cigarettes; the  sides of the  cage
was  scratched and thumb-smudged. As it passed  the fifth  floor, he saw the
lights of Ninsei. He drummed his fingers against the pistol grip as the cage
slowed with a gradual hiss. As always, it came to a full stop with a violent
jolt, but he was ready for it. He stepped out into the courtyard that served
the place as some combination of lobby and lawn.
     Centered in  the  square  carpet  of green  plastic  turf,  a  Japanese
teenager  sat  behind  a  C-shaped console, reading  a textbook.  The  white
fiberglass coffins were racked in a framework of industrial scaffolding. Six
tiers  of coffins, ten coffins  on  a  side. Case nodded in the  boy's
direction and limped  across the  plastic  grass  to the nearest ladder. The
compound was roofed  with cheap laminated matting  that rattled in a  strong
wind and leaked when it rained, but the coffins were reasonably difficult to
open without a key.
     The expansion-grate  catwalk vibrated with his weight as  he edged  his
way along the  third tier to Number 92. The coffins were three meters  long,
the oval hatches a meter wide and just under a meter and a half tall. He fed
his key into  the slot and waited  for verification from the house computer.
Magnetic bolts thudded reassuringly  and the hatch  rose vertically  with  a
creak  of springs. Fluorescents flickered on  as he crawled in,  pulling the
hatch shut  behind him and  slapping the  panel  that  activated the  manual
latch.
     There  was nothing in Number 92 but a  standard Hitachi pocket computer
and a small white styrofoam cooler chest. The  cooler contained the  remains
of  three  ten-kilo slabs of dry ice carefully  wrapped  in  paper to  delay
evaporation,  and  a  spun  aluminum  lab  flask.  Crouching  on  the  brown
temperfoam slab that was both floor and bed, Case took Shin's .22 from
his pocket and put it on top of the cooler. Then he took off his jacket. The
coffin's terminal was molded  into one  concave wall, opposite a panel
listing house rules in seven languages.  Case took the pink handset from its
cradle and punched a Hongkong number from memory. He let it ring five times,
then hung up.  His  buyer for the three megabytes of hot  RAM in the Hitachi
wasn't taking calls.
     He punched a Tokyo number in Shinjuku.
     A woman answered, something in Japanese.
     "Snake Man there?"
     "Very  good to  hear  from  you,"  said  Snake  Man, coming  in  on  an
extension. "I've been expecting your call."
     "I got the music you wanted." Glancing at the cooler.
     "I'm very glad to hear that. We have a cash flow problem. Can you
front?"
     "Oh, man, I really need the money bad. . ."
     Snake Man hung up.
     "You shit" Case  said to the humming  receiver. He stared  at the cheap
little pistol.
     "Iffy," he said, "it's all looking very iffy tonight."

        x x x
     Case walked into  the  Chat an hour  before  dawn, both  hands  in  the
pockets  of his jacket; one held  the  rented pistol, the other the aluminum
flask.
     Ratz  was  at  a  rear table,  drinking Apollonaris water  from  a beer
pitcher,  his  hundred  and twenty kilos of  doughy flesh tilted against the
wall  on  a  creaking chair. A Brazilian  kid called  Kurt was  on  the bar,
tending  a  thin crowd of  mostly  silent drunks.  Ratz's  plastic arm
buzzed as he  raised the pitcher  and drank. His shaven head was filmed with
sweat. "You look bad, friend artiste," he said, flashing the wet ruin of his
teeth.
     "I'm  doing just  fine," said  Case,  and  grinned like  a skull.
"Super fine."  He  sagged into the chair opposite Ratz,  hands still  in his
pockets.
     "And you wander back and forth in this  portable bombshelter  built  of
booze and ups, sure. Proof against the grosser emotions, yes?"
     "Why don't you get off my case, Ratz? You seen Wage?"
     "Proof against fear  and being alone," the bartender continued. "Listen
to the fear. Maybe it's your friend."
     "You hear anything about a fight in the  arcade tonight, Ratz? Somebody
hurt?"
     "Crazy cut a security man." He shrugged. "A girl, they say."
     "I gotta talk to Wage, Ratz, I. . ."
     "Ah." Ratz's  mouth  narrowed, compressed  into a single line. He
was looking past Case, toward the entrance. "I think you are about to."
     Case had a sudden flash of the shuriken in their window. The speed sang
in his head. The pistol in his hand was slippery with sweat.
     "Herr Wage," Ratz said, slowly extending  his pink manipulator as if he
expected it  to be shaken. "How great a pleasure.  Too seldom  do  you honor
us."
     Case turned his head  and looked up  into Wage's  face. It was  a
tanned  and  forgettable  mask.  The  eyes  were vat grown  sea-green  Nikon
transplants. Wage  wore  a suit of gunmetal silk  and a  simple bracelet  of
platinum on either wrist. He was flanked  by his Joe boys, nearly  identical
young men, their arms and shoulders bulging with grafted muscle.
