第 23 页

“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.

H ANIWA 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 reentry. 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, cream-walled corridor, “be there.” He launched himself with another effortless kick. From somewhere ahead, Case made out the familiar chatter of a printer turning out hard copy. It grew louder as he followed Maelcum through another doorway, into a swirling mass of tangled printout. Case snatched a length of twisted paper and glanced at it.

000000000

000000000

000000000

“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 hand-rubbed 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. Micro-LED monitors to the left of the faceplate lit as the neck ring connections closed. “No seh Japanese,” Maelcum said, over his suit’s transceiver, “but countdown’s wrong.” He tapped a particular line on the screen. “Seals not intact, bridge module. Launchin’ wi’ lock open.”

“Armitage!” Case tried to pound on the door. The physics of zero-g sent him tumbling back through the printout. “Corto! Don’t do it! We gotta talk! We gotta—”

“Case? Read you, Case . . .” The voice barely resembled Armitage’s now. It held a weird calm. Case stopped kicking. His helmet struck the far wall. “I’m sorry, Case, but it has to be this way. One of us has to get out. One of us has to testify. If we all go down here, it ends here. I’ll tell them, Case, I’ll tell them all of it. About Girling and the others. And I’ll make it, Case. I know I’ll make it. To Helsinki.” There was a sudden silence; Case felt it fill his helmet like some rare gas. “But it’s so hard, Case, so goddam hard. I’m blind.”

“Corto, stop. Wait. You’re blind, man. You can’t fly! You’ll hit the fucking trees. And they’re trying to get you, Corto, I swear to God, they’ve left your hatch open. You’ll die, and you’ll never get to tell ’em, and I gotta get the enzyme, name of the enzyme, the enzyme, man. . . .” He was shouting, voice high with hysteria. Feedback shrilled out of the helmet’s phone pads.

“Remember the training, Case. That’s all we can do.”

And then the helmet filled with a confused babble, roaring static, harmonics howling down the years from Screaming Fist. Fragments of Russian, and then a stranger’s voice, Midwestern, very young. “We are down, repeat, Omaha Thunder is down, we . . .”

“Wintermute,” Case screamed, “don’t do this to me!” Tears broke from his lashes, rebounding off the faceplate in wobbling crystal droplets. Then Haniwa thudded, once, shivered as if some huge soft thing had struck her hull. Case imagined the lifeboat jolting free, blown clear by explosive bolts, a second’s clawing hurricane of escaping air tearing mad Colonel Corto from his couch, from Wintermute’s rendition of the final minute of Screaming Fist.

“ ’Im gone, mon.” Maelcum looked at the monitor. “Hatch open. Mute mus’ override ejection failsafe.”

Case tried to wipe the tears of rage from his eyes. His fingers clacked against Lexan.

“Yacht, she tight for air, but bossman takin’ grapple control wi’ bridge. Marcus Garvey still stuck.”

But Case was seeing Armitage’s endless fall around Freeside, through vacuum colder than the steppes. For some reason, he imagined him in his dark Burberry, the trenchcoat’s rich folds spread out around him like the wings of some huge bat.

SEVENTEEN

“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 knickknacks, 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 Modern 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 as a gradual and willing accommodation of the machine, the system, the parent organism. It was the root of street cool, too, the knowing posture that implied connection, invisible lines up to hidden levels of influence.