Hardwired

by Walter Jon Williams

  “Michael says that Reno’s given him another four months,” she says. “Reno’s in his tank now. The Hetman paid for it. Have you heard?”

  “Yeah. He called me from there.”

  Reno’s tank is a crystal matrix in Havana, ready to move into a cloned body as soon as DNA can be found to approximate his original appearance and a new body grown from it. He was beginning to feel paranoid living in the Tempel computers, knowing that sooner or later they’d start looking for an intruder program.

  At least Reno’s body and the operation is paid for in advance. When Michael falls, Reno will be out of the way.

  “Our friend in South America is almost ready,” Cowboy says. “He’s got the date.”

  Sarah feels ice form in her veins. The deadline is coming.

  “When?”

  “Five days from now. We figure on moving you out by bullet in three days.”

  “I’ll have to prepare Daud,” she says. “And arrange to see the Hetman.”

  That, she thinks, is when it will have to happen. Feed them Roon at the same time. And then, a part of her thinks, a call through secure lines to Cowboy to let him know that he’s just crashed, that all his plans and hopes are going up in flames on some mountainside labeled Reality, that it’s time to say good-bye.

  “Say hi from me,” Cowboy says. Sarah remembers the way he looked a few months ago, when he was sitting in the armored cabin of his betrayed panzer outside Pittsburgh, the fear and bafflement and anger in his eyes...When the news comes, will the look be the same? Sarah wonders. When we can afford to be. The operative phrase.

  After the conversation she decides that she needs the hotel bar. Her guard isn’t happy but allows it. She sails down the elevator and submerges herself in thudding litejack, shouted conversation, dark rum served neat, a softglow high out of the bar inhaler that smooths the hardfire jitters. She looks at the single men in the room, wondering about the possibility of letting one come to her room, of letting the high she’s feeling peak in orgasm, in the necessary obliteration. But when one approaches her, she brushes him off. There’s plenty of time.

  She notices a crowd around one of the games at the other end of the bar. She picks up her drink and wanders over, hearing the hum of laserfire, the rush of missiles. Delta, the game is called. A black man is strapped into the seat, his head obscured by a sensory helmet that feeds him information, letting him feel the jar of missiles cutting loose, the pull of g-stresses. A wide-screen video unit above the machine gives other customers a glimpse of his play. Government liteweights pounce from the sky. The sun glitters off the rotating fins of turning missiles. Radar displays scream for attention. Liteweights dodge, leap, explode in flaring ruin, draw charcoal fingers across the sky.

  Sarah loses interest and decides to go back for another round of softglow. She turns to step away and meets the metal eyes of a man in a wheelchair. Memory jars her.

  “Is it Maurice who’s playing?” she asks.

  The man nods. His eyes stay on the display above his head. “Yes. It’s the closest we can come.”

  “Tell Maurice hi.” The video cockpit gushes flame as an enemy missile strikes home. Sadness wars with the softglow in Sarah’s veins. She wonders if Cowboy will end like that, endlessly rerunning the war he fought and lost.

  Maurice tries to eject, fails, tumbles to the earth like a broken dragonfly. Before he can raise the sensory helmet from his face, Sarah turns and drifts away with the murmuring crowd.

  LIVING IN PAIN CITY? LET US SEND YOU TO HAPPYVILLE!

  –Pointsman Pharmaceuticals A.G.

  Andre is dressed in tailored jungle fatigues, even to the cap. His stainless-steel irises gleam from the shadow of the brim. His inevitable pens are fixed to the breast pocket with camouflage velcro straps.

  “We don’t think,” he says, “that you’ve been entirely candid. ”

  Sarah cocks her hands on her hips. “Que?” she says softly.

  “We think that you know more than you’re giving us.” His voice is soft, his inflections unhurried. As if he’s made some decision. He takes a step toward her.

  Sarah’s mouth is suddenly dry. She runs her corrugated tongue over her palate, sandpaper on stone. She looks left and right, seeing patients in bathrobes and pajamas. “What do you think I know?”

  “We’re not sure. More than you’re telling.” His eyes are wide, unblinking, focused on her like a pair of gunsights. His calm voice drones on. “We’re going to make you disappear for a few hours. Give you a few drugs, let you talk. You won’t be hurt.”

