William Gibson - Count Zero

“Christ,” Buschel said, noticing him “Turner. I’m sorry, man. Came down this morning. Ugly fucking business “ He took a sodden handkerchief from his jacket pocket and wiped his face. “Ugly job. I’ve never had to do one of these, be-fore…”

“What’s in the case, Buschel?” He was much closer now, although he didn’t remember stepping forward. He could see the pores in Buschel’s tanned face.

“You okay, man?” Buschel taking a step back. “You look bad.”

“What’s in the case, Buschel?” Seersucker bunched in his fist, knuckles white and shaking.

“Damn it, Turner,” the man jerking free, the handle of the case clutched in both hands now. “They weren’t damaged. Only some minor abrasion on one of the corneas. They belong to the Net. It was in her contract, Turner.”

And he’d turned away, his guts knotted tight around eight glasses of straight Scotch, and fought the nausea. And he’d continued to fight it, held it off for nine years, until, in his flight from the Dutchman, all the memory of it had come down on him, had fallen on him in London, in Heathrow, and he’d leaned forward, without pausing in his progress down yet another corridor, and vomited into a blue plastic waste canister.

“Come on. Turner,” Webber said, “put some back in it. Show us how it’s done.” The module began to strain forward again, through the tarry smell of the desert plants.

“Ready here,” Ramirez said, his voice remote and calm.

Turner touched the throat mike’ “I’m sending you some company.” He removed his finger from the mike. “Nathan, it’s time. You and Davis, hack to the bunker.”

Davis was in charge of the squirt gear, their sole nonmatrix link with Hosaka. Nathan was Mr. Fix-it. Lynch was rolling the last of the bicycle wheels away into the brush beyond the parking lot. Webber and Compton were kneeling beside the module, attaching the line that linked the Hosaka surgeons with the Sony biomonitor in the command post. With the wheels removed, lowered and leveled on four jacks, the portable neurosurgery reminded Turner once again of the French vacation module. That had been a much later trip, four years after Conroy had recruited him in Los Angeles.

“How’s it going?” Sutcliffe asked, over the link.

“Fine,” Turner said, touching the mike.

“Lonely out here,” Sutcliffe said.

“Compton,” Turner said, “Sutcliffe needs you to help him cover the perimeter. You, too, Lynch.”

“Too bad,” Lynch said, from the dark. “I was hoping I’d get to see the action.”

Turner’s hand was on the grip of the holstered Smith Wesson, under the open flap of the parka. “Now, Lynch.” If Lynch was Connie’s plant. he’d want to be here. Or in the bunker.

“Fuck it,” Lynch said. “There’s nobody out there and you know it. You don’t want me here, I’ll go in there and watch Ramirez.

“Right,” Turner said, and drew the gun, depressing the stud that activated the xenon projector. The first tight-beam flash of noon-bright xenon light found a twisted saguaro, its needles like tufts of gray fur in the pitiless illumination. The second lit up the spiked skull on Lynch’s belt, framed it in a sharp-edged circle The sound of the shot and the sound of he bullet detonating on impact were indistinguishable, waves of concussion rolling out in invisible, ever-widening rings, out into the flat dark land like thunder.

In the first few seconds after, there was no sound at all, even the bats and bugs silenced, waiting. Webber had thrown herself flat in the scrub, and somehow he sensed her there, now, knew that her gun would be out, held dead steady in those brown, capable hands. He had no idea where Compton was. Then Sutcliffe’s voice, over the ear-bead, scratching at him from his brainpan: “Turner. What was that?”

There was enough starlight now to make out Webber. She was sitting up, gun in her hands, ready, her elbows braced on her knees.

“He was Conroy’s plant,” Turner said, lowering the Smith Wesson.

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “I’m Conroy’s plant.”

“He had a line out. I’ve seen it before.”

She had to say it twice.

Sutcliffe’s voice in his head, and then Ramirez: “We got your transportation. Eighty klicks and closing… Every-thing else looks clear. There’s a blimp twenty klicks south-southwest, Jaylene says, unmanned cargo and it’s right on schedule. Nothing else. What the fuck’s Sut yelling about? Nathan says he heard a shot” Ramirez was jacked in. most of his sensorium taken up with the input from the Maas-Neotek deck. “Nathan’s ready with the first squirt…”

Turner could hear the jet banking now, braking for the landing on the highway. Webber was up and walking toward him, her gun in her hand. Sutcliffe was asking the same question, over and over.

He reached up and touched the throat mike. “Lynch. He’s dead. The jet’s here. This is it.”

And then the Jet was on them, black shadow, incredibly low, coming in without lights. There was a flare of blow-back jets as the thing executed a landing that would have killed a human pilot, and then a weird creaking as it readjusted its articulated carbon-fiber airframe. Turner could make out the green reflected glow of instrumentation in the curve of the plastic canopy.

“You fucked up,” Webber said.

Behind her, the hatch in the side of the surgery module popped open, framing a masked figure in a green paper contamination suit. The light from inside was blue-white, brilliant, it threw a distorted shadow of the suited medic out through the thin cloud of dust that hung above the lot in the wake of the Jet’s landing. “Close it!” Webber shouted. “Not yet!”

As the door swung down, shutting out the light, they both heard the ultralight’s engine. After the roar of the jet, it seemed no more than the hum of a dragonfly, a drone that stuttered and faded as they listened. “He’s out of fuel,” Webber said. “But he’s close.”

“He’s here,” Turner said, pressing the throat mike. “First squirt.”

The tiny plane whispered past them, a dark delta against the stars They could hear something flapping in the wind of its silent passage, perhaps one of Mitchell’s pants legs. You’re up there, Turner thought, all alone, in the warmest clothes you own, wearing a pair of infrared goggles you built for yourself, and you’re looking for a pair of dotted lines picked out for you in hand warmers. “You crazy fucker,” he said, his heart filling with a strange admiration, “you really wanted out bad.”

Then the first flare went up, with a festive little pop. and the magnesium glare began its slow white parachute ride to the desert floor. Almost immediately, there were two more, and the long rattle of automatic fire from the west end of the mall. He was peripherally aware of Webber stumbling through the brush, in the direction of the bunker, but his eyes were fixed on the wheeling ultralight, on its gay orange and blue fabric wings, and the goggled figure hunched there in the open metal framework above the fragile tripod landing gear Mitchell.

The lot was bright as a football field, under the drifting flares. The ultralight banked and turned with a lazy grace that made Turner want to scream. A line of tracers hosed out in a white arc from beyond the site perimeter. Missed.

Get it down. Get it down. He was running, jumping clumps of brush that caught at his ankles, at the hem of his parka.

The flares. The light. Mitchell couldn’t use the goggles now, couldn’t see the infrared glow of the hand warmers. He was bringing it in wide of the strip. The nose wheel caught in something and the ultralight cartwheeled, crumpling, torn butterfly, and then lay down in its own white cloud of dust.