Cowboy watches as the last pieces of cargo are stowed, making sure the panzer is trimmed, that all’s ready for the run across what the Dodger, in an evocative mood, had once christened Damnation Alley.
“What’s my cargo?” Cowboy asks. He smiles diffidently, wondering if the Dodger can see the thoughts behind his artificial eyes. The suspicions, the discontents. “Just for the record.”
The Dodger is busy cutting a plug of tobacco. “Chloramphenildorphin,” he says. “There’s going to be a shortage on the East Coast. The hospitals will pay a lot. Or so the rumors say.” He grins. “So be of good cheer. You’re going to make sure a lot of sick people stay alive.”
“Nice to be sort of legal,” Cowboy says. “For a change.”
He looks at the panzer, all angular armor and intakes, ugly and graceless compared to a delta. He owns this one but he hasn’t given it a name, doesn’t think of it in the same way. A panzer is just a machine, not a way of life. Not like flying.
Cowboy calls himself Pony Express now. It’s his radio handle, another nickname. He wants to keep the idea alive, even if it can’t take wing.
Cowboy climbs on top of the panzer, worms through the dorsal hatch, and sits down in the forward compartment. He studs a jack in his right temple and suddenly his vision is expanded, as if his two eyes were stretched around his head and a third eye surfaced on top. He calls up the maps he has stored on comp, and displays begin pulsing like strobes on the inside of his skull. His head has become a ROM cube. Inside it he sees fuel trucks spotted down the Alley, ready to move when he needs to be topped up; there is his planned route, with deviations and emergency routes marked, drawn in wide bands of color; there are old barns and deep coulees and other hiding places spotted like acne on the displays, all marked down by Arkady’s scouts.
Cowboy fishes a datacube out of his jacket pocket and drops it into the trapdoor. The display flares with another series of pinpricks. His own secret hiding places, the ones he prefers to use, that he keeps up to date with scouting forays of his own. Arkady, he knows, wants this trip to succeed; but Cowboy doesn’t know everyone in the thirdman’s organization, and some of them might have been bought by the privateers. Best to stick with the places he knows are safe. The panzer rocks slightly and Cowboy can hear the sound of footsteps on the Chobham Seven armor. He looks up and sees the Dodger’s silhouette through the dorsal hatch. “Time to move, Cowboy,” the Dodger says, and then spits his chaw over the side.
“Yo,” says Cowboy. He unplugs himself and stands up in the cramped compartment. His Kikuyu pupils contract to pinpricks as he puts his head out the hatch and looks west, in the direction of the wine-dark Rockies he knows are somewhere over the horizon. He feels, again, the strange lassitude infecting his heart, a discontent with things as they are.
“Damn,” he says. There is longing in the word.
“Yeah,” says the Dodger.
“I wish I was flying.”
“Yeah.” The Dodger looks pensive. “Someday, Cowboy,” he says. “We’re just waiting for the technology to roll around the other way again. ”
Cowboy can see Arkady standing by his armored Packard, sweating in the shade of a cottonwood, and suddenly the discontent has a name. “Chloramphenildorphin,” he says. “Where’s Arkady get it?”
“We’re not paid to know those kind of things,” the Dodger says.
“In quantities like this?” Cowboy’s voice turns thoughtful as he gazes across the gap of bright sky between himself and the thirdman. “Do you think it’s true,” he asks, “that the Orbitals are running the thirdmen, just like everything else?”
The Dodger glances nervously at Arkady and shrugs. “It don’t pay to make those kind of speculations out loud.”
“I just want to know who I’m working for,” Cowboy says. “if the underground is run by the overground, then we’re working for the people we’re fighting, qué no?”
The Dodger looks at him crookedly. “I wasn’t aware that we were fighting anybody a-tall, Cowboy,” he says.
“You know what I mean.” That if the thirdmen and panzerboys are just participating in a reshuffling of finances on behalf of the Orbital blocs, then the dream of being the last free Americans on the last free road is a foolish, romantic delusion. And what is Cowboy, then? A dupe, a hovercraft clown. Or worse than that, a tool.
