Hardwired

by Walter Jon Williams

  The cooling engines give out metallic crackles, and the doorframe, behind, is silvered with approaching dawn. Cowboy drags himself out of the hatch and climbs down the long frontal slope of armor, his boots sliding in the sticky hemp resin.

  “Where you folks from?” he asks.

  “New York. Buffalo.” The voice is young and scared. Cowboy nears them and sees a pair of ragged kids of sixteen or so, a boy and a girl, the both of them huddled in a single sleeping bag atop a small pile of old straw. A pair of threadbare rucksacks sits in a forlorn heap near them.

  “Heading west?” Cowboy asks.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m going east. Bet you’re tired of living on a diet of roasting ears,” Cowboy says. He lofts the trade pack and it thumps on concrete next to the pair. They flinch at the sound. “There’s some real food in there, freeze-dried and canned. Some good whiskey and cigarettes. And a check postdated to next Monday, for five thousand dollars.”

  There is silence, broken only by the sound of breathing and the scuttle of rats.

  “In case you don’t get the picture,” Cowboy says, “the check will only be good if I finish my run.”

  The two look at each other for a moment, then at Cowboy. “You don’t have to pay us,” the boy says quietly. “We wouldn’t–– we’re from the East, you know. We know what you’re doing. I wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for some bootleg antibiotics.”

  “Yeah. Well. Just consider the money a goodwill gesture,” Cowboy says, and turns away to place some remote sensors outside and close the barn doors.

  Time for a rest.

  Back in the panzer the cabin smells of sweat and adrenaline. Cowboy takes off the g-suit and removes the electrodes, then gives himself a sponge bath from one of his jerricans. He eats some prepared food that’s heavy on protein, drinks something orange-flavored and packed with replacement electrolytes. He rolls into the little bunk.

  The adrenaline still has him pumped up and all he can see behind his closed lids are the burning afterimages of maps and displays and engine grids climbing toward orange, of exploding fuel and rockets flaming through the night with pyrotechnic abandon. And, somewhere behind the neon throbbing visions, a little claw of resentment.

  It has always been enough to run the Alley, to mesh his soul with throbbing turbopumps and wailing afterburners, bringing the mail from one free zone to another. There was an ethic in it, clean and pure. It was enough to be a free jock on a free road, doing battle with those who would restrict him, keep him bound to the Earth as if he were nothing more than a mudboy. It hadn’t mattered what he was carrying. It was enough to know that, whatever the state of the rest of the country, the blue sky over his own head was the air of freedom.

  But of late there has been a suspicion that adherence to the ethic may not be enough. He knows that while it is one thing to be a warrior noble and true, it is another to be a dupe.

  Suppose you are an Orbital manufacturer, interested in keeping control of your markets on the planet. You’ve won all the political control that is necessary, and you’ve kept prices high by controlling supply. But still, you’re smart enough to know that where there is scarcity, black markets will develop. Most of the stuff–– the drugs and a lot of the hardware, anyway, if not the special alloys–– can still be made Earthside, but more expensively.

  If you know that the black market will develop anyway, why not develop it yourself? You can keep the thirdmen supplied with a trickle of product, enough to make themselves rich. You can afford enough muscle to keep the competition down, and in the meantime you are not only dominating the legitimate market, you are controlling supply in the underground as well. You can create and supply a demand in two separate markets, the legitimate and illegitimate.

  Where does Arkady get his cargo? The question was beginning to have an important sound to it.

  But now the adrenaline has burned out of Cowboy’s body and his aches are dragging him down. He won’t find any answers in a deserted barn in Missouri and his thoughts have become muddled. It’s time to slip under the narrow wool trade blanket, marked with the line that means its value had once been equated with a beaver pelt, and prepare his mind and body for the last lunge across the Alley.

  It’s late afternoon before he wakes, and finds the kids gone. The postdated check flutters from one of the panzer’s aerials. Cowboy plucks it from the spike and looks at it for a while, wonders about ethics and debts, symbols and actions, and the thing that in olden times they called honor. Somewhere near here, he knows, two young people walk beneath another piece of free and lucid sky.

