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, se- cure 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 impe- dimentia 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 break- ing 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 Ar- mitage 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 sur- faced, 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 broad- cast sensory input through the corridors of Straylight, that he’d never really thought of anyone like Ashpool, anyone as pow- erful as he imagined Ashpool had been, as human. Power, in Case’s world, meant corporate power. The zai- batsus, 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 po- sition, 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 remem- bered 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 or- ganism. It was the root of street cool, too, the knowing posture that implied connection, invisible lines up to hidden levels of influence. But what was happening now, in the corridors of Villa Straylight? Whole stretches were being stripped back to steel and con- crete. “Wonder where our Peter is now, huh? Maybe see that boy soon,” she muttered. “And Armitage. Where’s he, Case?” “Dead,” he said, knowing she couldn’t hear him, “he’s dead.” He flipped.