-looking. She was way too skinny for the current fashion, she was flat-chested and her features weren’t regular enough to be called pretty. However, these were things she had neither the money, nor the inclination, to change.

But then Tilde frowned. The short clip had shown her something else. There had been a middle-aged woman standing right behind her, looking over her shoulder. She was still there. This was not to be tolerated. It was fucking rude. And nosey.

The older woman looked out of place at the Hardwire. But it wasn’t just her age. She’d have looked wrong anywhere. Her expression of smug righteousness rang alarm bells in Tilde’s head. People who looked like that usually had some weird shit to lay on you, about God or natural remedies or Spiritualism, and Tilde couldn’t be arsed to listen to it today. Or ever, in fact.

The woman’s voice grated inside her head, making it hurt even more. ‘Are you Matilda?’

Tilde felt her shoulders hunch up instinctively. ‘No. And stop looking over my shoulder.’

The woman ignored the direct command and gestured towards a dungaree-clad girl hovering uncertainly by the door. ‘She said that’s what you were called.’

This was one of those self-satisfied women who have never made a mistake in their lives. Tilde replaced the clunky Hardwire cyber-goggles and tried to sound discouraging. After a lifetime’s practice, it came pretty naturally. Shrugged, ‘Tilde. You know – as in tilde. Alternative? Tilde slash? A pathway in UNIX?’

The older woman obviously didn’t know. ‘Is that a proper name?’

‘It is if I say it is. Look, I’m busy. Could you go away?’

Maybe she wasn’t used to being told what to do. Whatever, she didn’t go away. Just said, ‘Can’t you stop doing that for a moment?’

When Tilde didn’t stop, she sort of huffed. ‘I hope I’m not making a really bad mistake here. I was told you might be able to help me. But now – now I’m not so sure.’

Tilde turned in her seat, ready to rid herself of this intrusion – by any means necessary. She pulled off the goggles and looked directly at the woman for the first time. Took in her thin, mouse-brown hair and unfashionable clothes. Floral prints, tapestry bag, open-toed sandals. Wished she hadn’t looked down at the sandals. The woman’s toenails were particularly revolting – long, broken and strangely dirty.

She guessed the woman’s age to be late forties but there was something revoltingly girlish about her, especially the dress she was wearing. It actually had ties round the waist that did up in a bow at the back. Tilde hadn’t seen anything like that since her own eighth birthday party – and she’d hated it then. She tore her eyes away from the hideous dress and looked up at the woman’s face.

Her visitor actually looked rather distressed and Tilde softened her reply. ‘Up to you, of course. But if you want my help, I’ll need to know who I’m talking to.’

The older woman held out her hand. It closely resembled a limp lettuce leaf. Tilde shook it, reluctantly. It felt like a limp lettuce leaf as well. But sweaty.

‘I’m Kathy Gold. Can we go somewhere to talk?’

But Tilde wasn’t easily led. She shook her head. ‘This is somewhere. And it’s about as private as I get with new friends. Get yourself a coffee and I’ll have another. It doesn’t matter what it says up there on the board about lattes and cappuccinos – it’s just black or white. And these days – it’s usually black.’

The other woman bleated, ‘I don’t drink coffee – well, not after midday anyway – I’d never sleep.’

‘Maybe that’s my problem too,’ smiled Tilde, who slept like a baby – fitfully, for a few hours at a time, interspersed with bawling her eyes out, drinking and having snacks.

Tilde broke her link to the Web without too many regrets. This computing equipment should have been in a museum. However, it was the only public access allowed under the Free Access Restriction on Traffic legislation. Anything secret or intimate, involving shades or wraparounds, had to take place in private. The idea was, she supposed, that you wouldn’t download porn if someone could just walk up behind you and see what you were doing. Which just showed how much the Communications Union knew.

Tilde only bothered with Free Access terminals when she wanted to do something a bit dodgy, something she didn’t want logged to her account by the satellite. Like hacking a Japanese bank, for instance. Easy enough to log in as an alias, route her hack via the server in Venezuela and bounce it off two or three satellites. Cover her tracks. It wasn’t like she was actually trying to transfer any funds. This had just been a quick reconnoitre and Tilde reckoned her secrets were safe.

