Hardwired

by Walter Jon Williams

  She settles herself into one of the seats and looks out the cab windows, seeing the blurring posts of the limited highway, the shining, stubby radio beacons that control the robot traffic. The tires whine over concrete. A hovercraft, its props throbbing, soars by at 200 miles per hour in the fast lane. She swipes at the blood running down her neck. Presses a button and feels a blast of hot air that soon turns cold. Her head is almost clear. Time to figure a way out of this. She brushes sweat from her eyes and looks at the instrument panel.

  Green gauges glow coldly. The red phone on the instrument panel beckons her. She pulls the phone from its cradle and wonders who she wants to talk to.

  The Hetman, she decides. Maybe he can arrange for some of his cops to pick her up on the way. He won’t have got any of the recordings yet, and she can try to figure a way to explain those later.

  She dials the only number she has, finds it’s been disconnected in the last twenty-four hours, the normal shifting of interface addresses to prevent monitoring. She calls the Gold Coast Maximum Law number and starts as the telephone tells her that her call is not coming from an authorized account.

  SARAH WE ARE JUST BEHIND YOU WE ARE COMING UP

  She slams the phone down, looks wildly in the rearview mirrors. Sees only a hovercraft coming up on the left. “Fuck you, Cunningham, ” she mutters, and reaches for the phone again.

  WE ARE GOING TO HAVE TO BLOW YOUR DOOR LOOK FOR COVER SARAH

  She presses Reno’s number and scans the rearview mirrors again. Adrenaline flows through her blood. She snaps upright, represses an urge to bounce the phone off the windscreen. There’s a long black car coming up on the right, racing along the expressway’s shoulder. It’s a car she recognizes.

  The voice on the phone bubbles in her ear. “This is Reno.”

  Sarah’s voice sounds like the shriek of a cornered animal. She can scarcely recognize it as her own. “Reno, this is Sarah! I’m trapped! They’ve killed my guard and now they’re after me!”

  The car is coming up fast on the edge of the expressway. The road is limited to robot traffic, and cars are forbidden here because the trucks and hovercraft can’t see them, but the car should be safe enough on the shoulder. Sarah sees a flash of color near the car.

  Reno’s voice doesn’t change expression. “Sarah, where are you?”

  Sarah tries to calm her runaway heart, takes a deliberate breath. “I’m in a robot truck on the limited expressway, moving from Tampa to Orlando. They’re following in a car.” Sarah can see the blur of a dark face in the mirror, pigtails streaming with yellow ribbon. “They’re just behind me, Reno!” Her voice cracks on the dead man’s name. She bounces in her seat, her fist pounding the instrument panel. Rage boils in her. “I’m locked in the truck! I can’t get out! Call the Hetman. Have him send his people out.”

  SARAH WE ARE GOING TO BLOW THE DOOR ON YOUR RIGHT...GET IN THE LEFT SEAT AND COVER UP...WE DON’T WANT TO HURT YOU

  “What’s the truck’s registration number? It should be in the cab somewhere.” Reno’s voice patterns over the letters of Cunningham’s message that are rolling past Sarah’s expanded vision. She can see one of the doors on the black car opening, the girl in the patterned blouse leaning out against the blast of wind, something in her hand.

  Sarah wants to shriek. “Jesus, Reno, what does it matter? They’re just behind. Get Michael now!”

  “The registration number. I need it to find you. Tell me.”

  WE JUST WANT TO TALK TO YOU...GET IN THE LEFT SEAT AND COVER UP

  “Oh, fuck, Reno. The registration. All right.” Droplets of her sweat and blood pattern the instruments as Sarah searches desperately for a number. She finds a metal plate, reads the contents into the phone. The black car fills the lower half of the mirror. She can see the whites of the dark girl’s eyes, the bright, sunny smile, the same smile of innocent pleasure she wore when she slapped the charge on the guard’s window. Sarah can see someone’s thick wrist, holding her by the belt as she leans out with the bomb in one hand, the other hand clawed to reach for the safety bar.

  “Where are they now, Sarah?” Reno says. The calm in his voice drives her to frenzy.

