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their DNA coded in silicon? If Straylight was an expression of the corporate
identity of Tessier-Ashpool, then T-A was crazy as the old man had been. The
same ragged tangle of fears, the same strange sense of aimlessness. "If
they'd turned into what they wanted to. . ." he remembered Molly
saying. But Wintermute had told her they hadn't.
Case had always taken it for granted that the real bosses, the kingpins
in a given industry, would be both more and less than people. He'd
seen it in the men who'd crippled him in Memphis, he'd seen Wage
affect the semblance of it in Night City, and it had allowed him to accept
Armitage's flatness and lack of feeling. He'd always imagined it
as a gradual and willing accommodation of the machine, the system, the
parent organism. It was the root of street cool, too, the knowing posture
that implied connection, invisible lines up to hidden levels of influence.
But what was happening now, in the corridors of Villa Straylight?
Whole stretches were being stripped back to steel and concrete.
"Wonder where our Peter is now, huh? Maybe see that boy soon," she
muttered. "And Armitage. Where's he, Case?"
"Dead," he said, knowing she couldn't hear him, "he's
dead."
He flipped.
The Chinese program was face to face with the target ice, rainbow tints
gradually dominated by the green of the rectangle representing the T-A
cores. Arches of emerald across the colorless void.
"How's it go, Dixie?"
"Fine. Too slick. Thing's amazing. . . Shoulda had one that time
in Singapore. Did the old New Bank of Asia for a good fiftieth of what they
were worth. But that's ancient history. This baby takes all the
drudgery out of it. Makes you wonder what a real war would be like, now. .
."
"If this kinda shit was on the street, we'd be out a job," Case
said.
"You wish. Wait'll you're steering that thing upstairs
through black ice."
"Sure."
Something small and decidedly nongeometric had just appeared on the far
end of one of the emerald arches.
"Dixie . . ."
"Yeah. I see it. Don't know if I believe it."
A brownish dot, a dull gnat against the green wall of the T-A cores. It
began to advance, across the bridge built by Kuang Grade Mark Eleven, and
Case saw that it was walking. As it came, the green section of the arch
extended, the polychrome of the virus program rolling back, a few steps
ahead of the cracked black shoes.
"Gotta hand it to you, boss," the Flatline said, when the short,
rumpled figure of the Finn seemed to stand a few meters away. "I never seen
anything this funny when I was alive." But the eerie nonlaugh didn't
come.
"I never tried it before," the Finn said, showing his teeth, his hands
bunched in the pockets of his frayed jacket.
"You killed Armitage," Case said.
"Corto. Yeah. Armitage was already gone. Hadda do it. I know, I know,
you wanna get the enzyme. Okay. No sweat. I was the one gave it to Armitage
in the first place. I mean I told him what to use. But I think maybe
it's better to let the deal stand. You got enough time. I'll
give it to you. Only a coupla hours now, right?"
Case watched blue smoke billow in cyberspace as the Finn lit up one of
his Partagas.
"You guys," the Finn said, "you're a pain. The Flatline here, if
you were all like him, it would be real simple. He's a construct, just
a buncha ROM, so he always does what I expect him to. My projections said
there wasn't much chance of Molly wandering in on Ashpool's big
exit scene, give you one example." He sighed.
"Why'd he kill himself?" Case asked.
"Why's anybody kill himself?" The figure shrugged. "I guess I
know, if anybody does, but it would take me twelve hours to explain the
various factors in his history and how they interrelate. He was ready to do
it for a long time, but he kept going back into the freezer. Christ, he was
a tedious old fuck." The Finn's face wrinkled with disgust.
"It's all tied in with why he killed his wife, mainly, you want the
short reason. But what sent him over the edge for good and all, little 3Jane
figured a way to fiddle the program that controlled his cryogenic system.
Subtle, too. So basically, she killed him. Except he figured he'd
killed himself, and your friend the avenging angel figures she got him with
an eyeball full of shellfish juice." The Finn flicked his butt away into the
matrix below. "Well, actually, I guess I did give 3Jane the odd hint, a
little of the old how–to, you know?"
"Wintermute," Case said, choosing the words carefully, "you told me you
were just a part of something else. Later on you said you wouldn't
exist, if the run goes off and Molly gets the word into the right slot."
The Finn's streamlined skull nodded.
"Okay, then who we gonna be dealing with then? If Armitage is dead, and
you're gonna be gone, just who exactly is going to tell me how to get
these fucking toxin sacs out of my system? Who's going to get Molly
back out of there? I mean where, where exactly, are all our asses gonna be,
we cut you loose from the hardwiring?"
The Finn took a wooden toothpick from his pocket and regarded it
critically, like a surgeon examining a scalpel. "Good question," he said,
finally. "You know salmon? Kinda fish? These fish, see, they're
compelled to swim upstream. Got it?"
"No," Case said.
"Well, I'm under compulsion myself. And I don't know why.
If I were gonna subject you to my very own thoughts, let's call
'em speculations, on the topic, it would take a couple of your
lifetimes. Because I've given it a lot of thought. And I just
don't know. But when this is over, we do it right, I'm gonna be
part of something bigger. Much bigger," The Finn glanced up and around the
matrix. "But the parts of me that are me now, that'll still be here.
And you'll get your payoff."
Case fought back an insane urge to punch himself forward and get his
fingers around the figure's throat, just above the ragged knot in the
rusty scarf. His thumbs deep in the Finn's larynx.
"Well, good luck," the Finn said. He turned, hands in pockets and began
trudging back up the green arch.
"Hey, asshole," the Flatline said, when the Finn had gone a dozen
paces. The figure paused, half turned. "What about me? What about my
payoff?"
"You'll get yours," it said.
"What's that mean?" Case asked, as he watched the narrow tweed
back recede.
"I wanna be erased," the construct said. "I told you that, remember?"
Straylight reminded Case of deserted early morning shopping centers
he'd known as a teenager, low-density places where the small hours
brought a fitful stillness, a kind of numb expectancy, a tension that left
you watching insects swarm around caged bulbs above the entrance of darkened
shops. Fringe places, just past the borders of the Sprawl, too far from the
all-night click and shudder of the hot core. There was that same sense of
being surrounded by the sleeping inhabitants of a waking world he had no
interest in visiting or knowing, of dull business temporarily suspended, of
futility and repetition soon to wake again.
Molly had slowed now, either knowing that she was nearing her goal or
out of concern for her leg. The pain was starting to work its jagged way
back through the endorphins, and he wasn't sure what that meant. She
didn't speak, kept her teeth clenched, and carefully regulated her
breathing. She'd passed many things that Case hadn't understood,
but his curiosity was gone. There had been a room filled with shelves of
books, a million flat leaves of yellowing paper pressed between bindings of
cloth or leather, the shelves marked at intervals by labels that followed a
code of letters and numbers; a crowded gallery where Case had stared,
through Molly's incurious eyes, at a shattered, dust-stenciled sheet
of glass, a thing labeled-- her gaze had tracked the brass plaque
automatically-- "La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même."
She'd reached out and touched this, her artificial nails clicking
against the Lexan sandwich protecting the broken glass. There had been what
was obviously the entrance to Tessier-Ashpool's cryogenic compound,
circular doors of black glass trimmed with chrome.
She'd seen no one since the two Africans and their cart, and for
Case they'd taken on a sort of imaginary life; he pictured them
gliding gently through the halls of Straylight, their smooth dark skulls
gleaming, nodding, while the one still sang his tired little song. And none
of this was anything like the Villa Straylight he would have expected, some
cross between Cath's fairy tale castle and a half-remembered childhood
fantasy of the Yakuza's inner sanctum.
07:02:18.
One and a half hours.
"Case," she said, "I wanna favor." Stiffly, she lowered herself to sit
on a stack of polished steel plates, the finish of each plate protected by
an uneven coating of clear plastic. She picked at a rip in the plastic on
the topmost plate, blades sliding from beneath thumb and forefinger.
"Leg's not good, you know? Didn't figure any climb like that,
and the endorphin won't cut it, much longer. So maybe-- just maybe,
right?-- I got a problem here. What it is, if I buy it here, before Riviera
does"-- and she stretched her leg, kneaded the flesh of her thigh through
Modern polycarbon and Paris leather-- "I want you to tell him. Tell him it
was me. Got it? Just say it was Molly. He'll know. Okay?" She glanced
around the empty hallway, the bare walls. The floor here was raw lunar
concrete and the air smelled of resins. "Shit, man, I don't even know
if you're listening."
She winced, got to her feet, nodded. "What's he told you, man,
Wintermute? He tell you about Marie-France? She was the Tessier half,
3Jane's genetic mother. And of that dead puppet of Ashpool's, I
guess. Can't figure why he'd tell me, down in that cubicle. . .
lotta stuff. . . Why he has to come on like the Finn or somebody, he told me
that. It's not just a mask, it's like he uses real profiles as
valves, gears himself down to communicate with us. Called it a template.
Model of personality." She drew her fletcher and limped away down the
corridor.
The bare steel and scabrous epoxy ended abruptly, replaced by what Case
at first took to be a rough tunnel blasted from solid rock. Molly examined
its edge and he saw that in fact the steel was sheathed with panels of
something that looked and felt like cold stone. She knelt and touched the
dark sand spread across the floor of the imitation tunnel. It felt like
sand, cool and dry, but when she drew her finger through it, it closed like
a fluid, leaving the surface undisturbed. A dozen meters ahead, the tunnel
curved. Harsh yellow light threw hard shadows on the seamed pseudo-rock of
the walls. With a start, Case realized that the gravity here was near earth
normal, which meant that she'd had to descend again, after the climb.
He was thoroughly lost now; spatial disorientation held a peculiar horror
for cowboys.
But she wasn't lost, he told himself.
Something scurried between her legs and went ticking across the un-sand
of the floor. A red LED blinked. The Braun.