The Hardwire was also a safe environment in that no one would actually try to talk to you here. Except this old girl, of course. But Tilde guessed that she probably didn’t know any better. She didn’t. And she didn’t go to the counter either – wasn’t going to spring for coffee just for Tilde. Not a good start.

Instead, she leant forward and whispered, ‘I’m looking for something important in cyberspace.’

‘Aren’t we all?’ said Tilde, sadly, and patted the chair beside her. ‘Tell me about it.’

Kathy Gold sat down heavily, the folds of her floral skirt flapping just enough to give out a slightly unpleasant smell.

‘Obviously not an android.’ Tilde suppressed a giggle, yawned instead and swivelled her chair a bit. Fiddled with the goggles.

But then the woman said something that made her sit up and take notice, ‘A program was stolen from a major software company last week. And I’m told you might know something about it.’

Suddenly, Tilde wasn’t bored anymore. She felt a bit exposed. Someone had been talking out of school, someone drunk and showing off – and now she was going to be arrested.

But her visitor wasn’t in law enforcement because she added, ‘I mean, you might know how to go about looking for it.’ Tilde smiled. ‘Why don’t you start at the beginning?’

This idea seemed a novel one to Kathy Gold. She took a deep breath. ‘Well, OK. I live here in Bristol – up near the Downs. Your name was given to me by a friend of a friend – although he seems to have got it a bit wrong. How I found out what you do isn’t important, is it? I wouldn’t want to betray a confidence.’ She pouted slightly at this, obviously thinking herself very clever for handing out such a bunch of crap.

It didn’t matter to Tilde. She’d find out everything she needed to know about Kathy Gold and her informant sooner or later, confidences betrayed or not. She’d find it out the good old-fashioned way. Patient, painstaking detective work.

And, of course, brutality.

Kathy checked to see that she had Tilde’s full attention and then continued – all the time twisting at her nasty skirt with her big, red hands. Tilde wasn’t sure whether the woman was really nervous or just excited. Guessed a bit of both.

‘A few days ago, I came home from work early. My husband was in his office – logged on. He was wearing his headset. I thought he’d fallen asleep. But he hadn’t. He was in a coma. And he died without ever recovering consciousness.’

Tilde felt like a heel. Wished she hadn’t been so flippant. Reviewing the conversation for possible insensitivities, she decided she hadn’t said anything too awful. Probably. Tried a conventional response. ‘I’m sorry.’

But this didn’t go big with Kathy Gold. ‘Why are you sorry? You didn’t kill him. Actually – I’m not particularly sorry either. We didn’t get on that well, to be honest. But I wanted to ask – can someone be killed by cyberspace? Because I thought there were all sorts of controls and safety features to stop that happening.’

Tilde wasn’t absolutely convinced that cyberspace could kill you. Kathy Gold was right – there were all sorts of controls built into the Web to keep users safe. Even if the samurai warrior protecting the Post Office Savings Bank of Japan had cut her head off with his wicked-looking sword, she’d have been alive in RL. Tagged and most likely arrested – but not decapitated. Even the security services’ supercomputers didn’t have lethal firewalls. However, there were always stories circulating the Web, stories about spikes and black ice and mysterious sites where the safety protocols had been deleted. She decided that discretion was the better part of valour.

Kathy took her silence for assent. ‘The doctor said he’d had a massive stroke and there was a blood clot lodged in his brain. They seemed surprised he hadn’t died instantly. The death certificate says ‘Natural Causes’ but I’ve been doing some checking. It seems that there’s no way a doctor can tell the difference between a spike and a stroke. Because the spike actually causes a stroke. I don’t want you to think I’m paranoid but I believe he was murdered. And I think I know who did it.’ Then she paused, practical again. ‘I cut the link – straight away. But I was too late.’

Tilde nodded. ‘You did the right thing.’ The young woman appeared to be thinking hard. But that was just appearance. Her next question was an obvious one and required very little hard thinking. ‘Are you sure he hadn’t been trying to do something he shouldn’t?’

Kathy looked like Tilde had farted in church. ‘He wasn’t that kind of man. But we’ll never know now, will we? His system had been set up to crash when the link was broken. So I couldn’t look at his History or check the firewall log or anything. The hard drive was completely melted.’

