Endorphins

Case forced himself to flip back. She was leaning against the wall, taking all of her weight on her right leg. She fumbled through the contents of the suit’s kangaroo pocket and withdrew a sheet of plastic studded with a rainbow of dermadisks. She selected three and thumbed them hard against her left wrist, over the veins. Six thousand micrograms of endorphin analog came down on the pain like a hammer, shattering it. Her back arched convulsively. Pink waves of warmth lapped up her thighs. She sighed and slowly relaxed.

“Okay, Brood. Okay now. But I’ll need a medical team when I come out. Tell my people. Cutter, I’m two minutes from target. Can you hold?”

“Tell her I’m in and holding,” Case said.

Molly began to limp down the corridor. When she glanced back, once, Case saw the crumpled bodies of three Sense/Net security guards. One of them seemed to have no eyes.

“Tacticals and Rapids have sealed the ground floor, Cat Mother. Foam barricades. Lobby’s getting juicy.”

“Pretty juicy down here,” she said, swinging herself through a pair of gray steel doors. “Almost there, Cutter.”

Case flipped into the matrix and pulled the trodes from his forehead. He was drenched with sweat. He wiped his forehead with a towel, took a quick sip of water from the bicycle bottle beside the Hosaka, and checked the map of the library displayed on the screen. A pulsing red cursor crept through the outline of a doorway. Only millimeters from the green dot that indicated the location of the Dixie Flatline’s construct. He wondered what it was doing to her leg, to walk on it that way. With enough endorphin analog, she could walk on a pair of bloody stumps. He tightened the nylon harness that held him in the chair and replaced the trodes.

***

Neuromancer ch 4