COWBOYHELPRENOCOWBOYHELPRENOCOWBOYHELPRENO
Adrenaline shrieks up Cowboy’s neck. He screams and yanks the studs from his head, the interface snapping out of his mind. Looking at the silent crystal display in front of him, he sits in the Packard and hears his heart crashing in his chest. He reaches a trembling hand out of the car window and yanks the comp’s cable from the telephone.
They’ve found him, he thinks. There are people on their way to kill him, and he hasn’t brought a bodyguard with him. He looks over each shoulder, trying to decide whether to head straight back to the Dodger’s or try an evasive pattern through the mountains.
He leans back against the cushioned headrest and puts his hands on the instrument panel in front of him, straightening his arms, trying to stop the trembling. He’s got to face in again to get the car moving, but he doesn’t want to touch the studs, to see those glowing crystal letters pulsing out their message.
Cowboy moves forward and clears everything out of the car’s RAM, which should take care of any more ghostly communications from Reno, then reaches out and takes the studs in his hands. The trembling has almost gone away.
He puts them in his head. He’s heading straight back to the Dodger’s, at the fastest possible speed. He’s pretty sure he can run any pursuers off the road.
Time to find out, anyway.
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Michael the Hetman lights a cigarette with a match that trembles. His eyes are deep and rimmed in red. “Too bad,” he said. “I was afraid my source might not be genuine. I’m sorry I was right.”
“Those people were good,” Sarah says. Fear rushes along her nerves in little packets, prickling the down on her arms. She stuffs her hands in her pockets to control her own shaking. Her mouth is dry and longs for the touch of cool citrus; tastes instead the dry refrigerated air of the Hetman’s study.
Michael reaches for a squeeze bottle of vodka, lets it fall in a thin silver stream into a pair of glasses. “It seemed worth a chance,” he says.
Sarah has spent the night huddled in a doorway with only her heartbeat for company, that and the taste of her own sweat. Earlier she’d been waiting with five other people for the Laffite snagboy that was supposed to come by with an attaché case of pharmaceuticals and only a single amateur guard, but either the information was part of a setup or the snagboy had smelled something in the air, because suddenly there were two big armored cars wailing down the street with muzzles pointing from the black reflective windows, gunfire echoes ringing from the hard surfaces of the buildings as teflon-coated bullets drilled the concrete and turned brick to powder. The people inside the cars were hardwired and fast, and though Sarah was careful enough to choose a post with an escape route, it was still only luck that she got away, the cars chasing others while she ran through a night that had become a shadowy monster with humid compost breath and infrared scanners for eyes, its laugh like the chatter of an automatic weapon. The fight had lasted only a few seconds. The rest of the night hours were spent in the doorway, feeling the moist urban grit of the sweating wall against her cheek, waiting while the cars patrolled the broken streets, looking for survivors.
She should put some money down on tonight’s body count. It’s going to be higher than usual.
Sarah takes the glass of vodka from Michael’s hand and lets it ease slowly down her throat, a cold alcohol fire. “It could have bought me another week,” Michael says, and sits in a deep chair of chrome and black leather. He looks at her with his liquid spiderwebbed eyes.
“I’ve got it worked out,” he says quietly. “I’ve got eight months before everything falls apart. Your bringing back those crystal hearts gave me one of those months.”
He leans back in the chair, gazing at the dark acoustic tiles of the ceiling. Even holding the arms of the chair his hands tremble. “Tempel cut off my sources, but I can get by with hijacking for a while, bribery, running things out of my labs–– all that and what I have stored. As soon as the war started I borrowed as much as I could, because I knew my credit would never be as good. I wanted to be in debt to a lot of people, I wanted me to be worth something to them alive.”
Sarah closes her eyes, seeing night, sudden movement, spotlight glare, the sheen of laser holograms reflecting off the polished, speeding hood of a rushing car.