Then she looked into Tilde’s face and said, ‘That’s an odd thing to do, isn’t it? Set your system up like that?’

Tilde said, ‘It happens.’ And thought, ‘It happens when something fucking illegal has been going on.’ But she added, as kindly as possible, ‘So how do you think I can help you? You’ve left it far too long to trace any sort of spike, you know.’

‘I know. Anyway, the Union looked straightaway. They didn’t find one. But there’s something else. Something I can’t ask them to look for. Because it’s – well – sensitive. I’m told you specialise in data retrieval. And that you can keep things quiet.’

This conversation was moving a little too fast for Tilde’s liking. Assumptions were being made that shouldn’t be being made. And there was something vital being left out.

‘OK, OK. Back up a bit here, Kathy. Why would anyone want to kill your husband?’

‘Charles – his name was Charles. He hated Charlie. So I always called him Charles. He was a software engineer. He’d been working on something really sensitive. Top secret. Kept saying the company were watching him – having him followed. I guess they thought he was going to move jobs. Or sell the code. And I believe they had him killed to stop him.’

Tilde wasn’t impressed. She did the eye-rolling thing. ‘Who’d the guy work for? The yakuza?’

Kathy shook her head. ‘Lemon Computers.’

‘Lemon Computers? Are you kidding? You’re not seriously suggesting that Lemon Computers had him whacked? The Lemon Computers? The ‘This One’s a Lemon®’ Lemon Computers?’

Tilde was sorry Charles Gold was dead but she couldn’t stop giggling. The idea of a software multinational that demanded life-long commitment was pretty risible – rather like the concept of black ice. At worst, high tech corporations just sacked you if you stole from them. She could believe that Lemon’s major competitor in the ’space race, Anodyne Software Systems, might, just might, try to terrify someone into complying with their contract. But it seemed beyond belief that a cuddly company like Lemon could have some kind of black ops unit going around slotting their dissident staff. Rather than just handing out P45s like everyone else.

However, Kathy didn’t seem to think Lemon was at all funny – unsurprisingly – and she gave her young companion a hard look.

Tilde decided to stop laughing and start taking this all a bit more seriously. ‘You don’t know for sure that your husband was murdered. The doctor did certify his death as natural causes.’

Kathy looked a bit exasperated. Her story obviously wasn’t being swallowed as easily as she’d hoped. ‘Yes. But he was a doctor from the company. He told me that Charles had been under a lot of strain lately. He’d told him to take some leave. But, you see, the company had reason to be suspicious. A man from Security came to see me. Told me that Charles had taken all his research, put it on a disk and smuggled it out of the building. Destroyed all his notes. Everything. And that’s what he’d do if he was moving jobs, isn’t it?’ She paused, theatrically. ‘What if they decided he was too much of a security risk?’

‘And sent a spike down the satellite?’ Tilde reckoned Kathy’s story was getting more implausible by the minute. The guy had taken a disk home. Surely a slot-worthy offence in any company’s eyes? Not.

Charles Gold’s widow sighed. ‘When you put it like that, it doesn’t seem likely. But the research has disappeared. I mean, I don’t have it. There was a disk in Charles’ hand but it was completely blank. Look, Lemon have given me a chance to find this code – without publicity. It’s good of them because they could easily get a Court Order. They could take my house – everything. Charles was in cyberspace when he died and he could have been hiding the software there. That’s why I’ve come to you. I can’t talk to the Communications Union about it.’

Tilde nodded. One thing she did know was that the Union would be less than sympathetic. They really hated criminal activity. Although it seemed rather to disappoint than make them cross. But another thing she knew - if the Union were to recover Lemon’s research from ’space, there was only one place it would be going.

And that was straight back to Lemon.

The throbbing in her head was beginning to fade and Tilde was getting interested. ‘So – what was on this disk he took home? What’d he been working on?’

Kathy lowered her voice and looked around the café conspiratorially. ‘I don’t know for certain. Something he called the up-link program. Does that mean anything to you? I never asked him much about his work. Too boring.’

This was possibly the first true statement Kathy Gold had made. Tilde knew, from bitter experience, that you never asked programmers what they’d been working on. They might just start to tell you. And then you’d have to commit suicide or poke sharp objects into your eyes – anything to make them stop.

