Hardwired (2 page)

“Hi, C’boy,” Warren says. He pronounces it “Cubboy.” He doesn’t turn from his work.

“Hi.” Cowboy opens the front of the Wurlitzer– the lock hasn’t worked in decades– and collects some quarters. He tells the machine to play some scratchy old country swing and then walks across the darkened hangar.

“Low-pressure fuel turbopump,” Warren says. Disassembled, the pump looks like a plastic model kit for a Galapagos turtle. “Running red lights on my tests. See where the metal’s bright, here, where the blade is rubbing? I think I may have to machine a new part.”

“Need a hand?”

“I just might.”

Warren’s face is craggier than usual in the bright overhead light, his eyes and forehead shadowed by the brim of his cap so that his beaky nose seems bigger than it is. He’s erect and intense, and though he’s flabby in places, these are places where flab doesn’t matter much. Behind him the soft colored lights of the Wurlitzer shine on the matte-black nose of a delta. He’s the actual owner of the airfield, with Cowboy as secret partner. Cowboy doesn’t like data trails that point in his direction.

Warren fiddles with the part a while more, then takes measurements. He moves over to the lathe and puts on his goggles. Cowboy readies himself to hand him the tools when necessary. Spare parts are hard to find for military-surplus jet engines, and the parts that are available often have too many questions attached.

The lathe whines. Sparks spill like tiny meteors against the concrete floor. “I’m making a run Wednesday night,” Cowboy says. “In five days.”

“I can come down Monday and start my checks on the panzer. Is that too late?”

“Not for where I’m going.” There is resentment in Cowboy’s voice.

“Iowa again?”

“Hell, yes.” Anger flares in Cowboy’s soul. “Arkady and the others... they keep looking at their damn analyses. Saying that the privateers are undercapitalized, all we have to do is wait and keep them from taking any cargoes.”

“And?”

“And it’s
wrong
. You can’t beat the heat by playing their own game. We should be running into Missouri every night. Making them eat fuel, ammo. Rock them if that’s what it takes.” He snorts. “Undercapitalized. See what the loss of a dozen aircraft will do for their cash flow.”

Warren looks up from the spinning lathe. “You running for Arkady on Wednesday night?”

Cowboy nods.

“I don’t like the man. I wonder about him.” Warren, in a studied way, is working the lathe again. His white hair, sticking out from under his cap, flashes in the light of sparks.

Cowboy waits, knowing Warren will make his point in his own time. Warren turns off the lathe and pushes his goggles up above the brim of his cap. “He came from nowhere in particular. And now he’s the biggest thirdman in the Rockies. He’s got sources of supply that the others can’t match. Dresses in all those cryo max fashions from the Florida Free Zone.”

“So? He’s got organization. And I don’t like his clothes either. ”

Warren holds up his gleaming alloy creation to the light. Narrowing his eyes. “He’s supposed to be getting it through cutouts. Hijackings, corrupt Orbital executives. That sort of thing. The usual. But in this kind of quantity? You can’t get that much in the way of goods without the Orbitals knowing.”

A protesting whisper runs through Cowboy’s mind. In it for the ride, not for the cargo.

He’s said it often enough. An ethic, this, a kind of purity. Half the time he hasn’t even known what he’s been carrying.

“I don’t know if I want to hear this,” he says.

“Don’t hear it, then.” Warren turns away and goes back to the pump. He puts on a headset and runs through some checks.

Cowboy thinks for a moment about Arkady, the burly man who runs half the traffic across the Line these days, who exists in a strange swirl of assistants, bodyguards, helpers, techs, hangers-on of no apparent function who imitate his fashionable dress and his mannerisms. Women always present, but never a part of business. An existence cognate with what Cowboy can understand of Arkady’s mind: convoluted, filled with violent prejudices and hatreds, sudden anger juxtaposed with sudden sentimentality, suspicious in a strange, offhand Russian way, as if paranoia were a way of life, not merely a set of reasonable precautions but a religion.

Cowboy doesn’t like Arkady, but hasn’t so far bothered to dislike him. Arkady considers himself an insider, a manipulator, but he’s outside what really counts; outside the life of the panzerboy, the mutant creature with turbine lungs and highpressure turbopump heart, crystal implanted in his skull, eyes like lasers, fingers that point missiles, alcohol throbbing through his veins... Arkady thinks he’s running things but he’s really just an instrument, an excuse for the panzerboys to make their runs across the Line and into legend. And if Arkady doesn’t understand that, his thoughts don’t count for much in the scheme of thing.