     "How you doing, Case?"
     "Gentlemen," said Ratz, picking up the  table's heaped ashtray in
his pink  plastic claw,  "I want  no  trouble here." The ashtray was made of
thick, shatterproof plastic, and advertised  Tsingtao  beer. Ratz crushed it
smoothly, butts and shards  of green plastic cascading onto  the  table top.
"You understand?"
     "Hey, sweetheart," said one of the Joe boys, "you  wanna try that thing
on me?"
     "Don't  bother  aiming for the  legs, Kurt,"  Ratz said, his tone
conversational. Case glanced across the room and saw the Brazilian  standing
on  the  bar,  aiming  a  Smith &  Wesson  riot  gun  at  the trio.  The
thing's  barrel, made of paper-thin  alloy wrapped with a kilometer of
glass filament,  was  wide enough  to  swallow a fist. The skeletal magazine
revealed five fat orange cartridges, subsonic sandbag jellies.
     "Technically nonlethal," said Ratz.
     "Hey, Ratz," Case said, "I owe you one."
     The bartender shrugged. "Nothing, you  owe me. These," and  he glowered
at Wage and the Joe boys, "should know better. You don't  take anybody
off in the Chatsubo."
     Wage coughed. "So who's talking about taking anybody off? We just
wanna talk business. Case and me, we work together."
     Case pulled the .22 out of his  pocket and  levelled it at Wage's
crotch. "I hear you wanna do  me."  Ratz's pink claw closed around the
pistol and Case let his hand go limp.
     "Look, Case, you tell me what the fuck is going on with you, you wig or
something? What's this shit I'm trying to kill you?" Wage turned
to the boy on his left. "You two go back to the Namban. Wait for me."
     Case watched  as they crossed the bar, which was now entirely  deserted
except for Kurt and a  drunken  sailor in khakis, who was curled at the foot
of a barstool.  The barrel of  the Smith & Wesson tracked the two to the
door,  then swung back  to cover Wage.  The magazine  of Case's pistol
clattered on the table.  Ratz held the  gun in his claw and pumped the round
out of the chamber.
     "Who told you I was going to hit you, Case?" Wage asked.
     Linda.
     "Who told you, man? Somebody trying to set you up?"
     The sailor moaned and vomited explosively.
     "Get him out of here," Ratz called to Kurt, who was sitting on the edge
of the bar now, the Smith & Wesson across his lap, lighting a cigarette.
     Case  felt the weight of  the  night come down on him like a bag of wet
sand settling behind his  eyes.  He took the  flask out  of  his  pocket and
handed it to Wage. "All I got. Pituitaries. Get you five hundred if you move
it fast. Had the rest of my roll in some RAM, but that's gone by now."
     "You  okay, Case?" The flask had  already  vanished  behind a  gunmetal
lapel. "I mean,  fine,  this'll square  us,  but  you  look  bad. Like
hammered shit. You better go somewhere and sleep."
     "Yeah."  He stood  up  and  felt the Chat sway around him. "Well, I had
this  fifty,  but I gave it  to somebody."  He giggled.  He  picked  up  the
.22's magazine and the one loose cartridge and dropped  them into  one
pocket, then put the pistol in the other. "I gotta  see Shin, get my deposit
back."
     "Go  home,"  said Ratz, shifting on  the creaking chair with  something
like embarrassment. "Artiste. Go home."
     He felt  them watching as  he crossed the room  and  shouldered his way
past the plastic doors.

     "Bitch,"  he said  to  the  rose  tint over Shiga.  Down on  Ninsei the
holograms were vanishing like ghosts,  and most of the neon was already cold
and  dead. He sipped  thick  black coffee from a street  vendor's foam
thimble and watched  the sun  come up. "You fly away, honey. Towns like this
are for people who like the way down." But that wasn't it, really, and
he was finding it increasingly  hard to maintain the  sense of betrayal. She
just wanted a ticket home, and the RAM in his  Hitachi would buy it for her,
if she  could  find  the right  fence.  And that  business  with  the fifty;
she'd  almost turned it down, knowing she was about to rip him for the
rest of what he had.
     When he climbed  out of  the elevator,  the  same boy  was on the desk.
Different textbook.  "Good buddy," Case called across the plastic turf, "you
don't need to tell me. I know already. Pretty lady came to visit, said
she had  my key. Nice little tip  for you, say  fifty New ones?" The boy put
down his book. "Woman," Case said, and drew a line across  his forehead with
his thumb. "Silk." He smiled broadly. The boy  smiled back, nodded. "Thanks,
asshole," Case said.
     On the catwalk, he had trouble with the lock.  She'd messed it up
somehow  when she'd fiddled it, he thought. Beginner. He knew where to
rent a  black box that would open anything in Cheap Hotel. Fluorescents came
on as he crawled in.
     "Close the hatch real slow, friend. You still  got that Saturday  night
special you rented from the waiter?"
