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"You tryin' to break my record, son?" the Flatline asked.
"You were braindead again, five seconds."
"Sit tight," Case said, and hit the simstim switch.
She crouched in darkness, her palms against rough concrete.
CASE CASE CASE CASE. The digital display pulsed his
name in alphanumerics, Wintermute informing her of the link.
"Cute," she said. She rocked back on her heels and rubbed
her palms together, cracked her knuckles. "What kept you?"
TIME MOLLY TIME NOW.
She pressed her tongue hard against her lower front teeth.
One moved slightly, activating her microchannel amps; the
random bounce of photons through the darkness was converted
to a pulse of electrons, the concrete around her coming up
ghost-pale and grainy. "Okay, honey. Now we go out to play."
Her hiding place proved to be a service tunnel of some kind.
She crawled out through a hinged, ornate grill of tarnished
brass. He saw enough of her arms and hands to know that she
wore the polycarbon suit again. Under the plastic, he felt the
familiar tension of thin tight leather. There was something slung
under her arm in a harness or holster. She stood up, unzipped
the suit and touched the checkered plastic of a pistolgrip.
"Hey, Case," she said, barely voicing the words, "you lis-
tening? Tell you a story.... Had me this boy once. You kinda
remind me . . ." She turned and surveyed the corridor. "Johnny,
his name was."
The low, vaulted hallway was lined with dozens of museum
cases, archaic-looking glass-fronted boxes made of brown wood.
They looked awkward there, against the organic curves of the
hallway's walls, as though they'd been brought in and set up
in a line for some forgotten purpose. Dull brass fixtures held
globes of white light at ten-meter intervals. The floor was
uneven, and as she set off along the corridor, Case realized
that hundreds of small rugs and carpets had been put down at
random. In some places, they were six deep, the floor a soft
patchwork of handwoven wool.
Molly paid little attention to the cabinets and their contents,
which irritated him. He had to satisfy himself with her disin-
terested glances, which gave him fragments of pottery, antique
weapons, a thing so densely studded with rusted nails that it
was unrecognizable, frayed sections of tapestry....
"My Johnny, see, he was smart, real flash boy. Started out
as a stash on Memory Lane, chips in his head and people paid
to hide data there. Had the Yak after him, night I met him,
and I did for their assassin. More luck than anything else, but
I did for him. And after that, it was tight and sweet, Case."
Her lips barely moved. He felt her form the words; he didn't
need to hear them spoken aloud. "We had a set-up with a squid,
so we could read the traces of everything he'd ever stored. Ran
it all out on tape and started twisting selected clients, ex-clients.
I was bagman, muscle, watchdog. I was real happy. You ever
been happy, Case? He was my boy. We worked together.
Partners. I was maybe eight weeks out of the puppet house
when I met him...." She paused, edged around a sharp turn
and continued. More of the glossy wooden cases, their sides
a color that reminded him of cockroach wings.
"Tight, sweet, just ticking along, we were. Like nobody
could ever touch us. I wasn't going to let them. Yakuza, I
guess, they still wanted Johnny's ass. 'Cause I'd killed their
man. 'Cause Johnny'd burned them. And the Yak, they can
afford to move so fucking slow, man, they'll wait years and
years. Give you a whole life, just so you'll have more to lose
when they come and take it away. Patient like a spider. Zen
spiders.
"I didn't know that, then. Or if I did, I figured it didn't
apply to us. Like when you're young, you figure you're
unique. I was young. Then they came, when we were thinking
we maybe had enough to be able to quit, pack it in, go to
Europe maybe. Not that either of us knew what we'd do there,
with nothing to do. But we were living fat, Swiss orbital ac-
counts and a crib full of toys and furniture. Takes the edge off
your game.
"So that first one they'd sent, he'd been hot. Reflexes like
you never saw, implants, enough style for ten ordinary hoods.
But the second one, he was, I dunno, like a monk. Cloned.
Stone killer from the cells on up. Had it in him, death, this
silence, he gave it off in a cloud...." Her voice trailed off as
the corridor split, identical stairwells descending. She took the
left.
"One time, I was a little kid, we were squatting. It was
down by the Hudson, and those rats, man, they were big. It's
the chemicals get into them. Big as I was, and all night one
had been scrabbling under the floor of the squat. Round dawn
somebody brought this old man in, seams down his cheeks and
his eyes all red. Had a roll of greasy leather like you'd keep
steel tools in, to keep the rust off. Spread it out, had this old
revolver and three shells. Old man, he puts one bullet in there,
then he starts walking up and down the squat, we're hanging
back by the walls.
"Back and forth. Got his arms crossed, head down, like
he's forgotten the gun. Listening for the rat. We got real quiet.
Old man takes a step. Rat moves. Rat moves, he takes another
step. An hour of that, then he seems to remember his gun.
Points it at the floor, grins, and pulls the trigger. Rolled it back
up and left.
"I crawled under there later. Rat had a hole between its
eyes." She was watching the sealed doorways that opened at
intervals along the corridor. "The second one, the one who
came for Johnny, he was like that old man. Not old, but he
was like that. He killed that way." The corridor widened. The
sea of rich carpets undulated gently beneath an enormous can-
delabrum whose lowest crystal pendant reached nearly to the
floor. Crystal tinkled as Molly entered the hall. THIRD DOOR
LEFT, blinked the readout.
She turned left, avoiding the inverted tree of crystal. "I just
saw him once. On my way into our place. He was coming out.