Warren is reassembling parts of the pump, ready to run his tests, and will be busy for a while. Cowboy leaves the pool of light and walks into the blackness of the hangar. The deltas loom above him, poised and ready, lacking only a pilot to make them living things. His hands reach up to touch a smooth underbelly, an epoxide canard, the fairing of a downward-gazing radar. Like stroking a matte-black animal, a half-wild thing too dangerous to be called a pet. It lacks only a pilot, and a purpose.

He moves a ladder from an engine access panel to a cockpit and climbs into the seat that was, years ago, molded to his body. The familiar metal and rubber smells warm up to him. He closes his eyes and remembers the night splattered with brightness, the sudden flare of erupting fuel, the mad chase as, supersonic, he bobbed and weaved among the hills and valleys of the Ozarks, the laws on his tail as he burned for home…

His first delta was called
Midnight Sun
, but he changed the name after he’d figured out what was really going on. He and the other deltajocks were not an abstract response to market conditions but a continuation of some kind of mythology. Delivering the mail across the high dome of night, despite all the oppressors’ efforts to the contrary. Keeping a light burning in the darkness, hope in the shape of an afterburner flame. The last free Americans, on the last high road…

So he’d begun to live what he suddenly knew. Accepting the half-scornful, condescending nickname they’d given him, living it, becoming Cowboy, the airjock. Answering to nothing else. Becoming the best, living in realms higher than any of the competition. He called his next delta
Pony Express
. And in it he delivered the mail as long as they’d let him. Till times changed, and modes of delivery changed. Till he had to become a boy instead of a jock. The eyes that could focus into the night blackness, straining to spot the infrared signature of the laws riding combat air patrol over the prairie, were now shut in a small armored cabin, all the visuals coming in through remotes. He is still the best, still delivering the mail. He shifts in his seat. The country swing fades and all Cowboy can hear in the echoing silence is the whirr of Warren’s lathe. And sense the restlessness in himself, wanting only a name…

Chapter Two

TODAY/YES

Bodies and parts of bodies flare and die in laserlight, here the translucent sheen of eyes rimmed in kohl or turned up to a heaven masked by the starry-glitter ceiling, here electric hair flaring with fashionable static discharges, here a blue-white glow of teeth rimmed in darkglow fire and pierced by mute extended tongue. It is zonedance. Though the band is loud and sweat-hot, many of the zoned are tuned to their own music through crystal wired delicately to the auditory nerves, or dancing to the headsets through which they can pick up any of the bar’s twelve channels... They seethe in arrhythmic patterns, heedless of one another. Perfect control is sought, but there are accidents–– impacts, a flurry of fists and elbows–– and someone crawls out of the zone, whimpering through a bloodstreaked hand, unnoticed by the pack. To Sarah the dancers at the Aujourd’Oui seem a twitching mass of dying flesh, bloody, insensate, mortal. Bound by the mud of earth. They are meat. She is hunting, and Weasel is the name of her friend.

MODERNBODYMODERNBODYMODERNBODYMODER

Need a Modern Body?

All Electric-Replaceable-In the Mode!

Get One Now!

NBODYMODERNBODYMODERNBODYMODERNBODY

The body designer had eyes of glittering violet above cheekbones of sculptured ivory. Her hair was a streaky blond that swept to an architecturally perfect dorsal fin behind her nape. Her muscles were catlike and her mouth was a cruel flower.

“Hair shorter, yes,” she said. “One doesn’t wear it long in freefall. ” Her fingers lashed out and seized Sarah by the chin, tilting her head to the cold north light. Her fingernails were violet, to match her eyes, and sharp. Sarah glared at her, sullen. The body designer smiled. “A little pad in the chin, yes,” she says. “You need a stronger chin. The tip of the nose can be altered; you’re a bit too retrousse. The curve of the jawbone needs a little flattening– I’ll bring my paring knife tomorrow. And, of course, we’ll remove the scars. Those scars have got to go.” Sarah curled her lip under the pressure of the violet-tipped fingers.

The designer dropped Sarah’s chin and whirled. “Must we use this girl, Cunningham?” she asked. “She has no style at all. She can’t walk gracefully. Her body’s too big, too awkward. She’s nothing. She’s dirt. Common.”

Cunningham sat silently in his brown suit, his neutral, unmemorable face giving away nothing. His voice was whispery, calm, yet still authoritative. Sarah thought it could be a computer voice, so devoid was it of highlights. “Our Sarah has style, Firebud,” he said. “Style and discipline. You are to give it form, to fashion it. Her style must be a weapon, a shaped charge. You will make it, I will point it. And Sarah will punch a hole right where we intend she should.” He looked at Sarah with his steady brown eyes. “Won’t you, Sarah?” he asked. Sarah did not reply. Instead, she looked up at the body designer, drawing back her lips, showing teeth. “Let me hunt you some night, Firebud,” she said. “I’ll show you style.”