     She sat with her back to the  wall, at the  far  end of the coffin. She
had her  knees  up, resting  her  wrists on them, the pepper box muzzle of a
flechette pistol emerged from her hands. "That you in the arcade?" He pulled
the hatch down. "Where's Linda?"
     "Hit that latch switch."
     He did.
     "That your girl? Linda?"
     He nodded.
     "She's  gone. Took your Hitachi. Real nervous kid. What about the
gun, man?" She wore  mirrored glasses. Her clothes were black, the heels  of
black boots deep in the temperfoam.
     "I  took it back  to Shin, got my deposit. Sold his bullets back to him
for half what I paid. You want the money?"
     "No."
     "Want some dry ice? All I got, right now."
     "What  got into  you  tonight?  Why'd you pull  that scene at the
arcade? I had to mess up this rentacop came after me with nunchucks."
     "Linda said you were gonna kill me."
     "Linda said? I never saw her before I came up here."
     "You aren't with Wage?"
     She shook her head. He realized that the glasses were surgically inset,
sealing her sockets. The  silver lenses seemed to grow from smooth pale skin
above her cheekbones, framed by dark hair cut  in  a rough shag. The fingers
curled  around  the  fletcher were  slender,  white,  tipped  with  polished
burgundy.  The  nails  looked artificial. "I think you screwed up,  Case.  I
showed up and you just fit me right into your reality picture."
     "So what do you want, lady?" He sagged back against the hatch.
     "You. One  live body,  brains still somewhat  intact. Molly,  Case.  My
name's Molly.  I'm collecting  you for the man I work for.  Just
wants to talk, is all. Nobody wants to hurt you "
     "That's good."
     "'Cept I do hurt people sometimes, Case.  I guess it's just
the way I'm wired." She  wore  tight  black glove leather jeans  and a
bulky  black jacket  cut from some matte fabric that seemed to absorb light.
"If I put this dart gun away, will you be easy, Case? You look like you like
to take stupid chances."
     "Hey, I'm very easy. I'm a pushover, no problem."
     "That's fine, man." The fletcher vanished into  the black jacket.
"Because you try to  fuck around  with me, you'll be taking one of the
stupidest chances of your whole life."
     She held out  her hands, palms up, the  white fingers  slightly spread,
and with a  barely  audible click, ten double-edged, four-centimeter scalpel
blades slid from their housings beneath the burgundy nails.
     She smiled. The blades slowly withdrew.



        2
     After a  year  of coffins, the room on  the  twenty-fifth floor  of the
Chiba Hilton seemed enormous. It was ten meters by eight, half of a suite. A
white Braun coffee maker steamed on a low table  by the sliding glass panels
that opened onto a narrow balcony.
     "Get some coffee in you. Look like you need it." She took off her black
jacket, the fletcher hung beneath her arm in a black nylon shoulder rig. She
wore a sleeveless gray pullover with  plain steel zips across each shoulder.
Bulletproof,  Case decided, slopping coffee into a bright red  mug. His arms
and legs felt like they were made out of wood.
     "Case." He looked  up, seeing the man for  the  first time. "My name is
Armitage." The dark robe was open to the waist, the broad chest hairless and
muscular, the stomach flat  and hard. Blue eyes so pale they made Case think
of bleach. "Sun's up, Case. This is your lucky day, boy."
     Case whipped  his  arm sideways and the man easily  ducked the scalding
coffee. Brown stain running down the imitation rice paper wall. He  saw  the
angular gold ring through the left lobe. Special Forces. The man smiled.
     "Get  your  coffee,   Case,"   Molly   said.  "You're  okay,  but
you're  not going  anywhere 'til Armitage has his say." She  sat
cross legged on  a silk futon and began  to fieldstrip the  fletcher without
bothering to  look at  it. Twin mirrors tracking  as he crossed to the table
and refilled his cup.
     "Too young to remember the war, aren't you, Case?" Armitage ran a
large  hand  back  through his  cropped brown  hair.  A heavy gold  bracelet
flashed on his wrist. "Leningrad, Kiev, Siberia. We invented you in Siberia,
Case."
     "What's that supposed to mean?"
     "Screaming Fist, Case. You've heard the name."
     "Some  kind  of run, wasn't it? Tried  to burn this Russian nexus
with virus programs. Yeah, I heard about it. And nobody got out."
     He sensed abrupt tension. Armitagc walkcd  to the window and looked out
over Tokyo Bay. "That isn't true. One  unit made it back to  Helsinki,
Case."
     Case shrugged, sipped coffee.
     "You're a console cowboy. The  prototypes of the programs you use
to crack industrial banks were developed for Screaming Fist. For the assault
on the Kirensk  computer nexus. Basic module was a Nightwing  micro light, a
pilot,  a matrix  deck,  a  jockey. We were running a virus called Mole. The
Mole series was the first generation of real intrusion programs."
     "Icebreakers," Case said, over the rim of the red mug.
     "Ice from ICE, intrusion countermeasures electronics."
