Neuromancer - William Gibson Page 0,25

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 Julie 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