The clips on Case's makeshift strap dug into his shoulder with the weight of the Ono-Sendai and the Flatline's construct. All he felt now was fear, a generalized dread. He pushed it away, forcing himself to replay Armitage's lecture on the spindle and Villa Straylight. He started climbing. Freeside's ecosystem was limited, not closed. Zion was a closed system, capable of cycling for years without the introduction of external materials. Freeside produced its own air and water, but relied on constant shipments of food, on the regular augmentation of soil nutrients. The Villa Straylight produced nothing at all.

`Mon,' Maelcum said quietly, `get up here, 'side me.' Case edged sideways on the circular ladder and climbed the last few rungs. The gangway ended in a smooth, slightly convex hatch, two meters in diameter. The hydraulic members of the tube vanished into flexible housings set into the frame of the hatch.

`So what do we --'

Case's mouth shut as the hatch swung up, a slight differential in pressure puffing fine grit into his eyes.

Maelcum scrambled up, over the edge, and Case heard the tiny click of the Remington's safety being released. `You th'~ mon in th'~ hurry...' Maelcum whispered, crouching there. Then Case was beside him.

The hatch was centered in a round, vaulted chamber floored with blue nonslip plastic tiles. Maelcum nudged him, pointed, and he saw a monitor set into a curved wall. On the screen, a tall young man with the Tessier-Ashpool features was brushing something from the sleeves of his dark suitcoat. He stood beside an identical hatch, in an identical chamber. `Very sorry, sir,' said a voice from a grid centered above the hatch. Case glanced up. `Expected you later, at the axial dock. One moment, please.' On the monitor, the young man tossed his head impatiently.

Maelcum spun as a door slid open to their left, the shotgun ready. A small Eurasian in orange coveralls stepped through and goggled at them. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He closed his mouth. Case glanced at the monitor. Blank.

`Who?' the man managed.

`The Rastafarian navy,' Case said, standing up, the cyberspace deck banging against his hip, `and all we want's a jack into your custodial system.'

The man swallowed. `Is this a test? It's a loyalty check. It must be a loyalty check.' He wiped the palms of his hands on the thighs of his orange suit.

`No, mon, this a real one.' Maelcum came up out of his crouch with the Remington pointed at the Eurasian's face. `You move it.'

They followed the man back through the door, into a corridor whose polished concrete walls and irregular floor of overlapping carpets were perfectly familiar to Case. `Pretty rugs,' Maelcum said, prodding the man in the back. `Smell like church.'

They came to another monitor, an antique Sony, this one mounted above a console with a keyboard and a complex array of jack panels. The screen lit as they halted, the Finn grinning tensely out at them from what seemed to be the front room of Metro Holografix. `Okay,' he said, `Maelcum takes this guy down the corridor to the open locker door, sticks him in there, I'll lock it. Case, you want the fifth socket from the left, top panel. There's adaptor plugs in the cabinet under the console. Needs Ono-Sendai twenty-point into Hitachi forty.' As Maelcum nudged his captive along, Case knelt and fumbled through an assortment of plugs, finally coming up with the one he needed. With his deck jacked into the adaptor, he paused.

`Do you have to look like that, man?' he asked the face on the screen. The Finn was erased a line at a time by the image of Lonny Zone against a wall of peeling Japanese posters.

`Anything you want, baby,' Zone drawled, `just hop it for Lonny...'

`No,' Case said, `use the Finn.' As the Zone image vanished, he shoved the Hitachi adaptor into its socket and settled the trodes across his forehead.

`What kept you?' the Flatline asked, and laughed.

`Told you don't do that,' Case said.

`Joke, boy,' the construct said, `zero time lapse for me. Lemme see what we got here...'

The Kuang program was green, exactly the shade of the T-A ice. Even as Case watched, it grew gradually more opaque, although he could see the black-mirrored shark thing clearly when he looked up. The fracture lines and hallucinations were gone now, and the thing looked real as Marcus Garvey,a wingless antique jet, its smooth skin plated with black chrome.

`Right on,' the Flatline said.

`Right,' Case said, and flipped.

`-like that. I'm sorry,' 3Jane was saying, as she bandaged Molly's head. `Our unit says no concussion, no permanent damage to the eye. You didn't know him very well, before you came here?'

`Didn't know him at all,' Molly said bleakly. She was on her back on a high bed or padded table. Case couldn't feel the injured leg. The synaesthetic effect of the original injection seemed to have worn off. The, black ball was gone, but her hands were immobilized by soft straps she couldn't see.

`He wants to kill you.'

`Figures,' Molly said, staring up at the rough ceiling past a very bright light.

`I don't think I want him to,' 3Jane said, and Molly painfully turned her head to look up into the dark eyes.

`Don't play with me,' she said.

`But I think I might like to,' 3Jane said, and bent to kiss her forehead, brushing the hair back with a warm hand. There were smears of blood on her pale djellaba.

`Where's he gone now?' Molly asked.

`Another injection, probably,' 3Jane said, straightening up. `He was quite impatient for your arrival. I think it might be fun to nurse you back to health, Molly.' She smiled, absently wiping a bloody hand down the front of the robe. `Your leg will need to be reset, but we can arrange that.'

`What about Peter?'

`Peter.' She gave her head a little shake. A strand of dark hair came loose, fell across her forehead. `Peter has become rather boring. I find drug use in general to be boring.' She giggled. `In others, at any rate. My father was a dedicated abuser, as you must have seen.'

Molly tensed.

`Don't alarm yourself.' 3Jane's fingers brushed the skin above the waistband of the leather jeans. `His suicide was the result of my having manipulated the safety margins of his freeze. I'd never actually met him, you know. I was decanted after he last went down to sleep. But I did know him verywell. The cores know everything. I watched him kill my mother. I'll show you that, when you're better. He strangles her in bed.'

`Why did he kill her?' Her unbandaged eye focused on the girl's face.

`He couldn't accept the direction she intended for our family. She commissioned the construction of our artificial intelligences. She was quite a visionary. She imagined us in a symbiotic relationship with the AI's, our corporate decisions made for us. Our conscious decisions, I should say. Tessier Ashpool would be immortal, a hive, each of us units of a larger entity. Fascinating. I'll play her tapes for you, nearly a thousand hours. But I've never understood her, really, and with her death, her direction was lost. All direction was lost, and we began to burrow into ourselves. Now we seldom come out. I'm the exception there.'

`You said you were trying to kill the old man? You fiddled his cryogenic programs?'

3Jane nodded. `I had help. From a ghost. That was what I thought when I was very young, that there were ghosts in the corporate cores. Voices. One of them was what you call Wintermute, which is the Turing code for our Berne AI, although the entity manipulating you is a sort of subprogram.'

`One of them? There's more?'

`One other. But that one hasn't spoken to me in years. It gave up, I think. I suspect that both represent the fruition of certain capacities my mother ordered designed into the original software, but she was an extremely secretive woman when she felt it necessary. Here. Drink.' She put a flexible plastic tube to Molly's lips. `Water. Only a little.'