     "Problem is, mister,  I'm no  jockey now, so  I  think I'll
just be going. . ."
     "I was there, Case; I was there when they invented your kind."
     "You got zip to do with me and my kind, buddy. You're rich enough
to hire expensive razor girls to  haul  my  ass up here, is  all.  I'm
never gonna  punch any deck again, not for you or anybody else."  He crossed
to the window and looked down. "That's where I live now."
     "Our profile says you're  trying  to con the street  into killing
you when you're not looking."
     "Profile?"
     "We've built up a detailed model. Bought a go-to for each of your
aliases  and  ran  the  skim  through  some military software.  You're
suicidal, Case. The  model gives you a month on the outside. And our medical
projection says you'll need a new pancreas inside a year."
     " 'We.&lsquo  "  He  met the  faded blue eyes. " ‘We'
who?"
     "What would you say if I told you we could  correct your neural damage,
Case?" Armitage suddenly looked to Case as if he were carved from a block of
metal; inert, enormously heavy. A statue. He knew now that this was a dream,
and  that  soon  he'd  wake.   Armitage  wouldn't  speak  again.
Case's dreams  always ended  in these freeze frames, and now this  one
was over.
     "What would you say, Case?"
     Case looked out over the Bay and shivered.
     "I'd say you were full of shit."
     Armitage nodded.
     "Then I'd ask what your terms were."
     "Not very different than what you're used to, Case."
     "Let the  man get some sleep, Armitage," Molly said from her futon, the
components of the  fletcher spread on  the  silk like some expensive puzzle.
"He's coming apart at the seams."
     "Terms," Case said, "and now. Right now."
     He was still shivering. He couldn't stop shivering.

     The  clinic was  nameless,  expensively appointed, a cluster  of  sleek
pavilions  separated by small formal gardens. He remembered the  place  from
the round he'd made his first month in Chiba.
     "Scared, Case.  You're real scared." It was  Sunday afternoon and
he stood with Molly in a sort of courtyard. White boulders, a stand of green
bamboo,  black  gravel raked into  smooth waves. A gardener,  a thing like a
large metal crab, was tending the bamboo.
     "It'll  work, Case. You got no idea, the kind of  stuff  Armitage
has. Like he's gonna pay these  nerve  boys  for fixing  you  with the
program he's  giving them to  tell them how to  do it. He'll put
them  three  years  ahead  of  the  competition.   You  got  any  idea  what
that's worth?"  She hooked thumbs in the  belt loops  of  her  leather
jeans and rocked backward on the lacquered heels of cherry red cowboy boots.
The  narrow toes  were  sheathed in bright Mexican  silver. The  lenses were
empty quicksilver, regarding him with an insect calm.
     "You're street samurai," he said. "How long you work for him?"
     "Couple of months."
     "What about before that?"
     "For somebody else. Working girl, you know?"
     He nodded.
     "Funny, Case."
     "What's funny?"
     ‘It's like  I know you. That profile he's got. I know
how you're wired."
     "You don't know me, sister."
     "You're  okay, Case.  What  got  you, it's just  called bad
luck."
     "How  about  him?  He  okay,  Molly?" The robot crab moved toward them,
picking  its way over  the  waves  of gravel. Its bronze carapace might have
been a thousand years old. When it was within a meter of her boots, it fired
a burst of light, then froze for an instant, analyzing data obtained.
     "What I always think  about first, Case, is my own sweet ass." The crab
had altered course to avoid her, but she kicked  it with a smooth precision,
the silver boot-tip  clanging on the  carapace. The thing fell on its  back,
but the bronze limbs soon righted it.
     Case sat on one of the boulders, scuffing at the symmetry of the gravel
waves  with  the  toes of  his  shoes. He began to  search  his  pockets for
cigarettes. "In your shirt," she said.
     "You  want  to answer my question?" He fished a wrinkled  Yeheyuan from
the pack and she lit it for him with a thin slab of German steel that looked
as though it belonged on an operating table.
     "Well, I'll tell you, the man's definitely on to something.
He's got big  money now,  and he's  never  had it before, and he
gets more all the time." Case noticed  a certain  tension around her  mouth.
"Or maybe, maybe something's on to him. . ." She shrugged.
     "What's that mean?"
     "I  don't know,  exactly. I know  I don't know who  or what
we're really working for."
     He stared at  the  twin mirrors. Leaving the  Hilton, Saturday morning,
he'd  gone  back  to  Cheap Hotel  and  slept  for ten  hours  .  Then
he'd taken a  long  and pointless walk along the port's security
perimeter, watching  the  gulls  turn  circles beyond  the  chain  link.  If
she'd  followed him, she'd  done a  good  job  of it. He'd
avoided Night City.  He'd  waited in  the  coffin for Armitage's
call.  Now  this  quiet  courtyard,  Sunday  afternoon,  this  girl  with  a
gymnast's body and conjurer's hands.
