Neuromancer - William Gibson Page 0,31
got a choice, boy?”
SIX
“YOU WANT YOU a paradise,” the Flatline advised, when Case had explained his situation. “Check Copenhagen, fringes of the university section.” The voice recited coordinates as he punched.
They found their paradise, a “pirate’s paradise,” on the jumbled border of a low-security academic grid. At first glance it resembled the kind of graffiti student operators sometimes left at the junctions of grid lines, faint glyphs of colored light that shimmered against the confused outlines of a dozen arts faculties.
“There,” said the Flatline, “the blue one. Make it out? That’s an entry code for Bell Europa. Fresh, too. Bell’ll get in here soon and read the whole damn board, change any codes they find posted. Kids’ll steal the new ones tomorrow.”
Case tapped his way into Bell Europa and switched to a standard phone code. With the Flatline’s help, he connected with the London data base that Molly claimed was Armitage’s.
“Here,” said the voice, “I’ll do it for you.” The Flatline began to chant a series of digits, Case keying them on his deck, trying to catch the pauses the construct used to indicate timing. It took three tries.
“Big deal,” said the Flatline. “No ice at all.”
“Scan this shit,” Case told the Hosaka. “Sift for owner’s personal history.”
The neuroelectronic scrawls of the paradise vanished, replaced by a simple lozenge of white light. “Contents are primarily video recordings of postwar military trials,” said the distant voice of the Hosaka. “Central figure is Colonel Willis Corto.”
“Show it already,” Case said.
A man’s face filled the screen. The eyes were Armitage’s.
TWO HOURS LATER, Case fell beside Molly on the slab and let the temperfoam mold itself against him.
“You find anything?” she asked, her voice fuzzy with sleep and drugs.
“Tell you later,” he said, “I’m wrecked.” He was hungover and confused. He lay there, eyes closed, and tried to sort the various parts of a story about a man called Corto. The Hosaka had sorted a thin store of data and assembled a precis, but it was full of gaps. Some of the material had been print records, reeling smoothly down the screen, too quickly, and Case had had to ask the computer to read them for him. Other segments were audio recordings of the Screaming Fist hearing.
Willis Corto, Colonel, had plummeted through a blind spot in the Russian defenses over Kirensk. The shuttles had created the hole with pulse bombs, and Corto’s team had dropped in in Nightwing microlights, their wings snapping taut in moonlight, reflected in jags of silver along the rivers Angara and Podhamennaya, the last light Corto would see for fifteen months. Case tried to imagine the microlights blossoming out of their launch capsules, high above a frozen steppe.
“They sure as hell did shaft you, boss,” Case said, and Molly stirred beside him.
The microlights had been unarmed, stripped to compensate for the weight of a console operator, a prototype deck, and a virus program called Mole IX, the first true virus in the history of cybernetics. Corto and his team had been training for the run for three years. They were through the ice, ready to inject Mole IX, when the emps went off. The Russian pulse guns threw the jockeys into electronic darkness; the Nightwings suffered systems crash, flight circuitry wiped clean.
Then the lasers opened up, aiming on infrared, taking out the fragile, radar-transparent assault planes, and Corto and his dead console man fell out of a Siberian sky. Fell and kept falling. . . .
There were gaps in the story, here, where Case scanned documents concerning the flight of a commandeered Russian gunship that managed to reach Finland. To be gutted, as it landed in a spruce grove, by an antique twenty-millimeter cannon manned by a cadre of reservists on dawn alert. Screaming Fist had ended for Corto on the outskirts of Helsinki, with Finnish paramedics sawing him out of the twisted belly of the helicopter. The war ended nine days later, and Corto was shipped to a military facility in Utah, blind, legless, and missing most of his jaw. It took eleven months for the Congressional aide to find him there. He listened to the sound of tubes draining. In Washington and McLean, the show trials were already underway. The Pentagon and the CIA were being Balkanized, partially dismantled, and a Congressional investigation had focused on Screaming Fist. Ripe for watergating, the aide told Corto.
He’d need eyes, legs, and extensive cosmetic work, the aide said, but that could be arranged. New plumbing, the man added, squeezing Corto’s shoulder