Night's Pawn by Tom Dowd

don't want to talk about it, and I don't want to hear you or anybody else talking about it."
    "It'd only be me and Gordo, I don't think anybody else's been around—"
    "Then it'd be you and Gordo. The point is more that I don't want Cara to hear anybody talking about it."
    Trinity looked up at him again. "The little girl you came in with?" she asked.
    Chase nodded and continued. "Der Nachtmachen is my history," he said. "She's got her own history with some other jokers of a similar persuasion. I don't want her even thinking about any kind of connection between me and people like them. She's got enough justified paranoia without adding more to the confusion."
    "I hear you. Nothin' said from now on."
    They stood in silence for a few minutes until Trinity was distracted by the growing roar of another set of engines somewhere else in the camp. Chase clasped her once on the shoulder, then moved deeper into the camp, his own clothes blending easily with the ground and the camouflage netting. Except for his hat.
    Chase had unintentionally made a lot of noise as he climbed the shallow wooden steps to the plastic house that he and Cara had on loan during their stay at Dart Base. Something had been sleeping in the shade under those steps and it expressed its displeasure at his arrival with a deep growl and the beginnings of some pungent odor. Chase decided not to find out what kind of Awakened monstrosity it was, and all but leaped off the steps and through the door into the building. He slammed the door with a curse, then made a quick check to make sure he hadn't damaged its fragile hinges. He was reaching for a beer in the cooler nearest the door when he spotted Cara, apparently oblivious to his entry.
    She was in the main room, really the only room in the small house. Sitting on the floor, back to him, she was rocking slowly back and forth. She was wearing a pair of khaki shorts she'd picked up in Dallas-Fort Worth and a deep-green tank top drenched in sweat. Chase could hear the barest sounds of some words she seemed to be muttering. He didn't understand them.
    He left the beer in the cooler, and walked slowly toward her. Her left arm twitched, and her head moved back and forth as though she were watching something on the floorboards in front of her. But Chase saw nothing when he got closer. Nothing, except a small black box no larger than an old paperback book. A thin, twisted double cable of optical wire spiraled up from the side of the case and traveled up near her left ear. Chase didn't need to see the end of the cable to know that it fit neatly into the chrome datajack she had there.
    A small wafer of gray was set into the case just above the sparse, flat-panel LCD screen that showed the box's controls. The chip was bare of the usual labels, except for a ragged piece of clear tape on which the word "buzz" had been written with a white marker.
    Chase circled around carefully to where he could see her face. Her eyes were open, but unfocused, nearly glazed, and jumping like the end of a loose, high-voltage wire. He could see the quick flashes of a dozen emotions rush across her face: fear, ecstasy, anger, confusion, fear again, and onward. Through it, she held a thin smile, despite the apparent effort of the muscles in her face to change it. Muscles in her neck danced, and a tear swelled in one eye. Her lips were parched. Her own senses overridden, she saw only what the chip showed her, heard, smelled, and tasted only what it was programmed to relate, felt only what it allowed. Her own senses were drowned out by the electronic flood from the deck in front of her.
    The simsense deck she was attached to was a Fuchi model, one of the best available. But that was ironic, considering who she was. More clear tape held the bottom half of the case in place; the deck had been altered. Someone had modified its circuits to make it unsafe. Chase figured they'd probably removed the filters and peak inhibitors that were supposed to maintain the