clinic!
Jonny pushed the Kid aside and ran between the rows of greenhouses. A block away, he could see a dozen of the Committee's meat wagons forming an armored barrier around the warehouse he and the others had left earlier that evening. Force men were leading a few cuffed Croakers to the wagons. There were bodies, Committee boys and anarchists, lying in the flood-lit parking lot. Ice and Groucho were there, pinned-down in an alley off to the right, meters apart, unable to reach the cover of the greenhouses.
'See? We're fucked!' Skid shrilled. 'They found the clinic!'
Jonny watched as Ice and Groucho tried to make a run for it, shooting into the air to cover each other. The Committee boys laughed at them from the roof, cat and mousing them, letting them get a few meters out, then forcing them back against the warehouse under a curtain of bullets.
'If we lay down some fire on that roof, they could make it,' Jonny told Skid. 'Watch them. I need a weapon.' He crawled away, then sprinted to the van.
Weapons and ammunition were scattered on the ground behind the van's open door. Some of Man Ray's clockwork constructions had been activated; they crawled absently off into the shadows where they popped and flared. The Guru was nowhere in sight. Jonny grabbed a Futukoro and, as he fished for a clip in the glycerin flooded bin, paused for a moment to take a couple of deep, even breaths. His hands were shaking. He closed his eyes, tried to will himself calm. Nothing but ruins, he thought. Seeing Ice pinned down had snapped something inside him. He thought of Sumi. He could not lose them both in one night.
A high-pitched animal scream. Jonny ran back to the warehouse in time to see Skid zig-zagging into the open, his pixels wild, a slight figure crawling with pastel geometrics and snapping death's heads. As the Kid ran, he shot wildly at the roof of the adjoining warehouse, forcing the Committee boys back. Ice, Jonny realized, had been caught between the buildings, unable to get out of the line of fire. Now, under Skid's cover, she made it to a greenhouse on the far side, Groucho right on her heels. They turned to give the Kid covering fire, but he seemed confused; unwilling to be pinned at the warehouse wall as they had been, he sprinted back toward Jonny.
He got about ten meters when a shot caught him from behind, punching a wet hole in his chest. The Kid spun around stiffly, firing the last of his clip into the pavement. 'Skid!' Ice screamed. The Kid was on his back, half- conscious, crawling with snakes and phosphenes. A file dump, Jonny realized. All the images in his software were bubbling up at once, out of control. The arm Skid held up strobed madly: the arm of a woman, a reptile, an industrial robot; crimson spiders webbed him; amber alphanumerics scrolled up his twisted face; Brando, Lee, Bowie, Vega; his system was looping, the faces flickering by faster and faster, merging into one meta-fantasy face, colorless, all colors, fading at the same instant it formed. Skid sat up, looked around wildly and laughed. A single bright flash of binary, and he slumped to the ground. The Kid lay still and dark.
By the meat wagons, a loudspeaker clicked on: MY GOD, IS THAT YOU, GORDON? NICE TO SEE YOU, ASSHOLE. WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR DEAL? came Zamora's voice. 'YOU
FUCKED ME, GORDON, BUT I DIDN'T THINK YOU WERE STUPID. I CUT YOU LOOSE AND YOU RUN RIGHT INTO THE ARMS OF CRIMINALS; TERRORISTS, FOR CHRISSAKE.'
It was a game, Jonny knew. Could the Colonel make him mad enough to do something stupid? Jonny tried to force the sound of Colonel Zamora's voice from his brain; he conjured up visions of clawing the man's eyes out with his hands, but he stayed in the shadows, shaking, hating himself, and biting his lip until he drew blood.
I'M GOING TO ROAST YOU, KID. ONE OF YOUR BITCHES IS MINE ALREADY. THEY LOVE FRESH CUNT AT THE WEAPONS LAB, YOU KNOW. THEY'LL HAVE HER INCUBATING SPINAL WORMS. EVER SEEN THOSE THINGS? ALL THEY EAT IS NERVE TISSUE, AND THEY DON'T STOP TILL IT'S ALL GONE…
Before Jonny knew what he was doing, he was flat on his belly, screaming, firing the Futukoro, filling the air above the meat wagons with dragons, burning comets, screeching harpies. He knocked out the P.A. with the first volley, and took out some of the flood lights.