We lived in a converted factory space, lots of young comers
from Sense/Net, like that. Pretty good security to start with,
and I'd put in some really heavy stuff to make it really tight.
I knew Johnny was up there. But this little guy, he caught my
eye, as he was coming out. Didn't say a word. We just looked
at each other and I knew. Plain little guy, plain clothes, no
pride in him, humble. He looked at me and got into a pedicab.
I knew. Went upstairs and Johnny was sitting in a chair by the
window, with his mouth a little open, like he'd just thought of
something to say."
The door in front of her was old, a carved slab of Thai teak
that seemed to have been sawn in half to fit the low doorway.
A primitive mechanical lock with a stainless face had been
inset beneath a swirling dragon. She knelt, drew a tight little
roll of black chamois from an inside pocket, and selected a
needle-thin pick. "Never much found anybody I gave a damn
about, after that."
She inserted the pick and worked in silence, nibbling at her
lower lip. She seemed to rely on touch alone; her eyes unfo-
cused and the door was a blur of blond wood. Case listened
to the silence of the hall, punctuated by the soft clink of the
candelabrum. Candles? Straylight was all wrong. He remem-
bered Cath's story of a castle with pools and lilies, and 3Jane's
mannered words recited musically by the head. A place grown
in upon itself. Straylight smelled faintly musty, faintly per-
fumed, like a church. Where were the Tessier-Ashpools? He'd
expected some clean hive of disciplined activity, but Molly
had seen no one. Her monologue made him uneasy; she'd never
told him that much about herself before. Aside from her story
in the cubicle, she'd seldom said anything that had even in-
dicated that she had a past.
She closed her eyes and there was a click that Case felt
rather than heard. It made him remember the magnetic locks
on the door of her cubicle in the puppet place. The door had
opened for him, even though he'd had the wrong chip. That
was Wintermute, manipulating the lock the way it had manip-
ulated the drone micro and the robot gardener. The lock system
in the puppet place had been a subunit of Freeside's security
system. The simple mechanical lock here would pose a real
problem for the AI, requiring either a drone of some kind or
a human agent.
She opened her eyes, put the pick back into the chamois,
carefully rerolled it, and tucked it back into its pocket. "Guess
you're kinda like he was," she said. "Think you're born to run.
Figure what you were into back in Chiba, that was a stripped
down version of what you'd be doing anywhere. Bad luck, it'll
do that sometimes, get you down to basics." She stood, stretched,
shook herself. "You know, I figure the one Tessier-Ashpool
sent after that Jimmy, the boy who stole the head, he must be
pretty much the same as the one the Yak sent to kill Johnny."
She drew the fletcher from its holster and dialed the barrel to
full auto.
The ugliness of the door struck Case as she reached for it.
Not the door itself, which was beautiful, or had once been part
of some more beautiful whole, but the way it had been sawn
down to fit a particular entrance. Even the shape was wrong,
a rectangle amid smooth curves of polished concrete. They'd
imported these things, he thought, and then forced it all to fit.
But none of it fit. The door was like the awkward cabinets,
the huge crystal tree. Then he remembered 3Jane's essay, and
imagined that the fittings had been hauled up the well to flesh
out some master plan, a dream long lost in the compulsive
effort to fill space, to replicate some family image of self. He
remembered the shattered nest, the eyeless things writhing....
Molly grasped one of the carved dragon's forelegs and the
door swung open easily.
The room behind was small, cramped, little more than a
closet. Gray steel tool cabinets were backed against a curving
wall. A light fixture had come on automatically. She closed
the door behind her and went to the ranged lockers.
THIRD LEFT, pulsed the optic chip, Wintermute overriding
her time display. FIVE DOWN. But she opened the top drawer
first. It was no more than a shallow tray. Empty. The second
was empty as well. The third, which was deeper, contained
dull beads of solder and a small brown thing that looked like
a human fingerbone. The fourth drawer held a damp-swollen
copy of an obsolete technical manual in French and Japanese.
In the fifth, behind the armored gauntlet of a heavy vacuum
suit, she found the key. It was like a dull brass coin with a
short hollow tube braised against one edge. She turned it slowly
in her hand and Case saw that the interior of the tube was lined
with studs and flanges. The letters CHUBB were molded across
one face of the coin. The other was blank.
"He told me," she whispered. "Wintermute. How he played
a waiting game for years. Didn't have any real power, then,
but he could use the Villa's security and custodial systems to
keep track of where everything was, how things moved, where
they went. He saw somebody lose this key twenty years ago,
and he managed to get somebody else to leave it here. Then
he killed him, the boy who'd brought it here. Kid was eight."
She closed her white fingers over the key. "So nobody would
find it." She took a length of black nylon cord from the suit's
kangaroo pocket and threaded it through the round hole above
CHUBB. Knotting it, she hung it around her neck. "They were
always fucking him over with how old-fashioned they were,
he said, all their nineteenth-century stuff. He looked just like
the Finn, on the screen in that meat puppet hole. Almost thought
he was the Finn, if I wasn't careful." Her readout flared the
time, alphanumerics superimposed over the gray steel chests.
"He said if they'd turned into what they'd wanted to, he
could've gotten out a long time ago. But they didn't. Screwed
up. Freaks like 3Jane. That's what he called her, but he talked
like he liked her."
She turned, opened the door, and stepped out, her hand
brushing the checkered grip of the holstered fletcher.
Case flipped.
Kuang Grade Mark Eleven was growing.