The first of the holos waited just beyond the curve, a sort of
triptych. She lowered the fletcher before Case had had time to realize that
the thing was a recording. The figures were caricatures in light, lifesize
cartoons: Molly, Armitage, and Case. Molly's breasts were too large,
visible through tight black mesh beneath a heavy leather jacket. Her waist
was impossibly narrow. Silvered lenses covered half her face. She held an
absurdly elaborate weapon of some kind, a pistol shape nearly lost beneath a
flanged overlay of scope sights, silencers, flash hiders. Her legs were
spread, pelvis canted forward, her mouth fixed in a leer of idiotic cruelty.
Beside her, Armitage stood rigidly at attention in a threadbare khaki
uniform. His eyes, Case saw, as Molly stepped carefully forward, were tiny
monitor screens, each one displaying the blue-gray image of a howling waste
of snow, the stripped black trunks of evergreens bending in silent winds.
She passed the tips of her fingers through Armitage's television
eyes, then turned to the figure of Case. Here, it was as if Riviera –
and Case had known instantly that Riviera was responsible – had been
unable to find anything worthy of parody. The figure that slouched there was
a fair approximation of the one he glimpsed daily in mirrors. Thin,
high-shouldered, a forgettable face beneath short dark hair. He needed a
shave, but then he usually did.
Molly stepped back. She looked from one figure to another. It was a
static display, the only movement the silent gusting of the black trees in
Armitage's frozen Siberian eyes.
"Tryin' to tell us something, Peter?" she asked softly. Then she
stepped forward and kicked at something between the feet of the holo-Molly.
Metal clinked against the wall and the figures were gone. She bent and
picked up a small display unit. "Guess he can Jack into these and program
them direct," she said, tossing it away.
She passed the source of yellow light, an archaic incandescent globe
set into the wall, protected by a rusty curve of expansion grating. The
style of the improvised fixture suggested childhood, somehow. He remembered
fortresses he'd built with other children on rooftops and in flooded
sub-basements. A rich kid's hideout, he thought. This kind of
roughness was expensive. What they called atmosphere.
She passed a dozen more holograms before she reached the entrance to
3Jane's apartments. One depicted the eyeless thing in the alley behind
the Spice Bazaar, as it tore itself free of Riviera's shattered body.
Several others were scenes of torture, the inquisitors always military
officers and the victims invariably young women. These had the awful
intensity of Riviera's show at the Vingtieme Siecle, as though they
had been frozen in the blue flash of orgasm. Molly looked away as she passed
them.
The last was small and dim, as if it were an image Riviera had had to
drag across some private distance of memory and time. She had to kneel to
examine it; it had been projected from the vantage point of a small child.
None of the others had had backgrounds; the figures, uniforms, instruments
of torture, all had been freestanding displays. But this was a view.
A dark wave of rubble rose against a colorless sky, beyond its crest
the bleached, half-melted skeletons of city towers. The rubble wave was
textured like a net, rusting steel rods twisted gracefully as fine string,
vast slabs of concrete still clinging there. The foreground might once have
been a city square; there was a sort of stump, something that suggested a
fountain. At its base, the children and the soldier were frozen. The tableau
was confusing at first. Molly must have read it correctly before Case had
quite assimilated it, because he felt her tense. She spat, then stood.
Children. Feral, in rags. Teeth glittering like knives. Sores on their
contorted faces. The soldier on his back, mouth and throat open to the sky.
They were feeding.
"Bonn," she said, something like gentleness in her voice. "Quite the
product, aren't you, Peter? But you had to be. Our 3Jane, she's
too jaded now to open the back door for just any petty thief. So Wintermute
dug you up. The ultimate taste, if your taste runs that way. Demon lover.
Peter." She shivered. "But you talked her into letting me in. Thanks. Now
we're gonna party."
And then she was walking – strolling, really, in spite of the
pain – away from Riviera's childhood. She drew the fletcher from
its holster, snapped the plastic magazine out, pocketed that, and replaced
it with another. She hooked her thumb in the neck of the Modern suit and
ripped it open to the crotch with a single gesture, her thumb blade parting
the tough polycarbon like rotten silk. She freed herself from the arms and
legs, the shredded remnants disguising themselves as they fell to the dark
false sand.
Case noticed the music then. A music he didn't know, all horns
and piano.
The entrance to 3Jane's world had no door. It was a ragged
five-meter gash in the tunnel wall, uneven stairs leading down in a broad
shallow curve. Faint blue light, moving shadows, music.
"Case," she said, and paused, the fletcher in her right hand. Then she
raised her left, smiled, touched her open palm with a wet tongue tip,
kissing him through the simstim link. "Gotta go."
Then there was something small and heavy in her left hand, her thumb
against a tiny stud, and she was descending.
She missed it by a fraction. She nearly cut it, but not quite. She went
in just right, Case thought. The right attitude; it was something he could
sense, something he could have seen in the posture of another cowboy leaning
into a deck, fingers flying across the board. She had it: the thing, the
moves. And she'd pulled it all together for her entrance. Pulled it
together around the pain in her leg and marched down 3Jane's stairs
like she owned the place, elbow of her gun arm at her hip, forearm up, wrist
relaxed, swaying the muzzle of the fletcher with the studied nonchalance of
a Regency duelist.
It was a performance. It was like the culmination of a lifetime's
observation of martial arts tapes, cheap ones, the kind Case had grown up
on. For a few seconds, he knew, she was every bad-ass hero, Sony Mao in the
old Shaw videos, Mickey Chiba, the whole lineage back to Lee and Eastwood.
She was walking it the way she talked it.
Lady 3Jane Marie-France Tessier-Ashpool had carved herself a low
country flush with the inner surface of Straylight's hull, chopping
away the maze of walls that was her legacy. She lived in a single room so
broad and deep that its far reaches were lost to an inverse horizon, the
floor hidden by the curvature of the spindle. The ceiling was low and
irregular, done in the same imitation stone that walled the corridor. Here
and there across the floor were jagged sections of wall, waist-high
reminders of the labyrinth. There was a rectangular turquoise pool centered
ten meters from the foot of the stairway, its underwater floods the
apartment's only source of light – or it seemed that way, to
Case, as Molly took her final step. The pool threw shifting blobs of light
across the ceiling above it.
They were waiting by the pool.
He'd known that her reflexes were souped up, jazzed by the
neurosurgeons for combat, but he hadn't experienced them on the
simstim link. The effect was like tape run at half speed, a slow, deliberate
dance choreographed to the killer instinct and years of training. She seemed
to take the three of them in at a glance: the boy poised on the pool's
high board, the girl grinning ove her wineglass, and the corpse of Ashpool,
his left socket gaping black and corrupt above his welcoming smile. He wore
his maroon robe. His teeth were very white.
The boy dove. Slender, brown, his form perfect. The grenade left her
hand before his hands could cut the water. Case knew the thing for what it
was as it broke the surface: a core of high explosive wrapped with ten
meters of fine, brittle steel wire.
Her fletcher whined as she sent a storm of explosive darts into
Ashpool's face and chest, and he was gone, smoke curling from the
pocked back of the empty, white-enameled pool chair.
The muzzle swung for 3Jane as the grenade detonated, a symmetrical
wedding cake of water rising, breaking, falling back, but the mistake had
been made.
Hideo didn't even touch her, then. Her leg collapsed.
In Garvey, Case screamed.
"It took you long enough," Riviera said, as he searched her pockets.
Her hands vanished at the wrists in a matte black sphere the size of a
bowling ball. "I saw a multiple assassination in Ankara," he said, his
fingers plucking things from her jacket, "a grenade job. In a pool. It
seemed a very weak explosion, but they all died instantly of hydrostatic
shock." Case felt her move her fingers experimentally. The material of the
ball seemed to offer no more resistance than temperfoam. The pain in her leg
was excruciating, impossible. A red moire shifted in her vision. "I
wouldn't move them, if I were you." The interior of the ball seemed to
tighten slightly. "It's a sex toy Jane bought in Berlin. Wiggle them
long enough and it crushes them to a pulp. Variant of the material they make
this flooring from. Something to do with the molecules, I suppose. Are you
in pain?"
She groaned.
"You seem to have injured your leg." His fingers found the flat packet
of drugs in the left back pocket of her jeans. "Well. My last taste from
Ali, and just in time."
The shifting mesh of blood began to whirl.
"Hideo," said another voice, a woman's, "she's losing
consciousness. Give her something. For that and for the pain. She's
very striking, don't you think, Peter? These glasses, are they a
fashion where she comes from?"
Cool hands, unhurried, with a surgeon's certainty. The sting of a
needle.
"I wouldn't know," Riviera was saying. "I've never seen her
native habitat. They came and took me from Turkey."
"The Sprawl, yes. We have interests there. And once we sent Hideo. My
fault, really. I'd let someone in, a burglar. He took the family
terminal." She laughed. "I made it easy for him. To annoy the others. He was
a pretty boy, my burglar. Is she waking, Hideo? Shouldn't she have
more?"
"More and she would die," said a third voice.
The blood mesh slid into black. The music returned, horns and piano.
Dance music.
C A S E : : : : : : : : : : J A C K O U T : : : : : :
Afterimages of the flashed words danced across Maelcum's eyes and
creased forehead as Case removed the trodes.
"You scream, mon, while ago."
"Molly," he said, his throat dry. "Got hurt." He took a white plastic
squeeze bottle from the edge of the g-web and sucked out a mouthful of flat
water. "I don't like how any of this shit is going."
The little Cray monitor lit. The Finn, against a background of twisted,
impacted junk. "Neither do I. We gotta problem."
Maelcum pulled himself up, over Case's head, twisted, and peered
over his shoulder. "Now who is that mon, Case?"