     "If  you'll come in  now, sir, the anesthetist is waiting to meet
you." The technician bowed, turned, and reentered the clinic without waiting
to see if Case would follow.

     Cold steel odor. Ice caressed his spine.
     Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down
corridors of television sky.
     Voices.
     Then black fire found the  branching  tributaries  of  the nerves, pain
beyond anything to which the name of pain is given. . .

     Hold still. Don't move.
     And Ratz was there, and Linda Lee, Wage and Lonny Zone, a hundred faces
from the  neon  forest,  sailors  and hustlers and whores, where  the sky is
poisoned silver, beyond chain link and the prison of the skull.
     Goddamn don't you move.
     Where the sky faded from hissing static to the non color of the matrix,
and he glimpsed the shuriken, his stars.
     "Stop it, Case, I gotta find your vein!"  She was straddling his chest,
a blue plastic  syrette in  one hand. "You don't lie still, I'll
slit your fucking throat. You're still full of endorphin inhibitors."

     He woke and found her stretched beside him in the dark.
     His neck was brittle, made of twigs. There was  a steady pulse  of pain
midway down  his spine.  Images formed and reformed: a flickering montage of
the Sprawl's towers and ragged Fuller domes, dim figures moving toward
him in the shade beneath a bridge or overpass. . .
     "Case?  It's Wednesday,  Case." She moved, rolling over, reaching
across him. A breast brushed his  upper arm. He heard her tear the foil seal
from a bottle of water and drink. "Here." She put the bottle in his hand. "I
can see in the dark, Case. Micro channel image-amps in my glasses."
     "My back hurts."
     "That's where  they replaced  your fluid. Changed your blood too.
Blood 'cause you got a new pancreas thrown into the deal. And some new
tissue patched into your liver. The nerve stuff I dun no. Lot of injections.
They didn't have to  open anything up for  the main show." She settled
back beside him. "It's 2:43:12 AM, Case. Got a readout chipped into my
optic nerve."
     He sat up and  tried to sip from the bottle. Gagged,  coughed, lukewarm
water spraying his chest and thighs.
     "I  gotta  punch deck," he  heard himself  say. He was groping for  his
clothes. "I gotta know. . ."
     She  laughed.  Small  strong  hands  gripped  his  upper arms.  "Sorry,
hotshot. Eight day wait. Your  nervous system would fall out on the floor if
you jacked in  now. Doctor's  orders.  Besides, they figure it worked.
Check you in a day or so." He lay down again.
     "Where are we?"
     "Home. Cheap Hotel."
     "Where's Armitage?"
     "Hilton,  selling beads to the natives or something. We're out of
here soon, man. Amsterdam, Paris, then back to the Sprawl."  She touched his
shoulder. "Roll over. I give a good massage."
     He lay  on  his  stomach, arms stretched forward, tips of  his  fingers
against the  walls of the  coffin. She settled over  the  small of his back,
kneeling on  the  temperfoam, the leather  jeans cool against his  skin. Her
fingers brushed his neck.
     "How come you're not at the Hilton?"
     She  answered him  by reaching  back,  between  his  thighs and  gently
encircling his  scrotum with  thumb and forefinger. She  rocked there for  a
minute in the dark, erect above him, her other hand on his neck. The leather
of her jeans creaked softly with the movement. Case shifted, feeling himself
harden against the temperfoam.
     His head throbbed, but  the  brittleness in his neck seemed to retreat.
He raised himself on one elbow, rolled, sank back against the  foam, pulling
her down, licking  her breasts, small  hard  nipples sliding wet  across his
cheek. He found the zip on the leather jeans and tugged it down.
     "It's  okay," she said, "I can  see." Sound of  the jeans peeling
down.  She struggled beside him until she could  kick them away. She threw a
leg across him and he touched her face. Unexpected hardness of the implanted
lenses. "Don't," she said, "fingerprints."
     Now she straddled him again, took his hand, and closed it over her, his
thumb along the cleft of  her buttocks, his fingers spread across the labia.
As  she began  to lower herself, the  images  came pulsing  back, the faces,
fragments of  neon  arriving  and receding. She slid down around him and his
back arched convulsively. She rode him that way, impaling  herself, slipping
down on  him again and again, until they both  had  come, his orgasm flaring
blue in a timeless  space, a vastness like the matrix,  where the faces were
shredded and blown away down hurricane corridors, and her inner thighs  were
strong and wet against his hips.

     On  Nisei, a thinner, weekday  version  of the crowd went  through  the
motions of the dance. Waves  of sound rolled from  the  arcades and pachinko
parlors. Case glanced into the Chat and saw  Zone watching over his girls in
the warm, beer-smelling twilight. Ratz was tending bar.
     "You seen Wage, Ratz?"
     "Not tonight." Ratz made a point of raising an eyebrow at Molly.
     "You see him, tell him I got his money."
     "Luck changing, my artiste?"
     "Too soon to tell."

     "Well, I gotta see this guy," Case said, watching his reflection in her
glasses. "I got biz to cancel out of."