  Sarah tries to calm the hardfire pulsing adrenaline messages through her body. A cold inner voice, a soulless inflection like Reno’s, tells her he’s got more chips, more talent. If she fights, she’ll lose. “I’ve got a guard, Andre. The Hetman will know.”

  “We have a story ready for Michael. We tried to snatch you. You got away.”

  She shakes her head slowly. “He’s not going to believe that. ”

  Andre takes another step toward her, only inches away. Her flesh prickles. She can feel his breath against her face, taste spearmint. “Turn around,” he says. “Look out the window. He’ll believe the evidence.”

  She can feel the hairs on her neck erect as she turns. He can hit her from here, and she has only instinct to tell her where and when.

  From the front window she can see her Maximum Law escort car stretched out by the curb, the color of blued steel. The windows are mirrors, but she can see the driver as a vague shadow behind the silver glass.

  A girl is coming down the street in a bicycle. Brown-skinned, young, her hair in pigtails braided with yellow ribbon. She’s reclining in the bucket seat of an alloy bicycle, feet first, low to the ground, moving fast behind an aerodynamic shield. In her lap is a woven basket with artificial daisies plaited around the rim. She’s wearing a white blouse with bright red patterns. As she rides she laughs to herself. Her teeth are white and contrast brilliantly with her dark face.

  She passes the car to streetward, out of Sarah’s sight, but still Sarah senses a movement.

  And then the bicycle is skimming past and there is a thud, hardly perceptible to Sarah through the double panes of window glass and the insulating walls of the hospital. The driver’s window of her car flies outward, brilliant bits of mirror gushing up in a sunlit expanding funnel…

  “Sticky bomb with a two-second delay,” Andre says. His tone is low, conversational. “Put a shaped charge right through the window glass. I don’t think your driver got out of the way. ”

  Sarah is suddenly aware that she hasn’t been breathing. She lets the air out of her lungs, breathes in. Neurotransmitters are multiplying, racing from her crystal. Her veins are smoking with adrenaline. The cybersnake waits coldly, uselessly in her throat.

  They’re going to get it all, she thinks. She knows she won’t get paid, but maybe they’ll let her live. And Daud has his ticket, that’s something.

  The last bit of mirror flutters to the pavement. Another car pulls up behind the Maximum Law car. Two men in summer suits get out, walk to the shattered window. Facing the car, visible only from the chest up as they draw pistols from their belts, they look, ludicrously, as if they’re getting ready to piss on the polished blue finish.

  “Silenced pistols,” Andre says. “If your driver has a head left, he’s going to lose it.”

  Spearmint whispers coolly into Sarah’s nostrils. Behind her in the room there is a low murmur of patient conversation. The assassins zip up their pants and start walking up the drive. Their car pulls away from the curb.

  Sarah sees government liteweights bursting on the screen. Cowboy’s head under the sensory helmet. The look in his eyes, the look of someone whose dream is broken and is desperate in searchof another.

  There is a smile of pleasure in Andre’s voice. “We’re going to wring you dry, Sarah,” he says. “You have no choice. We’ve bought you and we’re going to have you.”

  Sarah lets her head fall, gulps air. She kn
ew all along, as soon as she saw Andre, that this was going to happen, and that she was going to let it. That Andre would enjoy it. That his stainless-steel irises would dilate with satisfaction as her struggles ceased and the drugs took hold of her mind, as she began babbling her every thought into their cold, waiting crystal.

  “Come along, Sarah,” Andre says. “Time for, your ride.”

  It’s the tone that does it. Sarah has sold herself, and she can live with that, accept the consequences. But the idea that the man who has bought her will take such pleasure in it...Something in her screams outrage. She remembers a droning voice, a razor, a blur of movement, abstract patterns of red, like paint. Weasel stirs. Her chips are spitting instructions and the neurotransmitters are multiplying along their chemical pathways before she even knows she has made a conscious decision.

  She takes a step back with her right foot, toward Andre. Her fists cock up toward her chest, where she knows he can’t see. Then her weight shifts back and she is spinning, her right arm lashing out with a back-knuckle blow aimed at Andre’s temple, the torque of her upper body behind it.