"That's just a picture, Maelcum," Case said wearily. "Guy I know
in the Sprawl. It's Wintermute talking. Picture's supposed to
make us feel at home."
"Bullshit," the Finn said. "Like I told Molly, these aren't
masks. I need 'em to talk to you. 'Cause I don't have what
you'd think of as a personality, much. But all that's just
pissing in the wind, Case, 'cause, like I just said, we gotta
problem."
"So express thyself, Mute," Maelcum said.
"Molly's leg's falling off, for starts. Can't walk.
How it was supposed to go down, she'd walk in, get Peter out of the
way, talk the magic word outa 3Jane, get up to the head, and say it. Now
she's blown it. So I want you two to go in after her."
Case stared at the face on the screen. "Us?"
"So who else?"
"Aerol," Case said, "the guy on Babylon Rocker, Maelcum's pal."
"No. Gotta be you. Gotta be somebody who understands Molly, who
understands Riviera. Maelcum for muscle."
"You maybe forget that I'm in the middle of a little run, here.
Remember? What you hauled my ass out here for. . ."
"Case, listen up. Time's tight. Very tight. Listen. The real link
between your deck and Straylight is a sideband broadcast over Garvey's
navigation system. You'll take Garvey into a very private dock
I'll show you. The Chinese virus has completely penetrated the fabric
of the Hosaka. There's nothing in the Hosaka but virus now. When you
dock, the virus will be interfaced with the Straylight custodial system and
we'll cut the sideband. You'll take your deck, the Flatline, and
Maelcum . You'll find 3Jane, get the word out of her, kill Riviera,
get the key from Molly. You can keep track of the program by jacking your
deck into the Straylight system. I'll handle it for you. There's
a standard jack in the back of the head, behind a panel with five zircons."
"Kill Riviera!"
"Kill him."
Case blinked at the representation of the Finn. He felt Maelcum put his
hand on his shoulder. "Hey. You forget something." He felt the rage rising,
and a kind of glee. "You fucked up. You blew the controls on the grapples
when you blew Armitage. Haniwa's got us good and tight. Armitage fried
the other Hosaka and the mainframes went with the bridge, right?"
The Finn nodded.
"So we're stuck out here. And that means you're fucked
man." He wanted to laugh, but it caught in his throat.
"Case, mon," Maelcum said softly, "Garvey a tug."
"That's right," said the Finn, and smiled.
"You havin' fun in the big world outside?" the construct asked,
when Case jacked back in. "Figured that was Wintermute requestin' the
pleasure. . ."
"Yeah. You bet. Kuang okay?"
"Bang on. Killer virus."
"Okay. Got some snags, but we're working on it."
"You wanna tell me, maybe?"
"Don't have time."
"Well, boy, never mind me, I'm just dead anyway."
"Fuck off," Case said, and flipped, cutting off the tornfingernail edge
of the Flatline's laughter.
"She dreamed of a state involving very little in the way of individual
consciousness," 3Jane was saying. She cupped a large cameo in her hand,
extending it toward Molly. The carved profile was very much like her own.
"Animal bliss. I think she viewed the evolution of the forebrain as a sort
of sidestep." She withdrew the brooch and studied it, tilting it to catch
the light at different angles. "Only in certain heightened modes would an
individual – a clan member – suffer the more painful aspects of
self-awareness. . ."
Molly nodded. Case remembered the injection. What had they given her?
The pain was still there, but it came through as a tight focus of scrambled
impressions. Neon worms writhing in her thigh, the touch of burlap, smell of
frying krill – his mind recoiled from it. If he avoided focusing on
it, the impressions overlapped, became a sensory equivalent of white noise.
If it could do that to her nervous system, what would her frame of mind be?
Her vision was abnormally clear and bright, even sharper than usual.
Things seemed to vibrate, each person or object tuned to a minutely
different frequency. Her hands, still locked in the black ball, were on her
lap. She sat in one of the pool chairs, her broken leg propped straight in
front of her on a camelskin hassock. 3Jane sat opposite, on another hassock,
huddled in an oversized djellaba of unbleached wool. She was very young.
"Where'd he go?" Molly asked. "To take his shot?"
3Jane shrugged beneath the folds of the pale heavy robe and tossed a
strand of dark hair away from her eyes. "He told me when to let you in," she
said. "He wouldn't tell me why. Everything has to be a mystery. Would
you have hurt us?"
Case felt Molly hesitate. "I would've killed him.
I'd've tried to kill the ninja. Then I was supposed to talk with
you."
"Why?" 3Jane asked, tucking the cameo back into one of the
djellaba's inner pockets. "And why? And what about?"
Molly seemed to be studying the high, delicate bones, the wide mouth,
the narrow hawk nose. 3Jane's eyes were dark, curiously opaque.
"Because I hate him," she said at last, "and the why of that's just
the way I'm wired, what he is and what I am."
"And the show," 3Jane said. "I saw the show."
Molly nodded.
"But Hideo?"
"Because they're the best. Because one of them killed a partner
of mine, once."
3Jane became very grave. She raised her eyebrows.
"Because I had to see," Molly said.
"And then we would have talked, you and I? Like this?" Her dark hair
was very straight, center-parted, drawn back into a knot of dull sterling.
"Shall we talk now?"
"Take this off," Molly said, raising her captive hands.
"You killed my father," 3Jane said, no change whatever in her tone. "I
was watching on the monitors. My mother's eyes, he called them."
"He killed the puppet. It looked like you."
"He was fond of broad gestures," she said, and then Riviera was beside
her, radiant with drugs, in the seersucker convict outfit he'd worn in
the roof garden of their hotel.
"Getting acquainted? She's an interesting girl, isn't she?
I thought so when I first saw her." He stepped past 3Jane. "It isn't
going to work, you know."
"Isn't it, Peter?" Molly managed a grin.
"Wintermute won't be the first to have made the same mistake.
Underestimating me." He crossed the tiled pool border to a white enamel
table and splashed mineral water into a heavy crystal highball glass. "He
talked with me, Molly. I suppose he talked to all of us. You, and Case,
whatever there is of Armitage to talk to. He can't really understand
us, you know. He has his profiles, but those are only statistics. You may be
the statistical animal, darling, and Case is nothing but, but I possess a
quality unquantifiable by its very nature." He drank.
"And what exactly is that, Peter?" Molly asked, her voice flat.
Riviera beamed. "Perversity." He walked back to the two women, swirling
the water that remained in the dense, deeply carved cylinder of rock
crystal, as though he enjoyed the weight of the thing. "An enjoyment of the
gratuitous act. And I have made a decision, Molly, a wholly gratuitous
decision."
She waited, looking up at him.
"Oh, Peter," 3Jane said, with the sort of gentle exasperation
ordinarily reserved for children.
"No word for you, Molly. He told me about that you see. 3Jane knows the
code, of course, but you won't have it. Neither will Wintermute. My
Jane's an ambitious girl, in her perverse way." He smiled again. "She
has designs on the family empire, and a pair of insane artificial
intelligences, kinky as the concept may be, would only get in our way. So.
Comes her Riviera to help her out, you see. And Peter says, sit tight. Play
Daddy's favorite swing records and let Peter call you up a band to
match, a floor of dancers, a wake for dead King Ashpool." He drank off the
last of the mineral water. "No, you wouldn't do, Daddy, you would not
do. Now that Peter's come home." And then, his face pink with the
pleasure of cocaine and meperidine, he swung the glass hard into her left
lens implant, smashing vision into blood and light.
Maelcum was prone against the cabin ceiling when Case removed the
trodes. A nylon sling around his waist was fastened to the panels on either
side with shock cords and gray rubber suction pads. He had his shirt off and
was working on a central panel with a clumsy-looking zero-g wrench, the
thing's fat countersprings twanging as he removed another hexhead.
Marcus Garvey was groaning and ticking with g-stress.
"The Mute takin' I an' I dock," the Zionite said, popping
the hexhead into a mesh pouch at his waist. "Maelcum pilot th'
landin', meantime need we tool f' th' job."
"You keep tools back there?" Case craned his neck and watched cords of
muscle bunching in the brown back.
"This one," Maelcum said, sliding a long bundle wrapped in black poly
from the space behind the panel. He replaced the panel, along with a single
hexhead to hold it in place. The black package had drifted aft before
he'd finished. He thumbed open the vacuum valves on the
workbelt's gray pads and freed himself, retrieving the thing
he'd removed.
He kicked back, gliding over his instruments – a green docking
diagram pulsed on his central screen – and snagged the frame of
Case's g-web. He pulled himself down and picked at the tape of his
package with a thick, chipped thumbnail. "Some man in China say th'
truth comes out this," he said, unwrapping an ancient, oilslick Remington
automatic shotgun, its barrel chopped off a few millimeters in front of the
battered forestock. The shoulderstock had been removed entirely, replaced
with a wooden pistolgrip wound with dull black tape. He smelled of sweat and
ganja.
"That the only one you got?"
"Sure, mon," he said, wiping oil from the black barrel with a red
cloth, the black poly wrapping bunched around the pistolgrip in his other
hand, "I an' I th' Rastafarian navy, believe it."
Case pulled the trodes down across his forehead. He'd never
bothered to put the Texas catheter back on; at least he could take a real
piss in the Villa Straylight, even if it was his last.
He jacked in.
"Hey," the construct said, "ol' Peter's totally apeshit,
huh?"
They seemed to be part of the Tessier-Ashpool ice now; the emerald
arches had widened, grown together, become a solid mass. Green predominated
in the planes of the Chinese program that surrounded them. "Gettin'
close, Dixie?"
"Real close. Need you soon."
"Listen, Dix. Wintermute says Kuang's set itself up solid in our
Hosaka. I'm going to have to jack you and my deck out of the Circuit,
haul you into Straylight, and plug you back in, into the custodial program
there, Wintermute says. Says the Kuang virus will be all through there. Then
we run from inside through the Straylight net."
