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loosely about his shoulders and his eyes were hard. The weapon in his right hand was fixed unwaveringly on her breastbone. He stopped four metres in front of her, too far, and she knew it. He knew it too. And grinned at her unpleasantly.
    "Let's see you get out of this one, Skin."
    And he shot her in the chest.

CHAPTER 2

    Darkness. The chemicals stung, and she fought them. Established an active barrier. Failed to get immediately further, which was frightening. She should have been waking up. Unless there was a deliberate blockage, which was more frightening. She focused hard and felt that awareness trigger a response. It grew stronger. Through the tangled pathways of colour and light she found her bearings, and felt the pathways opening up on all sides.
    Sounds, faint and distant, now growing stronger. Beeping. It sounded like an audio mechanism for a monitor. Human voices. Indistinct. The whining of something mechanical. Electrical.
    "... can't you ..."
    "... much I ... insufficient penetration ..."
    And other things.
    Light, multi-spectrummed and unidirectional. She always saw that first, before the rest. Then brighter, and clearer, and she discovered her eyelids, and blinked. Lips parted, and for the briefest instant she felt them tingling.
    She was staring at the floor, she realised. Lying prone on something, face down. She couldn't feel the rest of her body. Yet. Again the whining noise. Then a thick humming. She could smell more chemicals then, rich and cloying. Antiseptic. And suffered a jolt of terror, knowing that smell intimately under different circumstances.
    "Nearly full consciousness. Damn, that's fast."
    "... not going to be able to shut it down for a while yet ... the intricacies of those barrier matrixes mean a long, hard time before the infiltrators get close enough."
    Sandy tried to speak, but her voice wouldn't work. Just a slight, ineffectual movement of her lips. She was nearly completely paralysed and numb, and was aware of something nibbling, working deeper, somewhere deep inside. She focused inward, searching for her linkups. The connections were sluggish, but they worked. And they told her that something was eating away at her barrier elements.
    She searched further. It had a power source, an external link, which meant it was plugged in somewhere. That was bad news. As for what it was ... and she recoiled as it shocked her, blanking her newly acquired vision back to darkness.
    "It's probing. Ran into the barrier elements just then. Probably try again in a moment."
    "Right, keep working. Don't get impatient..."
    It had left an impression when it shocked her, that invader. Sandy pondered over it for a moment. And when she figured she knew what it was, she began to drop a section of her elements, slowly, fading in and out.
    "... here, you see that? That's progress..."
    "Try it slowly, see what happens ..."
    The invader moved in, sucking in the codes, breaking them down, bit by bit, eating away ... and greedily bit deeper than it ought. Sandy raised her elements hard as she could, feeling a surge of fury as she trapped the thing momentarily, and hit it with as high an attack burst as she could muster, right where she thought it most vulnerable. For a moment, it was a complete energy whiteout.
    "Shit!" There was a popping noise, and she could suddenly smell something burning, like cabling. "What the fuck was that ..." and a confusion of activity.
    Her vision was clearing. Small muscles in her face, neck and throat, and down her spine, chemicals cleared out in that energy burst, down the main neural pathways. Down her back and into her legs, a tingling rush of sensation.
    "Damn, that's wiped the chemical blockages. She's regaining contact."
    "Increase the dosage ... get that damn unit replaced, it's completely fried, you'll never restart it..."
    "That's the most powerful neural attack pattern I've ever seen from a Skin ..."
    "Dammit, I told you not to underestimate it."
    More commotion, and the movement