     "Armitage won't  like it, I  let you out  of my sight." She stood
beneath Deane's melting clock, hands on her hips.
     "The  guy  won't  talk  to  me  if you're  there.  Deane  I
don't give two shits about. He takes care of himself. But I got people
who'll  just  go  under  if  I walk out  of Chiba cold. It's  my
people, you know?"
     Her mouth hardened. She shook her head.
     "I got people  in Singapore, Tokyo connections in Shinjuku and Asakuza,
and they'll go down, understand?" he lied, his hand on the shoulder of
her black jacket. "Five. Five minutes. By your clock, okay?"
     "Not what I'm paid for."
     "What you're paid for is one thing. Me letting some tight friends
die because you're  too literal about your  instructions  is something
else."
     "Bullshit. Tight friends my  ass. You're going in  there to check
us  out  with your smuggler." She put a booted foot up  on  the dust-covered
Kandinsky coffee table.
     "Ah,  Case,  sport, it  does look  as  though  your  companion there is
definitely armed, aside from having  a fair amount of  silicon in her head .
What  is this about, exactly?" Deane's ghostly cough seemed to hang in
the air between them.
     "Hold on, Julie. Anyway, I'll be coming in alone."
     "You can  be sure of that,  old  son. Wouldn't have  it any other
way."
     "Okay," she said. "Go. But five Minutes. Any more  and  I'll come
in and cool your tight friend permanently. And while you're at it, you
try to figure something out."
     "What's that?"
     "Why I'm  doing you the favor."  She turned and walked  out, past
the stacked white modules of preserved ginger.
     "Keeping stranger company than usual, Case?" asked Julie.
     "Julie, she's gone. You wanna let me in? Please, Julie?"
     The bolts worked. "Slowly, Case," said the voice.
     "Turn  on the  works, Julie,  all the  stuff  in the desk," Case  said,
taking his place in the swivel chair.
     "It's  on all  the time," Deane  said mildly,  taking a  gun from
behind  the  exposed works of his old  mechanical  typewriter  and aiming it
carefully at  Case. It was a belly gun,  a magnum  revolver with the  barrel
sawn down to a nub. The front of the trigger-guard had been cut away and the
grips wrapped with what looked like old masking tape. Case thought it looked
very strange in  Dean's  manicured pink hands. "Just taking  care, you
Understand. Nothing personal. Now tell me what you want."
     "I need a history lesson, Julie. And a go-to on somebody."
     "What's moving, old son?"  Deane's shirt was  candy-striped
cotton, the collar white and rigid, like porcelain.
     "Me, Julie. I'm leaving. Gone. But do me the favor, okay?"
     "Go-to on whom, old son?"
     "Gaijin name of Armitage, suite in the Hilton."
     Deane put the pistol  down. "Sit  still, Case." He tapped something out
on  a lap  terminal. "It  seems as though  you know as  much as my net does,
Case. This gentleman seems to have a temporary arrangement with  the Yakuza,
and  the sons of the neon chrysanthemum have ways of screening their  allies
from  the likes of me. I wouldn't have it any other way. Now, history.
You said history."  He  picked up  the gun again,  but didn't point it
directly at Case.
     "What sort of history?"
     "The war. You in the war, Julie?"
     "The war? What's there to know? Lasted three weeks."
     "Screaming Fist."
     "Famous. Don't  they teach  you  history these days? Great bloody
postwar  political football, that was. Watergated all to hell and back. Your
brass, Case, your Sprawlside brass in, where was it, McLean? In the bunkers,
all of that.  . . great scandal. Wasted a fair bit  of patriotic young flesh
in order  to test some new technology. They  knew  about the Russians'
defenses,  it came  out later. Knew about the  emps, magnetic pulse weapons.
Sent  these  fellows in  regardless, just  to see." Deane shrugged.  "Turkey
shoot for Ivan."
     "Any of those guys make it out?"
     "Christ," Deane said, "it's been  bloody years. .  . Though I  do
think a  few did. One of the teams.  Got hold of  a Sov gunship. Helicopter,
you know. Flew it back to Finland. Didn't have entry codes, of course,
and shot  hell  out  of the Finnish defense forces  in the  process. Special
Forces types." Deane sniffed. "Bloody hell."
     Case nodded. The smell of preserved ginger was overwhelming.
     "I spent the  war in Lisbon,  you  know," Deane said, putting  the  gun
down. "Lovely place, Lisbon."
     "In the service, Julie?"
     "Hardly.  Though  I  did  see  action."  Deane  smiled his pink  smile.
"Wonderful what a war can do for one's markets."
     "Thanks, Julie. I owe you one."
     "Hardly, Case. And goodbye."

        x x x
     And later he'd tell himself that the evening at Sammi's had
felt wrong from the start, that even as he'd followed Molly along that
corridor, shuffling through a trampled  mulch of ticket stubs and  styrofoam
cups, he'd sensed it. Linda's death, waiting. . .