The designer rolled her eyes. “Dirtgirl stuff,” she snorted, but she took a step back. Sarah grinned.

“And, Firebud,” Cunningham said, “leave the scars alone. They will speak to our Princess. Of this cruel terrestrial reality that she helped create. That she dominates. With which she is already half in love.

“Yes,” he said, “leave the scars alone.” For the first time he smiled, a brief tightening of the cheek muscles, cold as liquid nitrogen. “Our Princess will love the scars,” he said. “Love them till the very last.”

WINNERS/YES LOSERS/YES

The Aujourd’Oui is a jockey bar, and they are all here, moonjocks and rigjocks, holdjocks and powerjocks and rockjocks– the jocks condescending to share the floor with the mudboys and dirtgirls who surround them, those who hope to become them or love them or want simply to be near them, to touch them in the zonedance and absorb a piece of their radiance. The jocks wear their colors, vests, and jackets bearing the emblems of their blocs– Hughes, Pfizer, Toshiba, Tupolev, ARAMCO– the blazons of the Rock War-victors borne with careless pride by the jocks who had won them their place in the sky. Six feet three inches in height, Sarah stalks among them in a black satin jacket, blazoned on its back with a white crane that rises to the starry firmament amid a flock of chrome-bright Chinese characters. It is the badge of a small bloc that does most of its business out of Singapore, and is hardly ever seen here in the Florida Free Zone. Her face is unknown to the regulars, but it is hoped they won’t think it odd, not as odd as it would seem if she wore the badge of Tupolev or Kikuyu Optics I.G.

Her sculpted face is pale, the Florida tan gone, her eyes dark-rimmed. Her almost-black hair is short on the sides and brushy on top, her nape hair falling in two thin braids down her back. Chrome-steel earrings brush her shoulders. Firebud has broadened her already-broad shoulders and pared down the width of her pelvis; her face is sharp and pointed beneath a widow’s peak, looking like a succession of arrowheads, the shaped charge that Cunningham demands. She wears black dancing slippers laced over the ankles and dark purple stretch overalls with suspenders that frame her breasts, stretching the fabric over the nipples that Firebud has made more prominent. Her shirt is gauze spangled with silver; her neck scarf, black silk. There is a receiver tagged to the optic centers of her forebrain, at the moment monitoring police broadcasts, a constant Times Square of an LED running amber, at will, above her expanded vision.

Gifts from Cunningham. Her hardwired nerves are her own. So is Weasel.

I LOVE MY KIKUYU EYES, SEZ PRIMO PORNOSTAR ROD MCLEISH, AND WITH THE INFRARED OPTION, I CAN TELL IF MY PARTNER’S REALLY EXCITED OR IF I’M JUST ON A SILICON RIDE…

-Kikuyu Optics I.G.,

A Division Of Mikoyan-Gurevich

She first met Cunningham in another bar, the Blue Silk. Sarah ran Weasel as per contract, but the snagboy, a runner who had got more greedy than he had the smarts to handle, had been altered himself–– she is nursing bruises. She recovered the goods, fortunately, and since the contract was with the thirdmen, she was paid in endorphins, handy since she needs a few of them herself.

There is a bone bruise on the back of her thigh and she can’t sit; instead, she leans back against the padded bar and sips her rum and lime. The Blue Silk’s audio system plays island music and soothes her played-up nerves.

The Blue Silk is run by an ex-cutterjock named Maurice, a West Indian with the old-model Zeiss eyes who was on the losing side in the Rock War. He’s got Chip sockets on his ankles and wrists, the way the military wore them then. There are pictures of his friends and heroes on the walls, all of them with the azure silk neck scarves of the elite space defense corps, most of them framed with black mourning ribbons turning purple with the long years.

Sarah wonders what he has seen with those eyes. Did it include the burst of X rays that preceded the 10,000-ton rocks, launched from the orbital mass drivers, that tore through the atmosphere to crash on Earth’s cities? The artificial meteors, each with the force of a nuclear blast, had first fallen in the eastern hemisphere, over Mombasa and Calcutta, and by the time the planet had rotated and made the western hemisphere a target, the Earth had surrendered–– but the Orbital blocs felt they hadn’t made their point forcefully enough in the West, and so the rocks fell anyway. Communications foul-up, they said. Earth’s billions knew better.