COUNT ZERO

“Even when he’s pissed?”

“Half pissed. Well, he’s not going to operate, just derm her and tape that ankle.” She crushed dry tortilla chips into a black pan, over sizzling butter, and poured the eggs on top. “What happened to your eyes, Turner? You and her...” She stirred the mixture with the chrome spatula, slopping in salsa from a plastic tub.

“G-force. Had to take off quick.”

“That how she hurt her ankle?”

“Maybe. Don’t know.”

“People after you now? After her?” Busy taking plates from the cabinet above the sink, the cheap brown laminate of the cabinet doors triggering a sudden rush of nostalgia in Turner, seeing her ta

“Probably,” he said. “I don’t know what’s involved, not yet.”

“Eat some of this.” Transferring the mixture to a white plate, rummaging for a fork. “Rudy’s scared of the kind of people you might get after you.”

Taking the plate, the fork. Steam rising from the eggs. “So am I.”

“Got some clothes,” Sally said, over the sound of the shower, “friend of Rudy’s left ‘em here, ought to fit you. The shower was gravity-operated, rainwater from a roof tank, a fat white filtration unit strapped into the pipe above the spray head. Turner stuck his head out between cloudy sheets of plastic and blinked at her. “Thanks.”

“Girl’s unconscious,” she said. “Rudy thinks it’s shock, exhaustion. He says her crits are high, so he might as well run his scan now.” She left the room then, taking Turner’s fatigues and Oakey’s shirt with her.

* * *

“What is she?” Rudy extending a crumpled scroll of silvery printout.

“I don’t know how to read that,” Turner said, looking around the white room, looking for Angie. “Where is she?”

“Sleeping. Sally’s watching her.” Rudy turned and walked back, the length of the room, and Turner remembered it had been the living room once. Rudy began to shut his consoles down, the tiny pilot lights blinking out one by one. “I don’t know, man. I just don’t know. What is it, some kind of cancer?”

Turner followed him down the room, past a worktable where a micromanipulator waited beneath its dustcover Past the dusty rectangular eyes of a bank of aged monitors, one of them with a shattered screen.

“It’s all through her head,” Rudy said “Like long chains of it. It doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen, ever.”

Nothing

“How much do you know about biochips, Rudy?”

Rudy grunted. He seemed very sober now, but tense, agitated. He kept ru

“What’s it for?”

“For? Christ Who the fuck knows? Who did it to her? Somebody you work for?”

“Her father, I think.”

“Jesus.” Rudy wiped his hand across his mouth. “It shadows like tumor, on the scans, but her crits are high enough, normal What’s she like, ordinarily?”

“Don’t know. A kid.” He shrugged.

“Fucking hell,” Rudy said. “I’m amazed she can walk.”

He opened a little lab freezer and came up with a frosted bottle of Moskovskaya “Want it out of the bottle?” he asked.

“Maybe later.”

Rudy sighed, looked at the bottle, then returned it to the fridge. “So what do you want? Anything as weird as what’s in that little girl’s head, somebody’s going to be after it soon. If they aren’t already.”

“They are,” Turner said. “I don’t know if they know she’s here.”

“Yet.” Rudy wiped his palms on his grubby white shorts.

“But they probably will, right?”

Turner nodded.

“Where you going to go, then?”

“The Sprawl.”

“Why?”

“Because I’ve got money there I’ve got credit lines in four different names, no way to link ‘em back to me Because I’ve got a lot of other co

“Okay,” Rudy said. “When?”

“You that worried about it, you want us right out?”

“No I mean, I don’t know It’s all pretty interesting, what’s in your girl friend’s head. I’ve got a friend in Atlanta could rent me a function analyzer, brain map, one to one; put that on her, I might start to figure out what that thing is. Might be worth something.”

“Sure If you knew where to sell it.”

“Aren’t you curious? I mean, what the hell is she? You pull her out of some military lab?” Rudy opened the white freezer door again, took out the bottle of vodka, opened it, and took a swallow.

Turner took the bottle and tilted it, letting the icy fluid splash against his teeth. He swallowed, shuddered. “It’s corporate. Big. I was supposed to get her father out, but he sent her instead Then somebody took the whole site out, looked like a baby nuke. We just made it. This far.” He handed Rudy the bottle. “Stay straight for me, Rudy You get scared, you drink too much.”

Rudy was staring at him, ignoring the bottle. “Arizona,” he said. “It was on the news. Mexico’s still kicking about it. But it wasn’t a nuke. They’ve had crews out there, all over it.

No nuke.”

“What was it?”

“They think it was a railgun They think somebody put up a hypervelocity gun in a cargo blimp and blew hell out of some derelict mall out there in the boonies. They know there was a blimp near there, and so far nobody’s found it You can rig a railgun to blow itself to plasma when it discharges. The projectile could have been damn near anything, at those velocities. About a hundred and fifty kilos of ice would do the trick.” He took the bottle, capped it, and put it down on the counter beside him. “All that land around there, it belongs to Maas, Maas Biolabs, doesn’t it? They’ve been on the news, Maas. Cooperating fully with various authorities. You bet. So that tells us where you got your little honey from, I guess.”

“Sure. But it doesn’t tell me who used the railgun Or why.”

Rudy shrugged.

“You better come see this,” Sally said from the door.

Much later, Turner sat with Sally on the front porch. The girl had lapsed, finally, into something Rudy’s EEG called sleep. Rudy was back in one of his workshops, probably with his bottle of vodka. There were fireflies around the honeysuckle vines beside the chainlink gate. Turner found that if he half closed his eyes, from his seat on the wooden porch swing, he could almost see an apple’ tree that was no longer there, a tree that had once supported a length of silvery-gray hemp rope and an ancient automobile tire. There were fire-flies then as well, and Rudy’s heels thumping a bare hard skid of earth as he pumped himself out on the swing’s arc, legs kicking, and Turner lay on his back in the grass, watching the stars. .

“Tongues,” Sally said, Rudy’s woman, from the creaking rattan chair, her cigarette a red eye in the dark “Talking in the tongues.”

“What’s that?”

“What your kid was doing, upstairs. You know any French?”

“No, not much. Not without a lexicon.”

“Some of it sounded French to me.” The red amber was a short slash for an instant, when she tapped ash “When I was little, my old man took me one time to this stadium, and I saw the testifying and the speaking in tongues. It scared me I think it scared me more, today, when she started “Rudy taped the end of it, didn’t he?”

“Yeah. You know, Rudy hasn’t been doing too good.

That’s mainly why I moved back in here. I told him I wasn’t staying unless he straightened himself out, but then it got real bad, so about two weeks ago I moved back in. I was about ready to go when you showed up” The coal of the cigarette arced out over the railing and fell on the gravel that covered the yard.

“Drinking?”

“That and the stuff he cooks for himself in the lab You know, that man knows a little bit of damn near everything. He’s still got a lot of friends, around the county; I’ve heard ‘em tell stories about when you and him were kids, before you left.”