  He does his chores, replacing the sensors that were blown away by the privateers, scraping off most of the hemp resin along with the corn and wheat chaff that’s adhered to it, spraying antiradiation paint over the dings in the Chobham. The minigun has really given the craft a working over, and it’s lucky more systems weren’t breached. He doesn’t have much in the way of weapons left, but then there’s only a few miles to the Big Muddy.

  He sits in his padded couch and goes into the eye-face, listening to his sensors for a few minutes. Traffic seems normal. But then, as the day wanes, there’s a lot of talk to and from some airport tower in the neighborhood. The place must be only a few miles away because he can hear each syllable clearly. The chatter is uncoded and seems innocuous, but a lot of the aircraft seem to have the same prefixes. Cowboy begins to find this interesting.

  Suppose you were a privateer commander angry over a couple of losses the previous night. Suppose you’d worked out that the panzer you were chasing was beaten up, possibly disabled, and in any case couldn’t have made it over the Mississippi before dawn. Suppose you wanted to get some revenge for your friends who had been burned beyond recognition in a Missouri cornfield the previous night.

  You’d concentrate your forces on the airfield nearest to where the panzer is waiting for nightfall, and you’d have some picket planes move over the area with the best in detection technology, and the rest would be sitting on the runway apron ready to vector in on the panzer once it’s spotted, and turn it into a lightly armored grease spot in some scorched little piece of prairie. That’s what you’d do.

  Cowboy puts a map on the display and finds something called the Philadelphia Community Airport only four miles away. It’s far too small to have this kind of traffic coming in and out, and it’s just over a ridge and through some woods. Cowboy begins to smile.

  By dusk he’s strapped in his couch and has the engines sweetly warming. He reverses them gently and backs out of the barn, then moves at low speed across some half-rusted bobwire and along the length of the ridge, not quite daring to put his radar signature, however briefly, on top of it. There’s a dirt road here and he finds it, threads along it through a grove of pine that carries with it a memory of the smell and the sound of sweet breezes, the soft pillow of needles underfoot. He leaves the road and moves through a damp bottom, where the sound of his engines is muffled by leaves and moss. Then, moving in a roundabout track, he climbs a woody plateau, nudging young pine, until his expanded vision sees a little radar tower silhouetted against the sunset.

  They are all there, a dozen or more warcraft squatting like evil metal cicadas, sunset flames reflecting off their polished bodies, the barrels of their guns, the pointed noses of the weapons in their pods. The airships have slogans and cartoons painted on their noses, evocative of swift mechanical violence, warrior machismo, or the trust of the gambler in the instrument of his passion: Death from Above, PanzerBlaster, Sweet Judy Snakeyes, Ace of Spades. There are a few techs walking about on the apron, tools in their hands. Cowboy permits himself a moment of adrenaline triumph before he cuts loose.

  As the panzer trembles on the verge of the clearing Cowboy has a brief image of a runner poised on splayed fingertips, his feet in the blocks, his flesh molding the sinew in which the coiled energy waits, a faultless perfection, for the end of stillness. He unleashes the power and a covey of quail burst like scatter
shot from before the panzer’s oncoming bow. The engines cycle from murmur to thunder to shriek, and Cowboy can see the techs stand for a moment of frozen horror as the panzer lunges from the trees, mashing down a fence like an armored cyclone, a piece of roaring mechanical vengeance straight from the Inferno–– and then the men in coveralls scatter, crying warning.

  Too late. The armored panzer is traveling at over a hundred across the flat ground before it brushes aside the first helicopter. The panzer is heavier by far and the Ace of Spades folds like the hollow death-white abandoned skin of an insect. Cowboy’s popped up his minigun turret from beneath its armored cover and has it firing behind him into the wreckage, sparking off the fuel. Sweet Judy Snakeyes crumbles in front of the armored skirts, then a coleopter named Death from Above, then another called Hanging Judge. Through one of his sensors he catches a glimpse of pilots tumbling out of the airport lounge, coffee cups still in their hands, eyes and mouths wide as they watch the conflagration. Then burning fuel begins to set off ammunition and the pilots drop their drinks and scatter like the quail for cover.

