Hardwired

by Walter Jon Williams

  The answering signal comes quickly, a strong broadcast to Arkady’s people on the Kansas– Missouri border. There are other panzerboys out there, standing ready by their vehicles, waiting for the word... and when they receive it, their own panzers will hit the plains, moving swiftly and then stopping, tearing through fields in zigzag patterns, sending dust signatures aloft, tracking radar and infrared patterns across the computer displays of the privateers. The laws will have to expend a lot of effort tracking them down and apprehending them. And when found, the decoy panzerboys will surrender meekly enough---since they carry no contraband and will only be fined for the amount of bobwire they flattened during their runs, and maybe do a little time for reckless endangerment. Arkady will cover the fines and legal fees, as well as their generous salaries. If the worst happens, their widows and orphans will have the benefit of insurance. It’s well-paid work, and a training ground for ambitious panzerboys who want to run the Line.

  But after the signal to the other panzerboys comes the Dodger’s voice, dry as the Portales plains. “Arkady Mikhailovich would appreciate a little more information, here, Cowboy,” he says. “He wants to know why you didn’t report earlier. ”

  “They can trace a message these days, Dodger.”

  The Dodger is silent for a while, getting a lecture from Arkady no doubt, and when his voice returns, it is less good-humored. “A squirt transmission via microwave is next to untraceable,” he says. “Arkady says you should have reported when you got past the Kansas Defenses.”

  “Sorry,” Cowboy says cheerfully. “But I’m damn close to the Missouri line right now and I would just as soon not have to keep up this conversation while I’m trying to work.”

  There is another pause. “Arkady reminds you that he has a big investment in your panzer, and he wants to be kept informed of what his investment is doing.”

  “I aim to give him a nice return on his money,” Cowboy says. “I don’t plan to waste time with a lot of chatter. I’ve got a window right now, and I’m taking it. See you.” And he switches off, making a note to send Arkady some worry beads from the East when he gets there.

  The panzer climbs out of the Marais des Cygnes and increases its speed as it begins its run east. The drumming of corn on the bow increases to a steady hammer. Engine gauges are running orange to red. Green lights everywhere else. Steel guitars sing like angels in the mind and Missouri wails a siren song in accompaniment. Delivering the mail is a splendid thing. The decoy panzerboys are causing a stir, and more radar arrays are being turned on, the ones unused so far in the hope their sudden appearance will catch the smugglers by surprise.

  Cowboy’s blind spot is still a blank. He throws caution to the wind and decides to red out the engines. A half-heard message from his body signals he is being punched back in his seat, but he’s got other things to think about. The panzer is airborne half the time, tearing up the low hills and flying over the crests, throwing corn and scattering wire, its voice a madwoman’s wail.

  Neurons flicker in Cowboy’s mind, pulsing their messages to his crystal, keeping the craft stable as it punches up and down. He’s deep into the face as the control surfaces invade his mind, riding the wire edge of stability, skating the brink. Cowboy knows there will be deep bruises under his restraining straps, even through the padding.

  He crosses the Missouri line between Louisburg and the rusting monument to the Marais des Cygnes Massacre. Parched Missouri is waiting for rain, and his dusty rooster tail is towering a hundred yards, but there’s no one to see it. The control surfaces are getting used to the buffeting they’re taking, and the movement is easier.

  And then radar pulses from directly above as a new sensor drone is switched into the array. Cowboy’s blind spot has become pistol-hot and the dust signature must look like a flaming arrow in the night. Cowboy is shutting systems down from red to orange to amber and trying to make himself smaller, but the radar is right overhead and there’s no way to get out of its way. He slows down the lunging panzer and dives over the banks of the South Grand. His water plume is a lot lower than the dust and he wonders if he’s made a successful evasion, but then other airborne arrays begin to flick into existence in the nearby sky and he knows what’s going to happen. His own radar shows a fishing rowboat frozen in place on the still water, and the panzer lunges for the bank, avoiding it. He cools the engines from amber to green-best to save fuel for later. He decides it’s time to listen to what the laws have to say and switches on his police-band antenna. The privateers’ transmissions are coded but the state cops’ are not, and with a part of his expanded mind he listens to their calls of frustration as they try, with four-wheel vehicles, to follow the panzerboys as they whip their way across country. Occasionally a privateer controller comes on the air to give them advice. Cowboy has the impression that the state laws are somewhat reluctant to cooperate with free-lance mercenary enforcement, something he more or less suspected.