“I can fight the war unimpaired for six months,” Michael says, his soft accent the only sound in this soundproofed fortress. “After that I won’t be able to pay off the police anymore, and then they’ll start raiding me. Income will start to decline. After seven months I won’t be able to pay my Maximum Law guards and I’ll have to hire nonprofessionals. Sooner or later one of my friends will decide I’m hurting him too badly just by staying alive.”
Sarah opens her eyes to see Michael looking at her, an amused expression on his face.
“You’re the only one I can trust with this,” he says. “You’re the only one who can’t betray me. They want you, too.”
“I can’t help, Hetman,” she says. “I can’t change reality.”
“I know you can’t,” the Hetman says. His gaze turns from her, becoming the eyes of a gambler focused on the wheel as he waits for the silver ball to find his slot. “We can just keep moving,” he says. “Just keep things in the air. And when they fall”– he gives a little shrug– “we’ll try to run, and we can hope we no longer matter enough for them to come after us.”
Sarah looks into the vodka glass, seeing it reflect Michael’s dark refrigerated interior. Try not to matter, she thinks, perhaps they won’t notice and they’ll let you live. Matter the way Michael and Cowboy matter and they’ll take you down. Only the rats survive, never the lions. And rats never guard each other’s back.
ORBITAL COPS RAID TEXAS WAREHOUSE
HOME-BUILT WEAPONS PLANT UNCOVERED
ROCKETS BELIEVED USED IN SMUGGLING
Pony Express, a piece of the night in motion, glides along its parabola like a bow over a violin, making delicate music. Cowboy’s in the eye-face again, feeling the cold air whispering over the matte-black fuselage of the delta, his nerves thrilling to the wind-whisper of liberation as he lofts high over the Rockies. His metal eyes search the night sky for infrared signatures. This isn’t a mail run. Cowboy is hunting.
He had driven home like a madman after the day in Cimarron, feeling Reno or whatever was behind Reno clawing its way up his back like a rush of adrenaline. He’d seen no one that day, no one following, not even a suspicious glance. No sign of an enemy in the next two weeks. He hasn’t faced into a telephone since. Whatever was behind that message, it is more than Cowboy wants to deal with.
An amber blip flashes in Cowboy’s radar display, and Cowboy looks at it carefully. One of the rare commercial flights, he concludes, it’s too high to be Arkady’s plane.
The delta cuts neatly through the air, its vast power muted, under careful control.
Arkady’s plane is small and the Pony Express radars aren’t very efficient and have a limited range–– until now Cowboy’s been much more interested in detecting the location of enemy radars than in using his own. But he knows Arkady’s up here somewhere. The airfield receptionist, on the Dodger’s payroll, has passed on the information that his plane took off just before sunset, and that he was on it, his hair still rising and changing colors every few seconds.
Neurotransmitters tickle Cowboy’s crystal, and the Pony Express banks and sweeps eastward over Medicine Bow. Electronic ears are extended for the sound of microwave transmissions. Distant radars pulse weakly on the delta’s absorbent skin. Inside the seamless black hood of
his helmet Cowboy can hear only the echo of his own breath, taste only rubber and anesthetic gas. Cowboy’s mind rejoices, feeling the delta’s power vibrating under his control. His nerves tingle pleasure. It’s been too long since he possessed the sky.
A silver-white dot moves against the wheeling star field and Cowboy looks closer. It’s an infrared signature all right, and he tilts the delta’s nose upward to give his forward-looking radars a peek, g-forces tugging at the skin around his eyelids. An amber dot appears on the displays, outlines uncertain. Cowboy pictures himself as a falcon, narrowing its wings as it prepares to move upon its distant prey.
A steel guitar plays in Cowboy’s mind as he floods the engines with fuel, the big plane climbing toward the diamond stars. The whimper of wind turns to a hiss. Cowboy’s spine can feel delicate vibrations moving fore and aft along the plane’s structure as the frame absorbs the additional stress. Arkady is blind to this, he thinks, and can’t know what it’s about. Can’t come near the top, thinks only in terms of money and fashion, the cryo max clothes that he hopes will buy him a ticket into the world where things really happen, and all the while the panzerboys are building and living their legend and Arkady is frozen outside, trying to pretend he matters. The infrared signature is nearer, glowing white in Cowboy’s vision. Two engines. He’s above and behind the target now, at the top of along parabolic arc, and he lowers the delta’s nose and throttles back, the engine noises dying away almost entirely, left far behind in the craft’s wake.