"Wonderful," the Flatline said, "I never did like to do anything simple
when I could do it ass-backwards."
Case flipped.
Into her darkness, a churning synaesthesia, where her pain was the
taste of old iron, scent of melon, wings of a moth brushing her cheek. She
was unconscious, and he was barred from her dreams. When the optic chip
flared, the alphanumerics were haloed, each one ringed with a faint pink
aura.
07:29:40.
"I'm very unhappy with this, Peter." 3Jane's voice seemed
to arrive from a hollow distance. Molly could hear, he realized, then
corrected himself. The simstim unit was intact and still in place; he could
feel it digging against her ribs. Her ears registered the vibrations of the
girl's voice. Riviera said something brief and indistinct. "But I
don't," she said, "and it isn't fun. Hideo will bring a medical
unit down from intensive care, but this needs a surgeon."
There was a silence. Very distinctly, Case heard the water lap against
the side of the pool.
"What was that you were telling her, when I came back?" Riviera was
very close now.
"About my mother. She asked me to. I think she was in shock, aside from
Hideo's injection. Why did you do that to her?"
"I wanted to see if they would break."
"One did. When she comes around – if she comes around –
we'll see what color her eyes are."
"She's extremely dangerous. Too dangerous. If I hadn't been
here to distract her, to throw up Ashpool to distract her and my own Hideo
to draw her little bomb, where would you be? In her power."
"No," 3Jane said, "there was Hideo. I don't think you quite
understand about Hideo. She does, evidently."
"Like a drink?"
"Wine. The white."
Case jacked out.
Maelcum was hunched over Garvey's controls, tapping out commands
for a docking sequence. The module's central screen displayed a fixed
red square that represented the Straylight dock. Garvey was a larger square,
green, that shrank slowly, wavering from side to side with Maelcum's
commands. To the left, a smaller screen displayed a skeletal graphic of
Garvey and Haniwa as they approached the curvature of the spindle.
"We got an hour, man," Case said, pulling the ribbon of fiberoptics
from the Hosaka. His deck's back-up batteries were good for ninety
minutes, but the Flatline's construct would be an additional drain. He
worked quickly, mechanically, fastening the construct to the bottom of the
Ono-Sendai with micropore tape. Maelcum's workbelt drifted past. He
snagged it, unclipped the two lengths of shock cord, with their gray
rectangular suction pads, and hooked the jaws of one clip through the other.
He held the pads against the sides of his deck and worked the thumb lever
that created suction. With the deck, construct, and improvised shoulder
strap suspended in front of him, he struggled into his leather jacket,
checking the contents of his pockets. The passport Armitage had given him,
the bank chip in the same name, the credit chip he'd been issued when
he'd entered Freeside, two derms of the betaphenethylamine he'd
bought from Bruce, a roll of New Yen, half a pack of Yeheyuans, and the
shuriken. He tossed the Freeside chip over his shoulders, heard it click off
the Russian scrubber. He was about to do the same with the steel star, but
the rebounding credit chip clipped the back of his skull, spun off, struck
the ceiling, and tumbled past Maelcum's left shoulder. The Zionite
interrupted his piloting to glare back at him. Case looked at the shuriken,
then tucked it into his jacket pocket, hearing the lining tear.
"You missin' th' Mute, mon," Maelcum said. "Mute say he
messin' th' security for Garvey. Garvey dockin' as
'nother boat, boat they 'spectin' out of Babylon. Mute
broadcastin' codes for us."
"We gonna wear the suits?"
"Too heavy." Maelcum shrugged. "Stay in web 'til I tell you." He
tapped a final sequence into the module and grabbed the worn pink handholds
on either side of the navigation board. Case saw the green square shrink a
final few millimeters to overlap the red square. On the smaller screen,
Haniwa lowered her bow to miss the curve of the spindle and was snared.
Garvey was still slung beneath her like a captive grub. The tug rang,
shuddered. Two stylized arms sprang out to grip the slender wasp shape.
Straylight extruded a tentative yellow rectangle that curved, groping past
Haniwa for Garvey.
There was a scraping sound from the bow, beyond the trembling fronds of
caulk.
"Mon," Maelcum said, "mind we got gravity." A dozen small objects
struck the floor of the cabin simultaneously, as though drawn there by a
magnet. Case gasped as his internal organs were pulled into a different
configuration. The deck and construct had fallen painfully to his lap.
They were attached to the spindle now, rotating with it.
Maelcum spread his arms, flexed tension from his shoulders, and removed
his purple dreadbag, shaking out his locks. "Come now, mon, if you seh time
be mos' precious."
The Villa Straylight was a parasitic structure, Case reminded himself,
as he stepped past the tendrils of caulk and through Marcus Garvey's
forward hatch. Straylight bled air and water out of Freeside, and had no
ecosystem of its own.
The gangway tube the dock had extended was a more elaborate version of
the one he'd tumbled through to reach Haniwa, designed for use in the
spindle's rotation gravity. A corrugated tunnel, articulated by
integral hydraulic members, each segment ringed with a loop of tough,
nonslip plastic, the loops serving as the rungs of a ladder. The gangway had
snaked its way around Haniwa; it was horizontal , where it joined
Garvey' s lock, but curved up sharply and to the left, a vertical
climb around the curvature of the yacht's hull. Maelcum was already
making his way up the rings, pulling himself up with his left hand, the
Remington in his right. He wore a stained pair of baggy fatigues, his
sleeveless green nylon jacket, and a pair of ragged canvas sneakers with
bright red soles. The gangway shifted slightly, each time he climbed to
another ring.
The clips on Case's makeshift strap dug into his shoulder with
the weight of the Ono-Sendai and the Flatline's construct. All he felt
now was fear, a generalized dread. He pushed it away, forcing himself to
replay Armitage's lecture on the spindle and Villa Straylight. He
started climbing. Freeside's ecosystem was limited, not closed. Zion
was a closed system, capable of cycling for years without the introduction
of external materials. Freeside produced its own air and water, but relied
on constant shipments of food, on the regular augmentation of soil
nutrients. The Villa Straylight produced nothing at all.
"Mon," Maelcum said quietly, "get up here, 'side me." Case edged
sideways on the circular ladder and climbed the last few rungs. The gangway
ended in a smooth, slightly convex hatch, two meters in diameter. The
hydraulic members of the tube vanished into flexible housings set into the
frame of the hatch.
"So what do we – "
Case's mouth shut as the hatch swung up, a slight differential in
pressure puffing fine grit into his eyes.
Maelcum scrambled up, over the edge, and Case heard the tiny click of
the Remington's safety being released. "You th' mon in th'
hurry. . ." Maelcum whispered, crouching there. Then Case was beside him.
The hatch was centered in a round, vaulted chamber floored with blue
nonslip plastic tiles. Maelcum nudged him, pointed, and he saw a monitor set
into a curved wall. On the screen, a tall young man with the Tessier-Ashpool
features was brushing something from the sleeves of his dark suitcoat. He
stood beside an identical hatch, in an identical chamber. "Very sorry, sir,"
said a voice from a grid centered above the hatch. Case glanced up.
"Expected you later, at the axial dock. One moment, please." On the monitor,
the young man tossed his head impatiently.
Maelcum spun as a door slid open to their left, the shotgun ready. A
small Eurasian in orange coveralls stepped through and goggled at them. He
opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He closed his mouth. Case glanced at
the monitor. Blank.
"Who?" the man managed.
"The Rastafarian navy," Case said, standing up, the cyberspace deck
banging against his hip, "and all we want's a jack into your custodial
system."
The man swallowed. "Is this a test? It's a loyalty check. It must
be a loyalty check." He wiped the palms of his hands on the thighs of his
orange suit.
"No, mon, this a real one." Maelcum came up out of his crouch with the
Remington pointed at the Eurasian's face. "You move it."
They followed the man back through the door, into a corridor whose
polished concrete walls and irregular floor of overlapping carpets were
perfectly familiar to Case. "Pretty rugs," Maelcum said, prodding the man in
the back. "Smell like church."
They came to another monitor, an antique Sony, this one mounted above a
console with a keyboard and a complex array of jack panels. The screen lit
as they halted, the Finn grinning tensely out at them from what seemed to be
the front room of Metro Holografix. "Okay," he said, "Maelcum takes this guy
down the corridor to the open locker door, sticks him in there, I'll
lock it. Case, you want the fifth socket from the left, top panel.
There's adaptor plugs in the cabinet under the console. Needs
Ono-Sendai twenty-point into Hitachi forty." As Maelcum nudged his captive
along, Case knelt and fumbled through an assortment of plugs, finally coming
up with the one he needed. With his deck jacked into the adaptor, he paused.
"Do you have to look like that, man?" he asked the face on the screen.
The Finn was erased a line at a time by the image of Lonny Zone against a
wall of peeling Japanese posters.
"Anything you want, baby," Zone drawled, "just hop it for Lonny. . ."
"No," Case said, "use the Finn." As the Zone image vanished, he shoved
the Hitachi adaptor into its socket and settled the trodes across his
forehead.
"What kept you?" the Flatline asked, and laughed.
"Told you don't do that," Case said.
"Joke, boy," the construct said, "zero time lapse for me. Lemme see
what we got here. . ."
The Kuang program was green, exactly the shade of the T-A ice. Even as
Case watched, it grew gradually more opaque, although he could see the
black-mirrored shark thing clearly when he looked up. The fracture lines and
hallucinations were gone now, and the thing looked real as Marcus Garvey, a
wingless antique jet, its smooth skin plated with black chrome.
"Right on," the Flatline said.
"Right," Case said, and flipped.
" – like that. I'm sorry," 3Jane was saying, as she
bandaged Molly's head. "Our unit says no concussion, no permanent
damage to the eye. You didn't know him very well, before you came
here?"