     They'd gone to the Namban, after he'd seen Deane,  and paid
off his debt to Wage with a roll of Armitage's New Yen. Wage had liked
that, his boys had liked it less, and Molly had grinned at Case's side
with a  kind of ecstatic feral intensity, obviously longing  for one of them
to make a move. Then he'd taken her back to the Chat for a drink.
     "Wasting your time, cowboy," Molly said, when Case took an octagon from
the pocket of his jacket. "How's that? You want one?" He held the pill
out to her.
     "Your new pancreas, Case, and those plugs in your  liver.  Armitage had
them designed to bypass that shit." She tapped the octagon with one burgundy
nail. "You're biochemically incapable of getting off on amphetamine or
cocaine."
     "Shit," he said. He looked at the octagon, then at her.
     "Eat it. Eat a dozen. Nothing'll happen."
     He did. Nothing did.
     Three beers later, she was asking Ratz about the fights.
     "Sammi's," Ratz said.  "I'll pass," Case said, "I hear they
kill each other down there."
     An  hour  later, she was buying tickets from a skinny  Thai  in a white
t-shirt and baggy rugby shorts.
     Sammi's was an  inflated dome behind a port side  warehouse, taut
gray fabric reinforced with a net of thin steel cables. The corridor, with a
door at either end, was a crude airlock preserving the pressure differential
that  supported  the  dome.  Fluorescent rings were screwed  to  the plywood
ceiling at intervals, but most of them had been broken. The air was damp and
close with the smell of sweat and concrete.
     None of that prepared him for the arena, the crowd, the tense hush, the
towering puppets of light beneath the dome. Concrete sloped away in tiers to
a kind of central stage, a raised circle ringed with a glittering thicket of
projection gear. No light but the holograms that shifted and flickered above
the  ring,  reproducing  the  movements  of  the  two men below.  Strata  of
cigarette  smoke rose from the  tiers, drifting until it struck currents set
up by the blowers that supported the dome. No sound but the muted purring of
the blowers and the amplified breathing of the fighters.
     Reflected colors flowed across Molly's lenses as the men circled.
The holograms were ten-power magnifications; at ten,  the  knives they  held
were  just under  a  meter  long.  The  knife-fighter's  grip  is  the
fencer's grip, Case remembered, the fingers curled, thumb aligned with
blade. The knives seemed to move of their own  accord, gliding with a ritual
lack of urgency through  the  arcs and passes of their dance, point  passing
point, as  the men waited  for an  opening. Molly's upturned face  was
smooth and still, watching.
     "I'll go  find us  some food," Case  said.  She  nodded,  lost in
contemplation of the dance.
     He didn't like this place.
     He turned and walked back into the shadows. Too dark. Too quiet.
     The crowd,  he saw, was mostly Japanese. Not really a Night City crowd.
Techs down from  the arcologies. He supposed that  meant the  arena had  the
approval of some corporate recreational committee. He  wondered briefly what
it  would be like, working all your life for one zaibatsu. Company  housing,
company hymn, company funeral.
     He'd made nearly a full circuit of the dome  before he found  the
food stalls. He bought  yakitori  on skewers  and  two  tall waxy cartons of
beer.   Glancing  up  at  the   holograms,  he  saw  that  blood  laced  one
figure's chest.  Thick brown sauce trickled down the skewers  and over
his knuckles.
     Seven  days  and  he'd  jack  in.  If  he  closed  his eyes  now,
he'd see the matrix.
     Shadows twisted as the holograms swung through their dance.
     Then the fear began to knot between  his shoulders.  A cold  trickle of
sweat worked its way down and  across his  ribs. The operation  hadn't
worked. He was still here, still meat, no Molly waiting, her eyes  locked on
the  circling knives,  no Armitage waiting in  the Hilton with tickets and a
new passport and money. It  was all some dream,  some pathetic fantasy.  . .
Hot tears blurred his vision.
     Blood  sprayed from a jugular in a red gout of light. And now the crowd
was  screaming,  rising,  screaming  –  as  one  figure crumpled,  the
hologram fading, flickering. . .
     Raw  edge  of vomit in his throat. He closed  his  eyes,  took  a  deep
breath,  opened them,  and saw Linda Lee step  past him her gray eyes  blind
with fear. She wore the same French fatigues.
     And gone. Into shadow.
     Pure mindless reflex:  he threw the beer and chicken down and ran after
her. He might have called her name, but he'd never be sure.
     Afterimage of  a  single hair-fine  line of red light.  Seared concrete
beneath the thin soles of his shoes.
     Her white sneakers flashing,  close to  the curving wall now and  again
the ghost line of the laser branded across his eye, bobbing in his vision as
he ran.
     Someone tripped him. Concrete tore his palms.
     He rolled and kicked, failing to connect. A thin boy, spiked blond hair
lit from behind in  a rainbow nimbus, was leaning over him. Above the stage,
a figure turned, knife  held high, to the cheering crowd. The boy smiled and
drew something  from  his sleeve. A razor, etched  in  red  as a  third beam
blinked past them into the dark. Case  saw the razor dipping  for his throat
like a dowser's wand.