  Andre blocks it, of course. Foolish to think otherwise–– he is wired himself, and probably expecting resistance. But when his hands come up, she changes her movement from a blow to a sweep, gets her hands and forearm over both his hands, driving down his guard. Follows it up with a lash from Weasel, aimed at Andre’s throat…

  From somewhere there is a dry steel click, like a hammer going back…

  And her weight is already shifted forward to the right foot, her left coming up in a wheeling kick aimed high, a kick he can’t even see because when it was launched Sarah’s fist and his own two hands were in the way. By the time Andre sees the blur to his right, the only thing he can do is to try to hunch down into his shoulders and roll with it.

  Too late. The kick has all of Sarah’s weight behind it, all six feet three inches torqued in by hip and shoulder and concentrated along a few square inches of Andre’s reluctant skull. Sarah’s shin impacts Andre’s temple with enough force to send shards of pain shrieking along Sarah’s leg. Andre falls like a sack of sugar, his every nerve misfiring. Something extrudes from between his lips.

  Sarah recovers her balance, steps forward with her left foot, and delivers a rising kick with her right boot-tip square between Andre’s eyes. Andre’s head bounces back, hits the floor, bounces again. A cybersnake flails uselessly from his mouth, a glistening metal whip looking for something to kill. Maybe Andre is dead. Sarah doesn’t care.

  One eye is open, one shut. Sarah stares into the open eye, ignoring the whipping cybersnake, seeing something wrong. The stainless-steel iris is dilated wide and there is a hole where the pupil should be, and Sarah remembers the sound of that click. She looks down at herself, sees the steel needle stuck in her armored jacket, and feels the fear begin, clamping on her in a wave of nausea.

  Andre’s eyes, like gunsights because they were gunsights. A spring-loaded dart gun, snapping up into place on command, firing through the porthole pupil. Sarah reaches a hand to the dart, pulls it out, feels a tug in her flesh. The dart is slippery and squirts from her fingers, leaving a trace of something like oil on her fingertips. It went through the jacket, slipping through where a blunt-nosed bullet would be stopped cold. Less than a millimeter into her flesh, she suspects, but maybe enough.

  Sarah raises her fingers to her nose, sniffs, smells a faint medicinal scent. Drugged, then. It didn’t penetrate very far, so maybe she didn’t get a full dose.

  “Who is that?” An elderly patient, staring through thick glasses and stammering in outrage. Andre’s cybersnake is beating itself to death against the sound-deadening carpet. Sarah is already moving, running down a pastel corridor to Daud’s room.

  He’s exercising, lying back on his bed while he works with the weights, letting Mslope watch his muscles move under the pale skin. “Daud,” Sarah breathes, skidding through the door. Mslope is rising from his seat, his eyes wide with alarm. “Out,” Sarah says, and she can see pain forming in the man’s eyes, the knowledge that his moment is over.

  She pays him no attention. She runs to Daud, seeing the alarm entering his face. He lets the weights go and there is a crash.

  “Things have gone wrong. They tried to kidnap me.” She presses her cheek to Daud’s, whispering in his ear. “If I get away, call me at the same number as last time. Randolph Scott, Santa Fe. Don’t call from here; this phone is not secure. ”

  “Sarah.” His eyes are wide with fear. “I thought things were set. I thought––” She takes his head in her hands and kisses him, a fierce kiss that maybe he’ll remember through what is going to come.

  “I love you,” she says, and is running again. Abandoning him as he cries her name again, as he tries to catch her clothing with a hand. Sarah tries to blot out his voice. She can feel the first delicate touch of whatever drug was on the needle, something wrong with her nerves, the feathery pat of a kitten that has not yet unsheathed its claws.

  She’s mapped out the hospital and knows where to go. Down the green pastel corridor, left at the pink pastel intersection. Daud’s last cry is ringing in her ears. Her shin aches with each step. She reaches a steel door, takes a last breath of cold air, and, keeping her silhouette low, rolls out into the furnace of afternoon.

  A truck turbine dopplers past on the limited expressway. Her brain whirls as she staggers to her feet and runs clumsily for the truck stop behind the hospital. If she can get across the expressway, she’ll be able to lose herself in the rows of residential flats behind. The drug has just dug in with its claws and each steps seems to wade through gelatin.