"Didn't know him at all," Molly said bleakly. She was on her back
identity of Tessier-Ashpool, then T-A was crazy as the old man had been. The
same ragged tangle of fears, the same strange sense of aimlessness. "If
they'd turned into what they wanted to. . ." he remembered Molly
saying. But Wintermute had told her they hadn't.
Case had always taken it for granted that the real bosses, the kingpins
in a given industry, would be both more and less than people. He'd
seen it in the men who'd crippled him in Memphis, he'd seen Wage
affect the semblance of it in Night City, and it had allowed him to accept
Armitage's flatness and lack of feeling. He'd always imagined it
as a gradual and willing accommodation of the machine, the system, the
parent organism. It was the root of street cool, too, the knowing posture
that implied connection, invisible lines up to hidden levels of influence.
But what was happening now, in the corridors of Villa Straylight?
Whole stretches were being stripped back to steel and concrete.
"Wonder where our Peter is now, huh? Maybe see that boy soon," she
muttered. "And Armitage. Where's he, Case?"
"Dead," he said, knowing she couldn't hear him, "he's
dead."
He flipped.
The Chinese program was face to face with the target ice, rainbow tints
gradually dominated by the green of the rectangle representing the T-A
cores. Arches of emerald across the colorless void.
"How's it go, Dixie?"
"Fine. Too slick. Thing's amazing. . . Shoulda had one that time
in Singapore. Did the old New Bank of Asia for a good fiftieth of what they
were worth. But that's ancient history. This baby takes all the
drudgery out of it. Makes you wonder what a real war would be like, now. .
."
"If this kinda shit was on the street, we'd be out a job," Case
said.
"You wish. Wait'll you're steering that thing upstairs
through black ice."
"Sure."
Something small and decidedly nongeometric had just appeared on the far
end of one of the emerald arches.
"Dixie . . ."
"Yeah. I see it. Don't know if I believe it."
A brownish dot, a dull gnat against the green wall of the T-A cores. It
began to advance, across the bridge built by Kuang Grade Mark Eleven, and
Case saw that it was walking. As it came, the green section of the arch
extended, the polychrome of the virus program rolling back, a few steps
ahead of the cracked black shoes.
"Gotta hand it to you, boss," the Flatline said, when the short,
rumpled figure of the Finn seemed to stand a few meters away. "I never seen
anything this funny when I was alive." But the eerie nonlaugh didn't
come.
"I never tried it before," the Finn said, showing his teeth, his hands
bunched in the pockets of his frayed jacket.
"You killed Armitage," Case said.
"Corto. Yeah. Armitage was already gone. Hadda do it. I know, I know,
you wanna get the enzyme. Okay. No sweat. I was the one gave it to Armitage
in the first place. I mean I told him what to use. But I think maybe
it's better to let the deal stand. You got enough time. I'll
give it to you. Only a coupla hours now, right?"
Case watched blue smoke billow in cyberspace as the Finn lit up one of
his Partagas.
"You guys," the Finn said, "you're a pain. The Flatline here, if
you were all like him, it would be real simple. He's a construct, just
a buncha ROM, so he always does what I expect him to. My projections said
there wasn't much chance of Molly wandering in on Ashpool's big
exit scene, give you one example." He sighed.
"Why'd he kill himself?" Case asked.
"Why's anybody kill himself?" The figure shrugged. "I guess I
know, if anybody does, but it would take me twelve hours to explain the
various factors in his history and how they interrelate. He was ready to do
it for a long time, but he kept going back into the freezer. Christ, he was
a tedious old fuck." The Finn's face wrinkled with disgust.
"It's all tied in with why he killed his wife, mainly, you want the
short reason. But what sent him over the edge for good and all, little 3Jane
figured a way to fiddle the program that controlled his cryogenic system.
Subtle, too. So basically, she killed him. Except he figured he'd
killed himself, and your friend the avenging angel figures she got him with
an eyeball full of shellfish juice." The Finn flicked his butt away into the
matrix below. "Well, actually, I guess I did give 3Jane the odd hint, a
little of the old how–to, you know?"
"Wintermute," Case said, choosing the words carefully, "you told me you
were just a part of something else. Later on you said you wouldn't
exist, if the run goes off and Molly gets the word into the right slot."
The Finn's streamlined skull nodded.
"Okay, then who we gonna be dealing with then? If Armitage is dead, and
you're gonna be gone, just who exactly is going to tell me how to get
these fucking toxin sacs out of my system? Who's going to get Molly
back out of there? I mean where, where exactly, are all our asses gonna be,
we cut you loose from the hardwiring?"
The Finn took a wooden toothpick from his pocket and regarded it
critically, like a surgeon examining a scalpel. "Good question," he said,
finally. "You know salmon? Kinda fish? These fish, see, they're
compelled to swim upstream. Got it?"
"No," Case said.
"Well, I'm under compulsion myself. And I don't know why.
If I were gonna subject you to my very own thoughts, let's call
'em speculations, on the topic, it would take a couple of your
lifetimes. Because I've given it a lot of thought. And I just
don't know. But when this is over, we do it right, I'm gonna be
part of something bigger. Much bigger," The Finn glanced up and around the
matrix. "But the parts of me that are me now, that'll still be here.
And you'll get your payoff."
Case fought back an insane urge to punch himself forward and get his
fingers around the figure's throat, just above the ragged knot in the
rusty scarf. His thumbs deep in the Finn's larynx.
"Well, good luck," the Finn said. He turned, hands in pockets and began
trudging back up the green arch.
"Hey, asshole," the Flatline said, when the Finn had gone a dozen
paces. The figure paused, half turned. "What about me? What about my
payoff?"
"You'll get yours," it said.
"What's that mean?" Case asked, as he watched the narrow tweed
back recede.
"I wanna be erased," the construct said. "I told you that, remember?"
Straylight reminded Case of deserted early morning shopping centers
he'd known as a teenager, low-density places where the small hours
brought a fitful stillness, a kind of numb expectancy, a tension that left
you watching insects swarm around caged bulbs above the entrance of darkened
shops. Fringe places, just past the borders of the Sprawl, too far from the
all-night click and shudder of the hot core. There was that same sense of
being surrounded by the sleeping inhabitants of a waking world he had no
interest in visiting or knowing, of dull business temporarily suspended, of
futility and repetition soon to wake again.
Molly had slowed now, either knowing that she was nearing her goal or
out of concern for her leg. The pain was starting to work its jagged way
back through the endorphins, and he wasn't sure what that meant. She
didn't speak, kept her teeth clenched, and carefully regulated her
breathing. She'd passed many things that Case hadn't understood,
but his curiosity was gone. There had been a room filled with shelves of
books, a million flat leaves of yellowing paper pressed between bindings of
cloth or leather, the shelves marked at intervals by labels that followed a
code of letters and numbers; a crowded gallery where Case had stared,
through Molly's incurious eyes, at a shattered, dust-stenciled sheet
of glass, a thing labeled-- her gaze had tracked the brass plaque
automatically-- "La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même."
She'd reached out and touched this, her artificial nails clicking
against the Lexan sandwich protecting the broken glass. There had been what
was obviously the entrance to Tessier-Ashpool's cryogenic compound,
circular doors of black glass trimmed with chrome.
She'd seen no one since the two Africans and their cart, and for
Case they'd taken on a sort of imaginary life; he pictured them
gliding gently through the halls of Straylight, their smooth dark skulls
gleaming, nodding, while the one still sang his tired little song. And none
of this was anything like the Villa Straylight he would have expected, some
cross between Cath's fairy tale castle and a half-remembered childhood
fantasy of the Yakuza's inner sanctum.
07:02:18.
One and a half hours.
"Case," she said, "I wanna favor." Stiffly, she lowered herself to sit
on a stack of polished steel plates, the finish of each plate protected by
an uneven coating of clear plastic. She picked at a rip in the plastic on
the topmost plate, blades sliding from beneath thumb and forefinger.
"Leg's not good, you know? Didn't figure any climb like that,
and the endorphin won't cut it, much longer. So maybe-- just maybe,
right?-- I got a problem here. What it is, if I buy it here, before Riviera
does"-- and she stretched her leg, kneaded the flesh of her thigh through
Modern polycarbon and Paris leather-- "I want you to tell him. Tell him it
was me. Got it? Just say it was Molly. He'll know. Okay?" She glanced
around the empty hallway, the bare walls. The floor here was raw lunar
concrete and the air smelled of resins. "Shit, man, I don't even know
if you're listening."
She winced, got to her feet, nodded. "What's he told you, man,
Wintermute? He tell you about Marie-France? She was the Tessier half,
3Jane's genetic mother. And of that dead puppet of Ashpool's, I
guess. Can't figure why he'd tell me, down in that cubicle. . .
lotta stuff. . . Why he has to come on like the Finn or somebody, he told me
that. It's not just a mask, it's like he uses real profiles as
valves, gears himself down to communicate with us. Called it a template.
Model of personality." She drew her fletcher and limped away down the
corridor.
The bare steel and scabrous epoxy ended abruptly, replaced by what Case
at first took to be a rough tunnel blasted from solid rock. Molly examined
its edge and he saw that in fact the steel was sheathed with panels of
something that looked and felt like cold stone. She knelt and touched the
dark sand spread across the floor of the imitation tunnel. It felt like
sand, cool and dry, but when she drew her finger through it, it closed like
a fluid, leaving the surface undisturbed. A dozen meters ahead, the tunnel
curved. Harsh yellow light threw hard shadows on the seamed pseudo-rock of
the walls. With a start, Case realized that the gravity here was near earth
normal, which meant that she'd had to descend again, after the climb.
He was thoroughly lost now; spatial disorientation held a peculiar horror
for cowboys.
But she wasn't lost, he told himself.
Something scurried between her legs and went ticking across the un-sand
of the floor. A red LED blinked. The Braun.
