Molly grasped one of the carved dragon's forelegs and the door swung open easily.
The room behind was small, cramped, little more than a closet. Gray steel tool cabinets were backed against a curving wall. A light fixture had come on automatically. She closed the door behind her and went to the ranged lockers.
THIRD LEFT, pulsed the optic chip, Wintermute overriding her time display. FIVE DOWN. But she opened the top drawer first. It was no more than a shallow tray. Empty. The second was empty as well. The third, which was deeper, contained dull beads of solder and a small brown thing that looked like a human fingerbone. The fourth drawer held a damp-swollen copy of an obsolete technical manual in French and Japanese. In the fifth, behind the armored gauntlet of a heavy vacuum suit, she found the key. It was like a dull brass coin with a short hollow tube braised against one edge. She turned it slowly in her hand and Case saw that the interior of the tube was lined with studs and flanges. The letters CHUBB were molded across one face of the coin. The other was blank.
`He told me,' she whispered. `Wintermute. How he played a waiting game for years. Didn't have any real power, then, but he could use the Villa's security and custodial systems to keep track of where everything was, how things moved, where they went. He saw somebody lose this key twenty years ago, and he managed to get somebody else to leave it here. Then he killed him, the boy who'd brought it here. Kid was eight.' She closed her white fingers over the key. `So nobody would find it.' She took a length of black nylon cord from the suit's kangaroo pocket and threaded it through the round hole above CHUBB. Knotting it, she hung it around her neck. `They were always fucking him over with how old-fashioned they were, he said, all their nineteenth-century stuff. He looked just like the Finn, on the screen in that meat puppet hole. Almost thought he wasthe Finn, if I wasn't careful.' Her readout flared the time, alphanumerics superimposed over the gray steel chests. `He said if they'd turned into what they'd wanted to, he could've gotten out a long time ago. But they didn't. Screwed up. Freaks like 3Jane. That's what he called her, but he talked like he liked her.'
She turned, opened the door, and stepped out, her hand brushing the checkered grip of the holstered fletcher.
Case flipped.
Kuang Grade Mark Eleven was growing.
`Dixie, you think this thing'll work?'
`Does a bear shit in the woods?' The Flatline punched them up through shifting rainbow strata.
Something dark was forming at the core of the Chinese program. The density of information overwhelmed the fabric of the matrix, triggering hypnagogic images. Faint kaleidoscopic angles centered in to a silver-black focal point. Case watched childhood symbols of evil and bad luck tumble out along translucent planes: swastikas, skulls and crossbones, dice flashing snake eyes. If he looked directly at that null point, no outline would form. It took a dozen quick, peripheral takes before he had it, a shark thing, gleaming like obsidian, the black mirrors of its flanks reflecting faint distant lights that bore no relationship to the matrix around it.
`That's the sting,' the construct said. `When Kuang's good and bellytight with the Tessier-Ashpool core, we're ridin'~ that through.'
`You were right, Dix. There's some kind of manual override on the hardwiring that keeps Wintermute under control. However much he isunder control,' he added.
`He,' the construct said. `He. Watch that. It. I keep telling you.'
`It's a code. A word, he said. Somebody has to speak it into a fancy terminal in a certain room, while we take care of whatever's waiting for us behind that ice.'
`Well, you got time to kill, kid,' the flatline said. `Ol'~ Kuang's slow but steady.'
Case jacked out.
Into Maelcum's stare.
`You dead awhile there, mon.'
`It happens,' he said. `I'm getting used to it.'
`You dealin'~ wi'~ th'~ darkness, mon.'
`Only game in town, it looks like.'
`Jah love, Case,' Maelcum said, and turned back to his radio module. Case stared at the matted dreadlocks, the ropes of muscle around the man's dark arms.
He jacked back in.
And flipped.
Molly was trotting along a length of corridor that might have been the one she'd traveled before. The glass-fronted cases were gone now, and Case decided they were moving toward the tip of the spindle; gravity was growing weaker. Soon she was bounding smoothly over rolling hillocks of carpets. Faint twinges in her leg...
The corridor narrowed suddenly, curved split.
She turned right and started up a freakishly steep flight of stairs, her leg beginning to ache. Overhead, strapped and bundled cables hugged the stairwell's ceiling like colorcoded ganglia. The walls were splotched with damp.
She arrived at a triangular landing and stood rubbing her leg. More corridors, narrow, their walls hung with rugs. They branched away in three directions.
LEFT.
She shrugged. `Lemme look around, okay?'
LEFT.
`Relax. There's time.' She started down the corridor that led off to her right.
STOP.
GO BACK.
DANGER.
She hesitated. From the half-open oak door at the far end of the passage came a voice, loud and slurred, like the voice of a drunk. Case thought the language might be French, but it was too indistinct. Molly took a step, another, her hand sliding into the suit to touch the butt of her fletcher. When she stepped into the neural disruptor's field, her ears rang, a tiny rising tone that made Case think of the sound of her fletcher. She pitched forward, her striated muscles slack, and struck the door with her forehead. She twisted and lay on her back, her eyes unfocused, breath gone.
`What's this,' said the slurred voice, `fancy dress?' A trembling hand entered the front of her suit and found the fletcher, tugging it out. `Come visit, child. Now.'
She got up slowly, her eyes fixed on the muzzle of a black automatic pistol. The man's hand was steady enough, now; the gun's barrel seemed to be attached to her throat with a taut, invisible string.
He was old, very tall, and his features reminded Case of the girl he had glimpsed in the Vingtime Sicle. He wore a heavy robe of maroon silk, quilted around the long cuffs and shawl collar. One foot was bare, the other in a black velvet slipper with an embroidered gold foxhead over the instep. He motioned her into the room. `Slow, darling.' The room was very large, cluttered with an assortment of things that made no sense to Case. He saw a gray steel rack of old-fashioned Sony monitors, a wide brass bed heaped with sheepskins, with pillows that seemed to have been made from the kind of rug used to pave the corridors. Molly's eyes darted from a huge Telefunken entertainment console to shelves of antique disk recordings, their crumbling spines cased in clear plastic, to a wide worktable littered with slabs of silicon. Case registered the cyberspace deck and the trodes, but her glance slid over it without pausing.
`It would be customary,' the old man said, `for me to kill you now.' Case felt her tense, ready for a move. `But tonight I indulge myself. What is your name?'
`Molly.'
`Molly. Mine is Ashpool.' He sank back into the creased softness of a huge leather armchair with square chrome legs, but the gun never wavered. He put her fletcher on a brass table beside the chair, knocking over a plastic vial of red pills. The table was thick with vials, bottles of liquor, soft plastic envelopes spilling white powders. Case noticed an old-fashioned glass hypodermic and a plain steel spoon.
`How do you cry, Molly? I see your eyes are walled away. I'm curious.' His eyes were red-rimmed, his forehead gleaming with sweat. He was very pale. Sick, Case decided. Or drugs.