The target is very close now. Cowboy lowers Pony Express’s flaps, feeling the plane fight the brakes, jarring. The infrared signature is close, cat’s eyes in the night. Cowboy takes his eyes off infrared and can see the dark silhouette nearing him. He has to be certain this is the right one.
Neurotransmitters flick a switch, and electrons race along the cable to snap on the quartz-iodide brightness of his landing lights. Suddenly the night is afire with the form of a white fuselage pinstriped with blue. Arkady’s plane, the right configuration. Cowboy can see heads peering out the windows. The plane cocks one wing up and tries to fall away.
Too late. The plane is already exhaling, air gushing through the holes in the fuselage made by Cowboy’s humming dorsal minigun turret. A wing breaks away, an engine flares and breaks into pieces, spitting fire and melting alloy. Pony Express arcs over the falling craft, turning cockpit-down so Cowboy can watch it fall away. He knows impact the earth somewhere on the Nebraska line, falling amid a tumbling hail of thirty-millimeter casings while Arkady’s hair stands on end every few seconds, turning orange, green, blue in pointless fashionable sequence…
Cowboy watches it fall, slow regret already touching his mind. Arkady’s dead, but it was all too easy. The thirdman was in a defenseless civilian jet, up against a maneuverable armored monster. Cowboy’s nerves are still blazing, still ready for a fight, not realizing it’s already over.
He can feel Damnation Alley’s radars trying to touch him with furious microwave claws, and deep in him there is a yearning to run the Line again, feel the delta’s airframe moan with the stress of supersonic turns, dance among the lances of enemy missiles, feel the blue alcohol fires erupting behind him to drive him clear... This simple interception and destruction wasn’t worthy of Pony Express, wasn’t fitting as the flaming climax of a battle.
Cowboy turns the delta’s nose downward and works out his course toward Colorado. He’s done his job–– he’s taken Arkady out of the picture so that the Dodger and his allies will have a breathing space.
He takes comfort in the fact that this isn’t the final battle. Tempel backed Arkady, and they’ll return soon enough with someone else.
He’s just created a respite, and he hopes it will grant him enough time to organize his embassy to Albrecht Roon.
MARC MAHOMED TELLS YOU WHO YOU ARE
Sarah slips through the back door of the Blue Silk, seeing the cases of liquor and drugs stacked in their frozen cardboard rows. She closes the door silently and pockets the key. Her room upstairs has only a desk, a comp deck, a single chair, a plastic cooler chest, and a narrow mattress set on the floor. Music throbs up from the bar, a disconnected bass track. She’s been imitating the rat, hiding while the terrier sniffs overhead.
She pulls off her jacket and shirt, and reaches for a towel, dabbing off the sweat. She’s just been to visit Daud, spending an hour with him while he complained about the hospital and the treatment, how the therapists were working him too hard and cutting his dosage, how Jackstraw wouldn’t return his calls and had some new boy answering the phone, someone whose tone Daud didn’t like... It was a long monologue that poured out of him at every visit, like a recording set to infinite repeat. Sarah feels drained.
She throws the towel down and opens the cooler for a beer before she notices that there’s a message light on her deck.
She opens the foil bottle top with her teeth while reaching to touch the button that will display the message that Maurice has relayed up to her, and as it flashes on her monitor she can feel a rush of warmth along her nerves, as fine and real as the inhaled mist of a fine drug:
TOMORROW, THREE O’CLOCK, BLUE SILK. LEAVE MESSAGE IF YOU CAN’T MEET. RANDOLPH SCOTT.