Slowly, Tilde realised what the woman had said. ‘Holy shit. You’re telling me he just walked out of work with the Up-link Program? I’m not surprised they were watching him. If you’re right, you need a bodyguard. And I’m not a bodyguard. If you’d done your homework, you’d know I gave that up four years ago.’

But Kathy didn’t seem to have done much checking. She obviously hadn’t heard of Tilde’s rep. And she seemed intent on annoying her. Otherwise, Tilde reasoned, she wouldn’t have kept using that really whiny voice.

‘Perhaps I do need a bodyguard. But I don’t think so. I don’t see what anyone would do to me. I don’t have the disk and I don’t have the software. And I’ve got absolutely no idea where they could be. I’ve searched the house from top to bottom. Been through all his possessions. The company say they’ve searched at work.’

Tilde still couldn’t take the story seriously. ‘Well, how do you know that your husband hadn’t already sold it? He could have met with a man in a trilby and dark glasses in the lavatories of the Far Point Hotel and handed the disk over.’

Kathy looked pretty cross. ‘You’re laughing at me again. I don’t like that.’

But Tilde shook her head. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t help it. Just imagine I’ve got a real bad nervous tic and try to ignore it. That’s what all my friends do. But, seriously, I won’t be able to find Lemon’s software if it’s been stashed on REDNEX or tucked up at Anodyne’s secure site.’

‘Charles wouldn’t behave like that, you know. He was a very honourable person. And, anyway, he never got any money for it. You can bet the Union checked that one. Thoroughly.’ Then added, hurriedly, ‘But I’ll be able to pay you. Don’t worry about that.’

However, not being paid wasn’t Tilde’s main concern. She gave Kathy a half-smile and said, ‘I’m not worried about that.’ And thought to herself, ‘No, I’m worried about ending up floating face down in the Feeder.’

Kathy started rummaging in her capacious tapestry bag. ‘I’ve got that blank disk here somewhere. Lemon gave it back to me. I don’t know if it’s any use to you. I expect he’d already uploaded the data from it. Would that make it read as blank?’

This was a sensible question and it deserved a sensible answer. ‘No. Not really. There’d still be some trace – a resonance, if you like – on the disk, even if he’d wiped it completely. It’s more likely that he was just about to put a brand new blank disk in to download something. That would make more sense. Maybe he’d shunted the program off earlier and just wanted to copy down part of the code to show to someone. A sort of sample?’

Kathy was tight-lipped. ‘You’re still presuming he was going to sell it.’

Tilde shrugged. ‘I don’t have a very good opinion of human nature. Personal experience, I’m afraid. But I don’t believe that Lemon killed your old man. It’s really not their style. If he was murdered, it’s far more likely to be someone a bit shady. A buyer? Your husband could have been swimming with some big sharks, you know. I mean – it was the Up-link Program.’

But Kathy didn’t seem to care much about her late husband’s swimming companions. She seemed to care a lot more about herself. ‘I’ve only got a week to find this research and give it back to Lemon. Or I’m in real trouble.’

Tilde felt obliged to ask. ‘Have they made any threats?’

‘I told them they couldn’t get blood out of stone. They were pretty damn unpleasant, however.’

‘Yeah, well. Security officers are pretty damn unpleasant people. They practise unpleasantness in front of mirrors. I shouldn’t worry too much about that. But there’s something I don’t understand. If you’re right and the program is in ’space, why don’t Lemon just go and get it?’

Kathy paused just long enough for Tilde to recognise that another piece of the story was going to be fed to her. The woman moved closer and lowered her voice, conspiratorially. ‘You want my opinion?’

Tilde knew that ‘no thanks’ wasn’t really an option so she nodded.

Kathy continued. ‘I know a bit about Lemon. Well, software companies in general. Charles was in the biz for twenty years. My guess is that they haven’t told their client the code’s missing. They’re still hoping to get it back. And, unless they’ve put some kind of marker on it, they won’t be able to just pull it from cyberspace. They’d have to get a Court Order. Which is a bit too public. And their client would find out.’

Then the older woman looked around the Hardwire in a rather exaggerated fashion, considering that the place was nearly empty, and said, ‘I don’t know exactly who the client was. Lemon wouldn’t tell me. But I understand it’s a matter of national security.’