  Steel and flaming aluminum alloy storm on the Chobham. In the end Cowboy counts fourteen wrecks on the runway verge. He mashes down some more fence and follows the Salt River to the Father of Waters, crossing between Locks 21 and 22, unmolested by things that fly in the night. Though the sun is long gone, even from deep in Illinois he can still see the western horizon glowing red. He suspects he will hear no more of privateers.

  The Illinois defenses face north against a breed of blond, apple-cheeked panzerboys who run butter and cheese across the Line from Wisconsin, and Cowboy expects no trouble. As he gentles the hovercraft up to a fueling barge on the Illinois River, Cowboy decides it’s time to face the music and extrudes a directional microwave antenna and points it at the western horizon.

  “Pony Express here,” he says. “Sorry to be a little late with the report, but I got myself an antenna shot away.” There is a kind of angry growl of static in reply, b’s and p’s like magnum rounds, and Cowboy grins as he turns down the volume and talks right over the voice.

  “I’m not picking you up very well, but that’s okay,” he says. “I’m in Illinois right now, and I thought I’d mention that I’ve just about run out of Alley and that in the last twenty-four hours I’ve accounted for sixteen aircraft belonging to those undercapitalized bastards. You can read it on the screamsheets tomorrow. Print me some copies for my scrapbook.”

  The buzzing sound in his ears is miraculously stilled, and Cowboy grins again. “Adios,” he says, and he turns off the radio and sits in sweet and blissful silence while he watches the fuel gauges climbing upward, toward where he floats in the sky, a distant speck in the eyes of the other panzerboys, so high in the steely pure azure that to the mudboys and dirtgirls of Earth he is invisible, an icon of liberation. He has not simply run the Alley, he has beaten it, smashed the new instrument of oppression, and left it a mass of half-melted girders and blackened plexiglas amid a pool of flaming fuel and skyrocketing ammunition.

  Kentucky is a state that figures to make more money from free-spending thirdmen and panzerboys than they can from taxing what they do, and it’s an easy ride across Egypt to the Ohio. Burning across the river, he encounters none of the riverine patrol hovercraft that Ohio has out this way. Cowboy follows some nameless little creek up into the free state until it comes to a farm road, and then he makes another radio call explaining where he is.

  What he’s doing is legal in Kentucky, but the state does not appreciate large potentials for sudden violence within its borders, so all the stuff in the weapons pods is very much against the law. Cowboy has to wait up his little farm road for a crew to come along and pull them from the vehicle, and while he waits he takes the torn postdated check from his pocket and looks at it for a long while. By the time a truck full of mudboys comes bouncing along the corrugated road, he’s got things figured out.

  It matters, he decides. It matters where the chloramphenildorphine is coming from and it matters who bankrolls Arkady. In Cowboy’s hand is something that represents an obscure, indefinable debt to an anonymous pair of Alley rats, a debt as hard and cutting as Solingen steel, and the obligation is simply to find out.

  It is no longer enough to be the best. Somehow, as well, it matters to be wise. To know on whose behalf he wields the sword.

  And if he discovers the worst? That the thirdmen are masks worn by the Orbital power? Then another debt is called. The interest alone is staggering, will take years to pay. But he’s called himself a citizen of the free and immaculate sky too long to accept the notion that his world of air has bars on it.

  There is a polite knock on the hatch, and he puts the check back in his pocket. The mudboys are telling him it’s time to move. Somewhere in his mind, a steel guitar is singing…

  Chapter Four

  The city is melting, its outlines blurring in the August heat, the buildings swaying.

  Sarah closes her eyes and rests her temple against the cool metal frame of the window. Images of flame pulse orange and red on the backs of her eyelids. Just below the window frame, the ventilator seems to whisper, to urge her in a strange, occluded tongue toward some course of action. She does not know what it wants. She shakes her head, feeling exhaustion beating at her.

