COUNT ZERO

Turner nodded.

“You need anything,” Oakey said, “lemme know.”

“Like what?”

‘Nother drink, or I got some Peruvian flake, the kind that’s real yellow.” Oakey gri

“Thanks,” Turner said, seeing Conroy turn from the black woman. Oakey saw, too, kneeling quickly and tearing off a fresh length of silver tape.

“Who was that?” Conroy asked, after leading Turner through a narrow door with decayed black gasket seals at its edges Conroy spun the wheel that dogged the door shut, someone had oiled it recently.

“Name’s Oakey,” Turner said, taking in the new room. Smaller. Two of the lanterns, folding tables, chairs, all new On the tables, instrumentation of some kind, under black plastic dustcovers.

“Friend of yours?”

“No,” Turner said. “He worked for me once.” He went to the nearest table and flipped back a dustcover. “What’s this?” The console had the blank, half-finished look of a factory prototype.

“Maas-Neotek cyberspace deck Turner raised his eyebrows. “Yours?”

“We got two. One’s on site. From Hosaka. Fastest thing in the matrix, evidently, and Hosaka can’t even de-engineer the chips to copy them. Whole other technology.”

“They got them from Mitchell?”

“They aren’t saying. The fact they’d let go of ‘em just to give our jockeys an edge is some indication of how badly they want the man.”

“Who’s on console, Conroy?”

“Jaylene Slide. I was talking to her just now.” He jerked his head in the direction of the door. “The site man’s out of L.A., kid called Ramirez.”

“They any good?” Turner replaced the dustcover. “Better be, for what they’ll cost. Jaylene’s gotten herself a hot rep the past two years, and Ramirez is her understudy.

“Shit” – Conroy shrugged – “you know these cowboys. Fucking crazy...”

“Where’d you get them? Where’d you get Oakey for that matter?”

Conroy smiled. “From your agent, Turner.”

Turner stared at Conroy, then nodded. Turning, he lifted the edge of the next dustcover. Cases, plastic and Styrofoam, stacked neatly on the cold metal of the table. He touched a blue plastic rectangle stamped with a silver monogram: S&W.

“Your agent,” Conroy said, as Turner snapped the case open. The pistol lay there in its molded bed of pale blue foam, a massive revolver with an ugly housing that bulged beneath the squat barrel. “S&W Tactical. .408 with a xenon projector,” Conroy said. “What he said you’d want.”

Turner took the gun in his hand and thumbed the batterytest stud for the projector. A red LED in the walnut grip pulsed twice. He swung the cylinder out. “Ammunition?”

“On the table. Hand-loads, explosive tips.”

Turner found a transparent cube of amber plastic, opened it with his left hand, and extracted a cartridge. “Why did they pick me for this, Conroy?” He examined the cartridge, then inserted it carefully into one of the cylinder’s six chambers.

“I don’t know,” Conroy said. “Felt like they had you slotted from go, whenever they heard from Mitchell...

Turner spun the cylinder rapidly and snapped it back into the frame. “I said, ‘Why did they pick me for this, Conroy?’ He raised the pistol with both hands and extended his arms, pointing it directly at Conroy’s face. “Gun like this, sometimes you can see right down the bore, if the light’s right, see if there’s a bullet there.”

Conroy shook his head, very slightly.

“Or maybe you can see it in one of the other chambers...”

“No,” Conroy said, very softly, “no way.”

“Maybe the shrinks screwed up, Conroy. How about that?”

“No,” Conroy said, his face blank. “They didn’t, and you won’t.”

Turner pulled the trigger. The hammer clicked on an empty chamber. Conroy blinked once, opened his mouth, closed it, watched as Turner lowered the Smith & Wesson. A single bead of sweat rolled down from Conroy’s hairline and lost itself in an eyebrow.

“Well?” Turner asked, the gun at his side.

Conroy shrugged. “Don’t do that shit,” he said.

“They want me that bad?’

Conroy nodded. “It’s your show, Turner.”

“Where’s Mitchell?” He opened the cylinder again and began to load the five remaining chambers.

“Arizona. About fifty kilos from the Sonora line, in a mesatop research arcology. Maas Biolabs North America. They own everything around there, right down to the border, and the mesa’s smack in the middle of the footprints of four recon satellites. Mucho tight.”

“And how are we supposed to get in?”

“We aren’t. Mitchell’s coming out, on his own. We wait for him, pick him up, get his ass to Hosaka intact” Conroy hooked a forefinger behind the open collar of his black shirt and drew out a length of black nylon cord, then a small black nylon envelope with a Velcro fastener. He opened it carefully and extracted an object, which he offered to Turner on his open palm “Here. This is what he sent.”

Turner put the gun down on the nearest table and took the thing from Conroy. It was like a swollen gray microsoft, one end routine neurojack, the other a strange, rounded formation unlike anything he’d seen. “What is it?”

“It’s biosoft. Jaylene jacked it and said she thought it was output from an Al. It’s sort of a dossier on Mitchell, with a message to Hosaka tacked on the end. You better jack it yourself; you wa

Turner glanced up from the gray thing “How’d it grab Jaylene?”

“She said you better be lying down when you do it She didn’t seem to like it much.”

Machine dreams hold a special vertigo. Turner lay down on a virgin slab of green temperfoam in the makeshift dorm and jacked Mitchell’s dossier. It came on slow; he had time to close his eyes.

Ten seconds later, his eyes were open. He clutched the green foam and fought his nausea. Again, he closed his eyes... It came on, again, gradually, a flickering, nonlinear flood of fact and sensory data, a kind of narrative conveyed in surreal jump cuts and juxtapositions. It was vaguely like riding a roller coaster that phased in and out of existence at random, impossibly rapid intervals, changing altitude, at-tack, and direction with each pulse of nothingness, except that the shifts had nothing to do with any physical orientation, but rather with lightning alternations in paradigm and symbol system. The data had never been intended for human input.

Eyes open, he pulled the thing from his socket and held it, his palm slick with sweat. It was like waking from a night-mare. Not a screamer, where impacted fears took on simple, terrible shapes, but the sort of dream, infinitely more disturbing, where everything is perfectly and horribly normal, and where everything is utterly wrong...

The intimacy of the thing was hideous He fought down waves of raw transference, bringing all his will to bear on crushing a feeling that was akin to love, the obsessive tender-ness a watcher comes to feel for the subject of prolonged surveillance. Days or hours later, he knew, the most minute details of Mitchell’s academic record might bob to the surface of his mind, or the name of a mistress, the scent of her heavy red hair in the sunlight through -

He sat up quickly, the plastic soles of his shoes smacking the rusted deck. He still wore the parka, and the Smith & Wesson, in a side pocket, swung painfully against his hip.

It would pass. Mitchell’s psychic odor would fade, as surely as the Spanish grammar in the lexicon evaporated after each use. What he had experienced was a Maas security dossier compiled by a sentient computer, nothing more He replaced the biosoft in Conroy’s little black wallet, smoothed the Velcro seal with his thumb, and put the cord around his neck.

He became aware of the sound of waves lapping the flanks of the rig.

“Hey, boss,” someone said, from beyond the brown military blanket that screened the entrance to the dorm area, “Conroy says it’s time for you to inspect the troops, then you and him depart for other parts.” Oakey’s bearded face slid from behind the blanket “Otherwise, I wouldn’t wake you up, right?”