Hardwired (43 page)

And then he’s bottoming out over the Sierras, the mountains’ green fingers reaching up to tag him but falling short, and Cowboy is hauling back and feeding alcohol to the burners again. His crystal has built the necessary routines to keep
Pony Express
on the wire. There’s not much room in his head for anything else, and he looks up into the blue sky, his vision returning to seethe shuttle a vast shadow in the sky, beset by black shapes that swoop and dart like swallows. The speed of the fight has slowed down and its cubic volume decreased; Cowboy can see it all from his point of low vantage. There are only three frigates now, and one of them seems to be damaged and keeping its distance. One of the deltas is staggering away, trailing fire, the other doggedly staying in the fight, dodging Orbital missiles. There are only seconds left before the shuttle crosses the Sierras and drops to a landing at Edwards.

Pony Express
arcs upward. A tone sounds in Cowboy’s crystal; he fires a heat-seeker automatically, but his artificial eyes are fixed on the
Argosy
. More tones sound, and the delta jars with each missile it launches. A frigate trails flame and tumbles to an encounter with a mountain, but Cowboy’s mind is full of control surfaces, blazing crystal, knowledge of engine and surface heat, eager weapons systems, the compelling flood from the electron world pouring into his mind at the speed of light... He’s a creature of the interface now, his brain a processor. His black wings shudder in torment. The spars that are his ribs moan. Heat flashes through his black epoxy skin. His heart threatens to explode as it feeds alcohol to the engines. The target fills his narrowed vision. He rolls and sprays the shuttle’s belly with minigun rounds, but he’s out of ammunition in a few seconds and all his missiles are gone. The shuttle is battered, but it’s a tough ship, still on target for landing. The mountains drop away and Cowboy sees nothing but desert rolling on to the brown horizon.

Neurotransmitters fall on crystal, electrons pour from Cowboy’s sockets at the speed of light. Control surfaces bite the air, howl in anger. The interface demands a certain solution, and the decision is taken without conscious volition. But somewhere in Cowboy’s mind there is a realization that this is the necessary and correct conclusion to his legend, to use himself and his matte-black body as the last missile against the Orbital shuttle and win for himself a slice of immortality, a place in the mind of every panzerboy, every jock…

Cowboy accepts the decision of his crystal. A bark of triumphant laughter bursts from his lips as the shuttle grows larger and larger in his vision.

A black fragment intervenes, spiraling between Cowboy and his target. Cowboy recognizes Maurice’s distinctive delta, sees the damage on wing and fuselage, Maurice’s sky-blue helmet in the cockpit, its opaque face mask fixed on the juncture of his delta’s course and the shuttle...
Argosy
explodes as Maurice drives his delta into the juncture of wing and fuselage.

Cowboy’s crystal is coping with the impact of alloy shuttle parts vaporizing themselves on the delta’s battered skin before Cowboy realizes that his own death is no more, that it’s been usurped by Maurice, and by the time that’s brought home to him, the shuttle and Maurice are well in his wake, rubble spilling to an impact with the Mojave, stirred by the wind of his passing but no longer a thing that can interact with his own destiny. Anger rises in his mind at the thought of his fate being stolen.

“Target destroyed. This is Cowboy. It’s done.” He’s crossed miles of desert during the course of his short transmission. He doesn’t pay any attention to the acknowledgment. There are still two frigates behind him, both crying for vengeance. He’s out of weapons and has only a few thermite decoys left. He hauls in a tight turn to the south, dodging out over the desert, the delta invading his mind again as the unstable craft vibrates, his correction of the control surfaces lagging behind as he begins his high-stress maneuver. But there’s a frigate right behind, its laser blowing away more sensors, heating the delta’s polymerized skin, seeking a weak place in the armor... Cowboy dodges one missile, then another, tries to sideslip the frigate while triggering a thermite decoy. His crystal is humming a warning that there are only a few minutes of fuel left.

The frigate tries to follow the nimble delta but can’t, overshooting; but a missile pulls harder g’s, and Cowboy, with his burned rear sensors, hasn’t seen it. It runs up one of his twin Rolls-Royce engines, and suddenly
Pony Express
is unstable again, venting droplets of molten alloy as it slews across the sky. Cowboy’s mind adjusts control surfaces, fuel flows, balances. Fury explodes in him. He looks for the target and finds it, hauling
Pony Express
in a tight S-turn to head straight for the frigate and knock it bodily out of the sky... But with one engine gone the delta has lost its acceleration, and Cowboy can’t catch the Orbital frigate. Another laser lances into
Pony Express
from behind, the crippled frigate coming up for the kill.