The Dodger gives him a weary smile. “Concentrate on the privateers, Cowboy, that’s my advice,” he says. “You’re the best panzerboy on the planet. Stick to what you’re good at.”
Cowboy forces a grin and gives him the finger, and then closes the dorsal hatch. He strips naked and sticks electrodes to his arms and legs, then runs the wires from the electrodes to collars on his wrists and ankles. He attaches a catheter, then dons his g-suit and boots, sits on his acceleration couch and attaches cables to the collars, straps himself onto the couch. While his body remains immobile, his muscles will be exercised by electrode to keep the blood flowing. In the old days, before this technique had been developed and the jocks were riding their headsets out of Earth’s well and into the long diamond night, sometimes their legs and arms got gangrene.
Next he plugs jacks into the sockets in his temples, the silver-chased sockets over each ear, the fifth socket at the base of his skull. He pulls his helmet on over them, careful not to stress the laser-optic wires coming out of his head. He closes the mask across his face. He tastes rubber and hears the hiss of anesthetic, loud here in the closed space of the helmet.
His body will be put to sleep while he makes his run through the Alley. He is going to have more important things to do than look after it.
Cowboy does the chore swiftly, automatically. All along, there is a feeling: I have done this too often not to know what it’s about.
Neurotransmitters awaken the five studs in his head and Cowboy watches the insides of his skull blaze with incandescent light, the liquid-crystal data matrices of the panzer molding themselves to the configuration of his mind. His heart beats faster; he’s living in the interface again, the eye-face, his expanded mind racing like electrons through the circuits, into the metal and crystal heart of the machine. He can see around the panzer a full 360 degrees, and there are other boards in his strange mental space for engine displays and the panzer systems. He does a system check and a comp check and a weapons check, watching the long rows of green as they light up. His physical perceptions are no longer in three dimensions: the boards overlap and intertwine as they weave in and out of the face, as they mirror the subatomic reality of the electronics and the data that are the dying day outside.
Neurotransmitters lick with their chemical tongues the metal and crystal in his head, and electrons spit from the chips, racing along the cables to the engine starters, and through a dozen sensors Cowboy feels the bladed turbines reluctantly turn as the starters moan, and then flame torches the walls of the combustion chambers and the blades spin into life with a screaming whine. Cowboy monitors the howling exhaust as it belches fire. On his mental displays Cowboy can see the Dodger and Arkady and the ground crew watching the panzer through the blurred exhaust haze, and he watches fore and aft and checks the engine displays and sees another set of green lights and knows it’s time to move.
The howling of the engines beats at his senses. Warren’s spent the last week tuning them, running check after check, making certain they will perform beyond expectations. They’re military surplus jets, monsters. They aren’t built to ride this close to the ground, and without Cowboy’s straddling this mutant creature every inch of the way they’re going to run away with him.
Inside the rubber-tasting mask his lips draw back from his teeth and he grins: he will ride this beast across the Alley and through the web of traps set up this side of the Mississippi and add another layer of permeable sky to the distance separating him from the lesser icons of glory that are the other panzerboys, more proof that the flaming corn-alcohol throbs through his chest like blood and that the shrieking exhaust flows from his lu
ngs like breath, that his eyes beam radar and his fingers can flick missiles forth like pebbles. Through his sensors he can taste the exhaust and see the sky and the prairie sunset, and part of his mind can feel the throbbing radio energies that are the enemy’s search planes, and it seems to him that the watchers and the escort vehicles are suddenly lessened, separated from him by more than a few hundred yards–– he will be taking the panzer over the Line, and they will not, and he looks at them from within his interface, from his immeasurable height of radiant glory and pities them for what they do not know.
At the moment the ultimate beneficiaries of his run–– the hospitals in New England, the thirdmen, his own portfolio, possibly the immeasurably distant, insanely gluttonous creatures who ride their Orbital factories and look down on the Earth as a fast-depleting treasure house to be plundered–– all these fade down long redshifting lines, as if blurred by distance and the flaming jet’s exhaust. The reality is here in the panzer. Discontent is banished. Action is the thing, and All.