  SARAH THIS IS CUNNINGHAM...SARAH YOU CANT GET AWAY

  Suddenly there are amber lights above her vision. Someone’s broadcasting to her on her optical-tagged radio, her crystal translating the spoken words into moving print. She doesn’t have the control for it and can’t turn it off. “Go the fuck away,” she mumbles.

  ALL WE WANT IS COOPERATION SARAH

  She snorts her disbelief. “Go away. You’re not even Cunningham I bet.” A truck turbine begins to whine by the automated fuel pump, its tone rising. Sarah shakes sweat from her eyes and hops a low cinderblock fence, catches a foot, almost falls. Then something smashes her between the shoulder blades and she goes down.

  Concrete bites her breasts, her cheek. She has lost her breath and can’t find it. Her hands flail out, scrabble at the concrete. She realizes she’s just been shot. Someone behind at the hospital, with marksman’s crystal and a pistol.

  STAY WHERE YOU ARE SARAH WE WILL FIND YOU WE ONLY WANT TO HELP

  “Bullshit,” she says wearily. She finds that she can’t stand, that she can only crawl. She feels the touch of grit against her palms. She creeps, slithers, rolls. Feels her shoulders tensing for the next shot.

  It’s only then that she realizes that it’s lucky she couldn’t stand up. She’s been hidden from them behind the cinderblock wall. But she knows they’re sprinting for her, that the two assassins in their summer suits will be appearing above the wall shortly.

  Turbines are shrieking within an inch of her skull. Tires crunch gravel and something comes between her and the sun. A robot tractor-trailer rig, backing slowly away from the automated pumps. The assassins are on the other side of it, she realizes, and she rolls to her feet, falls to one knee, staggers up again. As the truck cab passes her, still in reverse, she seizes the safety bar and steps up onto the ladder leading to the observation cab.

  The turbine whimpers. Gears clatter. The truck begins to lurch forward, almost throwing Sarah off. She hugs the safety bar, then moves a foot up on the ladder. Moves a second foot. Seizes the emergency door latch and pulls on it. There is the sound of a warning buzzer, very loud in Sarah’s ears.

  “This is an unauthorized entry,” a voice recites. “Trespassers are subject to penalty upon discovery.”

  GIVE IT UP SARAH...WE DON’T WANT TO HURT YOU

  “Entrance may not be made saf
ely when the tractor is in motion. This is an unauthorized entry. Trespassers are subject to penalty upon discovery.”

  JUST LIE DOWN WHERE YOU ARE WE WILL FIND YOU

  “Shut up.” The truck lurches through another gear change. Pavement is moving by at a faster rate. Sarah’s vision contracts, her head swimming with the drug. Her arms tense on the safety bar, pulling her up. Pain cries through her arms, her spine. She kicks out and hauls herself blindly into the cab, draws a breath, reaches behind her to pull the cab door shut. She can hear the solid chunk of electromagnets drawing shut a pair of metal bolts. The turbine howl is muffled.

  “This is an unauthorized entry. You have been secured in the cabin until the tractor reaches its destination, where you will be turned over to the authorities. If this is a genuine emergency, you may contact the police on the red telephone located on the dashboard.”

  The message repeats itself. Sarah gives herself over to pain. She can feel blood trailing warmly down her neck. She coughs phlegm from her throat, spikes of pain driving into her back, where the shot blunted itself on her armored jacket.

  WE SAW YOU GETTING INTO THE TRUCK WE ARE COMING AFTER YOU

  Sarah fumbles for her inhaler, finds it, triggers another round of hardfire. Her heart goes mad, trying to pound its way out of her chest, but pain and the new round of stimulant fights whatever drug was on Andre’s needle and helps to clear her head.

  THAT TRUCK IS A ONE-WAY RIDE TO ORLANDO...ORLANDO IS OUR TOWN SARAH

  Sarah’s vision clears slowly. She’s lying across a pair of bucket seats in front of an instrument board filled with green glowing lights. The observation cab is where safety inspectors ride, or where emergency operators work the truck if the tractor’s crystal brain isn’t working. There are no controls as such–– the truck’s supposed to be worked through the face. Sarah looks across the panel and under the seats, fails to find a headset. The truck’s owners apparently don’t want stowaways running off with their truck. Not that she knows how to drive a turbine-tractor anyway.