Cowboy turns to look over his shoulder, shrieks in rage at the infrared vision of more missiles boring in. He drops thermite and dances out of the way, but it feels as if his control is eroding. The maneuvers are making the delta more difficult to handle, and the rough ride is glitching up more systems. There are red and orange lights all over his remaining engine display. An Orbital laser punches out a panel, melts a spar.
Pony Express
lurches, recovers. More missiles are on the way. Cowboy tries to haul the delta around for the ramming maneuver again, but the controls won’t answer any radical course changes.

He can feel
Pony Express
moaning with the strain. He knows the delta might be tough enough to survive the missile that will take out the remaining engine, that he might be able to land it on the desert if he doesn’t lose any more control surfaces. Data swarms into his brain, the craft telling him that it’s capable of surviving. The missile comes nearer. There are no more decoys to drop. A steel guitar plays sadly in his mind. Cowboy gazes up into the sky and sees only emptiness.

Rockets flame as he rides up and out of the delta. A wall of wind smashes his face mask. Sky and earth tumble. He screams with the pain that suddenly surges up from his body, no longer masked by the anesthetic and by the demanding swarm of data from his sockets. Suspended in the air, his brain swimming, he never sees the final impact as
Pony Express
slams into the desert. His body has not fully awakened when he lands. Fortunately the desert is still; his chute collapses and drapes itself over a Joshua tree. The hot desert air scalds his throat with every breath. Pain shrieks at him in ever-insistent tones. He knows some ribs have gone, probably when he was wrestling
Pony Express
after the laser burned his comps, and his left forearm apparently failed to clear the cockpit when he punched out, and it’s now hanging ragged and bloody. Amusement rises and he laughs, and then the laugh turns to a cough and he feels something break inside. He tastes blood in his mouth. He turns his head to spit, and something runs down his face.

Cowboy punches the quick release and frees himself from his chute, then pulls off his helmet and takes the dead studs out of his skull. He rolls carefully onto his side and tries to get to his feet. He fails, spits blood, tries again, succeeds. His left leg scraped the canopy punching out and it feels like it’s lost a lot of skin, but it doesn’t seem broken. He takes a pair of steps and laughs again, then bends over as coughs rack him, as blood fills his mouth. He hawks it out and then straightens his shoulders defiantly.

He’s landed on a rocky ridge overlooking a two-rut desert track. A column of smoke rises a mile away, where
Pony Express
fell after it tore itself to pieces battling the air. Another, vaster black pillar stands far to the north where the wreckage of
Argosy
lies tangled with a delta.

A pair of sonic booms throb through the air, and Cowboy can see the infrared signal of the two frigates circling back toward Edwards. Cowboy gives them the finger and grins. “You lost, you bastards.” He cackles and begins to hobble down the slope.

There’s a growling, whining noise coming from down the track, and Cowboy props himself against a scalding rock and waits. It’s a chrome turbine tricycle coming to investigate the wreck. Cowboy reaches for the pistol in his holster and fires a pair of shots into the air. The driver’s head turns and acknowledges his wave with a nod. The trike pulls off the road and the driver begins walking up the slope.

It’s a dark-skinned woman with a shaved head, some kind of bodybuilder, with her muscles increased and shaped by hormones, her breasts as irrelevant on her massive expanse of chest as a pair of peas. She’s wearing an alloy reflective mesh bikini top and baggy reflec trunks, with soft moccasins laced up above her ankles. Cowboy sees freckles on her shoulders, deep beneath the dark skin, and a necklace of bleached rattlesnake skulls. She looks at him with sea-green eyes.

“You look in bad shape, linefoot.”

Cowboy reaches into his pocket and pulls out a half ounce of gold. “You can earn a second one of these if you get me to Boulder City,” he says. “I don’t want to go through any Free Zone customs checks, either.”

She nods. “Fair enough. But I don’t think you’re gonna make it that far, not on desert roads.”

“That’s not your worry.”

“You got a med kit someplace?”