The first of the holos waited just beyond the curve, a sort of
triptych. She lowered the fletcher before Case had had time to realize that
the thing was a recording. The figures were caricatures in light, lifesize
cartoons: Molly, Armitage, and Case. Molly's breasts were too large,
visible through tight black mesh beneath a heavy leather jacket. Her waist
was impossibly narrow. Silvered lenses covered half her face. She held an
absurdly elaborate weapon of some kind, a pistol shape nearly lost beneath a
flanged overlay of scope sights, silencers, flash hiders. Her legs were
spread, pelvis canted forward, her mouth fixed in a leer of idiotic cruelty.
Beside her, Armitage stood rigidly at attention in a threadbare khaki
uniform. His eyes, Case saw, as Molly stepped carefully forward, were tiny
monitor screens, each one displaying the blue-gray image of a howling waste
of snow, the stripped black trunks of evergreens bending in silent winds.
She passed the tips of her fingers through Armitage's television
eyes, then turned to the figure of Case. Here, it was as if Riviera –
and Case had known instantly that Riviera was responsible – had been
unable to find anything worthy of parody. The figure that slouched there was
a fair approximation of the one he glimpsed daily in mirrors. Thin,
high-shouldered, a forgettable face beneath short dark hair. He needed a
shave, but then he usually did.
Molly stepped back. She looked from one figure to another. It was a
static display, the only movement the silent gusting of the black trees in
Armitage's frozen Siberian eyes.
"Tryin' to tell us something, Peter?" she asked softly. Then she
stepped forward and kicked at something between the feet of the holo-Molly.
Metal clinked against the wall and the figures were gone. She bent and
picked up a small display unit. "Guess he can Jack into these and program
them direct," she said, tossing it away.
She passed the source of yellow light, an archaic incandescent globe
set into the wall, protected by a rusty curve of expansion grating. The
style of the improvised fixture suggested childhood, somehow. He remembered
fortresses he'd built with other children on rooftops and in flooded
sub-basements. A rich kid's hideout, he thought. This kind of
roughness was expensive. What they called atmosphere.
She passed a dozen more holograms before she reached the entrance to
3Jane's apartments. One depicted the eyeless thing in the alley behind
the Spice Bazaar, as it tore itself free of Riviera's shattered body.
Several others were scenes of torture, the inquisitors always military
officers and the victims invariably young women. These had the awful
intensity of Riviera's show at the Vingtieme Siecle, as though they
had been frozen in the blue flash of orgasm. Molly looked away as she passed
them.
The last was small and dim, as if it were an image Riviera had had to
drag across some private distance of memory and time. She had to kneel to
examine it; it had been projected from the vantage point of a small child.
None of the others had had backgrounds; the figures, uniforms, instruments
of torture, all had been freestanding displays. But this was a view.
A dark wave of rubble rose against a colorless sky, beyond its crest
the bleached, half-melted skeletons of city towers. The rubble wave was
textured like a net, rusting steel rods twisted gracefully as fine string,
vast slabs of concrete still clinging there. The foreground might once have
been a city square; there was a sort of stump, something that suggested a
fountain. At its base, the children and the soldier were frozen. The tableau
was confusing at first. Molly must have read it correctly before Case had
quite assimilated it, because he felt her tense. She spat, then stood.
Children. Feral, in rags. Teeth glittering like knives. Sores on their
contorted faces. The soldier on his back, mouth and throat open to the sky.
They were feeding.
"Bonn," she said, something like gentleness in her voice. "Quite the
product, aren't you, Peter? But you had to be. Our 3Jane, she's
too jaded now to open the back door for just any petty thief. So Wintermute
dug you up. The ultimate taste, if your taste runs that way. Demon lover.
Peter." She shivered. "But you talked her into letting me in. Thanks. Now
we're gonna party."
And then she was walking – strolling, really, in spite of the
pain – away from Riviera's childhood. She drew the fletcher from
its holster, snapped the plastic magazine out, pocketed that, and replaced
it with another. She hooked her thumb in the neck of the Modern suit and
ripped it open to the crotch with a single gesture, her thumb blade parting
the tough polycarbon like rotten silk. She freed herself from the arms and
legs, the shredded remnants disguising themselves as they fell to the dark
false sand.
Case noticed the music then. A music he didn't know, all horns
and piano.
The entrance to 3Jane's world had no door. It was a ragged
five-meter gash in the tunnel wall, uneven stairs leading down in a broad
shallow curve. Faint blue light, moving shadows, music.
"Case," she said, and paused, the fletcher in her right hand. Then she
raised her left, smiled, touched her open palm with a wet tongue tip,
kissing him through the simstim link. "Gotta go."
Then there was something small and heavy in her left hand, her thumb
against a tiny stud, and she was descending.
She missed it by a fraction. She nearly cut it, but not quite. She went
in just right, Case thought. The right attitude; it was something he could
sense, something he could have seen in the posture of another cowboy leaning
into a deck, fingers flying across the board. She had it: the thing, the
moves. And she'd pulled it all together for her entrance. Pulled it
together around the pain in her leg and marched down 3Jane's stairs
like she owned the place, elbow of her gun arm at her hip, forearm up, wrist
relaxed, swaying the muzzle of the fletcher with the studied nonchalance of
a Regency duelist.
It was a performance. It was like the culmination of a lifetime's
observation of martial arts tapes, cheap ones, the kind Case had grown up
on. For a few seconds, he knew, she was every bad-ass hero, Sony Mao in the
old Shaw videos, Mickey Chiba, the whole lineage back to Lee and Eastwood.
She was walking it the way she talked it.
Lady 3Jane Marie-France Tessier-Ashpool had carved herself a low
country flush with the inner surface of Straylight's hull, chopping
away the maze of walls that was her legacy. She lived in a single room so
broad and deep that its far reaches were lost to an inverse horizon, the
floor hidden by the curvature of the spindle. The ceiling was low and
irregular, done in the same imitation stone that walled the corridor. Here
and there across the floor were jagged sections of wall, waist-high
reminders of the labyrinth. There was a rectangular turquoise pool centered
ten meters from the foot of the stairway, its underwater floods the
apartment's only source of light – or it seemed that way, to
Case, as Molly took her final step. The pool threw shifting blobs of light
across the ceiling above it.
They were waiting by the pool.
He'd known that her reflexes were souped up, jazzed by the
neurosurgeons for combat, but he hadn't experienced them on the
simstim link. The effect was like tape run at half speed, a slow, deliberate
dance choreographed to the killer instinct and years of training. She seemed
to take the three of them in at a glance: the boy poised on the pool's
high board, the girl grinning ove her wineglass, and the corpse of Ashpool,
his left socket gaping black and corrupt above his welcoming smile. He wore
his maroon robe. His teeth were very white.
The boy dove. Slender, brown, his form perfect. The grenade left her
hand before his hands could cut the water. Case knew the thing for what it
was as it broke the surface: a core of high explosive wrapped with ten
meters of fine, brittle steel wire.
Her fletcher whined as she sent a storm of explosive darts into
Ashpool's face and chest, and he was gone, smoke curling from the
pocked back of the empty, white-enameled pool chair.
The muzzle swung for 3Jane as the grenade detonated, a symmetrical
wedding cake of water rising, breaking, falling back, but the mistake had
been made.
Hideo didn't even touch her, then. Her leg collapsed.
In Garvey, Case screamed.
"It took you long enough," Riviera said, as he searched her pockets.
Her hands vanished at the wrists in a matte black sphere the size of a
bowling ball. "I saw a multiple assassination in Ankara," he said, his
fingers plucking things from her jacket, "a grenade job. In a pool. It
seemed a very weak explosion, but they all died instantly of hydrostatic
shock." Case felt her move her fingers experimentally. The material of the
ball seemed to offer no more resistance than temperfoam. The pain in her leg
was excruciating, impossible. A red moire shifted in her vision. "I
wouldn't move them, if I were you." The interior of the ball seemed to
tighten slightly. "It's a sex toy Jane bought in Berlin. Wiggle them
long enough and it crushes them to a pulp. Variant of the material they make
this flooring from. Something to do with the molecules, I suppose. Are you
in pain?"
She groaned.
"You seem to have injured your leg." His fingers found the flat packet
of drugs in the left back pocket of her jeans. "Well. My last taste from
Ali, and just in time."
The shifting mesh of blood began to whirl.
"Hideo," said another voice, a woman's, "she's losing
consciousness. Give her something. For that and for the pain. She's
very striking, don't you think, Peter? These glasses, are they a
fashion where she comes from?"
Cool hands, unhurried, with a surgeon's certainty. The sting of a
needle.
"I wouldn't know," Riviera was saying. "I've never seen her
native habitat. They came and took me from Turkey."
"The Sprawl, yes. We have interests there. And once we sent Hideo. My
fault, really. I'd let someone in, a burglar. He took the family
terminal." She laughed. "I made it easy for him. To annoy the others. He was
a pretty boy, my burglar. Is she waking, Hideo? Shouldn't she have
more?"
"More and she would die," said a third voice.
The blood mesh slid into black. The music returned, horns and piano.
Dance music.
C A S E : : : : : : : : : : J A C K O U T : : : : : :
Afterimages of the flashed words danced across Maelcum's eyes and
creased forehead as Case removed the trodes.
"You scream, mon, while ago."
"Molly," he said, his throat dry. "Got hurt." He took a white plastic
squeeze bottle from the edge of the g-web and sucked out a mouthful of flat
water. "I don't like how any of this shit is going."
The little Cray monitor lit. The Finn, against a background of twisted,
impacted junk. "Neither do I. We gotta problem."
Maelcum pulled himself up, over Case's head, twisted, and peered
over his shoulder. "Now who is that mon, Case?"
"That's just a picture, Maelcum," Case said wearily. "Guy I know
in the Sprawl. It's Wintermute talking. Picture's supposed to
make us feel at home."
