CASE HIT THE switch as his program surged through the gates of the subsystem that controlled security for the Sense/Net research library. He found himself stepping into an elevator.
“Excuse me, but are you an employee?” The guard raised his eyebrows. Molly popped her gum. “No,” she said, driving the first two knuckles of her right hand into the man’s solar plexus. As he doubled over, clawing for the beeper on his belt, she slammed his head sideways, against the wall of the elevator.
Chewing a little more rapidly now, she touched CLOSE DOOR and STOP on the illuminated panel. She took a blackbox from her coat pocket and inserted a lead in the keyhole of the lock that secured the panel’s circuitry.
THE PANTHER MODERNS allowed four minutes for their first move to take effect, then injected a second carefully prepared dose of misinformation. This time, they shot it directly into the Sense/Net building’s internal video system.
At 12:04:03, every screen in the building strobed for eighteen seconds in a frequency that produced seizures in a susceptible segment of Sense/Net employees. Then something only vaguely like a human face filled the screens, its features stretched across asymmetrical expanses of bone like some obscene Mercator projection. Blue lips parted wetly as the twisted, elongated jaw moved. Something, perhaps a hand, a thing like a reddish clump of gnarled roots, fumbled toward the camera, blurred, and vanished. Subliminally rapid images of contamination: graphics of the building’s water supply system, gloved hands manipulating laboratory glassware, something tumbling down into darkness, a pale splash. . . . The audio track, its pitch adjusted to run at just less than twice the standard playback speed, was part of a month-old newscast detailing potential military uses of a substance known as HsG, a biochemical governing the human skeletal growth factor. Overdoses of HsG threw certain bone cells into overdrive, accelerating growth by factors as high as one thousand percent.
At 12:05:00, the mirror-sheathed nexus of the Sense/Net consortium held just over three thousand employees. At five minutes after midnight, as the Moderns’ message ended in a flare of white screen, the Sense/Net Pyramid screamed.
Half a dozen NYPD Tactical hovercraft, responding to the possibility of Blue Nine in the building’s ventilation system, were converging on the Sense/Net Pyramid. They were running full riot lights. A BAMA Rapid Deployment helicopter was lifting off from its pad on Riker’s.
CASE TRIGGERED HIS second program. A carefully engineered virus attacked the code fabric screening primary custodial commands for the sub-basement that housed the Sense/Net research materials. “Boston,” Molly’s voice came across the link, “I’m downstairs.” Case switched and saw the blank wall of the elevator. She was unzipping the white pants. A bulky packet, exactly the shade of her pale ankle, was secured there with micropore. She knelt and peeled the tape away. Streaks of burgundy flickered across the mimetic polycarbon as she unfolded the Modern suit. She removed the pink raincoat, threw it down beside the white pants, and began to pull the suit on over the white mesh top.
12:06:26.
Case’s virus had bored a window through the library’s command ice. He punched himself through and found an infinite blue space ranged with color-coded spheres strung on a tight grid of pale blue neon. In the nonspace of the matrix, the interior of a given data construct possessed unlimited subjective dimension; a child’s toy calculator, accessed through Case’s Sendai, would have presented limitless gulfs of nothingness hung with a few basic commands. Case began to key the sequence the Finn had purchased from a mid-echelon sarariman with severe drug problems. He began to glide through the spheres as if he were on invisible tracks.
Here. This one.
Punching his way into the sphere, chill blue neon vault above him starless and smooth as frosted glass, he triggered a subprogram that effected certain alterations in the core custodial commands.
Out now. Reversing smoothly, the virus reknitting the fabric of the window.
Done.
IN THE SENSE/NET lobby, two Panther Moderns sat alertly behind a low rectangular planter, taping the riot with a video camera. They both wore chameleon suits. “Tacticals are spraying foam barricades now,” one noted, speaking for the benefit of his throat mike. “Rapids are still trying to land their copter.”