"Dixie, you think this thing'll work?"
"Does a bear shit in the woods?" The Flatline punched them up through shifting rainbow strata.
Something dark was forming at the core of the Chinese program. The density of information overwhelmed the fabric of the matrix, triggering hypnagogic images. Faint kaleidoscopic angles centered in to a silver-black focal point.
Case watched childhood symbols of evil and bad luck tumble out along translucent planes: swastikas, skulls and crossbones dice flashing snake eyes. If he looked directly at that null point, no outline would form. It took a dozen quick, peripheral takes before he had it, a shark thing, gleaming like obsidian, the black mirrors of its flanks reflecting faint distant lights that bore no relationship to the matrix around it.
"That's the sting," the construct said. "When Kuang's good and bellytight with the Tessier-Ashpool core, we're ridin' that through."
"You were right, Dix. There's some kind of manual override on the hardwiring that keeps Wintermute under control. However much he is under control," he added.
"He," the construct said. "He. Watch that. It. I keep telling you . "
"It's a code. A word, he said. Somebody has to speak it
into a fancy terminal in a certain room, while we take care of
whatever's waiting for us behind that ice."
"Well, you got time to kill, kid," the Flatline said. "Ol'
Kuang's slow but steady."
Case jacked out..
Into Maelcum's stare.
"You dead awhile there mon."
"It happens," he said. "i'm getting used to it."
"You dealin' wi' th' darkness, mon."
"Only game in town, it looks like."
"Jah love, Case," Maelcum said, and turned back to his
radio module. Case stared at the matted dreadlocks, the ropes
of muscle around the man's dark arms.
He jacked back in.
And flipped.
Molly was trotting along a length of corridor that might have been the one she'd traveled before. The glass-fronted cases were gone now, and Case decided they were moving toward the tip of the spindle; gravity was growing weaker.
Soon she was bounding smoothly over rolling hillocks of carpets. Faint twinges in her leg....
The corridor narrowed suddenly, curved, split.
She turned right and started up a freakishly steep flight of
stairs, her leg beginning to ache. Overhead, strapped and bun-
dled cables hugged the stairwell's ceiling like colorcoded gan-
glia. The walls were splotched with damp.
She arrived at a triangular landing and stood rubbing her leg. More corridors, narrow, their walls hung with rugs. They branched away in three directions.
LEFT.
She shrugged. "Lemme look around, okay?"
LEFT.
"Relax. There's time." She started down the corridor that
led off to her right.
STOP GO BACK. DANGER.
She hesitated. From the half-open oak door at the far end
of the passage came a voice, loud and slurred, like the voice
of a drunk. Case thought the language might be French, but it
was too indistinct. Molly took a step, another, her hand sliding
into the suit to touch the butt of her fletcher. When she stepped
into the neural disruptor's field, her ears rang, a tiny rising
tone that made Case think of the sound of her fletcher. She
pitched forward, her striated muscles slack, and struck the door
with her forehead. She twisted and lay on her back, her eyes
unfocused, breath gone.
"What's this," said the slurred voice, "fancy dress?" A trem-
bling hand entered the front of her suit and found the fletcher,
tugging it out. "Come visit, child. Now."
She got up slowly, her eyes fixed on the muzzle of a black
automatic pistol. The man's hand was steady enough, now; the
gun's barrel seemed to be attached to her throat with a taut,
invisible string.
He was old, very tall, and his features reminded Case of
the girl he had glimpsed in the Vingtieme Siecle. He wore a
heavy robe of maroon silk, quilted around the long cuffs and
shawl collar. One foot was bare, the other in a black velvet
slipper with an embroidered gold foxhead over the instep. He
motioned her into the room. "Slow, darling." The room was
very large, cluttered with an assortment of things that made no
sense to Case. He saw a gray steel rack of old-fashioned Sony
monitors, a wide brass bed heaped with sheepskins, with pil-
lows that seemed to have been made from the kind of rug used
to pave the corridors. Molly's eyes darted from a huge Tele-
funken entertainment console to shelves of antique disk re-
cordings, their crumbling spines cased in clear plastic, to a
wide worktable littered with slabs of silicon. Case registered
the cyberspace deck and the trodes, but her glance slid over it
without pausing.
"It would be customary," the old man said, "for me to kill
you now." Case felt her tense, ready for a move. "But tonight
I indulge myself. What is your name?"
"Molly."
"Molly. Mine is Ashpool." He sank back into the creased
softness of a huge leather armchair with square chrome legs,
but the gun never wavered. He put her fletcher on a brass table
beside the chair, knocking over a plastic vial of red pills. The
table was thick with vials, bottles of liquor, soft plastic en-
velopes spilling white powders. Case noticed an old-fashioned
glass hypodermic and a plain steel spoon.
"How do you cry, Molly? I see your eyes are walled away.
I'm curious." His eyes were red-rimmed, his forehead gleaming
with sweat. He was very pale. Sick, Case decided. Or drugs.
"I don't cry, much."
"But how would you cry, if someone made you cry?"
"I spit," she said. "The ducts are routed back into my mouth."
"Then you've already learned an important lesson, for one
so young." He rested the hand with the pistol on his knee and
took a bottle from the table beside him, without bothering to
choose from the half-dozen different liquors. He drank. Brandy.
A trickle of the stuff ran from the corner of his mouth. "That
is the way to handle tears." He drank again. "I'm busy tonight,
Molly. I built all this, and now I'm busy. Dying."
"I could go out the way I came," she said.