  The radars seem to be circling more randomly now, as if they’ve lost him at least part of the time. The panzer is into Johnson County before Cowboy detects a radar boring toward him from the east, low enough to be attached to an aircraft. He triggers the explosive bolts that release the shrouds covering his weapons pods; the panzer will be less aerodynamic now and will require watching at speed. Cowboy cycles his engine displays from green to blue and makes a wide swing to the south, hoping to avoid the craft, and for a moment it seems to be working; the aircraft continues on to the north, but then suddenly it jinks, swooping directly for the panzer. Cowboy feels a wave of alcohol leaping through his heart as the engine displays rocket up to red, the panzer shuddering as it spits flame. For a moment it tries to climb aloft, the wind humming through the weapons pods like the southeast trades through a windjammer’s rigging, but gravity pulls hard on its vector and the panzer crashes down onto its cushion. As the indicators max out, Cowboy looses a radar decoy missile and kicks the panzer into a shuddering left turn, its starboard side scraping soil as the panzer mashes its cushion down. The missile continues on a straight course, its wide wings extended, keeping low to the ground. It has no radarabsorbent paint and so its signature should look about the size of an absorbent panzer; and its exhaust should attract anyone looking at infrared.

  Cowboy kicks on the afterburners and makes tracks for the Father of Waters. Behind him he can see flashes in the night sky as the aircraft fires off its weaponry at his decoy. He hopes there are no citizens below: those sheaf rockets look really unpleasant.

  There are no explosions he can see; the privateer aircraft continues its course for a while, slowing, and Cowboy slows, too, minimizing his infrared signal. Strong radar pulses are still coming from right overhead. Cowboy hears from the state laws that two of the decoys have been caught, which means more resources available for chasing him. The privateer is beginning to circle back in his direction, and Cowboy sees the strange silhouettes of a metal forest on the horizon; he changes course again and dives into it.

  It’s a forest of rectennas, miles wide, receiving the low-energy microwave coming down from a solar power satellite high above, a burning fixed star in the heavens that symbolizes the prostrate Earth’s dependence on the Orbital power. Cowboy threads his way neatly through the metal web on night vision alone. He’s probably confused any signal the enemy radars are getting, but the privateer craft is still getting closer. The panzer emerges into a clearing, where a metal maintenance shack rusts on its slab of concrete, and in that brief moment Cowboy fires a chaff rocket straight up and dives among the alloy trees once more.

  The chaff rocket climbs three miles and bursts, and suddenly Cowboy’s gear is picking up radar signals and low-energy microwaves bouncing from everywhere. The chaff, wafting gently down from altitude, is composed of aluminum strips, one out of ten of which are implanted with a minichip and a tiny power source that records and then plays back any radio signal it receives. On Cowboy’s radar displays it looks as if a vast radio Christmas tree has suddenly bloomed a
bove the prairie. The people controlling the power grid are probably going crazy. Once out of the rectenna forest, Cowboy kicks in the afterburners again. The aircraft’s signal is lost in all the chaff and he figures it’s time to run. His computer maps show a riverbed ahead. It seems a good time to go fishing.

  The riverbed is dry and winding, but it leaves the enemy craft far behind. There’s a lot of coded radio traffic flying around, each message echoed by the chaff as it slowly flutters down. There’s a frantic quality to it, and there’s one message from the privateers that requests assistance from the state cops, broadcast in the clear and repeated with endless, echoing lunatic efficiency by the chaff. Cowboy grins and climbs out of the riverbed, running northeast.