  “Cunningham’s people are offering money for you, mi hermana.” It is the soft voice of the Hetman. “I have let it be known that anyone who accepts their offer is no longer my friend. But that can only go so far. There are many who will do their job for them. And they have only to keep a watch on Daud. ”

  Sarah opens her eyes. The city melts. “I know,” she says.

  She turns to face him. They are standing in a corner of the hospital waiting room, a circular chamber cantilevered high above the city in a corner of the hospital tower, its mirrored windows facing in a dozen directions like multiple insect eyes. A vid set blithers in a corner, stared at without interest by two Cuban women, sisters, each with vast makeup eyes and eyebrows painted like wings. Their father is in the last stages of viral Huntington’s, his mind gone: he thinks they are harpies, come to eat his liver while he is chained to the rock of his disease. Passively, at a distance, they await his dying. Near them a young man cries softly into a succession of paper tissues. Twisted pastel colors litter the floor near his feet like broken flowers. Michael’s eyes are watery, red-rimmed. His gestures are jangled. Sarah suspects he’s coming down from something.

  “I have a job for you,” he says. “It’s not even illegal, and it pays in gold, very well.” He names a sum, and from the size of it Sarah knows it has a high risk factor. Michael is an honorable man, at least as thirdmen go, but charity is not one of his traits.

  Sarah walks to a chair and lets herself sink in it. Orange plastic cushions, trying to be cheerful. She puts her head down. The air is heavy with the smell of stale cigarettes. “Who will I be working for?” Hopelessly.

  Daud lies in a room a few doors away amid the blinking eyes that are the LEDs of his machines. He is conscious now, pain masked by doses of endorphins far greater than he took even at the height of his addiction. His body is striped by bright pink tissue, all factory-new, including a whole lower arm. His legs are still swathed in gel, awaiting transplant of tissue and muscle. And the transplants await new funds.

  Sarah is running low on chloramphenildorphin. It was supposed to be scarce and in high demand, but a new source appeared just when she needed to pay for Daud’s first bills, the price plummeted. Normally she would have waited for the price to rise again, but the hissing machines that kept Daud alive were indifferent to market conditions... She had to put the ’dorphin on the street, even at the lowest value in months. She wonders if Cunningham had somehow arranged it. She is poison now, and knows it. Her usual sources of income are gone. Normally she works as a bodyguard, but who wants a guard who will draw fire? And as for the special jobs...she hasn’t had an offer. There is word that she comes tangled up with matters no one else
wants to touch, that her profile is far too high. She can make a few street deals, move things for other people who don’t want to move their action personally, but that won’t pay for the hospital and would also expose her, keep her too much in the public view, never knowing if any of the people she is hustling for will be eager to collect Cunningham’s reward.

  So. “Who will I be working for?” As if the answer mattered.

  Michael the Hetman stares out the window, his face bleached by the sun. “For me,” he says. “There is a job...” He screws up his face and shrugs. “There is maybe something wrong with it. I can’t tell. Everything seems right, but the feeling is wrong. I want you to watch it for me.”

  Sarah looks up at him, wondering if this is another oblique warning like the one from Cunningham. As if Michael is maybe finding her too hot to shelter anymore, taking too much pressure from the people he does business with. Wants to move her out where she will be a target.

  “Who’s dealing?”

  As if that answer mattered. She would have to take the job no matter how bad it smelled.

  “I’ve taken delivery of a new shipment,” Michael says. He frowns and moves to the next chair. His calf-high soft, leather boots creak as he sits. “Crystal computer matrices,” he says thoughtfully. “Fifteen thousand of them. High quality, from a source that’s never delivered so well before. New boys just reaching the big markets, maybe. Or maybe thirdmanning for someone else. I can’t tell.”

  “You want me to guard it?”

  “Yes. Among other things.” The Hetman sighs and rubs his chin. “Normally it would take me some time to move that kind of quantity. Months. But now there’s someone up north, in Pennsylvania, who approached Andrei, wanting matrices in quantity. Will pay well for them.” His liquid eyes turn to Sarah. “I can think of no reason not to sell. Andrei wants the deal badly. But there are too many coincidences here, mi hermana.”