Hiro goes over the lip of the amphitheater doing a couple of hundred miles per hour and soars out into space, in free fall, above the heads of a quarter of a million wildly cheering hackers.

They all know Hiro. He's the guy with the swords. He's a friend of Da5id's. And as his own personal contribution to the benefit, he's apparently decided to stage a sword fight with some kind of hulking, scary-looking daemon on a motorcycle. Don't touch that dial, it's going to be a hell of a show.

He lands on the stage and bounces to a halt next to his motorcycle. The bike still works, but it's worthless down here. Raven is ten meters away, grinning at him.

"Bombs away," Raven says. He pulls the glowing blue lozenge out of his sidecar with one hand and drops it on the center of the amphitheater. It breaks open like the shell of an egg and light shines out of it. The light begins to grow and take shape.

The crowd goes wild.

Hiro runs toward the egg. Raven cuts him off. Raven can't move around on his feet now because he's lost a leg. But he can still control the bike. He's got his long knife out now, and the two blades come together above the egg, which has become the vortex of a blinding, deafening tornado of light and sound. Colored shapes, foreshortened by their immense speed, shoot from the center of it and take positions above their heads, building a three-dimensional picture.

The hackers are going nuts. Hiro knows that the Hacker Quadrant in The Black Sun is, at............