Chapter Eleven
Cowboy sits restlessly in the back of the car and watches the wind tugging at the broken leaves of the dying palm outside the Blue Silk. White noise hisses from the radio receiver that sits on the seat next to his Flash Force driver. The dark mirrored windows of the bar reflect the baking street, the laser glowing image of the three-dimensional holographic phantom that parades the bar’s name past the eyes of passersby.
There’s another Flash Force man inside the bar, trying to sniff out an ambush. Cowboy shifts nervously in his seat and hopes the guard won’t spook Sarah, that she isn’t already dodging through the alley behind the bar with images of assassination in her head.
Two short bursts of noise crackle from the guard’s receiver as the merc in the Blue Silk breaks squelch twice, the all-clear signal delivered from the transmitter buried in his skull. The driver moves the car forward along the narrow sidewalk and parks in front of the bar. He scans the crowd once and nods, and Cowboy bursts out of the car and lopes through the cool inviting Blue Silk doors.
Sarah’s not inside the bar, only some businessmen soaking up a late lunch, a man in a wheelchair gazing down at the place where his legs used to be, and Cowboy’s Flash Force guard sitting quietly over his Canadian and water, his back to the wall, where he won’t have to watch his own spine.
Cowboy walks to the bar and orders a beer from the quiet black man with the metal eyes. By the time the beer comes he’s seen the pictures on the wall and figures he knows what the bar’s name stands for. “Did you know a man called Warren?” he asks. “He was a crew chief at Vandenberg during the war.”
“No sir,” Maurice says. “I rode my cutter out of Panama:”
“You were with Townsend? You must have done some good, then.”
“Not damn near enough.” It’s the man in the wheelchair talking, his chin jerking up with reflex pride at the mention of Townsend’s name. Cowboy looks with surprise into a pair of Zeiss eyes that glow with a twisted, grudging fury that seems less than entirely sane.
“I got burned early and never climbed the well,” the man says. “Crashed here in Florida. Maurice was one of the people who took out the Chinese SPS, but got burned on his way down and force-landed at Orlando.”
Cowboy turns to Maurice. He knows that only about a dozen made it back from the SPS fight.
“That was some good piloting,” he says.
“The war was over before we even left the ground. We just didn’t know it.” Maurice’s soft voice is edged with weary bitterness. Cowboy thinks of that voice coming over the controller’s speakers at Orlando, quietly calling in his mayday landing as his burning cutter draws a line of fire across the hot Florida sky.
Cowboy sips his beer. “I’m a pilot. Air jockey.”
�
�I thought you were.” Maurice raises a finger to his blank metal eyes. “I saw you had all the equipment.”
They talk flying while Cowboy drinks half his beer. Then he looks up at Maurice and lowers his voice. He can feel anticipation warming his nerves. “Is Sarah here? Could you tell her that Randolph Scott wants to talk to her?”
Maurice jerks his chin toward the Flash Force guard nursing his drink in the corner. “Is he yours?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Thought he might be, ah, the other people again. One moment, sir.” He turns to his cash register and punches some code on its keyboard with his fingernail. His eyes reflect an amber message on its screen.
“Okay, Mr. Scott. Go back through the door to the toilets, take the door marked PRIVATE, go up the stairs.”
Cowboy drains his beer. “Thanks. Talk to you later.”
He walks to the door without glancing in his guard’s direction and pushes through the door into the back room. He can hear the electric lock snapping shut behind him. There is a muted smell of hashish. Crates of liquor and legal drugs stand dimly around him. He walks up some narrow stairs and sees Sarah silhouetted against the light of a bare bulb on the landing.
She’s wearing a red T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off and soft white cotton jeans above her bare feet. Her hair has grown out, strand tips touching the junction of neck and shoulder. As he steps onto the landing she grins and reaches out to feel the shoulder of his armored jacket. “I see you’ve been to my tailor.”
“Jacket and two pairs of pants.”
Sarah turns and begins to move down a hallway crowded with more crates of liquor. “Let’s go to my room.” He watches her wary panther strut as he follows her.
Hardwired Page 21