He laughed, a harsh high sound. "You intrude on my suicide
and then ask to simply walk out? Really, you amaze me. A
thief."
"It's my ass, boss, and it's all I got. I just wanna get it out
of here in one piece."
"You are a very rude girl. Suicides here are conducted with
a degree of decorum. That's what I'm doing, you understand.
But perhaps I'll take you with me tonight, down to hell.... It
would be very Egyptian of me." He drank again. "Come here
then." He held out the bottle, his hand shaking. "Drink."
She shook her head.
"It isn't poisoned," he said, but returned the brandy to the
table. "Sit. Sit on the floor. We'll talk."
"What about?" She sat. Case felt the blades move, very
slightly, beneath her nails.
"Whatever comes to mind. My mind. It's my party. The
cores woke me. Twenty hours ago. Something was afoot, they
said, and l was needed. Were you the something, Molly? Surely
they didn't need me to handle you, no. Something else . . . but
I'd been dreaming, you see. For thirty years. You weren't born,
when last I lay me down to sleep. They told us we wouldn't
dream, in that cold. They told us we'd never feel cold, either.
Madness, Molly. Lies. Of course I dreamed. The cold let the
outside in, that was it. The outside. All the night I built this
to hide us from. Just a drop, at first, one grain of night seeping
in, drawn by the cold . . . Others following it, filling my head
the way rain fills an empty pool. Calla lilies. I remember. The
pools were terracotta, nursemaids all of chrome, how the limbs
went winking through the gardens at sunset.... I'm old, Molly.
Over two hundred years, if you count the cold. The cold." The
barrel of the pistol snapped up suddenly, quivering. The ten-
dons in her thighs were drawn tight as wires now.
"You can get freezerburn," she said carefully.
"Nothing burns there," he said impatiently, lowering the
gun. His few movements were increasingly sclerotic. His head
nodded. It cost him an effort to stop it. "Nothing burns. I
remember now. The cores told me our intelligences are mad.
And all the billions we paid, so long ago. When artificial
intelligences were rather a racy concept. I told the cores I'd
deal with it. Bad timing, really, with 8Jean down in Melbourne
and only our sweet 3Jane minding the store. Or very good
timing, perhaps. Would you know, Molly?" The gun rose again.
"There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight."
"Boss," she asked him, "you know Wintermute?"
"A name. Yes. To conjure with, perhaps. A lord of hell,
surely. In my time, dear Molly, I have known many lords.
And not a few ladies. Why, a queen of Spain, once, in that
very bed.... But I wander." He coughed wetly, the muzzle of
the pistol jerking as he convulsed. He spat on the carpet near
his one bare foot. "How I do wander. Through the cold. But
soon no more. I'd ordered a Jane thawed, when I woke. Strange,
to lie every few decades with what legally amounts to one's
own daughter." His gaze swept past her, to the rack of blank
monitors. He seemed to shiver. "Marie-France's eyes," he said,
faintly, and smiled. "We cause the brain to become allergic to
certain of its own neurotransmitters, resulting in a peculiarly
pliable imitation of autism." His head swayed sideways, re-
covered. "I understand that the effect is now more easily ob-
tained with an embedded microchip."
The pistol slid from his fingers, bounced on the carpet.
"The dreams grow like slow ice," he said. His face was
tinged with blue. His head sank back into the waiting leather
and he began to snore.
Up, she snatched the gun. She stalked the room, Ashpool's
automatic in her hand.
A vast quilt or comforter was heaped beside the bed, in a
broad puddle of congealed blood, thick and shiny on the pat-
terned rugs. Twitching a corner of the quilt back, she found
the body of a girl, white shoulder blades slick with blood. Her
throat had been slit. The triangular blade of some sort of scraper
glinted in the dark pool beside her. Molly knelt, careful to
avoid the blood, and turned the dead girl's face to the light.
The face Case had seen in the restaurant.
There was a click, deep at the very center of things, and
the world was frozen. Molly's simstim broadcast had become
a still frame, her fingers on the girl's cheek. The freeze held
for three seconds, and then the dead face was altered, became
the face of Linda Lee.
Another click, and the room blurred. Molly was standing,
looking down at a golden laser disk beside a small console on
the marble top of a bedside table. A length of fiberoptic ribbon
ran like a leash from the console to a socket at the base of the
slender neck.
"I got your number, fucker," Case said, feeling his own lips
moving, somewhere, far away. He knew that Wintermute had
altered the broadcast. Molly hadn't seen the dead girl's face
swirl like smoke, to take on the outline of Linda's deathmask.
Molly turned. She crossed the room to Ashpool's chair. The
man's breathing was slow and ragged. She peered at the litter
of drugs and alcohol. She put his pistol down, picked up her
fletcher, dialed the barrel over to single shot, and very carefully
put a toxin dart through the center of his closed left eyelid. He
jerked once, breath halting in mid-intake. His other eye, brown
and fathomless, opened slowly.
It was still open when she turned and left the room.
16
"Got your boss on hold," the Flatline said. "He's coming
through on the twin Hosaka in that boat upstairs, the one that's
riding us piggy-back. Called the Haniwa."
"I know," Case said, absently, "I saw it."
A lozenge of white light clicked into place in front of him,
hiding the Tessier-Ashpool ice; it showed him the calm, per-
fectly focused, utterly crazy face of Armitage, his eyes blank
as buttons. Armitage blinked. Stared.
"Guess Wintermute took care of your Turings too, huh?