CASE HIT THE simstim switch. And flipped into the agony of broken bone. Molly was braced against the blank gray wall of a long corridor, her breath coming ragged and uneven. Case was back in the matrix instantly, a white-hot line of pain fading in his left thigh.
“What’s happening, Brood?” he asked the link man.
“I dunno, Cutter. Mother’s not talking. Wait.”
Case’s program was cycling. A single hair-fine thread of crimson neon extended from the center of the restored window to the shifting outline of his icebreaker. He didn’t have time to wait. Taking a deep breath, he flipped again.
Molly took a single step, trying to support her weight on the corridor wall. In the loft, Case groaned. The second step took her over an outstretched arm. Uniform sleeve bright with fresh blood. Glimpse of a shattered fiberglass shockstave. Her vision seemed to have narrowed to a tunnel. With the third step, Case screamed and found himself back in the matrix.
“Brood? Boston, baby . . .” Her voice tight with pain. She coughed. “Little problem with the natives. Think one of them broke my leg.”
“What you need now, Cat Mother?” The link man’s voice was indistinct, nearly lost behind static.
Case forced himself to flip back. She was leaning against the wall, taking all of her weight on her right leg. She fumbled through the contents of the suit’s kangaroo pocket and withdrew a sheet of plastic studded with a rainbow of dermadisks. She selected three and thumbed them hard against her left wrist, over the veins. Six thousand micrograms of endorphin analog came down on the pain like a hammer, shattering it. Her back arched convulsively. Pink waves of warmth lapped up her thighs. She sighed and slowly relaxed.
“Okay, Brood. Okay now. But I’ll need a medical team when I come out. Tell my people. Cutter, I’m two minutes from target. Can you hold?”
“Tell her I’m in and holding,” Case said.
Molly began to limp down the corridor. When she glanced back, once, Case saw the crumpled bodies of three Sense/Net security guards. One of them seemed to have no eyes.
“Tacticals and Rapids have sealed the ground floor, Cat Mother. Foam barricades. Lobby’s getting juicy.”
“Pretty juicy down here,” she said, swinging herself through a pair of gray steel doors. “Almost there, Cutter.”
Case flipped into the matrix and pulled the trodes from his forehead. He was drenched with sweat. He wiped his forehead with a towel, took a quick sip of water from the bicycle bottle beside the Hosaka, and checked the map of the library displayed on the screen. A pulsing red cursor crept through the outline of a doorway. Only millimeters from the green dot that indicated the location of the Dixie Flatline’s construct. He wondered what it was doing to her leg, to walk on it that way. With enough endorphin analog, she could walk on a pair of bloody stumps. He tightened the nylon harness that held him in the chair and replaced the trodes.
Routine now: trodes, jack, and flip.
The Sense/Net research library was a dead storage area; the materials stored here had to be physically removed before they could be interfaced. Molly hobbled between rows of identical gray lockers.
“Tell her five more and ten to her left, Brood,” Case said.
“Five more and ten left, Cat Mother,” the link man said.
She took the left. A white-faced librarian cowered between two lockers, her cheeks wet, eyes blank. Molly ignored her. Case wondered what the Moderns had done to provoke that level of terror. He knew it had something to do with a hoaxed threat, but he’d been too involved with his ice to follow Molly’s explanation.
“That’s it,” Case said, but she’d already stopped in front of the cabinet that held the construct. Its lines reminded Case of the Neo-Aztec bookcases in Juli
e Deane’s anteroom in Chiba.
“Do it, Cutter,” Molly said.
Case flipped to cyberspace and sent a command pulsing down the crimson thread that pierced the library ice. Five separate alarm systems were convinced that they were still operative. The three elaborate locks deactivated, but considered themselves to have remained locked. The library’s central bank suffered a minute shift in its permanent memory: the construct had been removed, per executive order, a month before. Checking for the authorization to remove the construct, a librarian would find the records erased.
The door swung open on silent hinges.
“0467839,” Case said, and Molly drew a black storage unit from the rack. It resembled the magazine of a large assault rifle, its surfaces covered with warning decals and security ratings.
