Burning Chrome Read Free Page A

the corner to report a single Volks module in front of the Drome, red lights flashing. They were sweeping Ralfi up. Asking questions.
    I was covered in scorched white fluff. The tennis socks. The gym bag was a ragged plastic cuff around my wrist. ‘I don’t see how the hell I missed him.’
    â€˜Cause he’s fast, so fast.’ She hugged her knees and rocked back and forth on her bootheels. ‘His nervous system’s jacked up. He’s factory custom.’ She grinned and gave a little squeal of delight. ‘I’m gonna get that boy. Tonight. He’s the best, number one, top dollar, state of the art.’
    â€˜What you’re going to get, for this boy’s two million, is my ass out of here. Your boyfriend back there was mostly grown in a vat in Chiba City. He’s a Yakuza assassin.’
    â€˜Chiba. Yeah. See, Molly’s been Chiba, too.’ And she showed me her hands, fingers slightly spread. Her fingers were slender, tapered, very white against the polished burgundy nails. Ten blades snicked straight out from their recesses beneath her nails, each one a narrow, double-edged scalpel in pale blue steel.
    I’d never spent much time in Nighttown. Nobody there had anything to pay me to remember, and most of them had a lot they paid regularly to forget. Generations of sharpshooters had chipped away at the neon until the maintenance crews gave up. Even at noon the arcs were soot-black against faintest pearl.
    Where do you go when the world’s wealthiest criminal order is feeling for you with calm, distant fingers? Where do you hide from the Yakuza, so powerful that it owns comsats and at least three shuttles? The Yakuza is a true multinational, like ITT and Ono-Sendai. Fifty years before I was born the Yakuza had already absorbed the Triads, the Mafia, the Union Corse.
    Molly had an answer: You hide in the Pit, in the lowest circle, where any outside influence generates swift, concentric ripples of raw menace. You hide in Nighttown. Better yet, you hide above Nighttown, because the Pit’s inverted, and the bottom of its bowl touches the sky, the sky that Nighttown never sees, sweating under its own firmament of acrylic resin, up where the Lo Teks crouch in the dark like gargoyles, black-market cigarettes dangling from their lips.
    She had another answer, too.
    â€˜So you’re locked up good and tight, Johnny-san? No way to get that program without the password?’ She led me into the shadows that waited beyond the bright tube platform. The concrete walls were overlaid with graffiti, years of them twisting into a single metascrawl of rage and frustration.
    â€˜The stored data are fed in through a modified series of microsurgical contraautism prostheses.’ I reeled off a numb version of my standard sales pitch. ‘Client’s code is stored in a special chip; barring Squids, which we in the trade don’t like to talk about, there’s no way to recoveryour phrase. Can’t drug it out, cut it out, torture it. I don’t know it, never did.’
    â€˜Squids? Crawly things with arms?’ We emerged into a deserted street market. Shadowy figures watched us from across a makeshift square littered with fish heads and rotting fruit.
    â€˜Superconducting quantum interference detectors. Used them in the war to find submarines, suss out enemy cyber systems.’
    â€˜Yeah? Navy stuff? From the war? Squid’ll read that chip of yours?’ She’d stopped walking, and I felt her eyes on me behind those twin mirrors.
    â€˜Even the primitive models could measure a magnetic field a billionth the strength of geomagnetic force; it’s like pulling a whisper out of a cheering stadium.’
    â€˜Cops can do that already, with parabolic microphones and lasers.’
    â€˜But your data’s still secure.’ Pride in profession. ‘No government’ll let their cops have Squids, not even the security heavies. Too much chance