  It looks as if the chase craft are all down and fueling because he’s well across the Missouri north of Columbia before he runs into any more trouble. He is expecting it, cooling his engines on green and utilizing cover, because the police radios are telling him another two of his decoy panzerboys have been taken and the rest driven to ground. Suddenly there’s radar pulsing from directly overhead again and another radar dopplering in from the northwestern horizon, as if it’s just hopped up from somebody’s airfield. Cowboy slows and turns away: no good. He looks for a piece of extensive woods and can’t find one, and suddenly there’s another radar signature arcing in fast from the south. He fires another chaff rocket and alters course once again. The two seem confused for a moment by the chaff, but then the southern one corrects its course, followed by the northern craft. The southern craft has probably spotted him on infrared and is vectoring the other one in.

  Targeting displays flash like scarlet madness in the interior of Cowboy’s mind. A snarl from his throat echoes the amplified roar of the combustion chambers, and the panzer gouges earth as it spins right, toward the oncoming southern radar source. Cowboy turns his own radar off to discourage homing missiles and navigates on his visual sensors alone, his mind making lightning decisions, neurotransmitters clattering against his headswitches like hail, the interface encompassing the whole flashing universe, the panzer and its systems, the corn thundering under the armored skirts, the blithering chaff, the two hostile privateers burning out of the night. His craft threatens to leave the Earth; its bones moan with stresses and the weapons pods shriek in the wind. The air is full of dismembered corn. Two fences are flattened, and the tall silhouette of a silo spears the blackness, the panzer’s optics making it seem to curl in toward him, threatening. He can see the enemy now, a conventional helicopter speeding toward him at tree level, its minigun flashing. He fires an antiradiation homer right between the privateer’s eyes just as the Chobham over his head begins to ring to the sound of cannonfire. Sparks flood his exterior displays and he flinches as he loses an eye.

  Then he is past, and through the armor and the bucking of the vehicle he can hear the roar of the chopper as its blades flog apart the overhead sky. The antiradiation homer missed: too much chaff confusing things, or the copter got its radars off in time. But now there’s another sound; the tone of a heat-seeker asking its permission to fly, and Cowboy triggers the bird and hauls the panzer to the left, feeling as from a dim distance the lurch as the craft slaloms over a hillcrest in a spray of corn dust; sliding sideways on its cushion.

  The chopper dies in a flame of blazing glory, scoring the field in an eruption of fuel and weaponry. The silo stands in rearview like a tombstone, flickering red. There is mad chatter on the radio, a scrambled microwave screaming, still recognizably human, amplified and echoed to the point of yammering lunacy by the falling chaff. The privateer coming from the northwest has just seen what happened to his comrade. The panzer is trying to turn on a reverse camber, skidding on a bed of corn silk as gravity and momentum try to turn it over. Cowboy can feel the spin of the gyros in his head, trembling as the hovercraft rides the brink.

  The privateer craft wails overhead with a banshee shriek and Cowboy can see its underbody reflecting the red flickering of its comrade’s pyre. A coleopter, turbines throbbing inside the rotating shrouds that top the stubby wing tips. It’s a light jet fighter that can take off vertically and hover, combining the best qualities of a subsonic pursuit craft and helicopter, though at a considerable expense in fuel consumption. Cowboy hopes to find a window to launch another missile, but the blazing fuel just over the rise is confusing his sensors and the coleopter suddenly banks into a swift turn, scattering thermite decoys that burn like miniature parachute suns, and the window that fluttered open for a second is gone. The panzer hurls itself above the rise again and skates along the edge of the red glare cast by the scattered chopper, heading for the spire of a silo in the distance.

  Plans flicker through Cowboy’s liquid-crystal switches with the fluid electric grace of heat lightning. The smartest thing for the privateer to do is to keep the panzer in sight and guide others in without risking itself. In that case, Cowboy will have to go after the coleopter; but on the other hand, radar is still hopelessly confused and the coleopter can’t sort out the infrared signal of the panzer from that of the wreck, and this is Cowboy’s chance to fly. He decides to cycle up to red and run for the safety of Egypt on the other side of the Mississippi.

