Thirty minutes later and Jammer was staring glumly at Beauvoir. “I gotta hand it to you. That’s the most half-assed plan I’ve heard in a long time.” “Yeah, Beauvoir,” Bobby cut in, “why can’t we just crawl back up that vent, sneak across the roof, and get over to the next building? Use the line you came over on.” “There’s Kasuals on the roof like flies on shit,’ Beauvoir said. “Some of them might even have brain enough to have found the cap I opened to get down here. I left a couple of baby frag mines on my way in.” He grinned mirthlessly. “Aside from that, the building next door is taller. I had to go up on that roof and shoot the monomol down to this one. You can’t hand-over-hand up monomolecular filament; your fin- gers fall off.” “Then how the hell did you expect to get out?” Bobby said. “Drop it, Bobby,” Jackie said quietly. “Beauvoir’s done what he had to do. Now he’s in here with us, and we’re armed” “Bobby,” Beauvoir said, “why don’t you run the plan back to us, make sure we understand it. Bobby had the uncomfortable feeling that Beauvoir wanted to make sure he understood it, but he leaned back against the bar and began. “We get ourselves all armed up and we wait, okay? Jammer and I, we go out with his deck and scout around the matrix, maybe we get some idea what’s happening . “I think I can handle that by myself,” Jammer said. “Shit!” Bobby was off the bar “Beauvoir said! I wanna go, I wanna jack! How am lever supposed to learn anything?” “Never mind, Bobby,” Jackie said, “you go on.” “Okay,” Bobby said, sulkily, “so, sooner or later, the guys who hired the Gothicks and Kasuals to keep us here, they’re gonna come for us. When they do, we take `em. We get at least one of `em alive. Same time, we’re on our way out, and the Goths `n’ all, they won’t expect all the fire- power, so we get to the street and head for the Projects . “I think that about covers it,” Jammer said, strolling across the carpet to the locked and curtained door. “I think that about sums it up.” He pressed his thumb against a coded latch plate and pulled the door half open. “Hey, you!” he bellowed. “Not you! You with the hat! Get your ass over here. I want to talk” The pencil-thick red beam pierced door and curtain, two of Jammer’s fingers, and winked over the bar. A bottle ex- ploded, its contents billowing out as steam and vaporized esters. Jammer let the door swing shut again, stared at his ruined hand, then sat down hard on the carpet. The club slowly filled with the Christmas-tree smell of boiled gin. Beauvoir took a silver pressure bottle from the bar counter and hosed the smouldering curtain with seltzer, until the CO2 cartridge was exhausted and the stream faltered. “You’re in luck, Bobby,” Beauvoir said, tossing the bottle over his shoulder, ” `cause brother Jammer, he ain’t gonna be punch- ing any deck . Jackie was making clucking sounds over Jammer’s hand, kneeling down. Bobby caught a glimpse of cauterized flesh, then quickly looked away.
“You KNOW,” REZ said, hanging upside down in front of Marly, “it’s strictly no biz of mine, but is somebody maybe expecting you when we get there? I mean, I’m taking you there, for sure, and if you can’t get in, I’ll take you back to JAL Term But if nobody wants to let you in, I don’t know how long I want to hang around. That thing’s scrap, and we get some funny people hanging out in the hulks, out here.” Rezor Ther~se, Marly gathered, from the laminated pilot’s license clipped to the Sweet Jane’s consolehad removed her canvas work vest for the trip. Marly, numb with the rainbow of derms Rez had pasted along her wrist to counteract the convulsive nausea of space adaptation syndrome, stared at the rose tattoo. It had been executed in a Japanese style hundreds of years old, and Marly woozily decided that she liked it. That, in fact, she liked Rez, who was at once hard and girlish and concerned for her strange passenger. Rez had admired her leather jacket and purse, before bundling them into a kind of narrow nylon net hammock already stuffed with cassettes, print books, and unwashed clothing. “I don’t know,” Marly managed, “I’ll just have to try to getin. .” “You know what that thing is, sister?” Rez was adjusting the g-web around Marly’s shoulders and armpits. “What thing?” Marly blinked. “Where we’re going. It’s part of the old Tessier-Ashpool cores. Used to be the mainframes for their corporate mem- ory. “I’ve heard of them,” Marly said, closing her eyes. “An- drea told me “Sure, everybody’s heard of `emthey used to own alla Freeside. Built it, even. Then they went tits up and sold out Had their family place cut off the spindle and towed to another orbit, but they had the cores wiped before they did that, and torched `em off and sold `em to a scrapper. The scrapper’s never done anything with `em I never heard any- body was squatting there, but out here you live where you can I guess that’s true for anybody. Like they say that Lady Jane, old Ashpool’s daughter. she’s still living in their old place, stone crazy She gave the g-web a last profes- sional tug. “Okay. You just relax. I’m gonna burn Jane hard for twenty minutes, but it’ll get us there fast, which I figure is what you’re paying for..” And Marly slid back into a landscape built all of boxes, vast wooden Cornell constructions where the solid residues of love and memory were displayed behind rain-streaked sheets of dusty glass, and the figure of the mysterious boxmaker fled before her down avenues paved with mosaics of human teeth, Marly’s Paris boots clicking blindly over symbols outlined in dull gold crowns. The boxmaker was male and wore Alain’s green jacket, and feared her above all things. “I’m sorry,” she cried, running after him, “I’m sorry . .