Like he took care of mine," Case said.
Armitage stared. Case resisted the sudden urge to look away,
drop his gaze. "You okay, Armitage?"
"Case"--and for an instant something seemed to move,
behind the blue stare--"you've seen Wintermute, haven't you?
In the matrix."
Case nodded. A camera on the face of his Hosaka in Marcus
Garvey would relay the gesture to the Naniwa monitor. He
imagined Maelcum listening to his tranced half conversations,
unable to hear the voices of the construct or Armitage.
"Case"--and the eyes grew larger, Armitage leaning toward
his computer--"what is he, when you see him?"
"A high-rez simstim construct."
"But who?"
"Finn, last time.... Before that, this pimp I ..."
"Not General Girling?"
"General who?"
The lozenge went blank.
"Run that back and get the Hosaka to look it up," he told
the construct.
He flipped.
The perspective startled him. Molly was crouching between
steel girders, twenty meters above a broad, stained floor of
polished concrete. The room was a hangar or service bay. He
could see three spacecraft, none larger than Garvey and all in
various stages of repair. Japanese voices. A figure in an orange
jumpsuit stepped from a gap in the hull of a bulbous construc-
tion vehicle and stood beside one of the thing's piston-driven,
weirdly anthropomorphic arms. The man punched something
into a portable console and scratched his ribs. A cartlike red
drone rolled into sight on gray balloon tires.
CASE, flashed her chip.
"Hey," she said. "Waiting for a guide."
She settled back on her haunches, the arms and knees of
her Modern suit the color of the blue-gray paint on the girders.
Her leg hurt, a sharp steady pain now. "I shoulda gone back
to Chin," she muttered.
Something came ticking quietly out of the shadows, on a
level with her left shouder. It paused, swayed its spherical body
from side to side on high-arched spider legs, fired a micro-
second burst of diffuse laserlight, and froze. It was a Braun
microdrone, and Case had once owned the same model, a
pointless accessory he'd obtained as part of a package deal with
a Cleveland hardware fence. It looked like a stylized matte
black daddy longlegs. A red LED began to pulse, at the sphere's
equator. Its body was no larger than a baseball. "Okay," she
said, "I hear you." She stood up, favoring her left leg, and
watched the little drone reverse. It picked its methodical way
back across its girder and into darkness. She turned and looked
back at the service area. The man in the orange jumpsuit was
sealing the front of a white vacuum rig. She watched him ring
and seal the helmet, pick up his console, and step back through
the gap in the construction boat's hull. There was a rising whine
of motors and the thing slid smoothly out of sight on a ten-
meter circle of flooring that sank away into a harsh glare of
arc lamps. The red drone waited patiently at the edge of the
hole left by the elevator panel.
Then she was off after the Braun, threading her way between
a forest of welded steel struts. The Braun winked its LED
steadily, beckoning her on.
"How you doin', Case? You back in Garvey with Maelcum?
Sure. And jacked into this. I like it, you know? Like I've always
talked to myself, in my head, when I've been in tight spots.
Pretend I got some friend, somebody I can trust, and I'll tell
'em what I really think, what I feel like, and then I'll pretend
they're telling me what they think about that, and I'll just go
along that way. Having you in is kinda like that. That scene
with Ashpool . . ." She gnawed at her lower lip, swinging around
a strut, keeping the drone in sight. "I was expecting something
maybe a little less gone, you know? I mean, these guys are all
batshit in here, like they got luminous messages scrawled across
the inside of their foreheads or something. I don't like the way
it looks, I don't like the way it smells...."
The drone was hoisting itself up a nearly invisible ladder
of U-shaped steel rungs, toward a narrow dark opening. "And
while I'm feeling confessional, baby, I gotta admit maybe I
never much expected to make it out of this one anyway. Been
on this bad roll for a while, and you're the only good change
come down since I signed on with Armitage." She looked up
at the black circle. The drone's LED winked, climbing. "Not
that you're all that shit hot." She smiled, but it was gone too
quickly, and she gritted her teeth at the stabbing pain in her
leg as she began to climb. The ladder continued up through a
metal tube, barely wide enough for her shoulders.
She was climbing up out of gravity, toward the weightless
axis.
Her chip pulsed the time.
04:23:04 .
It had been a long day. The clarity of her sensorium cut the
bite of the betaphenethylamine, but Case could still feel it. He
preferred the pain in her leg.
CASE: O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O .
"Guess it's for you," she said, climbing mechanically. The
zeros strobed again and a message stuttered there, in the corner
of her vision, chopped up by the display circuit.
GENERAL G IRLING ::: TRAINED CORTO F O R SCREAMING FIST A N D SOLD H I S ASS TO THE PENT AGON:::: W/MUTE'S PRIMARY GRIP ON ARMITAG E IS A CONSTRU CT OF G IRLING: W/MUTE SEZ A'S MENTION OF G MEANS HE'S CRACK ING:::: WATCH YOUR ASS:::: ::DIXIE
"Well," she said, pausing, taking all of her weight on her
right leg, "guess you got problems too." She looked down.
There was a faint circle of light, no larger than the brass round
of the Chubb key that dangled between her breasts. She looked
up. Nothing at all. She tongued her amps and the tube rose
into vanishing perspective, the Braun picking its way up the
rungs. "Nobody told me about this part," she said.
Case jacked out.
"Maelcum . . ."
