Hardwired

by Walter Jon Williams

  The rock falls in midafternoon. Sarah is working in a trench with the last of the two air-to-air missiles that are being set in their cradles, ready to be delivered to Maurice’s delta, hidden under camouflage nets a mile and a half away. She’s dressed only in a one-piece bathing suit and sneakers, her armored clothes and gun hanging from one of the bomb cradles. She’s seen Cowboy only once today with some of the other pilots at the breakfast tent. Since that time she’s seen only the three men helping with the missiles, and Maurice, who’s sitting patiently in his delta waiting for the rockets to be fed into the slots in his wings.

  And suddenly alarms are ringing. Sarah snaps upright, seeing the blank, appalled gaze on the faces of the missile assembly crew, and reaches for the submachine chopper, her armored jacket and pants. She vaults toward a small slit trench a few yards distant. She’s not going to be caught near that much explosive in a fight.

  She jumps into the trench, breathless already in the unbearable heat, and reaches into her jacket pocket for the inhaler of hardfire. She can hear the whooping alarm, the sound of running feet, the rising whine of panzer engines as they begin turning over... Hardfire races along her nerves, her muscles and blood coming alive. She jams her feet into her trousers and fumbles with the zip. Then she’s paralyzed for a second as something tears apart the air over her head, as she gazes up into the blue, expecting from the sound to see the black ablative needle of an Orbital frigate aimed straight between her eyes...she sees nothing. The shock throws her against the sand wall of the trench. The air is full of grit pouring down from above. There is more tearing of the air, more shocks. Artillery, she realizes. Mortars or something, big ones. Walking their rounds up and down the base.

  She sits up, coughing the grit from her lungs. The sand that coats her sweat resists the fabric of the jacket as she pulls it on. The explosives are moving away and she chances a look over the rim of the trench, blinking away the sweat and dust just in time to see the armored angular shapes of four panzers topping a ridge half a mile away, trailing dust plumes that seem to throw half the desert into the sky. Howling brightness splashes the ridge as Flash Force automated defense systems fire sheaf rockets. Behind her someone is screaming. One of the Dodger’s panzers is moving, building speed over, the flat. It shrieks as it moves behind her, and Sarah realizes it’s putting her between two fires. She throws herself flat on the surface of the trench.

  A screaming in the air, concussions, the scream of metal and engines. The mortars march back and forth again, hammering the earth. The sounds seem to move away from her and Sarah chances a look again.

  In front of her, slightly to the right, one of the intruder panzers is hit, black smoke gushing skyward from its aft section. A dorsal minigun turret is flashing with a basso moan. The panzer’s cargo doors are down, and men are rushing out and fanning over the surface, men in desert camouflage and black helmets. They seem to move in synch, their heads turning to scan the ground around them, one of them always looking in every direction so the unit has an ever-present 360-degree awareness, their arms and legs moving with alarming speed and efficiency. Hardwired, with crystal for small-unit combat, way out of Sarah’s league. Sarah feels gratitude they’re out of range of her machine pistol and there will be no temptation for her to shoot and draw their fire. An intruder panzer races by on her left, dust rising in a sheet. She turns as it smashes headlong into one of the parked deltas, brushing it aside like a car ramming a tricycle. The delta spins aside and moans as its spars give way. The panzer roars on, the delta’s camouflage net flapping from its bow. Then the canopy of dust reaches Sarah’s position and blots the world from view.

  Panic flutters in her throat. I don’t have the crystal for this, she thinks. She drops back into her trench and reaches for the machine pistol. If anyone gets in the trench with her, she’ll kill him; otherwise, she’ll stay out of it and wait for circumstances to declare the winner. Sucking enemy bullets is all a streetgirl is worth in these situations, and Sarah knows it. It’s time to leave the defense to the Flash Force: that’s what they’re paid for. The hardfire wailing in her veins, she plants her back against the wall of the trench and points the chopper at its opposite rim. Hopes she’ll be fast enough when the time comes.

