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  bundled cables hugged the
stairwell's ceiling like colorcoded ganglia. 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 trembling
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 pillows that seemed to have been made from the  kind of rug
used to pave the corridors. Molly's eyes darted from a huge Telefunken
entertainment console to shelves of antique disk recordings, 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 envelopes 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 tendons
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,
recovered. "I understand that the effect is now more easily obtained 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 patterned  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,  perfectly 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 Haniwa 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
construction   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 microsecond  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.

C A S E : O O 0 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.

G E N E R A L G I R L I N G : : : T R A I N  E D C O R T O F O R S C R E A M
I N G F I S T A N D S O L D H I S A S S T O T H E P E N T  A G O N : : : : W
/ M U T E ' S P R I M A R Y G R I P O N A R M I T A G E  I S A C O N S T R U
C T O F G I R L I N  G : W / M U T E S E Z A ' S M E N T I O N O F G M E A N
S H E  ' S C R A C K I N G : : : : W A T C H Y O U R A S S : : : : : : D I X
I E

     "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 hangover 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. Maelcum'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 runnin',  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; delicate  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  hoppin'  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. Armitage  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 resurrection 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 penetration 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 systems  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 exceptions. 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 closeup 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  anguished 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
Wintermute in  that room in the Chiba Hilton. . . And now Armitage 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  cheekbones 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 expensive 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 shoulder 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  Marcus
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  calculated  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 insulation. 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  followed  him  clumsily,  hand  over  hand,  along  a
waist-high padded rail. "Bridge,"  Maelcum  said, pointing down a  seamless,
creamwalled  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,  remembering
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 bulkhead 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. "Wintermute?" 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. Maelcum snatched the helmet from Case and ringed it for him smoothly,
the palms of his gloves smacking the seals. MicroLED 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.
     "I'm 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.



        17
     "Get what you went for?" the construct asked.
     Kuang Grade Mark Eleven was filling the grid between itself and the T-A
ice with hypnotically intricate traceries  of rainbow, lattices fine as snow
crystal on a winter window.
     "Wintermute killed Armitage.  Blew  him out in a lifeboat with  a hatch
open."
     "Tough  shit,"  the  Flatline   said.  "Weren't  exactly  asshole
buddies, were you?"
     "He knew how to unbond the toxin sacs."
     "So Wintermute knows too. Count on it."
     "I don't exactly trust Wintermute to give it to me."
     The  construct's  hideous  approximation   of  laughter   scraped
Case's  nerves  like a  dull  blade. "Maybe  that  means  you're
gettin' smart."
     He hit the simstim switch.

     06:27:52 by  the chip in  her optic nerve;  Case had been following her
progress through Villa Straylight for  over an  hour, letting  the endorphin
analog she'd  taken blot  out  his hangover. The  pain in her  leg was
gone; she seemed to move through a warm bath. The Braun drone was perched on
her  shoulder, its tiny manipulators, like padded surgical clips,  secure in
the polycarbon of the Modern suit.
     The  walls here were  raw steel,  striped with rough  brown  ribbons of
epoxy where some  kind  of covering had been ripped away. She'd hidden
from a work crew,  crouching, the fletcher cradled  in  her  hands, her suit
steel-gray, while the two slender  Africans and their balloon-tired workcart
passed. The men  had shaven heads and wore orange coveralls. One was singing
softly to himself in  a language Case had never heard, the tones and  melody
alien and haunting.
     The head's speech,  3Jane's  essay on Straylight, came back
to him as she worked her way  deeper into the  maze of the place. Straylight
was crazy, was craziness grown in the resin concrete they'd mixed from
pulverized lunar stone, grown in welded steel and tons of knick-knacks,  all
the bizarre impedimentia they'd  shipped  up  the  well  to line their
winding  nest.  But it  wasn't  a  craziness he understood.  Not  like
Armitage's madness, which he now imagined he could understand; twist a
man  far  enough, then twist him as  far back, in  the  opposite  direction,
reverse and twist again. The man broke. Like breaking a length  of wire. And
history had done that for Colonel Corto. History had already done the really
messy work,  when  Wintermute  found him, sifting him  out  of  all  of  the
war's ripe detritus,  gliding into the man's  flat gray field of
consciousness like a  water spider crossing  the face of some stagnant pool,
the  first messages blinking  across the face of a child's  micro in a
darkened  room in a  French  asylum. Wintermute had  built Armitage up  from
scratch,  with Corto's memories  of  Screaming Fist as the foundation.
But Armitage's "memories" wouldn't have been Corto's after
a certain  point. Case doubted  if Armitage had recalled the  betrayal,  the
Nightwings whirling  down in flame. . . Armitage had been  a  sort of edited
version of  Corto,  and when the  stress  of  the  run had reached a certain
point,  the Armitage mechanism  had crumbled; Corto had  surfaced, with  his
guilt and  his sick  fury.  And  now Corto-Armitage was dead, a small frozen
moon for Freeside.
     He thought of the toxin sacs. Old Ashpool was dead too, drilled through
the  eye with  Molly's microscopic dart, deprived  of whatever  expert
overdose he'd  mixed  for  himself.  That was a more  puzzling  death,
Ashpool's, the death of a mad king.  And he'd  killed the puppet
he'd called his daughter,  the one with 3Jane's face.  It seemed
to Case,  as  he rode  Molly's  broadcast sensory  input  through  the
corridors of Straylight, that he'd never really thought of anyone like
Ashpool, anyone as powerful as he imagined Ashpool had been, as human.
     Power, in Case's world, meant corporate power. The zaibatsus, the
multinationals that shaped  the course of human history, had transcended old
barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a  kind of immortality. You
couldn't kill  a  zaibatsu by  assassinating  a  dozen key executives;
there  were  others  waiting  to  step  up the ladder,  assume  the  vacated
position,    access    the    vast   banks   of    corporate   memory.   But
Tessier–Ashpool wasn't like that,  and he  sensed the difference
in the death of its founder.  T-A was an atavism, a clan. He  remembered the
litter of the old man's chamber, the soiled humanity of it, the ragged
spines of  the old audio disks  in their paper sleeves.  One foot bare,  the
other in a velvet slipper.
     The Braun plucked at the hood of the Modem suit  and Molly turned left,
through another archway.
     Wintermute  and   the  nest.  Phobic  vision  of  the  hatching  wasps,
time-lapse machine gun of biology. But weren't the zaibatsus more like
that, or  the Yakuza, hives with cybernetic memories, vast single organisms,
their DNA coded in silicon? If Straylight was an expression of the corporate
identity of Tessier-Ashpool, then T-A was crazy as the old man had been. The
same  ragged tangle of fears, the  same  strange  sense of  aimlessness. "If
they'd turned  into what  they  wanted  to. .  ." he  remembered Molly
saying. But Wintermute had told her they hadn't.
     Case had always taken it for granted that the real bosses, the kingpins
in  a given industry,  would be  both more and less than people.  He'd
seen it in the men who'd crippled him in Memphis, he'd seen Wage
affect the semblance of  it in Night City,  and it had allowed him to accept
Armitage's flatness and lack of feeling. He'd always imagined it
a