  “They’re right beside me! On the right! Reno help me!” She screams the last words, seeing only a blur in the mirror now, white smile, black metal, windows reflecting the blue of Daud’s altered eyes...Then there is a loud overwhelming electronic moan, filling the cab from the truck’s speakers, and she shrieks in outrage and fear and drops the phone, huddling in the left seat, scrabbling for her collar to pull it up over her head, wondering if the truck somehow senses the oncoming violence of its impending violation.

  The electronic moan fades. Lights on the instrument panel flick from green to red. There is a lurch that throws Sarah against the door, and the amber lights above her vision are screaming silent panic: OH GOD LOOK OUT FOR THE...And then Sarah feels the kiss of metal, only the lightest brush, and she looks in the mirror to see a pinwheeling form, bright print blouse and yellow hair ribbons, flying like the corn doll before mad Ivan’s foot, and then there’s a wheeling car that snaps a radio post like a toothpick and flies off the embankment. An impact, a silent gush of flame in the ever-receding distance. The amber lights, the written version of an assassin’s last cry, finish their track across Sarah’s vision.

  Magnetic bolts thud open in the doorframes.

  “I’ve taken command of your truck, Sarah,” says Reno’s voice, his tone faint but clear from the dropped phone spinning on the metal floor. “I’ll be calling the Gold Coast people to meet you at an underpass. I’ll park the truck there. The laws will find it.”

  Sarah’s heart hammers in cold emptiness, the panic still bottled in her throat, lost without its reason for existence. She scrabbles for the phone. “Reno,” she calls. “Reno, thank you.”

  “I’m glad to have something to do, Sarah.”

  Sarah’s hands tremble with adrenaline shock. A blinding pain is forming behind her eyes.

  “You’ve got to wipe your fingerprints off the truck, Sarah,” Reno says. White noise flitters in the background of his voice. “Do that now, and then sit back and don’t touch anything.”

  “Just let me catch my breath.” She leans back and gulps in the cool air. Her nerves flash hot and cold.

  “Reno,” she says. “I’ve got to talk to the Hetman. Tempel is going to send him a recording. They had my voice from the job I did for them, and...The recordings are doctored. They said they’d send them to Michael if I didn’t cooperate.”

  “I’ll connect you,” Reno answers.

  Dimly, from far away, Sarah hears the sound of a phone ringing.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Pony Express waits under camouflage nets a quarter mile behind the Dodger’s place, surrounded by a blizzard of security and passive electronic countermeasures. Warren, wearing a headset, his cap stuffed in a back pocket, is feeding a program into the crystal heart of a radar-guided missile, making sure the missile knows its job. Cowboy stands under a ponderosa nearby and listens to the breeze high up in the trees. Here on the ground the air is still. Tension without a name crouches in his body, touching his muscles and mind, letting him know of its presence.

  Down the slopes Cowboy can see Jimi Gutierrez walking with Thibodaux. The panzerboy and the crystal jock are lovers now, devotees of the face: Thibodaux is still here, trying to stay close to Jimi, even though his job is more or less over. No one’s raised any objection. It keeps Jimi out of people’s hair.

  Cowboy’s eyes flicker at the sight of another movement and he sees Sarah coming up the slope. There’s a machine pistol on her hip, the Heckler & Koch. Her new scars are worn with the old defiance, but he can see there’s something else there, a kind of fever behind the eyes. As if there’s a fear there she hasn’t got over. Cowboy begins walking down toward her, his bootheels making crescent marks in the bed of needles.

  “Sorry I couldn’t meet you,” he says. “Warren needed me for something.”


  “Yeah. That’s okay. I was surrounded by security anyway. The Hetman didn’t want to take any more chances.” While she speaks she puts her arms around him, her last words breathed out against his neck. Cowboy exhales, and part of the tension he’s been feeling goes out with the stale air, seeing Sarah here, knowing she’s away from the things in Florida that have been putting their claws in her. He takes a step back and takes her chin, looks at the gouge marks on one cheek. The swelling has gone down but the bruises are still bad.

  “Another fucking mistake,” she says. Her mouth twitches in anger. “Another goddamn fucking mistake.”

  “Mistakes get made.”

  Cowboy can see her clenched teeth: “Not by me. I can’t afford them. If it wasn’t for Reno saving my ass...” She shakes her head.