  Explosions shake the planet beneath her. The crackle of small-arms fire is added to the roar of missiles and the scream of jet engines. Dust falls in clouds, dropping on her arms, gathering in her lap, coating her lashes. She keeps brushing it off the Heckler & Koch with quick movements. At one point the dust clears above her and she looks straight up and sees a delta, stalled and falling wing-down right at her. She realizes it’s Maurice from the distinctive configuration of his craft, and then she sees a glint of silver as a missile shoots above his high wing and careens into the sky. Sarah waits helplessly for the impact, for the laden epoxide body to crush her, but the delta’s aerodynamics seem to grab just enough air to keep it aloft, and the plane twists and disappears out of her vision. She braces for the impact but there isn’t one. Maurice has somehow sidestepped the missile without falling into the fatal embrace of gravity. Mortars begin plashing around her, and she huddles deeper into her jacket. Then the mortars are gone, and Sarah realizes that the volume of fire has slackened. Most of it is small arms fire now, with the occasional roar of a minigun or hammer of a machine gun. The dusty sky overhead is tainted with blue. She shifts, crouching on the balls of her feet, and risks a Look.

  Columns of smoke rise from the broken desert floor. She sees four smashed panzers within her range of vision, as well as the crumpled delta, a gutted Flash Force limo, and the fuel truck, broken and burning brightly. Bodies dot the landscape, most of them in the bright coveralls worn by the Dodger’s people. She doesn’t see anyone moving, but there’s fire chattering from somewhere.

  A black peregrine falls out of the sky, and she recognizes Maurice’s delta, flame shooting from its wings as it launches rockets. She hears the explosions but can’t see what he was shooting at. Then the delta soars up into the sky again.

  Sarah drops back to the trench floor and tries to wipe the sweat and dust from her face, feeling it smear. Weariness wars in her with the hardfire; she’s exhausted herself simply with the effort of living through the attack. Daud, she thinks dully, brought this down on them with only a phone call. She can feel her fingers tightening on the butt of her machine pistol, her jaw muscles clenching. She pictures Weasel scoring Daud’s soft new flesh, flickering for his false blue eyes. Hears Daud’s panicked evasions as she makes her own calculated strikes…

  The delta whines overhead. All fire has died away. She can hear cars and trucks moving. She shakes herself free of her vision and peers out of the trench again, seeing men in camouflage armor and black helmets rising from the ground with their hands over their heads, Flash Force people moving out in vehicles to round them up. Mercenaries, she thinks angrily. When they capture one another they have agreements that allow for fair treatment and parole of prisoners. Not like the world she lives in, where no mistakes are allowed.

  “Technical personnel report to their team leaders.” A bullhorn brays from the direction of the command tent. “We need a head count.” Sarah rises from the trench. The next half hour is an exhausted blur of motion, sweating labor performed around scenes of horror, all the while expecting to hear again the alarms, the sounds of another attack.

  Maurice brings his delta in, and Sarah wrestles her pair of missiles out of the trench toward his craft. Other armorers are running up to reload the miniguns. She learns it was Maurice who saved the fight, the only pilot in his delta when the attack came. He’d flown over the ridge and blown away the mortars that were ranging on the deltas, and then helped to take care of the attacking panzers. Two of the deltas were destroyed on the ground, the rest–– dispersed behind ridges or hills, protected by camouflage–– survived, partly because the two defending panzers stood in the way and took most of the enemy rockets.

  Maurice is standing in the cockpit when she a
rrives. “Maurice,” she says. Her heart is hammering wildly. “Where’s Cowboy? Have you heard?”

  “He’s okay. He and the Express both. Spent the fight in a slit trench. ”

  Sarah breathes easier, tries to smile.

  “It’s okay, Sarah,” Maurice says. “We’ll bring the shuttle down.” His reassurance seems weaker when Sarah sees that the two missiles she’s putting in his wings are the only ones he’s got.

  “I’m okay.” Jimi Gutierrez is brought past in a stretcher improvised from a blanket. His skin is blackened, both legs are burned away at the thigh, Somehow he’s still conscious. He’s smiling, the braces on his teeth gleaming in the burned and shredding face. “I’m okay, I still got my sockets.”

