extreme sports dangerous

crashing of the games, his heart hammering. When the fear came, it was like some half-forgotten friend. Not the cold rapid mechanism of the dex-paranoia, but simple animal fear. Hed lived

for so long on a constant edge of anxiety that hed almost forgotten what real fear was. This cubicle was the sort of place where people died. He might die here. They might extreme sports dangerous have guns. . . A crash, from the far end of the corridor. A mans voice, shouting something in Japanese. A scream, shrill terror. Another crash. And footsteps, unhurried, coming closer. Passing his closed door. Pausing for the space of three rapid beats of his heart. And returning. One, two, three. A bootheel scraped the matting. The last of his octagon-induced bravado collapsed. He snapped the cobra into its extreme sports dangerous handle and scrambled for the window, blind with fear, his nerves screaming. He was up, out, and falling, all before he was conscious of what hed done. The impact with pavement drove dull rods of extreme sports dangerous pain through his shins. A narrow wedge of light from a half-open service hatch framed a heap of discarded fiber optics and the chassis of a junked console. Hed fallen face forward on

a slab of soggy chip board, he rolled over, into the shadow of the console. The cubicles window was a square of faint light. The alarm still oscillated, louder here, the extreme sports dangerous rear wall dulling the roar of the games. A head appeared, framed in the window, back lit by the fluorescents in the corridor, then vanished. It returned, but he still couldnt read the features. Glint of extreme sports dangerous silver across the eyes. Shit, someone said, a woman, in the accent of the northern Sprawl. The head was gone. Case lay under the console for a long count extreme sports dangerous of twenty, then stood up. The steel cobra was still in his hand, and it took him a few seconds to remember what it was. He limped away down the alley, nursing his left ankle. x x x Shins pistol was a fifty-year-old Vietnamese imitation of a South American copy of a Walther PPK, double-action on the first shot, with a very rough pull. extreme sports dangerous It was chambered for .22 long rifle, and Case wouldve preferred lead azide explosives to the simple Chinese hollow points Shin had sold him. Still it extreme sports dangerous was a handgun and nine rounds of ammunition, and as he made his way down Shiga from the sushi stall he cradled it in his jacket pocket. The grips were bright red plastic molded in a raised dragon motif, something to run your thumb across in the dark. Hed consigned the cobra to a dump canister extreme sports dangerous on Ninsei and dry-swallowed another octagon. The pill lit his circuits and he rode the rush down Shiga to Ninsei, then over to Baiitsu. His tail, hed decided, extreme sports dangerous was gone and that was fine. He had calls to make, biz to transact, and it wouldnt wait. A block down Baiitsu, toward the port, stood a featureless ten-story office building in ugly yellow extreme sports dangerous brick. Its windows were dark now, but a faint glow from the roof was visible if you craned your neck. An unlit neon sign near the main entrance offered CHEAP HOTEL under a cluster of ideograms. extreme sports dangerous If the place had another name, Case didnt know it; it was always referred to as Cheap Hotel. You reached it through an alley off Baiitsu, where an elevator waited at the extreme sports dangerous foot of a transparent shaft. The elevator, like Cheap Hotel, was an afterthought, lashed to the building with bamboo and epoxy. Case climbed into the plastic cage and used his key, an unmarked length of extreme sports dangerous rigid magnetic tape. Case had rented a coffin here, on a weekly basis, since hed arrived in Chiba, but hed never slept in Cheap Hotel. He slept in cheaper places.

The elevator smelled of perfume and cigarettes; the sides of the cage was scratched and thumb-smudged. As it passed the fifth floor, he saw the lights of Ninsei. He drummed his fingers against the pistol extreme sports dangerous grip as the cage slowed with a gradual hiss. As always, it came to a full stop with a violent jolt, but he was ready for it. He stepped out into the courtyard that served the place as some combination of lobby and lawn. Centered in the square carpet of green plastic turf, a Japanese teenager sat behind a C-shaped console, reading a textbook. The extreme sports dangerous white fiberglass coffins were racked in a framework of industrial scaffolding. Six tiers of coffins, ten coffins on a side. Case nodded in the boys direction and limped across the plastic grass extreme sports dangerous to the nearest ladder. The compound was roofed with cheap laminated matting that rattled in a strong wind and leaked when it rained, but the coffins were reasonably difficult to open without a key. The expansion-grate catwalk vibrated with his weight as he edged his way along the third tier to Number 92. The coffins were three meters long, the oval hatches a meter wide and just under a meter