He diverts a part of the jets exhaust and another set of fans whine into life, lifting the ground-effect panzer with a lurch onto its inflatable self-sealing cushion. The Pony Express will deliver the mail or know the reason why. Microwave chatter spins around his ears like gnats, and he wishes he could brush it away with his hands.
“Arkady wants to say a few words, Cowboy.” The voice is the Dodger’s, and Cowboy can tell he knows this isn’t a good idea.
“I’m sort of getting ready here,” Cowboy says.
“I know that.” Shortly, sounding as if his mouth is full of tobacco: “Arkady thinks it’s important.”
Cowboy concedes, watching the green lights, seeing maps flash behind his eyes. “Whatever Arkady wants,” he says.
Arkady has the mic too close to his lips. His p’s and b’s sound like cannon shots. Put the damn headset on your head, Cowboy thinks in irritation. That’s what it’s for, not to hold it to your fucking mouth.
“I’ve got a lot at stake here, Cowboy,” Arkady says. “I’ll be in the plane and with you all the way.”
“I am comforted as hell to hear that, Arkady Mikhailovich.” Cowboy knows Arkady will have paid off a lot of his costs with the other thirdmen, who wanted the Missouri privateers broken as much as he did.
There is a pause on the other end as Arkady digests this:
“I want you to come back,” Arkady says. Cowboy can hear the sounds of temper as if from far away. The thirdman’s voice drums on and on, every plosive a barrage. “But I fixed up that machine for a reason, and I don’t want you to come back without it. And I don’t want you to come back without having used it. Understand? Those fucking privateers are gonna get what’s coming to ’em.”
“Ten-four,” Cowboy says, and before Arkady can ask what the fuck ten-four is supposed to mean, Cowboy opens his throttles and the howl, heard with utter clarity over Arkady’s mic, buries Arkady’s speech beneath its alcohol shriek. Though he can’t hear Arkady anymore, Cowboy is fairly certain that the distant yammering he’s hearing through his sockets contains a fair amount of abuse. He smiles.
“Adios, muchachitos.” Cowboy laughs, and takes the panzer off the road. The farmer here, a friend of free enterprise and true, is getting paid for his wheat being trampled every so often, and Cowboy is going to have a clear run for the Line. The radar detectors pick up only weak signals from far away and Cowboy knows no one’s looking at him.
The beast roars like the last lonely dinosaur and trembles as it gains way. Mental indicators climb their columns from blue to green to orange. Ripe wheat straw flies out behind in a plume. Cowboy has a steel guitar playing a lonesome cadenza somewhere in his mind. He cranks up the flame and is doing over a hundred when he blazes through some poor citizen’s bobwire and crosses the Line.
His lidar is forward-looking and strictly limited: it’s to keep him out of pits and gullies and let him know when there might be a house or vehicle sitting in his way. It sends out a fairly weak signal and it shouldn’t be detected by anything unless the detector is so close the first contact would be visual anyway. Kansas has most of its defenses out this way, and if he trips anything, it should be now.
The horizon is a blur of dark emptiness marked by an occasional silo. Any enemy radars are far away. The moon rises and the engines howl and Cowboy keeps his speed in check so as not to raise a dust signature that might be picked up on radar. He wants to save his systems for the real test. Missouri. Where the privateers crouch in the sky, snarling and ready to spring. Cattle scatter from the panzer’s scream. Robot harvesters sweep through the fields, standing like stately alien sentinels in pools of brilliant light, moving alone, unable to detect the panzer as it sweeps across the land. Cowboy gets a stronger radar signal to the north and knows a picket plane is coming his way. The panzer’s absorbent camouflage paint sucks up radar signal like a thirsty elephant, but Cowboy slows and turns, lowering his infrared profile and making a wide swing away from any trouble. The picket plane moves on, undisturbed. Mobile towers loom up like Neolithic monuments, awesomely expensive derricks built to inject a special bacteria into the bedrock below the eroded topsoil, bugs that will break down the stone and make new soil. Another eroded farm foreclosed by an Orbital bloc–– no small farmer could afford to replace topsoil this way. Cowboy suppresses a desire to ram the derricks and snarls at them instead.
