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 shoulder. 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 tenmeter 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
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 : 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 .
`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'~
`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
`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.
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.