     The face  was  erased  in a humming  cloud  of microscopic  explosions.
Molly's fletchettes,  at  twenty  rounds per  second. The  boy coughed
once, convulsively, and toppled across Case's legs.
     He  was walking  toward the stalls,  into the shadows. He looked  down,
expecting  to  see that  needle of ruby  emerge from his chest.  Nothing. He
found her. She was  thrown  down at  the foot  of  a  concrete pillar,  eyes
closed.  There  was  a smell  of cooked  meat.  The crowd was  chanting  the
winner's name. A beer vendor was wiping his taps  with a dark rag. One
white sneaker had come off, somehow, and lay beside her head.
     Follow the wall.  Curve of  concrete. Hands  in pockets. Keep  walking.
Past unseeing faces, every eye raised to the victor's image above  the
ring. Once  a  seamed  European  face danced in  the glare of a  match, lips
pursed around  the  short stem of a metal pipe. Tang of hashish. Case walked
on, feeling nothing.
     "Case." Her mirrors emerged from deeper shadow. "You okay?"
     Something mewled and bubbled in the dark behind her.
     He shook his head.
     "Fight's over, Case. Time to go home."
     He tried to walk  past her. back  into the  dark, where  something  was
dying. She stopped  him with a  hand on his chest.  "Friends of  your  tight
friend.  Killed  your girl  for you.  You  haven't  done  too well for
friends in this town, have you? We got a partial profile on that old bastard
when we did you, man. He'd fry anybody, for a few  New  ones.  The one
back there  said they got on to her when  she was trying to fence  your RAM.
Just cheaper for them to kill her and  take it. Save a little money.  .  . I
got the one who  had the laser to tell me all  about it. Coincidence we were
here, but I  had to make sure." Her mouth was hard, lips pressed into a thin
line.
     Case felt as though  his brain were  jammed. "Who,"  he said, "who sent
them?"
     She passed him a blood-flecked bag of preserved ginger. He saw that her
hands  were  sticky with blood. Back in the shadows, someone made wet sounds
and died.

     After  the postoperative check at the  clinic,  Molly  took him  to the
port. Armitage was waiting. He'd chartered a hovercraft. The last Case
saw of Chiba were the dark angles of the arcologies. Then a mist closed over
the black water and the drifting shoals of waste.




         * PART TWO * THE SHOPPING EXPEDITION



        3
     Home.
     Home was BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis.
     Program  a  map  to display frequency of data exchange,  every thousand
megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan  and Atlanta burn
solid  white. Then  they start to pulse, the rate of traffic  threatening to
overload  your simulation. Your map is  about  to go nova. Cool it down.  Up
your scale. Each pixel a million  megabytes. At a hundred million  megabytes
per second,  you begin  to make  out  certain  blocks in midtown  Manhattan,
outlines  of  hundred-year-old industrial  parks  ringing  the old  core  of
Atlanta. . .

     Case woke from  a dream of  airports,  of Molly's  dark  leathers
moving ahead of him through the concourses of Narita, Schipol, Orly.  . . He
watched himself buy a flat plastic flask  of Danish  vodka at some kiosk, an
hour before dawn.
     Somewhere  down  in the  Sprawl's  ferro-concrete roots,  a train
drove a column of stale  air through  a tunnel. The train itself was silent,
gliding over its induction cushion,  but displaced air made the tunnel sing,
bass down into subsonics. Vibration reached the room where he lay and caused
dust to rise from the cracks in the dessicated parquet floor.
     Opening his eyes,  he saw Molly, naked and just out of reach across  an
expanse of very new pink temperfoam. Overhead, sunlight filtered through the
soot-stained  grid of a skylight.  One half-meter  square  of glass had been
replaced with chip-board, a fat gray cable emerging there to dangle within a
few centimeters of the floor. He  lay on his  side and watched her  breathe,
her breasts, the sweep of a flank defined with the functional elegance of  a
war plane's fusilage.  Her  body was spare, neat, the muscles  like  a
dancer's.
     The room was large. He sat  up. The room was empty, aside from the wide
pink  bedslab and two nylon  bags, new  and identical, that  lay  beside it.
Blank  walls, no windows, a single  white-painted steel fire door. The walls
were coated with countless layers  of white  latex paint. Factory space.  He
knew this kind of room, this kind of building; the tenants would  operate in
the interzone where art wasn't quite crime, crime not quite art.
     He was home.
     He  swung his feet to the floor. It was  made of little blocks of wood,
some missing, others loose. His head ached. He remembered Amsterdam, another
room, in the Old City section of the Centrum, buildings centuries old. Molly
back from the canal's edge with orange juice and eggs. Armitage off on
some cryptic foray,  the two of them walking alone  past Dam Square to a bar
she  kn