Free Cybermancy by Kelly McCullough Page A

attached directly to the motherboard. There were no obvious connections leading out of the server. E-mail went in and then it went . . . somewhere else. Then verification of messages received came back from wherever that somewhere was.
    I moved closer, almost touching the node. I couldn’t be sure without entering, but it looked an awful lot like an independent core, a computer within the computer. I reached out toward it and . . . stopped. Something about the node raised the virtual hairs on the back of my electronic neck, and it wasn’t just knowing I was flirting on the edges of Necessity’s business. Accessing Melchior, I had him pull up one of my standard hacking tools, a code weasel, a completely independent program with no connections back to him or me. It appeared in my hand, a small furry thing like its namesake, different only in that it had bat wings. Moving well away from the node, I released it.
    It dropped like a hunting hawk, backwinging just before it touched the black surface and landing gently. Before it had time to so much as fold its wings, a ball of black fire emerged from the node and engulfed it, incinerating it instantly. A dark flash and the weasel was gone. The flame, hovering above the node and spinning in place, remained. I decided I’d used up my luck for the day and had better leave. The second I moved, so did the ball. It came after me like an ebony comet with a tail of black sparks glinting behind it like chips of midnight.
    I moved as quickly as thought could take me, but it gained steadily. I wouldn’t make—
    Sudden searing pain, like I’d put my hand on the burner of a stove. I heard a whimper and realized it had come from my own lips. I was back in my body, and the pain was on this side of the link. The athame embedded in my palm had fresh carbon on it, a loose star of char marks, centered on the networking port, whose delicate contacts were actually glowing a dull red as they melted. The connector itself was gone. Using the tail of my shirt as an insulator, I grabbed the hilt and pulled the blade out.
    It didn’t quite burn my fingers through the cloth, but it came close. Almost out of reflex I whistled the binary spell that closed athame-induced wounds. To my surprise it worked, sealing the flesh and soothing most of my pain. I could still feel a dull throbbing, but it no longer dominated my thinking. It was only then that I remembered Melchior. If the security program had done that to my athame, what had it done to my familiar?
    I looked up and saw a line burned into the surface of the wooden table. It led from the place where my wrist had rested to the now-empty spot Mel had occupied when I crossed over into the virtual world of the mweb. It was only then that I heard the running water and swearing. Turning, I found my webgoblin. He was kneeling in the sink and swearing a streak as blue as he was. Water from the tap ran across his nose—the location of his networking port in goblin shape—and from there over his right hand, both of which were showing blisters. I rose to help him, then almost went down when the world wavered around me.
    “Are you all right?” I asked, my voice sounding tinny and distant.
    “I will be,” he answered, “with a couple of minor repairs. I take it from the fact that you’re speaking to me that I pulled the plug in time.”
    “What happened?”
    “You know how they say that ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Well, she’s a mother all right.” Melchior shook his burned right hand a couple of times. “Man but that smarts. I don’t know how the security on that black box worked, but it went through my system without leaving a mark until it hit the line out to its target.”
    “Me.”
    “You. That’s when the networking cable caught fire.” He pointed at the burned line on the table, his pupils huge and black, and shook his head. “It actually caught fire. I didn’t know that was possible. I’ve never