Cowboy nods upslope. “Yeah. With my chute.”

Wordlessly she moves upslope to the chute, drags it off the Joshua tree, and weighs it down with rocks. She picks up the med kit and brings it down.

Cowboy is sitting down when she gets back, the gun hanging limp in his hand. She takes it from him and puts it back in his holster. He almost faints with the pain as she pulls off the top of his g-suit. She cleans up some of the blood, disinfects the cut, tapes up his ribs, ties up his broken arm in a sling. Then she fires some endorphin into his right biceps and the drug whispers gracefully between his pain receptors and his efficient hardwired nerves. He fades so fast that she has to help him down the slope to get him on her cycle. As he mounts behind her he notices three freshly killed rattlesnakes draped over the handlebars.

He can hear sirens from the north, and there’s a billow of dust on the track, moving closer. She wrestles the trike off the road and cuts across country, moving slowly so as not to raise a dust cloud. The jouncing is easier on his ribs than he thought it would be.

Occupied California extends east to Beacon Station. The trike weaves down desert trails, up mountain ridges, drives fast across a dry lakebed. Cowboy leans his head back against the rest and drowses. The endorphin murmurs in his mind. The trike gets onto the expressway east of Silver Lake and the ride gets easier, the turbine screaming. Cowboy watches the working of the driver’s powerful shoulder muscles as she dodges potholes. Dead snakes flap in the wind. Amusement rises in him again.

“Hey, lady. You’re driving right into a legend, you know that?”

She gives him an incurious look over her shoulder. “I figure that legend’s your own business, man.”

“I wish I could see the screamsheets.”

“I wish I could see the other half of that gold. I don’t suppose that’s gonna happen right now, either.”

He laughs, coughs, laughs again. “You remind me of somebody. ”

“Is that supposed to make me feel good?”

He laughs some more. Licks his dry lips. “You got any water?”

She hands him a plastic squeeze bottle. He fills his mouth, spits it overside, fills his mouth again and swallows. He hands her the squeeze bottle and she clips it to the trike frame. Cowboy leans back and closes his eyes again, feeling the cycle swerving under him like a carnival ride. The setting sun licks the back of his neck.

With his eyes closed he can still feel the punch of the afterburners, the song of the missiles in his crystal, the feeling of
Pony Express
living in his nerves, his veins. Gone now, a wreck on the desert floor. The last of the working deltas, the last not cannibalized to make the graceless panzers that Cowboy dislikes. He’s got more reason than ever to hate them now that, for a short while, he’s been a flier again.

The endorphin patterns bright images behind his closed lids, the images of green displays glowing deep in his mind, the sight of silver missile fins rotating against the sky,
Argosy
growing larger and larger as he loops up to intercept...the sight of extinction filling the canopy, the nearing obliteration demanded by crystal and interface...the dark wedge blotting out the steel sky, the interception proof of his devotion to life at the speed of light...the final impact that secures his place in the sky, his last triumphant grin drawn taut like the smile of a skull…

Cowboy opens his eyes and draws a breath, the shriek poised in his throat. It doesn’t come. Fear dopplers along his triggered nerves. The cycle girl is weaving across night asphalt, dodging between potholes picked out by her headlight. “Fuck,” Cowboy says. He tells his nerves to shut down again.

“You say something, linefoot?”

He gazes at the necklace of skulls, the ridged hollow rattler eyes staring at him. The eyes of Mistress Death, whose cool and tenebrous lips brushed against his in the sky. A tremor shakes him. “Nothing much,” he says.

“That’s what I thought.”

“Can I have some more water?”

He drinks half the squeeze bottle this time before handing it back. His good hand is trembling so much he almost drops it. Pain is lurking deep in his chest, the endorphins wearing off.

“Are your people going to miss you?” he asks.

A massive shrug. “My sisters’ll miss me when they miss me.”

“They all got muscles like you?”

“That’s why we live together, man.”

She turns her head to look at him. Starlight glitters in her eyes. “You got anyplace in Boulder City you want to go?”

“A public phone’ll do. Then maybe a hotel.”

“Whatever you say, linefoot.”

The lights of Boulder City splay out into the night. The cycle idles while Cowboy fights stiffness and pain, and manages to stand upright. “Right thigh pocket,” he says, after a moment of struggle. “A credit needle.”