  But the privateer pilot must have eyes like singularities, devouring worlds, or there’s some remarkably fine equipment on the ’opter–– maybe one of those sound detectors?–– because the coleopter comes out of its bank and heads right for the panzer’s exhaust. No error. Cowboy cuts in the afterburners and hopes there’s some cover just over the horizon. His antiradiation homers won’t work in the chaff, and neither will his radar-directed missiles. He can’t get a good infrared signature from the coleopter’s bow and so the heat-seekers won’t be lucky, either. The terrain is irregular, and suddenly the corn is replaced by hemp, high as an elephant’s eye and bursting with resin. That will make the ground less slick than the corn did, maneuver less critical. The enemy pilot is burning right for him in apparent anger over what happened to his friend, and Cowboy knows he can use that anger as an aikido master uses his opponent’s kinetic energy against him–– but first the engines have to max red, afterburners bleeding alcohol fire, and the panzer has to take some punishment.

  Cowboy is airborne as he floats across the crest of a rise, and a tug on the controls slews the skimming panzer to starboard just as the coleopter triggers a weapons pod and half a dozen shaped-charge rockets set the hemp ablaze. There is pounding on the Chobham, and a blaze of red lights on Cowboy’s displays tells him that one of his own weapons pods has been penetrated by a jug-sized minigun round that’s wiped out a couple hundred K’s worth of advanced electronics. The sensors aiming his own minigun are shot away just as he decides to trigger some rounds. The neurotransmitters clattering against Cowboy’s brainchips are smoking with the sour tang of adrenaline, and the coleopter pilot seems to have tempered anger with caution because he’s matching speed without overshooting, and so Cowboy has no choice but to rocket on across the good earth of Missouri, building momentum, jinking left and right, clawing against the hemp for the leverage that will send his enemy cartwheeling to the mat. The minigun hammers, hammers. The panzer’s sensors flare and die.

  And then Cowboy opens new floodgates of alcohol and his engines cry in anguish as in calculating fever he slams in his thrust reversers. Even through its chemical slumber his body wails as the straps dig in. Half the comp displays are frozen in utter shock. The coleopter staggers as it tries to maintain its position, but it’s too close to the earth to stall in hope of losing momentum and its flaps are already fully deployed. The pilot knows what’s going to happen and is loosing thermite flares even before his half-controlled and thoroughly doomed craft whispers overhead and the tone sounds on Cowboy’s aural crystal. Cowboy’s missiles leap from his remaining pod, the port turbine explodes with red energy, and the coleopter whimpers in metallic pain and corkscrews in.

  The panzer flees across the red-scored night. Egypt is near, but so is the dawn.

 
Staggering systems reawaken; Cowboy gentles the engines and manages to keep them alive. Time to find a place to hide and wait out the day.

  Cowboy gets across another fifty miles of country before being reined in by dawn and the sense of an approaching wave of enemy. There are thousands of abandoned farms and barns here, old privately owned places that couldn’t compete with the Orbital-controlled agriplexes and their robot farms. Cowboy knows of quite a few where the old buildings, next to the robot-farmed cornfields, remain empty.

  A new taste comes through the face mask as Cowboy’s body is reawakened. A barn appears on his sensors, one of the long, narrow type, rectangular in cross section, designed to store baled hay in the days before the Orbitals built their big warehouses, one for every hundred farms. Carefully, with gentle precision, he shoulders aside the heavy double doors and guides the panzer into the concrete-walled barn. He remembers, just before he shuts off the engines, that he forgot to send Arkady a message.

  Well, let him watch the news and find out that way. Cowboy will just tell him he couldn’t get a signal through all the chaff.

  With a touch of regret, Cowboy unfaces. Waves of delayed pain flame into his mind as the displays slip into night. His body is bruised and aching and slick with sweat. He takes the carbine from its scabbard and pops the hatch.

  The barn smells like must and unburnt hydrocarbons. Cowboy turns the Kikuyu eyes to infrared and scans the barn. He can hear the scuttle of rats. With his hardwired nerves he can fire the carbine with perfect accuracy at anything the eyes can see.

  And the eyes can see two people, huddled under some ancient straw in a concrete corner.

  Cowboy pauses for a moment, straining to find the signature of weapons, and then, keeping the carbine in his hand, he reaches below for a trade pack.