"Mon, you bossman gone ver' strange." The Zionite was
wearing a blue Sanyo vacuum suit twenty years older than the
one Case had rented in Freeside, its helmet under his arm and
his dreadlocks bagged in a net cap crocheted from purple
cotton yarn. His eyes were slitted with ganja and tension. "Keep
callin' down here wi' orders, mon, but be some Babylon war...."
Maelcum shook his head. "Aerol an' I talkin', an' Aerol talkin'
wi' Zion, Founders seh cut an' run." He ran the back of a large
brown hand across his mouth.
"Armitage?" Case winced as the betaphenethylamine hang-
over hit him with its full intensity, unscreened by the matrix
or simstim. Brain's got no nerves in it, he told himself, it can't
really feel this bad. "What do you mean, man? He's giving
you orders? What?"
"Mon, Armitage, he tellin' me set course for Finland, ya
know? He tellin' me there be hope, ya know? Come on my
screen wi' his shirt all blood, mon, an' be crazy as some dog,
talkin' screamin' fists an' Russian an' th' blood of th' betrayers
shall be on our hands." He shook his head again, the dreadcap
swaying and bobbing in zero-g, his lips narrowed. "Founders
seh the Mute voice be false prophet surely, an' Aerol an' I
mus' 'bandon Marcus Garvey and return."
"Armitage, he was wounded? Blood?"
"Can't seh, ya know? But blood, an' stone crazy, Case."
"Okay," Case said, "So what about me? You're going home.
What about me, Maelcum?"
"Mon," Maelcum said, "you comin' wi' me. I an' I come
Zion wi' Aerol, Babylon Rocker. Leave Mr. Armitage t' talk
wi' ghost cassette, one ghost t' 'nother...."
Case glanced over his shoulder: his rented suit swung against
the hammock where he'd snapped it, swaying in the air current
from the old Russian scrubber. He closed his eyes. He saw the
sacs of toxin dissolving in his arteries. He saw Molly hauling
herself up the endless steel rungs. He opened his eyes.
"I dunno, man," he said, a strange taste in his mouth. He
looked down at his desk, at his hands. "I don't know." He
looked back up. The brown face was calm now, intent. Mael-
cum's chin was hidden by the high helmet ring of his old blue
suit. "She's inside," he said. "Molly's inside. In Straylight,
it's called. If there's any Babylon, man, that's it. We leave on
her, she ain't comin' out, Steppin' Razor or not."
Maelcum nodded, the dreadbag bobbing behind him like a
captive balloon of crocheted cotton. "She you woman, Case?"
"I dunno. Nobody's woman, maybe." He shrugged. And
found his anger again, real as a shard of hot rock beneath his
ribs. "Fuck this," he said. "Fuck Armitage, fuck Wintermute,
and fuck you. I'm stayin' right here."
Maelcum's smile spread across his face like light breaking.
"Maelcum a rude boy, Case. Garvey Maelcum boat." His gloved
hand slapped a panel and the bass-heavy rocksteady of Zion
dub came pulsing from the tug's speakers. "Maelcum not run-
nin', no. I talk wi' Aerol, he certain t' see it in similar light."
Case stared. "I don't understand you guys at all," he said.
"Don' 'stan' you, mon," the Zionite said, nodding to the
beat, "but we mus' move by Jah love, each one."
Case jacked in and flipped for the matrix.
"Get my wire?"
"Yeah." He saw that the Chinese program had grown; del-
icate arches of shifting polychrome were nearing the T-A ice.
"Well, it's gettin' stickier," the Flatline said. "Your boss
wiped the bank on that other Hosaka, and damn near took ours
with it. But your pal Wintermute put me on to somethin' there
before it went black. The reason Straylight's not exactly hop-
pin' with Tessier-Ashpools is that they're mostly in cold sleep.
There's a law firm in London keeps track of their powers of
attorney. Has to know who's awake and exactly when. Ar-
mitage was routing the transmissions from London to Straylight
through the Hosaka on the yacht. Incidently, they know the
old man's dead."
"Who knows?"
"The law firm and T-A. He had a medical remote planted
in his sternum. Not that your girl's dart would've left a res-
urrection crew with much to work with. Shellfish toxin. But
the only T-A awake in Straylight right now is Lady 3Jane
Marie-France. There's a male, couple years older, in Australia
on business. You ask me, I bet Wintermute found a way to
cause that business to need this 8Jean's personal attention. But
he's on his way home, or near as matters. The London lawyers
give his Straylight ETA as 09:00:00, tonight. We slotted Kuang
virus at 02:32:03. It's 04:45:20. Best estimate for Kuang pen-
etration of the T-A core is 08:30:00. Or a hair on either side.
I figure Wintermute's got somethin' goin' with this 3Jane, or
else she's just as crazy as her old man was. But the boy up
from Melbourne'll know the score. The Straylight security sys-
tems keep trying to go full alert, but Wintermute blocks 'em,
don't ask me how. Couldn't override the basic gate program
to get Molly in, though. Armitage had a record of all that on
his Hosaka; Riviera must've talked 3Jane into doing it. She's
been able to fiddle entrances and exits for years. Looks to me
like one of T-A's main problems is that every family bigwig
has riddled the banks with all kinds of private scams and ex-
ceptions. Kinda like your immune system falling apart on you.
Ripe for virus. Looks good for us, once we're past that ice."
"Okay. But Wintermute said that Arm--"
A white lozenge snapped into position, filled with a close-
up of mad blue eyes. Case could only stare. Colonel Willie
Corto, Special Forces, Strikeforce Screaming Fist, had found
his way back. The image was dim, jerky, badly focused. Corto
was using the Haniwa's navigation deck to link with the Hosaka
in Marcus Garvey.
