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.With a shout, he jumped onto the landing, swinging the heavy power-strip over his head.The Critic’s academic cadre were no physical match for the Referee’s knights-in-armor; but their fire extinguishers were surprisingly effective weapons.They coated everything in white caustic soda and filled the air with great blinding, billowing wads of flying, freezing droplets.It was clear that the defenders had been practicing.The sight of the desperate struggle downstairs overwhelmed Eddy.He jumped down the stairs three at a time and flung himself into the midst of the battle.He conked a soda-covered helmet with a vicious overhead swing of his power-strip, then slipped and fell heavily on his back.He began wrestling desperately across the soda-slick floor with a half-blinded knight.The knight clawed his visor up.Beneath the metal mask the knight was, if anything, younger than himself.He looked like a nice kid.He clearly meant well.Eddy hit the kid in the jaw as hard as he could, then began slamming his helmeted head into the floor.Another knight kicked Eddy in the belly.Eddy fell off his victim, got up, and went for the new attacker.The two of them, wrestling clumsily, were knocked off balance by a sudden concerted rush through the doorway; a dozen Moral raiders slammed through, flinging torches and bottles of flaming gel.Eddy slapped his new opponent across the eyes with his soda-daubed hand, then lurched to his feet and jammed the loose spex back onto his face.He began coughing violently.The air was full of smoke; he was smothering.He lurched for the door.With the panic strength of a drowning man, he clawed and jostled his way free.Once outside the data-haven, Eddy realized that he was one of dozens of people daubed head to foot with white foam.Wheezing, coughing, collapsing against the side of the building, he and his fellow refugees resembled veterans of a monster cream-pie fight.They didn’t, and couldn’t, recognize him as an enemy.The caustic soda was eating its way into Eddy’s cheap jumpsuit, reducing the bubbled fabric to weeping red rags.Wiping his lips, ribs heaving, Eddy looked around.The spex had guarded his eyes, but their filth subroutine had crashed badly.The internal screen was frozen.Eddy shook the spex with his foamy hands, finger-snapped at them, whistled aloud.Nothing.He edged his way along the wall.At the back of the crowd, a tall gentleman in a medieval episcopal mitre was shouting orders through a bullhorn.Eddy wandered through the crowd until he got closer to the man.He was a tall, lean man, in his late forties, in brocaded vestments, a golden cloak, and white gloves.This was the Moral Referee.Eddy considered jumping this distinguished gentleman and pummeling him, perhaps wrestling his bullhorn away and shouting contradictory orders through it.But even if he dared to try this, it wouldn’t do Eddy much good.The Referee with the bullhorn was shouting in German.Eddy didn’t speak German.Without his spex he couldn’t read German.He didn’t understand Germans or their issues or their history.In point of fact he had no real reason at all to be in Germany.The Moral Referee noticed Eddy’s fixed and calculating gaze.He lowered his bullhorn, leaned down a little from the top of his portable mahogany pulpit, and said something to Eddy in German.“Sorry,” Eddy said, lifting his spex on their neck chain.“Translation program crashed.”The Referee examined him thoughtfully.“Has the acid in that foam damaged your spectacles?” he said, in excellent English.“Yes sir,” Eddy said.“I think I’ll have to strip ’em and blow-dry the chips.”The Referee reached within his robe and handed Eddy a monogrammed linen kerchief.“You might try this, young man.”“Thanks a lot,” Eddy said.“I appreciate that, really.”“Are you wounded?” the Referee said, with apparently genuine concern.“No, sir.I mean, not really.”“Then you’d better return to the fight,” the Referee said, straightening.“I know we have them on the run.Be of good cheer.Our cause is just.” He lifted his bullhorn again and resumed shouting.The first floor of the building had caught fire.Groups of the Referee’s people were hauling linked machines into the street and smashing them to fragments on the pavement.They hadn’t managed to knock the bars from the windows, but they had battered some enormous holes through the walls.Eddy watched, polishing his spex.Well above the street, the wall of the third floor began to disintegrate.Moral Knights had broken into the office where Eddy had last seen the Cultural Critic.They had hauled their hydraulic ram up the stairs with them.Now its blunt nose was smashing through the brick wall as if it were stale cheese.Fist-sized chunks of rubble and mortar cascaded to the street, causing the raiders below to billow away.In seconds, the raiders on the third floor had knocked a hole in the wall the size of a manhole cover.First, they flung down an emergency ladder.Then, office furniture began tumbling out to smash to the pavement below: voice mailboxes, canisters of storage disks, red-spined European law-books, network routers, tape backup-units, color monitors.…A trenchcoat flew out the hole and pinwheeled slowly to earth.Eddy recognized it at once.It was Frederika’s sandpaper coat.Even in the midst of shouting chaos, with an evil billowing of combusting plastic now belching from the library’s windows, the sight of that fluttering coat hooked Eddy’s awareness.There was something in that coat.In its sleeve pocket.The key to his airport locker.Eddy dashed forward, shoved three knights aside, and grabbed up the coat for himself.He winced and skipped aside as a plummeting office chair smashed to the street, narrowly missing him.He glanced up frantically.He was just in time to see them throw out Frederika.The tide was leaving Düsseldorf, and with it all the schooling anchovies of Europe.Eddy sat in the departure lounge balancing eighteen separate pieces of his spex on a Velcro lap-table.“Do you need this?” Frederika asked him.“Oh yeah,” Eddy said, accepting the slim chromed tool.“I dropped my dental pick.Thanks a lot.” He placed it carefully into his black travel bag.He’d just spent all his European cash on a deluxe, duty-free German electronics repair kit.“I’m not going to Chattanooga, now or ever,” Frederika told him.“So you might as well forget that.That can’t be part of the bargain.”“Change your mind,” Eddy suggested.“Forget this Barcelona flight, and come transatlantic with me.We’ll have a fine time in Chattanooga.There’s some very deep people I want you to meet.”“I don’t want anybody to meet,” Frederika muttered darkly.“And I don’t want you to show me off to your little hackerboy friends.”Frederika had taken a hard beating in the riot, while covering the Critic’s successful retreat across the rooftop.Her hair had been scorched during the battle, and it had burst from its meticulous braiding like badly overused steel wool.She had a black eye, and her cheek and jaw were scorched and shiny with medicinal gel.Although Eddy had broken her fall, her three-storey tumble to the street had sprained her ankle, wrenched her back, and barked both knees.And she had lost her spex.“You look just fine,” Eddy told her [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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