"Desjardins saved us from Rio," Mr. McMurdo had opined, moments earlier, in a Hindian accent. "We'd have surely taken ten times the losses had he not acted when he did. How those people threw off the Trip—"

Ms. London: "How do you know they did?" Irish lilt. Enticing.

"Well let me see. They launched an unprovoked attack on a large number of—"

"How do we know it was unprovoked?"

"Of course it was unprovoked."

"Why? How do you know they didn't just see a threat to the greater good, and try to stop it?"

Precious moments of this fleeting excerpt, wasted on astonished silence. Finally: "Are you suggesting that—"

"I'm saying history gets written by the victors. Rio's history. How do we know the good guys won?"

End of intercept. If McMurdo had had an answer, he hadn't got it out before the frequency skidded away.

Wow, Desjardins thought.

It was horseshit, of course. The idea that twenty-one separate CSIRA franchises could have simultaneously gone rogue was hardly more plausible than the thought that Rio alone had. Ms. London was a 'lawbreaker, not an idiot. She knew about parsimony. She'd just been blowing smoke out her ass, yanking poor old McMurdo's chain.

Still, it gave Desjardins pause. He'd gotten used to being the Man Who Stopped Rio. It put him above suspicion on so many counts. And it didn't sit well, to think that there were people out there who could doubt his virtue even for a moment.

That could lead to second thoughts, he reflected. It could lead to closer looks.

The board beeped again. For a moment he thought that he'd beaten all odds and reacquired the signal—but no. The new alert came from a different source entirely, a broadband dump from somewhere in Maine.

That's odd, he thought.

A Lenie had gotten into a medical database and was spewing random intelligence across half the EM spectrum. They did that a lot, these days—not content to merely scramble and hash, some had taken to shouting into the ether, indiscriminately dumping data into any network they could access. Some reproductive subroutine, mutated to spread data instead of executables. At the very least it threw more chaff into a system already losing usable bandwidth by the hour; at worst it could blow the lid off all sorts of secret and sensitive data.

Either way it was bad news for the real world; that would be enough to keep it going.

This particular demon had uploaded a whole shitload of biomedical stuff from the database it had plundered. Desjardins's board had flagged it for potential epidemiological significance. He popped the lid and looked inside.

And immediately forgot about any trivial bullshit gossip from London.