"Case, I need the damage reports on Omaha Thunder."
"Say, I...Colonel?"
"Hang in there, boy. Remember your training."
But where have you been, man? he silently asked the an-
guished eyes. Wintermute had built something called Armitage
into a catatonic fortress named Corto. Had convinced Corto
that Armitage was the real thing, and Armitage had walked,
talked, schemed, bartered data for capital, fronted for Win-
termute in that room in the Chiba Hilton.... And now Arm-
itage was gone, blown away by the winds of Corto's madness.
But where had Corto been, those years?
Falling, burned and blinded, out of a Siberian sky.
"Case, this will be difficult for you to accept, I know that.
You're an officer. The training. I understand. But, Case, as
God is my witness, we have been betrayed."
Tears started from the blue eyes.
"Colonel, ah, who? Who's betrayed us?"
"General Girling, Case. You may know him by a code name.
You do know the man of whom I speak."
"Yeah," Case said, as the tears continued to flow, "I guess
I do. Sir," he added, on impulse. "But, sir, Colonel, what
exactly should we do? Now, I mean."
"Our duty at this point, Case, lies in flight. Escape. Evasion.
We can make the Finnish border, nightfall tomorrow. Treetop
flying on manual. Seat of the pants, boy. But that will only
be the beginning." The blue eyes slitted above tanned cheek-
bones slick with tears. "Only the beginning. Betrayal from
above. From above..." He stepped back from the camera,
dark stains on his torn twill shirt. Armitage's face had been
masklike, impassive, but Corto's was the true schizoid mask,
illness etched deep in involuntary muscle, distorting the ex-
pensive surgery.
"Colonel, I hear you, man. Listen, Colonel, okay? I want
you to open the, ah . . . shit, what's it called, Dix?"
"The midbay lock," the Flatline said.
"Open the midbay lock. Just tell your central console there
to open it, right? We'll be up there with you fast, Colonel.
Then we can talk about getting out of here."
The lozenge vanished.
"Boy, I think you just lost me, there," the Flatline said.
"The toxins," Case said, "the fucking toxins," and jacked
out.
"Poison?" Maelcum watched over the scratched blue shoul-
der of his old Sanyo as Case struggled out of the g-web.
"And get this goddam thing off me...." Tugging at the
Texas catheter. "Like a slow poison, and that asshole upstairs
knows how to counter it, and now he's crazier than a shithouse
rat." He fumbled with the front of the red Sanyo, forgetting
how to work the seals.
"Bossman, he poison you?" Maelcum scratched his cheek.
"Got a medical kit, ya know."
"Maelcum, Christ, help me with this goddam suit."
The Zionite kicked off from the pink pilot module. "Easy,
mon. Measure twice, cut once, wise man put it. We get up
there...."
There was air in the corrugated gangway that led from Mar-
cus Garvey's aft lock to the midbay lock of the yacht called
Haniwa, but they kept their suits sealed. Maelcum executed
the passage with balletic grace, only pausing to help Case,
who'd gone into an awkward tumble as he'd stepped out of
Garvey. The white plastic sides of the tube filtered the raw
sunlight; there were no shadows.
Garvey's airlock hatch was patched and pitted, decorated
with a laser-carved Lion of Zion. Haniwa's midbay hatch was
creamy gray, blank and pristine. Maelcum inserted his gloved
hand in a narrow recess. Case saw his fingers move. Red LEDs
came to life in the recess, counting down from fifty. Maelcum
withdrew his hand. Case, with one glove braced against the
hatch, felt the vibration of the lock mechanism through his suit
and bones. The round segment of gray hull began to withdraw
into the side of Haniwa. Maelcum grabbed the recess with one
hand and Case with the other. The lock took them with it.
Haniwa was a product of the Dornier-Fujitsu yards, her
interior informed by a design philosophy similar to the one that
had produced the Mercedes that had chauffeured them through
Istanbul. The narrow midbay was walled in imitation ebony
veneer and floored with gray Italian tiles. Case felt as though
he were invading some rich man's private spa by way of the
shower. The yacht, which had been assembled in orbit, had
never been intended for re-entry. Her smooth, wasplike line
was simply styling, and everything about her interior was cal-
culated to add to the overall impression of speed.
When Maelcum removed his battered helmet, Case followed
his lead. They hung there in the lock, breathing air that smelled
faintly of pine. Under it, a disturbing edge of burning insula-
tion.
Maelcum sniffed. "Trouble here, mon. Any boat, you smell
that...."
A door, padded with dark gray ultrasuede, slid smoothly
back into its housing. Maelcum kicked off the ebony wall and
sailed neatly through the narrow opening, twisting his broad
shoulders, at the last possible instant, for clearance. Case fol-
lowed him clumsily, hand over hand, along a waist-high padded
rail. "Bridge," Maelcum said, pointing down a seamless, cream-
walled corridor, "be there." He launched himself with another
effortless kick. From somewhere ahead, Case made out the
familiar chatter of a printer turning out hard copy. It grew
louder as he followed Maelcum through another doorway, into
a swirling mass of tangled printout. Case snatched a length of
twisted paper and glanced at it.
O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O
"Systems crash?" The Zionite flicked a gloved finger at the column of zeros.
"No," Case said, grabbing for his drifting helmet, "the Flatline said Armitage wiped the Hosaka he had in there."