  Sarah waves to Maurice and runs back to the command tent. It’s down but it’s being propped up, its contents hastily readied for evacuation. Things are being packed up and moved, and the wounded have to be delivered to a hospital in Vegas. As Sarah jogs over the stony desert, she passes a pair of surviving enemy panzerboys being executed by a couple of the Dodger’s techs. The machine-pistol fire echoes off distant hills. The panzerboys, like Sarah, are not subject to the professional courtesies offered between mercenary groups. The rest of the surviving attackers, Japanese mercs flown in overnight by suborbital shuttle, stand in emotionless sweating lines as they’re stripped of their armor and weapons. She sees a slight, blond figure standing among them and freezes.

  It’s one of Cunningham’s two associates, the smaller one. There are abrasions scoring half his face, blood trickling onto his white undershirt. One arm is bound up, red soaking through the improvised bandage. “Sarah,” he says.

  An explosion burns behind her eyes. The chips make the movement easy, economical. She walks a burst up his chest and watches him fall, sees the wary eyes of the Japanese as they shift away from the line of fire.

  “Hey,” one of the Flash Force men says, raising his gun.

  “He’s not a merc. He’s Orbital personnel.” Despite the fury burning in her veins her voice stays cool. “He’s not covered by any agreements.” The mercenary looks at her doubtfully. He’s got a little mustache with flecks of dust on it. His eyes are hollow, red-rimmed. She holsters her pistol and bares her teeth at him. “You see any more round-eyes with this group, they’re Orbitals. Where was this guy taken? Cunningham-Calvert-was probably with him.”

  She can see the cords standing out in the soldier’s neck. His voice is a suppressed scream. “Who the hell are you? I don’t have any instructions––”

  Behind her, she hears the rising whine of engines. She turns her back on the babbling mercenary and sees four deltas rising from hidden folds in the desert, hovering like black insects on columns of shimmering heat. Their sound begins to change as the deltas start moving forward, their needle points rising like dark fingers toward the sky.

  “Hey. Who are you?” The mercenary jabbers at her. She can see the dots of sweat on his face, the staring eyes, the hands shaking as they clutch his gun. All the suppressed fear bursting forth in the violence of his question.

  “Hey. I wanna know–” The man is weeping. Sarah watches the deltas rise into the sky. Her breath catches in her throat. “Dammit,” the man gasps, “you just can’t...just can’t shoot someone... That’s not...You gotta have authority.”

  The man’s tears patter on his uniform, making fresh clear pathways in the dust. Sarah runs for the command tent, finds an officer, explains. It turns out the man was captured with the mortar crew, knocked out by Maurice’s rockets before he got a chance to escape.

  “Calvert was probably with him,” Sarah says. “He’s running Tempel’s effort out here. You’d better find him.”

  The deltas have long since vanished into the sun when two all-terrain vehicles full of Flash Force mercs move off in a trail of dust for the mortar site. Sarah rides with them, next to the officer in the back of the vehicle.

  The mortars lie on the desert, four black broken tubes flung dozens of yards from where their ammo erupted under Maurice’s rockets. There’re remnants of a comm rig here, too, that kept the attackers in communication with their base. The officer searches the rough hills with enhanced eyes. He points. “Pickup and rendezvous for these guys was probably back that way,” he says, and gives the commands that send most of the Flash Force on foot toward their quarry. The two vehicles move off on either flank, hoping to drive Cunningham in toward the men on foot.

  Sarah clutches the side of the vehicle as it lurches over the ground. Sweat bounces from her armored shell. Dust coats her skin. She stares at the desert, intent, her fingers on the butt of her machine pistol.

  She misses the end. There’s a burst of fire from off to the left, and a crackle on the officer’s radio. He slaps the driver on the shoulder and points. The vehicle turns, accelerates in a blossoming cloud of dust.

  The head shot that killed him went in through an eye and removed the back of his head, but Cunningham’s face is still recognizable. Sarah looks down from the vehicle at the dusty corpse, the broken steel spring that was Cunningham. The officer looks at her for confirmation.

  “He wouldn’t have let himself be taken alive,” she says; and the officer nods and looks down at the corpse with a measure of respect.

  “Put him in the back,” he says, and his troopers sling the corpse into the vehicle and then jump in themselves. Sarah watches the body as it bounces back and forth to the lurches of the vehicle.

