Chapter III
FOR THE BUSIEST WOMAN IN MAINFRAME, DOT MATRIX WAS SURPRISINGLY EASY TO find. She was exactly where Enzo and Matrix both knew she would be---in her office, at her desk, glasses on her nose with her organizer in her hand. Bob sat cross-legged on the floor nearby, keeping a pair of energetic young twins entertained. Jaric was sitting on his father's lap, while his sister Jana played with Bob's long, silvery-black hair.
"Surprise, surprise," Matrix grinned at his sister.
"Do you ever leave this office?"
"Not often," Bob snickered, just before Jana gave his hair a particularly hard tug. "Ahhhh�Jana, that hurts." The little girl laughed, and continued plaiting her father's hair.
Dot ignored the jibe altogether, smiling at her brothers and AndrAIa as the trio strode into her office. She set her organizer aside. "How was the game?"
"Ugh," Enzo groaned. "Well, it was a new one for me. For my stomach's sake, I sincerely hope it never drops again."
"That bad?" Dot's mouth curved into a lopsided, sympathetic grin, as she pulled her glasses off and laid them on top of her desk.
"Worse."
"Uncle Enzo!" Jumping up out of Bob's lap, Jaric laughed happily and bounced over towards his favorite uncle, followed by an equally excited Jana. As small as they were---they'd just turned four---they had a lot of energy, and the two of them knocked Enzo flat on his back.
"Sorry," Dot shrugged, rising from behind her desk. She spread her hands in apology. "I sent Hack and Slash on an errand, and..."
Enzo waved it off. "Ah, don't worry about it. I guess this is just payback," he grinned, pushing himself back up, in spite of the anxious twins tugging at his arms.
"Did you beat the User?" Jana asked excitedly.
Enzo smiled, ruffling his niece's dark hair. Even at this young age, they both had a strong resemblance to their parents---they shared Bob's silver-black hair and wide brown eyes, and Dot's bright smile. Their skin was a hue somewhere between that of both parents, a shade of light aquamarine. Enzo adored the twins. As rambunctious as they could be at times, they were a wonder to him. It amazed him to see how huge and exciting the world was to them, as they saw it for the first time---how innocent and uncomplicated their lives were. Sometimes it made him jealous. Had he ever been like them? He couldn't remember.
"Yup," he grinned, lifting Jana and setting the girl on his hip. "He just gets slower with every game."
"That, or you're getting quicker," Bob suggested quietly, smiling at Enzo as he tried to work out the crooked braids that Jana had knotted his hair into.
"Can I go with you next time?" Jaric asked, for what was hardly the first time. "I could help you. I'm really good!"
"I bet you are," Enzo smiled, but glancing quickly over at the look on Dot's face, he turned back to Jaric and shook his head. "But you're still too young to play games."
He looked up to see Matrix giving him a pointed look. They'd both heard that before. Dot's alarmed expression slowly eased. Enzo knew that the mere mention of her children going into games upset her, as did their innocent dreams of becoming Guardians someday. So many times, she'd come close to losing the other Guardians in her life---first Bob, then Matrix, and even Enzo once or twice. That had been hard enough. He noticed her hand resting on her slightly rounded middle. A little longer, and she and Bob would be parents again.
Jaric frowned indignantly, as if he'd been insulted.
"I am good. Dad's been teaching me. I'm going to be a Guardian really soon!"
"Someday, kiddo," Matrix smiled. "Someday, if you work really hard."
"Even Matrix and I hadn't seen this game before, Bob," AndrAIa cut in. "If you'd like, the three of us could put together a profile for the archives."
Bob had pulled himself back to his feet, and hoisted Jaric up off the floor onto his shoulders. "That'd be great. There've been a lot of new games dropping l---"
A loud chime sounded on the desk panel, cutting Bob off in mid-sentence. Sighing, Dot reached over and activated the channel. "Yes?"
"Commander," a small, high-pitched voice sounded over the com. "I'm sorry to disturb you, but the long-range sensors just picked up a power surge on the energy C."
There was a short, tense pause, filled only with the crackling of the intercom system. "We think it's a portal."
"It's impossible," Dot said as she hurried into the P.O.'s command center, down the steps, toward the flat holoboard. "The ports to the Net have been locked for minutes. There's no way anyone could've gotten in or out of Mainframe."
She rested her hands on her hips and peered at the table's display. "What've we got?"
Across the room, a One binome in a green military uniform glanced up at her from his control station.
"Confirmed---it is, or rather was, a portal. It vanished again just three nanoseconds ago."
"Can you tell if anything came through?" Bob asked in alarm.
"Checking..."
The doors to the command center hissed open, and the familiar whirr of motorized treads hummed as Phong wheeled into the room. He was getting older now, but his counsel continued to be invaluable to Dot and the others. And it wasn't easy to convince Phong that he wasn't as young as he used to be.
"What is this about a portal?" he asked, bumping clumsily down the steps and heading over to Dot's side.
Matrix stood on the second level of the command center, at the sensor station. An open vidwindow in front of him displayed what was coming back from the long-range sensors on the fringes of the city. "I hate to be the first to get everyone's hopes up, after this long---"
"Sensors confirmed, a single energy signal passed through the portal," the binome officer reported. "It appears to be...drifting...out on the energy C. It's too far away to get a precise fix on what it is."
"---but there was only one person who could've gotten back into Mainframe through the port locks," Matrix continued, resting his hands on the railing over the command pit. "And that was Mouse."