"Smell like he wipe 'em wi' laser, ya know?" The Zionite braced his foot against the white cage of a Swiss exercise machine and shot through the floating maze of paper, batting it away from his face.
"Case, mon..."
The man was small, Japanese, his throat bound to the back of the narrow articulated chair with a length of some sort of fine steel wire. The wire was invisible, where it crossed the black temperfoam of the headrest, and it had cut as deeply into his larynx. A single sphere of dark blood had congealed there like some strange precious stone, a red-black pearl. Case saw the crude wooden handles that drifted at either end of the garrotte, like worn sections of broom handle.
"Wonder how long he had that on him?" Case said, re- membering Corto's postwar pilgrimage.
"He know how pilot boat, Case, bossman?"
"Maybe. He was Special Forces."
"Well, this Japan-boy, he not be pilotin'. Doubt I pilot her
easy myself. Ver' new boat. . ."
"So find us the bridge."
Maelcum frowned, rolled backward, and kicked.
Case followed him into a larger space, a kind of lounge,
shredding and crumpling the lengths of printout that snared him
in his passage. There were more of the articulated chairs, here,
something that resembled a bar, and the Hosaka. The printer,
still spewing its flimsy tongue of paper, was an in-built bulk-
head unit, a neat slot in a panel of handrubbed veneer. He
pulled himself over the circle of chairs and reached it, punching
a white stud to the left of the slot. The chattering stopped. He
turned and stared at the Hosaka. Its face had been drilled through,
at least a dozen times. The holes were small, circular, edges
blackened. Tiny spheres of bright alloy were orbiting the dead
computer. "Good guess," he said to Maelcum.
"Bridge locked, mon," Maelcum said, from the opposite
side of the lounge.
The lights dimmed, surged, dimmed again.
Case ripped the printout from its slot. More zeros. "Win-
termute?" He looked around the beige and brown lounge, the
space scrawled with drifting curves of paper. "That you on the
lights, Wintermute?"
A panel beside Maelcum's head slid up, revealing a small
monitor. Maelcum jerked apprehensively, wiped sweat from
his forehead with a foam patch on the back of a gloved hand,
and swung to study the display. "You read Japanese, mon?"
Case could see figures blinking past on the screen.
"No," Case said.
"Bridge is escape pod, lifeboat. Countin' down, looks like
it. Suit up now." He ringed his helmet and slapped at the seals.
"What? He's takin' off? Shit!" He kicked off from the
bulkhead and shot through the tangle of printout. "We gotta
open this door, man!" But Maelcum could only tap the side of
his helmet. Case could see his lips moving, through the Lexan.
He saw a bead of sweat arc out from the rainbow braided band
of the purple cotton net the Zionite wore over his locks. Mael-
cum snatched the helmet from Case and ringed it for him
smoothly, the palms of his gloves smacking the seals. Micro-
LED monitors to the left of the faceplate lit as the neck ring
connections closed. "No seh Japanese," Maelcum said, over
his suit's transceiver, "but countdown's wrong." He tapped a
particular line on the screen. "Seals not intact, bridge module.
Launchin' wi' lock open."
"Armitage!" Case tried to pound on the door. The physics
of zero-g sent him tumbling back through the printout. "Corto!
Don't do it! We gotta talk! We gotta--"
"Case? Read you, Case..." The voice barely resembled
Armitage's now. It held a weird calm. Case stopped kicking.
His helmet struck the far wall. "I'm sorry, Case, but it has to
be this way. One of us has to get out. One of us has to testify.
If we all go down here, it ends here. I'll tell them, Case, I'll
tell them all of it. About Girling and the others. And I'll make
it, Case. I know I'll make it. To Helsinki." There was a sudden
silence; Case felt it fill his helmet like some rare gas. "But it's
so hard, Case, so goddam hard. I'm blind."
"Corto, stop. Wait. You're blind, man. You can't fly! You'll
hit the fucking trees. And they're trying to get you, Corto, I
swear to God, they've left your hatch open. You'll die, and
you'll never get to tell 'em, and I gotta get the enzyme, name
of the enzyme, the enzyme, man...." He was shouting, voice
high with hysteria. Feedback shrilled out of the helmet's phone
pads.
"Remember the training, Case. That's all we can do."
And then the helmet filled with a confused babble, roaring static, harmonics howling down the years from Screaming Fist.
Fragments of Russian, and then a stranger's voice, Midwestern, very young. "We are down, repeat, Omaha Thunder is down, we ..."
"Wintermute," Case screamed, "don't do this to me!" Tears broke from his lashes, rebounding off the faceplate in wobbling crystal droplets. Then Haniwa thudded, once, shivered as if some huge soft thing had struck her hull. Case imagined the lifeboat jolting free,, blown clear by explosive bolts, a second's clawing hurricane of escaping air tearing mad Colonel Corto from his couch, from Wintermute's rendition of the final minute of Screaming Fist.
"'Im gone, mon." Maelcum looked at the monitor. "Hatch open. Mute mus' override ejection failsafe."
Case tried to wipe the tears of rage from his eyes. His fingers clacked against Lexan.
"Yacht, she tight for air, but bossman takin' grapple control wi' bridge. Marcus Garvey still stuck."
But Case was seeing Armitage's endless fall around Freeside, through vacuum colder than the steppes. For some reason, he imagined him in his dark Burberry, the trenchcoat's rich folds spread out around him like the wings of some huge bat.