The panzer crosses the Little Arkansas south of McPherson, and Cowboy knows he’ll make it across Kansas without trouble. The defenses are behind him. The only trouble will come if he rides right across the track of a state trooper when crossing a road, and even then the authorities will have to somehow scramble a chopper in time. He doesn’t think it will happen.
And it doesn’t. In the deep violet shadow of some crumbling grain silos near Gridley the panzer sweeps out of the darkness and scares the bejesus out of the sleeping kid in the cab of the fuel truck. Cowboy cycles his engines down and waits for the sweet cool alcohol to settle into the tanks. Already he can feel the pulsing radars questing out from the Missouri line. Stronger than anything he’s seen yet. The privateers are not going to be easy.
“They’re undercapitalized, Cowboy,” Arkady had told him. “They can’t afford to lose any equipment. They’ve got to score a lot of successes right away and get some cargo. Otherwise they’re in trouble.”
Since the Rock War, the U.S.A. had been balkanized far beyond the wildest dreams of the old states’ rights crowd. The so-called central government no longer had its hands on interstate commerce and the result was a wild rush to impose tariffs all across the Midwest. In the West, close to the spaceports in California and Texas where the finished goods came down from the factories in orbit, the borders were free, but the Midwest saw no reason why it shouldn’t profit from anything crossing its territory. A heavy duty was slammed on goods that passed through the states en route to elsewhere.
Which left the Northeast out of luck, as far as the distribution of Orbital-built products was concerned. They got some from the spaceports in the Florida Free Zone, but the Free Zone was under bloc control, and the Orbitals like to keep the market hungry for their product. Artificial scarcity was the name of the game, and the Northeast paid with its dwindling wealth for the scraps the Orbitals doled out. The West had more to offer the Orbitals, and the goods were cheaper and more abundant there–– cheap enough to ship them to the markets in the Northeast at a fat profit, so long as there wasn’t much duty to pay along the way.
And so the first atmosphere jocks rode their supersonic deltas across the Alley with their midnight loads of contraband. And the Midwest responded, first by sending up radar planes and armed interceptor aircraft, then, when the action shifted from planes to panzers, by strengthening their ground defenses.
And now, in Missouri, by licensing privateers. The states were unable to keep up with the changes in smuggling technology, and so they decided instead to license a local corporation to chase the contraband for them. The fact that the C
onstitution authorized only the federal government to grant letters of marque and reprisal had been ignored; the Constitution is a dead letter anyway, in the face of Orbital superiority.
The privateers are authorized to shoot to kill, and in addition to a hefty bounty are rewarded by ownership, free and clear, of whatever contraband they can secure. Reports spoke of impressive arrays of airborne radar, of heat sensors and weird sound detectors and aircraft full of sensing missiles and bristling with guns.
From Gridley Cowboy moves slowly northeast, taking his time, mapping the flying radar arrays. They are drone aircraft, ultralights under robot control, solar-powered to stay aloft forever, rising with the sun and gliding slowly earthward at night, only having to return to base for servicing every couple of months or so. They are in constant microwave communication with computers on the ground, ready to scramble aircraft if anything suspicious pops up. They are so light that radar-homing missiles can’t find them to shoot them down, and antiradiation homers would be spotted as they climbed, in plenty of time for the arrays to switch off before the missile arrives.
Cowboy is aiming for the wide area between New Kansas City and the Ozarks. People in the Ozarks are friendly, he knows, with a tradition of resistance to the people they call “the laws” that goes back at least to Cole Younger, but the terrain is too restrictive. Cowboy wants a fast run over the flat. The fact that this part of the state is where the privateers have concentrated their defenses is just a pleasant coincidence.
The sensor drones are turning lazy circles in the air as they glide downward on battery power, and Cowboy thinks he sees a pattern building that will allow him to slide into a blind spot that might last until he’s fifty miles the other side of the Missouri border. As his panzer slides down the crumbling banks of the Marais des Cygnes and tears across flat mudbanks and muddy water, it extrudes a directional antenna and spits a coded message to the west, to where Arkady and the Dodger wait in Arkady’s aircraft, turning its own circles over the plains of eastern Colorado.
Hardwired Page 6