"Bullshit," the Finn said. "Like I told Molly, these aren't
masks. I need 'em to talk to you. 'Cause I don't have what
you'd think of as a personality, much. But all that's just
pissing in the wind, Case, 'cause, like I just said, we gotta
problem."
"So express thyself, Mute," Maelcum said.
"Molly's leg's falling off, for starts. Can't walk.
How it was supposed to go down, she'd walk in, get Peter out of the
way, talk the magic word outa 3Jane, get up to the head, and say it. Now
she's blown it. So I want you two to go in after her."
Case stared at the face on the screen. "Us?"
"So who else?"
"Aerol," Case said, "the guy on Babylon Rocker, Maelcum's pal."
"No. Gotta be you. Gotta be somebody who understands Molly, who
understands Riviera. Maelcum for muscle."
"You maybe forget that I'm in the middle of a little run, here.
Remember? What you hauled my ass out here for. . ."
"Case, listen up. Time's tight. Very tight. Listen. The real link
between your deck and Straylight is a sideband broadcast over Garvey's
navigation system. You'll take Garvey into a very private dock
I'll show you. The Chinese virus has completely penetrated the fabric
of the Hosaka. There's nothing in the Hosaka but virus now. When you
dock, the virus will be interfaced with the Straylight custodial system and
we'll cut the sideband. You'll take your deck, the Flatline, and
Maelcum . You'll find 3Jane, get the word out of her, kill Riviera,
get the key from Molly. You can keep track of the program by jacking your
deck into the Straylight system. I'll handle it for you. There's
a standard jack in the back of the head, behind a panel with five zircons."
"Kill Riviera!"
"Kill him."
Case blinked at the representation of the Finn. He felt Maelcum put his
hand on his shoulder. "Hey. You forget something." He felt the rage rising,
and a kind of glee. "You fucked up. You blew the controls on the grapples
when you blew Armitage. Haniwa's got us good and tight. Armitage fried
the other Hosaka and the mainframes went with the bridge, right?"
The Finn nodded.
"So we're stuck out here. And that means you're fucked
man." He wanted to laugh, but it caught in his throat.
"Case, mon," Maelcum said softly, "Garvey a tug."
"That's right," said the Finn, and smiled.
"You havin' fun in the big world outside?" the construct asked,
when Case jacked back in. "Figured that was Wintermute requestin' the
pleasure. . ."
"Yeah. You bet. Kuang okay?"
"Bang on. Killer virus."
"Okay. Got some snags, but we're working on it."
"You wanna tell me, maybe?"
"Don't have time."
"Well, boy, never mind me, I'm just dead anyway."
"Fuck off," Case said, and flipped, cutting off the tornfingernail edge
of the Flatline's laughter.
"She dreamed of a state involving very little in the way of individual
consciousness," 3Jane was saying. She cupped a large cameo in her hand,
extending it toward Molly. The carved profile was very much like her own.
"Animal bliss. I think she viewed the evolution of the forebrain as a sort
of sidestep." She withdrew the brooch and studied it, tilting it to catch
the light at different angles. "Only in certain heightened modes would an
individual – a clan member – suffer the more painful aspects of
self-awareness. . ."
Molly nodded. Case remembered the injection. What had they given her?
The pain was still there, but it came through as a tight focus of scrambled
impressions. Neon worms writhing in her thigh, the touch of burlap, smell of
frying krill – his mind recoiled from it. If he avoided focusing on
it, the impressions overlapped, became a sensory equivalent of white noise.
If it could do that to her nervous system, what would her frame of mind be?
Her vision was abnormally clear and bright, even sharper than usual.
Things seemed to vibrate, each person or object tuned to a minutely
different frequency. Her hands, still locked in the black ball, were on her
lap. She sat in one of the pool chairs, her broken leg propped straight in
front of her on a camelskin hassock. 3Jane sat opposite, on another hassock,
huddled in an oversized djellaba of unbleached wool. She was very young.
"Where'd he go?" Molly asked. "To take his shot?"
3Jane shrugged beneath the folds of the pale heavy robe and tossed a
strand of dark hair away from her eyes. "He told me when to let you in," she
said. "He wouldn't tell me why. Everything has to be a mystery. Would
you have hurt us?"
Case felt Molly hesitate. "I would've killed him.
I'd've tried to kill the ninja. Then I was supposed to talk with
you."
"Why?" 3Jane asked, tucking the cameo back into one of the
djellaba's inner pockets. "And why? And what about?"
Molly seemed to be studying the high, delicate bones, the wide mouth,
the narrow hawk nose. 3Jane's eyes were dark, curiously opaque.
"Because I hate him," she said at last, "and the why of that's just
the way I'm wired, what he is and what I am."
"And the show," 3Jane said. "I saw the show."
Molly nodded.
"But Hideo?"
"Because they're the best. Because one of them killed a partner
of mine, once."
3Jane became very grave. She raised her eyebrows.
"Because I had to see," Molly said.
"And then we would have talked, you and I? Like this?" Her dark hair
was very straight, center-parted, drawn back into a knot of dull sterling.
"Shall we talk now?"
"Take this off," Molly said, raising her captive hands.
"You killed my father," 3Jane said, no change whatever in her tone. "I
was watching on the monitors. My mother's eyes, he called them."
"He killed the puppet. It looked like you."
"He was fond of broad gestures," she said, and then Riviera was beside
her, radiant with drugs, in the seersucker convict outfit he'd worn in
the roof garden of their hotel.
"Getting acquainted? She's an interesting girl, isn't she?
I thought so when I first saw her." He stepped past 3Jane. "It isn't
going to work, you know."
"Isn't it, Peter?" Molly managed a grin.
"Wintermute won't be the first to have made the same mistake.
Underestimating me." He crossed the tiled pool border to a white enamel
table and splashed mineral water into a heavy crystal highball glass. "He
talked with me, Molly. I suppose he talked to all of us. You, and Case,
whatever there is of Armitage to talk to. He can't really understand
us, you know. He has his profiles, but those are only statistics. You may be
the statistical animal, darling, and Case is nothing but, but I possess a
quality unquantifiable by its very nature." He drank.
"And what exactly is that, Peter?" Molly asked, her voice flat.
Riviera beamed. "Perversity." He walked back to the two women, swirling
the water that remained in the dense, deeply carved cylinder of rock
crystal, as though he enjoyed the weight of the thing. "An enjoyment of the
gratuitous act. And I have made a decision, Molly, a wholly gratuitous
decision."
She waited, looking up at him.
"Oh, Peter," 3Jane said, with the sort of gentle exasperation
ordinarily reserved for children.
"No word for you, Molly. He told me about that you see. 3Jane knows the
code, of course, but you won't have it. Neither will Wintermute. My
Jane's an ambitious girl, in her perverse way." He smiled again. "She
has designs on the family empire, and a pair of insane artificial
intelligences, kinky as the concept may be, would only get in our way. So.
Comes her Riviera to help her out, you see. And Peter says, sit tight. Play
Daddy's favorite swing records and let Peter call you up a band to
match, a floor of dancers, a wake for dead King Ashpool." He drank off the
last of the mineral water. "No, you wouldn't do, Daddy, you would not
do. Now that Peter's come home." And then, his face pink with the
pleasure of cocaine and meperidine, he swung the glass hard into her left
lens implant, smashing vision into blood and light.
Maelcum was prone against the cabin ceiling when Case removed the
trodes. A nylon sling around his waist was fastened to the panels on either
side with shock cords and gray rubber suction pads. He had his shirt off and
was working on a central panel with a clumsy-looking zero-g wrench, the
thing's fat countersprings twanging as he removed another hexhead.
Marcus Garvey was groaning and ticking with g-stress.
"The Mute takin' I an' I dock," the Zionite said, popping
the hexhead into a mesh pouch at his waist. "Maelcum pilot th'
landin', meantime need we tool f' th' job."
"You keep tools back there?" Case craned his neck and watched cords of
muscle bunching in the brown back.
"This one," Maelcum said, sliding a long bundle wrapped in black poly
from the space behind the panel. He replaced the panel, along with a single
hexhead to hold it in place. The black package had drifted aft before
he'd finished. He thumbed open the vacuum valves on the
workbelt's gray pads and freed himself, retrieving the thing
he'd removed.
He kicked back, gliding over his instruments – a green docking
diagram pulsed on his central screen – and snagged the frame of
Case's g-web. He pulled himself down and picked at the tape of his
package with a thick, chipped thumbnail. "Some man in China say th'
truth comes out this," he said, unwrapping an ancient, oilslick Remington
automatic shotgun, its barrel chopped off a few millimeters in front of the
battered forestock. The shoulderstock had been removed entirely, replaced
with a wooden pistolgrip wound with dull black tape. He smelled of sweat and
ganja.
"That the only one you got?"
"Sure, mon," he said, wiping oil from the black barrel with a red
cloth, the black poly wrapping bunched around the pistolgrip in his other
hand, "I an' I th' Rastafarian navy, believe it."
Case pulled the trodes down across his forehead. He'd never
bothered to put the Texas catheter back on; at least he could take a real
piss in the Villa Straylight, even if it was his last.
He jacked in.
"Hey," the construct said, "ol' Peter's totally apeshit,
huh?"
They seemed to be part of the Tessier-Ashpool ice now; the emerald
arches had widened, grown together, become a solid mass. Green predominated
in the planes of the Chinese program that surrounded them. "Gettin'
close, Dixie?"
"Real close. Need you soon."
"Listen, Dix. Wintermute says Kuang's set itself up solid in our
Hosaka. I'm going to have to jack you and my deck out of the Circuit,
haul you into Straylight, and plug you back in, into the custodial program
there, Wintermute says. Says the Kuang virus will be all through there. Then
we run from inside through the Straylight net."