Molly closed the locker door; Case flipped.
He withdrew the line through the library ice. It whipped back into his program, automatically triggering a full system reversal. The Sense/Net gates snapped past him as he backed out, subprograms whirling back into the core of the icebreaker as he passed the gates where they had been stationed.
“Out, Brood,” he said, and slumped in his chair. After the concentration of an actual run, he could remain jacked in and still retain awareness of his body. It might take Sense/Net days to discover the theft of the construct. The key would be the deflection of the Los Angeles transfer, which coincided too neatly with the Modern’s terror run. He doubted that the three security men Molly had encountered in the corridor would live to talk about it. He flipped.
The elevator, with Molly’s blackbox taped beside the control panel, remained where she’d left it. The guard still lay curled on the floor. Case noticed the derm on his neck for the first time. Something of Molly’s, to keep him under. She stepped over him and removed the blackbox before punching LOBBY.
As the elevator door hissed open, a woman hurtled backward out of the crowd, into the elevator, and struck the rear wall with her head. Molly ignored her, bending over to peel the derm from the guard’s neck. Then she kicked the white pants and the pink raincoat out the door, tossing the dark glasses after them, and drew the hood of her suit down across her forehead. The construct, in the suit’s kangaroo pocket, dug into her sternum when she moved. She stepped out.
Case had seen panic before, but never in an enclosed area.
The Sense/Net employees, spilling out of the elevators, had surged for the street doors, only to meet the foam barricades of the Tacticals and the sandbag-guns of the BAMA Rapids. The two agencies, convinced that they were containing a horde of potential killers, were cooperating with an uncharacteristic degree of efficiency. Beyond the shattered wreckage of the main street doors, bodies were piled three deep on the barricades. The hollow thumping of the riot guns provided a constant background for the sound the crowd made as it surged back and forth across the lobby’s marble floor. Case had never heard anything like that sound.
Neither, apparently, had Molly. “Jesus,” she said, and hesitated. It was a sort of keening, rising into a bubbling wail of raw and total fear. The lobby floor was covered with bodies, clothing, blood, and long trampled scrolls of yellow printout.
“C’mon, sister. We’re for out.” The eyes of the two Moderns stared out of madly swirling shades of polycarbon, their suits unable to keep up with the confusion of shape and color that raged behind them. “You hurt? C’mon. Tommy’ll walk you.” Tommy handed something to the one who spoke, a video camera wrapped in polycarbon.
“Chicago,” she said, “I’m on my way.” And then she was falling, not to the marble floor, slick with blood and vomit, but down some bloodwarm well, into silence and the dark.
THE PANTHER MODERN leader, who introduced himself as Lupus Yonderboy, wore a polycarbon suit with a recording feature that allowed him to replay backgrounds at will. Perched on the edge of Case’s worktable like some kind of state of the art gargoyle, he regarded Case and Armitage with hooded eyes. He smiled. His hair was pink. A rainbow forest of microsofts bristled behind his left ear; the ear was pointed, tufted with more pink hair. His pupils had been modified to catch the light like a cat’s. Case watched the suit crawl with color and texture.
“You let it get out of control,” Armitage said. He stood in the center of the loft like a statue, wrapped in the dark glossy folds of an expensive-looking trenchcoat.
“Chaos, Mr. Who,” Lupus Yonderboy said. “That is our mode and modus. That is our central kick. Your woman knows. We deal with her. Not with you, Mr. Who.” His suit had taken on a weird angular pattern of beige and pale avocado. “She needed her medical team. She’s with them. We’ll watch out for her. Everything’s fine.” He smiled again.
“Pay him,” Case said.
Armitage glared at him. “We don’t have the goods.”
“Your woman has it,” Yonderboy said.
“Pay him.”
Armitage crossed stiffly to the table and took three fat bundles of New Yen from the pockets of his trenchcoat. “You want to count it?” he asked Yonderboy.
“No,” the Panther Modern said. “You’ll pay. You’re a Mr. Who. You pay to stay one. Not a Mr. Name.”