  “You’re allowed to be human, Sarah,” he says.

  “What I’m not allowed to be is stupid.” She puts her hands in her pockets, begins walking upslope. He can see the self-contempt in her as he walks by her side. “I’m keeping these scars, Cowboy. So I can look at myself in the mirror every morning and know not to be stupid today.”

  “You were ambushed. It can happen to anyone. How does that make you stupid?”

  She gives him a sidelong look. “Maybe I’ll tell you someday, Cowboy. But not now.”

  “How’s your brother?”

  She stiffens slightly, her gait slowing. “Okay. Looking for an apartment. They let him alone–– he’s not useful anymore.”

  Cowboy gazes up at the smooth matte nose of Pony Express lying under the nets. His heart lifts. “Reno said that Cunningham might have been in that car.”

  “No. Three men, one woman. None of them were Cunningham. One of them just said he was.”

  “Too bad.”

  She gives him a skeletal smile. “Yeah. Too bad.”

  The camouflage net prints patterns on Sarah’s face, merging with the bruises. Warren squints as he looks up at her from his bench. “Sarah,” Cowboy says, “this is my friend Warren. He keeps the deltas flying.”

  “Hi, Warren.”

  “Howdy.” He looks at the dark bulk of the crouching delta. “Not bad for a home-built job, hey?”

  Sarah grins. “Not bad.” She reaches out to touch the port canard, brushing it with her fingertips. “How do you build something like this in your backyard?”

  “Out of odds and ends,” Warren says. He squints as he looks up at the dark panther shape. “The engines are ex-military. They’re the expensive part, because they’re made out of Orbital alloy and they have to be pulled for overhaul every three thousand hours or so. Everything else we make ourselves. It’s easier than it sounds–– after the war, all the recipes for hardware and the secret aerospace design software, uh, became available. We’ve avoided alloys in making the airframe and used something cheaper and almost as good–– composites made of epoxy resins and a few other things. The landing gear and some of the hydraulics are the only things made of metal.”

  Cowboy points out the nearly invisible seams of the cargo doors on the delta’s smooth belly. “Deltas are made to carry cargo, and they have to have a lot of onboard fuel to get the necessary range,” he says. “So they can’t be as fast and maneuverable as a government liteweight. We try to make up for that by carrying a lot more electronics, armor, and weapons, and by using lots of redundancy in the plane’s systems.”

  Sarah looks down at a rack of missiles, seeing one of them open, revealing its components to Warren’s scrutiny. “You make those at home, too?”

  “Yep,” Warren says. “They’re easier than anything– everything we use can be bought in an electronics store except the propellant and the explosive, and those we brew up in a garage lab.”

  “We’ve been putting those missiles together all afternoon,” Cowboy says. “That’s why I couldn’t meet you in Santa Fe.”

  Sarah ducks under a wing, walks along the length of the plane, gazing up at the smooth black epoxide, her fingers trailing along the rivetless surface. Cowboy follows. “I’m flying to Nevada tomorrow morning, just before dawn. I figure to be landing just as the dawn breaks over the base.”

  She steps out from under the delta’s tail, straightening and looking out over the small mountain meadow to the green peaks beyond. Cowboy follows her, watching the camouflage patterns on her hands, her face. “The Dodger’s given me a room in the back,” he says. “You could join me there tonight, if you don’t mind me getting up early.”

  She gives him a sidelong grin. “I’m glad you said that, Cowboy. I had my bags put in your room.”

  “That’s fair.” The tension he’s felt all day seems to whisper out of him. “Have you seen the jukebox yet?”

  “The what box? Oh. No, I haven’t.”

  “Let me help Warren finish up here. Then I’ll show you.”

  She nods, shifts her balance to relieve the weight of the gun on her hip. “I’m guarding you now,” she says. “So don’t blow yourself up.”

  “I won’t.” Cowboy watches Sarah’s profile as she looks out on the high meadow, the tall trees beyond. Sees the sudden look of what might be relief or gratitude that suddenly blazes out of her, through the cracks in her armor. He wonders briefly what it’s about.