He watched his sister's eyes widen, as everyone else showed varying degrees of disbelief, foolish hope, or a combination of the two. It had, after all, been six hours since the last time any of them had seen or heard from either Mouse or Ray Tracer. They'd long since given the two up as either lost or deleted---they'd mourned, and moved on. By now their memories of the fiery-haired hacker and the Web surfer had begun to fade.
Matrix put up his hands. "All I'm saying is that she was the one who locked them. I don't think anyone else could've opened them."
"Well," Dot said after a moment, her voice barely audible. She cleared her throat and spoke louder. "Whatever or whoever it was that came through that portal, we've got to investigate it anyway. Is the Ada Byron online yet?"
A slight smile crept up AndrAIa's face. "The crew's still working out a few bugs, but she's seaworthy, if that's what you mean---at least enough to get us out there and back."
"Good. Enz..." Dot paused, shook her head and glanced at the older of her two brothers. "Matrix. You and AndrAIa, take a squad with you to the docks. I'll tell the Captain that you're coming."
AndrAIa nodded to Dot, then shot Matrix a quick glance that said, Let's go. He nodded back, meeting her at the door. The pair wordlessly left the command center, as Dot whispered softly after them, "Stay frosty..."
In the corridor, AndrAIa turned to Matrix and asked quietly, "Do you really think it might be Mouse?"
"I don't know. I guess we're going to find out."
They quickly gathered the binome soldiers and hustled them into a small transport, which sped away from the Principal Office towards Kits Sector and the docks. The trip only took a few micros, but the time seemed to crawl by. Matrix glanced nervously out the small viewport, watching, as the tiny speck sitting in the docks grew slowly larger.
The Ada Byron.
Her predecessor, the infamous Saucy Mare, had been destroyed in the war, and like all other casualties that were not originally part of the system, she had not been restored. Her crew, however, refused to let the lost Mare bring an end to their adventuring. Ever since the restart, they'd been hard at work constructing this new ship. It had taken them this long to get even close to completing the Ada Byron, but she was a beauty---larger than the Mare, sleeker, and far faster. AndrAIa, now quite the mechanic, had helped the pirates piece the ship together from the keel up. As a gesture of gratitude, the pirates had carved the Ada Byron's figurehead to resemble the lithe game sprite, right down to the navel ring and the seastar in her hair. AndrAIa, of course, was flattered; it had taken Matrix a little while to get used to it.
"Welcome aboard, Matrix!" the jovial, scarlet-clad One binome known as Gavin Capacitor greeted, sweeping his hat off his cubed head in a grand gesture. "Dot tells me we're to set sail...something about a portal?"
"That's right," Matrix said, ushering the troops on board the Ada Byron, via a small wooden plank the pirates had dropped to the shuttle's hatch. "We tracked it a few micros again...and something came through it."
"Or someone," AndrAIa murmured.
Capacitor waved his hook at the boarding soldiers.
"And what're these lads for?" he asked, eyeing them suspiciously.
Matrix grinned. "Just in case."
"By the Code, man," Capacitor replied, looking shocked and even a bit insulted, "even if there be trouble, don't you think me crew and I can handle it on our own?"
Laughing, AndrAIa pulled the boarding plank back in and gave her helper---the enormous, tattooed Princess Bula---a glance over. "I'm sure you could," she told the Captain, as the shuttle lifted up and zipped away. "But we can't argue with Dot's orders."
"That we can't," Capacitor agreed. He whirled around on his crew and bellowed, "Well, what're ye waiting for? Raise the anchor!"
The Ada Byron pulled out and away from the docks, as her giant blue sails sprung into place. Gingerly she turned, her bow pointed straight out towards the distant horizon, and the ship sped away across the flickering blue waves of energy. Whatever it was that had crossed through the portal, it was drifting quite a ways out from the city. Even someone who had wanted to avoid drawing attention to his or her arrival would've probably tried to drop in at least a little closer. Whoever'd made the portal calculations must've been doing one sloppy job. Or else been in an awful hurry.
"Can you see it yet, Matrix?" AndrAIa called from the main deck, where she stood with the small detail of soldiers and a slapped-together group of armed pirates.
Matrix was up near the helm, with the Captain, his eyes cast out over the waves. Quietly he scanned the horizon, adjusting the zoom and focus of his artificial right eye, carefully looking ahead of the ship. They should've been coming up on it soon---
"There!" He first pointed, and then called off the exact coordinates as his eye calculated them. The helmsman adjusted the ship's course accordingly. Matrix tried to magnify the image, to get a closer view of the dark blot that was floating on the surface. It was flat, and as long as a sprite. Definitely not alive. That was all he could make out from this distance. Once the Ada Byron reached the mark, three soldiers and a pair of pirates went over on zipboards with a net in which to carry the object. Matrix hastily slid down the ladder from the upper deck, followed closely by Captain Capacitor and his first mate, Christopher. As he walked over to where AndrAIa was standing, the pirates and soldiers were bringing the mysterious object aboard, hauling it over the railing onto the deck. Tangled in the net, it clattered to the deck loudly, and fell flat. One of the pirates whipped out a knife and cut the netting away. AndrAIa let out a sudden gasp.
"Oh dear," Mr. Christopher said quietly, his ledger dropping to the deck.
Lying before them, damaged and dripping wet but still functioning, was Ray Tracer's surf baud.
Or, to be correct, Ray himself.