“I hope that isn’t a threat,” Armitage said.
“That’s business,” said Yonderboy, stuffing the money into the single pocket on the front of his suit.
The phone rang. Case answered.
“Molly,” he told Armitage, handing him the phone.
THE SPRAWL’S GEODESICS were lightening into predawn gray as Case left the building. His limbs felt cold and disconnected. He couldn’t sleep. He was sick of the loft. Lupus had gone, then Armitage, and Molly was in surgery somewhere. Vibration beneath his feet as a train hissed past. Sirens dopplered in the distance.
He took corners at random, his collar up, hunched in a new leather jacket, flicking the first of a chain of Yeheyuans into the gutter and lighting another. He tried to imagine Armitage’s toxin sacs dissolving in his bloodstream, microscopic membranes wearing thinner as he walked. It didn’t seem real. Neither did the fear and agony he’d seen through Molly’s eyes in the lobby of Sense/Net. He found himself trying to remember the faces of the three people he’d killed in Chiba. The men were blanks; the woman reminded him of Linda Lee. A battered tricycle-truck with mirrored windows bounced past him, empty plastic cylinders rattling in its bed.
“Case.”
He darted sideways, instinctively getting a wall behind his back.
“Message for you, Case.” Lupus Yonderboy’s suit cycled through pure primaries. “Pardon. Not to startle you.”
Case straightened up, hands in jacket pockets. He was a head taller than the Modern. “You oughta be careful, Yonderboy.”
“This is the message. Wintermute.” He spelled it out.
“From you?” Case took a step forward.
“No,” Yonderboy said. “For you.”
“Who from?”
“Wintermute,” Yonderboy repeated, nodding, bobbing his crest of pink hair. His suit went matte black, a carbon shadow against old concrete. He executed a strange little dance, his thin black arms whirling, and then he was gone. No. There. Hood up to hide the pink, the suit exactly the right shade of gray, mottled and stained as the sidewalk he stood on. The eyes winked back the red of a stoplight. And then he was really gone.
Case closed his eyes, massaged them with numb fingers, leaning back against peeling brickwork.
Ninsei had been a lot simpler.
FIVE
THE MEDICAL TEAM Molly employed occupied two floors of an anonymous condo-rack near the old hub of Baltimore. The building was modular, like some giant version of Cheap Hotel, each coffin forty meters long. Case met Molly as she emerged from one that wore the elaborately worked logo of one GERALD CHIN, DENTIST. She was limping.
“He says if I kick anything, it’ll fall off.”
“I ran into one of your pals,” he said, “a Modern.”
“Yeah? Which one?”
“Lupus Yonderboy. Ha
d a message.” He passed her a paper napkin with W I N T E R M U T E printed in red feltpen in his neat, laborious capitals. “He said—” But her hand came up in the jive for silence.
“Get us some crab,” she said.
AFTER LUNCH IN Baltimore, Molly dissecting her crab with alarming ease, they tubed into New York. Case had learned not to ask questions; they only brought the sign for silence. Her leg seemed to be bothering her, and she seldom spoke.
A thin black child with wooden beads and antique resistors woven tightly into her hair opened the Finn’s door and led them along the tunnel of refuse. Case felt the stuff had grown somehow during their absence. Or else it seemed that it was changing subtly, cooking itself down under the pressure of time, silent invisible flakes settling to form a mulch, a crystalline essence of discarded technology, flowering secretly in the Sprawl’s waste places.
Beyond the army blanket, the Finn waited at the white table.
Molly began to sign rapidly, produced a scrap of paper, wrote something on it, and passed it to the Finn. He took it between thumb and forefinger, holding it away from his body as though it might explode. He made a sign Case didn’t know, one that conveyed a mixture of impatience and glum resignation. He stood up, brushing crumbs from the front of his battered tweed jacket. A glass jar of pickled herring stood on the table beside a torn plastic package of flatbread and a tin ashtray piled with the butts of Partagas.