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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 con-
sciousness. 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 1. 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 sup-
posed 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, Mael-
cum'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 com-
pletely 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 Mael-
cum put his hand on his shoulder. "Hey. You forget some-
thing." 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 Winter-
mute 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 torn-
fingernail 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 pain-
ful 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 impres-
sions 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 mis-
take. 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. Mar-
cus 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, re-
placed 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 pis-
tolgrip 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 any-
thing 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 some-
thing 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, fasten-
ing the construct to the bottom of the Ono-Sendai with micro-
pore tape. Maelcum's workbelt drifted past. He snagged it,
unclipped the two lengths of shock cord, with their gray rec-
tangular 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 trem-
bling 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."