  But Pony Express is waiting. Cowboy turns and steps under the wing of his black polymerized obsession.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Sarah’s armored limo whispers across the flats of northwestern Arizona. She’s sharing the back with two Maximum Law communications specialists, who assure her that the encrypted phone link is as secure as these things ever get. It’s as good a time as any to place a call.

  “Yes?” She feels her nerves begin to crackle at the sound of the voice. She tries to control her shock.

  “Is Daud there?”

  “Yes. Just a moment.”

  There is a moment’s silence in which Sarah fights a losing war with her amazement and anger. “Hello, Sarah,” Daud says.

  “Was that Nick?” she asks.

  “Yeah.” She can see the way Daud’s eyes would flicker, the way they would look away. “He’s stuck here. They won’t send him back. They say he abrogated their contract when he didn’t try to stop you. As if he could have. And they made me sign away my contract after you ran. So we’re both out of money.”

  “Listen. He may still be working for them.”

  “Maybe he is. I don’t care. He’s stuck here and we’re going to look for a place.” Sarah can hear Daud sucking briefly on a cigarette. “His real name is Sandor Nxumalo. I still have a hard time not calling him Nick.”

  Sarah can feel Daud drifting away. Tries to hold him, remembering the man’s soft body, his cynical gaze over Daud’s blind head. “Daud, I want you to be careful. He may try to get into our communications. If you need to talk to me, call from–”

  “I know that. Yeah. Anything else? We were going to go look for a place.”

  For a moment Sarah thinks, just a word to the Hetman and the man is dead. But Daud would know, would throw it at her. Despair trickles into her heart.

  “Just be careful, Daud.” The line goes dead. She thinks how they know just how to give her brother hope, how they know, as they knew with her, that if they promise certain things there is no choice other than to obey, even though obedience means leaving them all the opportunity in the world for their inevitable betrayal.

  “Daud, take care,” she says to the telephone. It cries back at her in a language she does not know. A warning, she knows, but not of what.

  Chapter Twenty

  A song bends steel notes through Cowboy’s mind: He calls it “Face Riders in the Sky.” PonyExpress is climbing high above the white, wheeling eye of a low-pressure system about to impact the Pacific coast; the sun glows off the delta’s black cockpit struts. The sky above is a brilliant blue, just beginning to go dark with the promise of space. Cowboy tells his helmet to lower his visor as he climbs toward the sun. He tastes anesthetic gas as he whistles through his teeth.

 
; “Reno.” Cowboy doesn’t bother to verbalize his message, just sends it through his chips and keeps whistling. “Tell them I’m in position.”

  “Roger.” Reno’s got his electronic fingers stretching across microwave relays from coast to coast, keeping the communications net together more efficiently than the Dodger’s mercenaries.

  Cowboy runs automatically through the displays, seeing the engines idling at blue, the rest of the columns green. From far below he can feel California’s radars reaching out for him, touching the skin of Pony Express with feeble paws, not able to bounce a strong enough reflection from the delta’s rounded surfaces and absorbent antiradiation paint. These aren’t as powerful as the Midwest’s radars–– no need for them to be. They aren’t used to deltas running illegal missions high over the Pacific.

  “Cowboy? Are you busy?” Reno’s distant voice, bubbles rising slowly in crystal.

  “Just circling. Waiting for our friends.”

  “I found out something. I’ve been poking around in the crystal here at the labs.”

  “Isn’t that likely to cause, ah, a termination of your contract?”

  “I’m bored, Cowboy. There’s nothing to do here.”

  “It’s dangerous, Reno.”

  “No. Their outside defenses are pretty strong, but once you get into their system, their security isn’t very good. Their stuff would have been adequate ten years ago, when they set up, but now it’s easy enough to break. I borrowed an intrusion program from our Maximum Law friends when they weren’t looking.”

  Cowboy thinks what could happen if the lab people discover the tampering and freeze Reno’s crystal. An unavoidable accident, they’ll say. “You’re taking chances, friend,” he says.

  “I had a good idea of what I was looking for, once I saw how this place is put together. It isn’t exactly a black lab, but they’re into a lot of gray areas. That’s how come Michael knew about them, and knew they’d take someone like me, just a mind over the phone without a body. They’re used to dealing with customers who have a lot of money for one reason or another, and who want to appear with a new face and identity.”