COUNT ZERO

He wiped the plane’s banks, dumping Conroy’s programming, what there was of it: the approach from California, identification data for the site, a flight plan that would have taken them to a strip within three hundred kilometers of Bogotá’s urban core...

Someone would find the jet eventually. He thought about the Maas orbital recon system and wondered if the stealth-and-evasion programs he’d ordered the plane to run had done any real good. He could offer the jet to Rudy for salvage, but he doubted Rudy would want to be involved. For that matter, simply showing up at the farm, with Mitchell’s daughter in tow, dragged Rudy in right up to his neck But there was nowhere else to go, not for the things he needed now.

It was a four-hour walk, along half-remembered trails and down a weed-grown, winding stretch of two-lane blacktop.

The trees were different, it seemed to him, and then he remembered how much they would have grown over the years since he’d been back. At regular intervals they passed the stumps of wooden poles that had once supported telephone wires, overgrown now with bramble and honeysuckle, the wires pulled down for fuel. Bees grazed in flowering grass at the roadside...

“Is there food where we’re going?” the girl asked, the soles of her white sneakers scuffing the weathered blacktop.

“Sure,” Turner said, “all you want.”

“What I want right now’s water.” She swiped a lank strand of brown hair back from a ta

“What’s wrong with your leg?”

“Ankle. Something, I think when I decked the ‘light “ She grimaced, kept walking.

“We’ll rest.”

“No. I want to get there, get anywhere.”

“Rest, he said, taking her hand, leading her to the edge of the road. She made a face, but sat down beside him, her right leg stretched carefully in front of her.

“That’s a big gun,” she said. It was hot now, too hot for the parka. He’d put the shoulder rig on bareback, with the sleeveless work shirt over it, tails out and flapping. “Why’s the barrel look like that, like a cobra’s head, underneath?”

“That’s a sighting device, for night-fights.” He leaned forward to examine her ankle. It was swelling quickly now. “I don’t know how much longer you’ll want to walk on that,” he said.

“You get into a lot of fights, at night? With guns?”

“No.”

“I don’t think I understand what it is that you do

He looked up at her. I don’t always understand that myself, not lately I was expecting your father. He wanted to change companies, work for somebody else. The people he wanted to work for hired me and some other people to make sure he got out of his old contract.”

“But there wasn’t any way out of that contract,” she said. “Not legally.”

“That’s right “ Undoing the knot, unlacing the sneaker. “Not legally.”

“Oh So that’s what you do for a living?”

“Yes.” Sneaker off now, she wore no sock, the ankle swelling badly. “This is a sprain.”

‘What about the other people, then? You had more peoples back there, in that ruin? Somebody was shooting, and those flares...”

“Hard to say who was shooting,” he said, “but the flares weren’t ours. Maybe Maas security team, following you out. Did you think you got out clean?”

“I did what Chris told me,” she said. “Chris, that’s my father.”

“I know. I think I’m going to have to carry you the rest of the way.”

“But what about your friends?”

“What friends?”

“Back there, in Arizona.”

“Right. Well,” and he wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, “can’t say. Don’t really know.”

Seeing the white-out sky, flare of energy, brighter than the sun. But no pulse of electromagnetics, the plane had said The first of Rudy’s augmented dogs picked them up fifteen minutes after they started out again. Angie riding Turner’s back, arms around his shoulders, ski

A lean gray hound regarded them from a high clay bank at a turning in the road, its narrow head sheathed and blindered in a black hood studded with sensors. It panted, tongue lolling, and slowly swung its head from side to side.

“It’s okay,” Turner said. “Watchdog. Belongs to my friend.”

The house had grown, sprouting wings and workshops, but Rudy had never painted the peeling clapboard of the original structure. Rudy had thrown up a taut square of chainlink, since Turner’s time, fencing away his collection of vehicles, but the gate was open when they arrived, the hinges lost in morning glory and rust. The real defenses, Turner knew, were elsewhere. Four of the augmented hounds trotted after him as he trudged up the gravel drive, Angie’s head limp on his shoulder, her arms still locked around him.

Rudy was waiting on the front porch, in old white shorts and a navy T-shirt, its single pocket displaying at least nine pens of one kind or another. He looked at them and raised a green can of Dutch beer in greeting. Behind him, a blonde in a faded khaki shirt stepped out of the kitchen, a chrome spatula in her hand; her hair was clipped short, swept up and back in a cut that made Turner think of the Korean medic in Hosaka’s pod, of the pod burning, of Webber, of the white sky... He swayed there, in Rudy’s gravel driveway, legs wide to support the girl, his bare chest streaked with sweat, with dust from the mall in Arizona, and looked at Rudy and the blonde.

“We got some breakfast for you,” Rudy said. “When you came up on the dog screens, we figured you’d be hungry His tone was carefully noncommittal.

The girl groaned.

“That’s good,” Turner said. “She’s got a bum ankle, Rudy. We better look at that. Some other things I have to talk to you about, too.”

“Little young for you. I’d say,” Rudy said, and took another swig of his beer.

“Fuck off, Rudy,” the woman beside him said, “can’t you see she’s hurt? Bring her in this way,” she said to Turner, and was gone, back through the kitchen door.

“You look different,” Rudy said, peering at him, and Turner saw that he was drunk. “The same, but different.”

“It’s been a while,” Turner said, starting for the wooden steps.

“You get a face job or something?”

“Reconstruction. They had to build it back from records He climbed the steps, his lower back stabbed through with pain at every move.

“It’s not bad,” Rudy said. “I almost didn’t notice.” He belched. He was shorter than Turner, and going to fat, but they had the same brown hair, very similar features.

Turner paused, on the stair, when their eyes were level. “You still do a little bit of everything. Rudy? I need this kid sca

“Well,” his brother said, “we’ll see what we can do. We heard something last night. Maybe a sonic boom. Anything to do with you?”

“Yeah. There’s a jet up by the squirrel wood, but it’s pretty well out of sight.”

Rudy sighed “Jesus... Well, bring her in...”

Rudy’s years in the house had stripped it of most of the things that Turner might have remembered, and something in him was obscurely grateful for that. He watched the blonde crack eggs into a steel bowl, dark yellow free-range yolks;

Rudy kept his own chickens. “I’m Sally,” she said, whisking the eggs around with a fork.

“Turner.”

‘That’s all he ever calls you either,” she said. “He never has talked about you much.”

“We haven’t kept all that much in touch. Maybe I should go up now and help him.”

“You sit. Your little girl’s okay with Rudy. He’s got a good touch.”