Something occurred to him then, and he was up, scrambling back to the van. Some of Man Ray's toys were been back there, he remembered. What a nice surprise they would be for the Colonel.
But he never got there.
Two dark suited men intercepted him as he was stepping into the vehicle. Instinctively, Jonny brought his boot up into one man's armpit, paralyzing the arm. But it was not enough. His whole system hummed, crying out for blood. Jonny grabbed a handful of the first man's face and pushed him into the second. They both went down, and Jonny was on them, bringing his boots down heel-first, aiming for the throat. He missed the first man, corrected his aim for the second and knocked out some of his teeth. Jonny's fun was cut short, however, when an arm clamped across his face, and something cold and stinging touched his throat. As his body went limp, some neutral part of his brain noted that he had been stuck with a neural scrambler. The effect was a strange one since Jonny's mind continued to function perfectly, but with the pyramidal tracks of his brain jammed, his body had suddenly been reduced to so much useless meat. He was aware of the two men carrying him for some distance.
He hoped they would not let him swallow his tongue.
When they removed the scrambler, Jonny found himself on the filthy floor of an underground garage. A stretched Cadillac limousine, the rear end huge under twin sweeping tail fins, was parked nearby.
His tongue seemed to be intact. The car door swung open, and a familiar florid scent of clove cigarettes billowed out. Then the ugliest man Jonny had ever seen smiled out at him.
'Please don't be angry, Jonny. Your friends are gone. Some of their compatriots picked them up a few moments ago,' said Mister Conover, the smuggler lord. 'Aside from that, it's been my sad experience that people who are ready to die for a cause, all too often, end up doing just that.' He grinned apologetically, showing horrid yellow teeth. 'There are far too many of them out there for you to do any good, you know. You'll just get yourself killed.'
'Killed?' said Jonny. He laughed. Wouldn't that be a joke on everybody.
SIX
Mister Conover, relaxed and smiling, was sporting that season's newest suit style from Milan (high-waisted pants, shoulder pads in the jacket, all woven from Russian silk. There was a Cyrillic character on each of the gold buttons. In all, the suit violated a dozen U.S. trade embargoes against pro-Arab countries.). He was the most powerful smuggler lord in Los Angeles, single-handedly controlling most of the drug traffic in and out of southern California.
Many of the other lords were working small, furtive drug deals of their own, deals designed to boost their cash flow and their self-esteem, and while they were, technically, cutting into Conover's action, he did not mind. Allowing the other lords to have their little deals helped to keep them happy and in line. And that, Conover knew, was a form of power he could not buy or do without.
Rumor had it that Mr. Conover's influence reached far beyond the limits of Los Angeles, into the governor's mansion, and the offices of the multi-nationals in Osaka and Mexico City. Part of this was due to an elaborate kick- back scheme he had reputedly concocted with several pharmaceutical firms decades before, a scheme having to do with the scuttling of artificial intelligence controlled-cargo blimps and tankers, allowing the companies to collect on the insurance, then returning the vessels with new names and computer logs, while he kept the cargo. However, a portion of his influence had simply to do with his age. He had been born in the previous century, making him older than most of the corporations and politicos he was dealing with.
Through the years, he had become a link to a golden age when the foundations for the power structure of their world was being laid, a sort of icon to commerce and stability.
Mr. Conover was also a Greenies addict. Originally marketed in the late nineteen nineties as a longevity drug, Greenies were later found to be responsible for a whole range of bizarre side effects.
However, these effects manifested themselves only after decades of use, and by then it was usually too late; the drug had already bonded with and re-inscribed large segments of the addict's DNA. To stop taking the drug would have killed Conover. The drug's street name derived from its peculiar tendency to slow the oxidation of blood in the user's system, giving the addict's skin a brittle, greenish-blue quality.
