She wasn’t as happy with the attack stuff as she could have been. She’d gotten it with area-effect rather than high-penetration, thinking the shotgun approach was best when she couldn’t be sure what the Fuchi boys would have built in. Still, the Filipino armor program she’d hawked from Paris looked as if it was good enough to buy her the extra time and defense she’d need when up against the heavy IC. She also had a reliable medic program to keep the MPCP rolling when the guano hit the fan; that venerable utility had done yeoman work for at least the last couple of years.

The key to it all was programming the smartframe. She was going to use it as a decoy, she decided, rather than to cover her butt as a defense back-up. That meant she’d have to program it with instructions to confuse, detour, delay, and generally frag with anything she might encounter while dumping the virus into the Fuchi system. She’d contemplated exploring the system in sensor mode, trying to learn what she could in order to better instruct the frame, but then thought better of it. One mistake could place the system on alert, and she wasn’t about to hand out any advance warnings.

Chewing her lip, Francesca keyed in the instruction codes. When in doubt, she figured, nuke the bastards and shoot ‘em when they glow in the dark. Let’s bust through to the CPU and frag anything else.

The adrenaline was pouring through her veins now. Second-guessing Fuchi’s strategies, she used her experience and skills to anticipate what she might find, allowing for just a bit of the smartframe’s capacity for contingency programming. She flew as high as a kite, and by three in the afternoon the cyberdeck was humming. Francesca jacked in to her deck and entered the Matrix.

Optical Neotech, here I come. You are about to get squared.

* * *

The resistance was just what she’d expected. She’d battered through the IC, the frame smoking her from one crucial attack, and then she’d downloaded the virus into the CPU.