Burning Chrome Read Free Page B

of interdepartmental funnies; they’re too likely to watergate you.’
    â€˜Navy stuff,’ she said, and her grin gleamed in the shadows. ‘Navy stuff. I got a friend down here who was in the navy, name’s Jones. I think you’d better meet him. He’s a junkie, though. So we’ll have to take him something.’
    â€˜A junkie?’
    â€˜A dolphin.’
    He was more than a dolphin, but from another dolphin’s point of view he might have seemed like something less. I watched him swirling sluggishly in his galvanized tank. Water slopped over the side, wetting my shoes. He was surplus from the last war. A cyborg.
    He rose out of the water, showing us the crusted plates along his sides, a kind of visual pun, his grace nearly lost under articulated armor, clumsy and prehistoric. Twin deformities on either side of his skull had been engineered to house sensor units. Silver lesions gleamed on exposed sections of his gray-white hide.
    Molly whistled. Jones thrashed his tail, and more water cascaded down the side of the tank.
    â€˜What is this place?’ I peered at vague shapes in the dark, rusting chain link and things under tarps. Above the tank hung a clumsy wooden framework, crossed and recrossed by rows of dusty Christmas lights.
    â€˜Funland. Zoo and carnival rides. “Talk with the War Whale.” All that. Some whale Jones is…’
    Jones reared again and fixed me with a sad and ancient eye.
    â€˜How’s he talk?’ Suddenly I was anxious to go.
    That’s the catch. Say “hi,” Jones.’
    And all the bulbs lit simultaneously. They were flashing red, white, and blue.

    â€˜Good with symbols, see, but the code’s restricted. In the navy they had him wired into an audiovisual display.’ She drew the narrow package from a jacket pocket. ‘Pure shit, Jones. Want it?’ He froze in the water and started to sink. I felt a strange panic, remembering that he wasn’t a fish, that he could drown. ‘We want the key to Johnny’s bank, Jones. We want it fast.’
    The lights flickered, died.
    â€˜Go for it, Jones!’

    Blue bulbs, cruciform.
    Darkness.
    â€˜Pure! It’s clean . Come on, Jones.’

    White sodium glare washed her features, stark monochrome, shadows cleaving from her cheekbones.

    The arms of the red swastika were twisted in her silver glasses. ‘Give it to him,’ I said. ‘We’ve got it.’
    Ralfi Face. No imagination.
    Jones heaved half his armored bulk over the edge of his tank, and I thought the metal would give way. Molly stabbed him overhand with the Syrette, driving the needle between two plates. Propellant hissed. Patterns of light exploded, spasming across the frame and then fading to black.
    We left him drifting, rolling languorously in the dark water. Maybe he was dreaming of his war in the Pacific, of the cyber mines he’d swept, nosing gently into their circuitry with the Squid he’d used to pick Ralfi’s pathetic password from the chip buried in my head.
    â€˜I can see them slipping up when he was demobbed, letting him out of the navy with that gear intact, but how does a cybernetic dolphin get wired to smack?’
    â€˜The war,’ she said. ‘They all were. Navy did it. How else you get ’em working for you?’
    â€˜I’m not sure this profiles as good business,’ the pirate said, angling for better money. ‘Target specs on a comsat that isn’t in the book –’
    â€˜Waste my time and you won’t profile at all,’ said Molly, leaning across his scarred plastic desk to prod him with her forefinger.
    â€˜So maybe you want to buy your microwaves somewhere else?’ he was a tough kid, behind his Mao-job. A Nighttowner by birth, probably.
    Her hand blurred down the front of his jacket, completely severing a lapel without even rumpling the fabric.
    â€˜So we got a deal or not?’
    â€˜Deal,’ he said,