  Sarah looks at him, thinks of the last time she’d seen him, that back room in the Plastic Girl when they had said goodbye, and when Sarah had wanted more than anything else to have Cunningham’s ticket, have it at any price. Here, she thinks, was the price of it, a shallow grave on the desert floor. A mudboy come back to the Earth to die.

  She glances west, into the sky. Cowboy is there, probably already grappling with the Tempel jockeys. Sarah raises a hand to her throat, a gypsy woman touching iron.

  Beyond her sight, she knows, the sky is stained with fire.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Alcohol shrieks through Cowboy’s heart. His epoxide skin burns at the touch of the air. Pony Express arcs over California, riding into the darkening face of a Mach three sky.

  Cowboy’s late for the planned intercept and knows it, and so he’s hurtling as fast as he can across the roof of the world. The shuttle has only about seven minutes in the air between the ion blackout and landing at Edwards, and the deltas will have to kill it during that time. After the chase and a fight over the Mojave, Cowboy figures that he won’t have enough fuel to get back; he can only hope to bring his ship to a landing on a flat piece of desert or a dry lakebed, then call for a fuel truck to top up the tanks and give him a run for Colorado.

  He feels grit between his skin and his face mask, biting his skin. Little mementoes in the shape of dust particles, remembrances of a long hot afternoon in a slit trench, crouched with the Dodger as the Orbital mortars walked up and down and the deltas died in a storm of jet-powered Chobham. Not his kind of fight, not something he was chipped for.

  Now it’s time for revenge. Already he can feel pulsing radar energies directed downward from the dome of the sky. Seven distinct pulses, two frigates in the lead, crashing through the atmosphere with their wings drawn in, their ablative skin trailing fire. Point men, clearing their path of anything that may have survived the Orbital strike into Nevada. Then the shuttle, marked by its more powerful radars, trailing by twenty miles. Two more pairs of frigates behind, each at a twenty-mile distance.

  “This is Cowboy. We’ve acquired the target.”

  While his ground people acknowledge, Cowboy snarls the contempt for the Orbitals’ amateur setup. The laws never seem to learn that a fighter craft using radar gives its position away to a passive detection system long before the radar itself will ever see anything. The Orbitals will probably see Cowboy on infrared long before they pick him up on radar.

  The deltas howling toward the Orbitals are also in pairs, Cowboy in the l
ead with his wingman Andy, a former deltajock, two miles above and behind, trailing to port. The two ex-Space Force people, Diego and Maurice, flying second string twenty-five miles behind.

  Coded Orbital transmissions rain against Cowboy’s crystal. The brown rim of California drops into the sea. The frigates ahead are bright infrared bullets foreshortening toward Cowboy’s brain. He pulses a signal to Andy, and Pony Express begins to jitter through the sky, the airframe quaking, trying to dance away from the frigate’s lasers. The delta buckets up and down, yawing, correcting, yawing again. Cowboy runs through the checks and finds that his systems are surviving the atmospheric hammer. Through his skin he feels an additional pulse of microwave, then a second–– Orbital radar-homers on their way. He drops a decoy missile that should give out a strong radar image.

  He fires an antiradiation-homer just to discourage the frigates from using their radar sets, and an instant later hears confirmation from Andy that his wingman’s done the same. His sensors go wild for a second, proof that he’s just jittered across a laser track, and gives a death’s-head grin to the sky and the alloy intruders. Some people aren’t coming back from this, and he figures it should be the Tempel men. It’s time someone gave them a comeuppance.

  There’s a glimpse of silver over his canopy as the radar-homer draws past at a converging rate of eight times the speed of sound. Cowboy bellows inchoate defiance into his face mask. There’s a flash of infrared off his port bow, and Andy reports, “We hit one, C’Boy!”–– and then Pony Express is shuddering in the frigates’ slipstream, shedding thermite flares to discourage heat-seekers. There’s nothing between it and the shuttle.

  His nerves wail in triumph, taut like the strings of a steel guitar. The dorsal minigun slams into the air and begins its roar, spitting out a steel wall in the path of the target.