"Wonderful," the Flatline said, "I never did like to do anything simple
when I could do it ass-backwards."
Case flipped.
Into her darkness, a churning synaesthesia, where her pain was the
taste of old iron, scent of melon, wings of a moth brushing her cheek. She
was unconscious, and he was barred from her dreams. When the optic chip
flared, the alphanumerics were haloed, each one ringed with a faint pink
aura.
07:29:40.
"I'm very unhappy with this, Peter." 3Jane's voice seemed
to arrive from a hollow distance. Molly could hear, he realized, then
corrected himself. The simstim unit was intact and still in place; he could
feel it digging against her ribs. Her ears registered the vibrations of the
girl's voice. Riviera said something brief and indistinct. "But I
don't," she said, "and it isn't fun. Hideo will bring a medical
unit down from intensive care, but this needs a surgeon."
There was a silence. Very distinctly, Case heard the water lap against
the side of the pool.
"What was that you were telling her, when I came back?" Riviera was
very close now.
"About my mother. She asked me to. I think she was in shock, aside from
Hideo's injection. Why did you do that to her?"
"I wanted to see if they would break."
"One did. When she comes around – if she comes around –
we'll see what color her eyes are."
"She's extremely dangerous. Too dangerous. If I hadn't been
here to distract her, to throw up Ashpool to distract her and my own Hideo
to draw her little bomb, where would you be? In her power."
"No," 3Jane said, "there was Hideo. I don't think you quite
understand about Hideo. She does, evidently."
"Like a drink?"
"Wine. The white."
Case jacked out.
Maelcum was hunched over Garvey's controls, tapping out commands
for a docking sequence. The module's central screen displayed a fixed
red square that represented the Straylight dock. Garvey was a larger square,
green, that shrank slowly, wavering from side to side with Maelcum's
commands. To the left, a smaller screen displayed a skeletal graphic of
Garvey and Haniwa as they approached the curvature of the spindle.
"We got an hour, man," Case said, pulling the ribbon of fiberoptics
from the Hosaka. His deck's back-up batteries were good for ninety
minutes, but the Flatline's construct would be an additional drain. He
worked quickly, mechanically, fastening the construct to the bottom of the
Ono-Sendai with micropore tape. Maelcum's workbelt drifted past. He
snagged it, unclipped the two lengths of shock cord, with their gray
rectangular suction pads, and hooked the jaws of one clip through the other.
He held the pads against the sides of his deck and worked the thumb lever
that created suction. With the deck, construct, and improvised shoulder
strap suspended in front of him, he struggled into his leather jacket,
checking the contents of his pockets. The passport Armitage had given him,
the bank chip in the same name, the credit chip he'd been issued when
he'd entered Freeside, two derms of the betaphenethylamine he'd
bought from Bruce, a roll of New Yen, half a pack of Yeheyuans, and the
shuriken. He tossed the Freeside chip over his shoulders, heard it click off
the Russian scrubber. He was about to do the same with the steel star, but
the rebounding credit chip clipped the back of his skull, spun off, struck
the ceiling, and tumbled past Maelcum's left shoulder. The Zionite
interrupted his piloting to glare back at him. Case looked at the shuriken,
then tucked it into his jacket pocket, hearing the lining tear.
"You missin' th' Mute, mon," Maelcum said. "Mute say he
messin' th' security for Garvey. Garvey dockin' as
'nother boat, boat they 'spectin' out of Babylon. Mute
broadcastin' codes for us."
"We gonna wear the suits?"
"Too heavy." Maelcum shrugged. "Stay in web 'til I tell you." He
tapped a final sequence into the module and grabbed the worn pink handholds
on either side of the navigation board. Case saw the green square shrink a
final few millimeters to overlap the red square. On the smaller screen,
Haniwa lowered her bow to miss the curve of the spindle and was snared.
Garvey was still slung beneath her like a captive grub. The tug rang,
shuddered. Two stylized arms sprang out to grip the slender wasp shape.
Straylight extruded a tentative yellow rectangle that curved, groping past
Haniwa for Garvey.
There was a scraping sound from the bow, beyond the trembling fronds of
caulk.
"Mon," Maelcum said, "mind we got gravity." A dozen small objects
struck the floor of the cabin simultaneously, as though drawn there by a
magnet. Case gasped as his internal organs were pulled into a different
configuration. The deck and construct had fallen painfully to his lap.
They were attached to the spindle now, rotating with it.
Maelcum spread his arms, flexed tension from his shoulders, and removed
his purple dreadbag, shaking out his locks. "Come now, mon, if you seh time
be mos' precious."
The Villa Straylight was a parasitic structure, Case reminded himself,
as he stepped past the tendrils of caulk and through Marcus Garvey's
forward hatch. Straylight bled air and water out of Freeside, and had no
ecosystem of its own.
The gangway tube the dock had extended was a more elaborate version of
the one he'd tumbled through to reach Haniwa, designed for use in the
spindle's rotation gravity. A corrugated tunnel, articulated by
integral hydraulic members, each segment ringed with a loop of tough,
nonslip plastic, the loops serving as the rungs of a ladder. The gangway had
snaked its way around Haniwa; it was horizontal , where it joined
Garvey' s lock, but curved up sharply and to the left, a vertical
climb around the curvature of the yacht's hull. Maelcum was already
making his way up the rings, pulling himself up with his left hand, the
Remington in his right. He wore a stained pair of baggy fatigues, his
sleeveless green nylon jacket, and a pair of ragged canvas sneakers with
bright red soles. The gangway shifted slightly, each time he climbed to
another ring.
The clips on Case's makeshift strap dug into his shoulder with
the weight of the Ono-Sendai and the Flatline's construct. All he felt
now was fear, a generalized dread. He pushed it away, forcing himself to
replay Armitage's lecture on the spindle and Villa Straylight. He
started climbing. Freeside's ecosystem was limited, not closed. Zion
was a closed system, capable of cycling for years without the introduction
of external materials. Freeside produced its own air and water, but relied
on constant shipments of food, on the regular augmentation of soil
nutrients. The Villa Straylight produced nothing at all.
"Mon," Maelcum said quietly, "get up here, 'side me." Case edged
sideways on the circular ladder and climbed the last few rungs. The gangway
ended in a smooth, slightly convex hatch, two meters in diameter. The
hydraulic members of the tube vanished into flexible housings set into the
frame of the hatch.
"So what do we – "
Case's mouth shut as the hatch swung up, a slight differential in
pressure puffing fine grit into his eyes.
Maelcum scrambled up, over the edge, and Case heard the tiny click of
the Remington's safety being released. "You th' mon in th'
hurry. . ." Maelcum whispered, crouching there. Then Case was beside him.
The hatch was centered in a round, vaulted chamber floored with blue
nonslip plastic tiles. Maelcum nudged him, pointed, and he saw a monitor set
into a curved wall. On the screen, a tall young man with the Tessier-Ashpool
features was brushing something from the sleeves of his dark suitcoat. He
stood beside an identical hatch, in an identical chamber. "Very sorry, sir,"
said a voice from a grid centered above the hatch. Case glanced up.
"Expected you later, at the axial dock. One moment, please." On the monitor,
the young man tossed his head impatiently.
Maelcum spun as a door slid open to their left, the shotgun ready. A
small Eurasian in orange coveralls stepped through and goggled at them. He
opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He closed his mouth. Case glanced at
the monitor. Blank.
"Who?" the man managed.
"The Rastafarian navy," Case said, standing up, the cyberspace deck
banging against his hip, "and all we want's a jack into your custodial
system."
The man swallowed. "Is this a test? It's a loyalty check. It must
be a loyalty check." He wiped the palms of his hands on the thighs of his
orange suit.
"No, mon, this a real one." Maelcum came up out of his crouch with the
Remington pointed at the Eurasian's face. "You move it."
They followed the man back through the door, into a corridor whose
polished concrete walls and irregular floor of overlapping carpets were
perfectly familiar to Case. "Pretty rugs," Maelcum said, prodding the man in
the back. "Smell like church."
They came to another monitor, an antique Sony, this one mounted above a
console with a keyboard and a complex array of jack panels. The screen lit
as they halted, the Finn grinning tensely out at them from what seemed to be
the front room of Metro Holografix. "Okay," he said, "Maelcum takes this guy
down the corridor to the open locker door, sticks him in there, I'll
lock it. Case, you want the fifth socket from the left, top panel.
There's adaptor plugs in the cabinet under the console. Needs
Ono-Sendai twenty-point into Hitachi forty." As Maelcum nudged his captive
along, Case knelt and fumbled through an assortment of plugs, finally coming
up with the one he needed. With his deck jacked into the adaptor, he paused.
"Do you have to look like that, man?" he asked the face on the screen.
The Finn was erased a line at a time by the image of Lonny Zone against a
wall of peeling Japanese posters.
"Anything you want, baby," Zone drawled, "just hop it for Lonny. . ."
"No," Case said, "use the Finn." As the Zone image vanished, he shoved
the Hitachi adaptor into its socket and settled the trodes across his
forehead.
"What kept you?" the Flatline asked, and laughed.
"Told you don't do that," Case said.
"Joke, boy," the construct said, "zero time lapse for me. Lemme see
what we got here. . ."
The Kuang program was green, exactly the shade of the T-A ice. Even as
Case watched, it grew gradually more opaque, although he could see the
black-mirrored shark thing clearly when he looked up. The fracture lines and
hallucinations were gone now, and the thing looked real as Marcus Garvey, a
wingless antique jet, its smooth skin plated with black chrome.
"Right on," the Flatline said.
"Right," Case said, and flipped.
" – like that. I'm sorry," 3Jane was saying, as she
bandaged Molly's head. "Our unit says no concussion, no permanent
damage to the eye. You didn't know him very well, before you came
here?"
"Didn't know him at all," Molly said bleakly. She was on her back