William Gibson - Count Zero

He lay there for a long time, watching the squirrels, while the woods woke and the morning warmed around him. A crow swept in, banking, braking with feathers it spread like black mechanical fingers. Checking to see if he were dead.

Turner grinned up at the crow as it flapped away.

Not yet.

He crawled back in, under the overhanging branches, and found her sitting up in the cockpit. She wore a baggy white T-shirt slashed diagonally with the MAAS-NEOTEK logo. There were lozenges of fresh red blood across the front of the shirt. Her nose was bleeding again. Bright blue eyes, dazed and disoriented, in sockets bruised yellow-black, like exotic makeup.

Young, he saw, very young.

“You’re Mitchell’s daughter,” he said, dragging the name up from the biosoft dossier. “Angela.”

“Angie,” she said, automatically “Who’ re you? I’m bleeding. She held out a bloody carnation of wadded tissue.

“Turner. I was expecting your father.” Remembering the gun now, her other hand out of sight, below the edge of the cockpit. “Do you know where he is?”

“In the mesa. He thought he could talk with them, explain it Because they need him.”

“With who?” He took a step forward.

“Maas. The Board. They can’t afford to hurt him. Can they?”

“Why would they?” Another step.

She dabbed at her nose with the red tissue. “Because he sent me out. Because he knew they were going to hurt me, kill me maybe. Because of the dreams.”

“The dreams?”

“Do you think they’ll hurt him?”

“No, no, they wouldn’t do that. I’m going to climb up there now. Okay?”

She nodded. He had to run his hands over the side of the fuselage to find the shallow, recessed handholds; the mimetic coating showed him leaf and lichen, twigs… And then he was up, beside her, and he saw the gun beside her sneakered foot. “But wasn’t he coming himself? I was expecting him, your father.”

“No. We never planned that. We only had the one plane. Didn’t he tell you?” She started to shake. “Didn’t he tell you anything?”

“Enough,” he said, putting his hand on her shoulder, “he told us enough. It’ll be all right…” He swung his legs over, bent, moved the Smith Wesson away from her foot, and found the interface cable. His hand still on her, he raised it, snapped it into place behind his ear.

‘Give me the procedures for erasing anything you stored in the past forty-eight hours,” he said. “I want to dump that course for Mexico City, your flight from the coast, anything…”

“There was no plan logged for Mexico City,” the voice said, direct neural input on audio.

Turner stared at the girl, rubbed his jaw.

“Where were we going?”

“Bogotá,” and the jet reeled out coordinates for the landing they hadn’t made.

She blinked at him, her lids bruised dark as the surrounding skin. “Who are you talking to?”

“The plane. Did Mitchell tell you where he thought you’d be going””

“Japan…”

Know anyone in Bogotá? Where’s your mother?”

“No. Berlin, I think. I don’t really know her.”

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 tanned cheek. He’d noticed she was developing a limp, and she’d started to wince each time she put her right foot down.

“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, skinny thighs under his armpits, his fingers locked in front of his sternum in a double fist. She smelled like a kid from the up-line ’burbs, some vaguely herbal hint of soap or shampoo. Thinking that, he thought about what he must smell like to her. Rudy had a shower “Oh, shit, what’s that?” Stiffening on his back, pointing.

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.