Hardwired (6 page)

Weasel follows the vein to Danica’s heart. Sarah holds her down, her own chest near bursting with lack of air, until the struggling stops and Daud’s blue eyes grow cloudy and die.

Purple and black rim Sarah’s vision. She heaves herself off the bed, partly retracting Weasel as she gasps for air through the constricted passage in her throat. She stumbles for the washroom, falls and crashes into the sink. The impact drives the air from her. Her hands turn the spigots. Her hands put Weasel in the sink and feel the water running chill. Her breath comes in rasps. Weasel is coated with a gel that supposedly prevents blood and matter from adhering, but she doesn’t want even a chance of Danica’s flesh in her mouth. The cybersnake is tearing at her breast. The water thunders until she can feel nothing but the speed with which she is falling into blackness, and then she falls back and sucks Weasel into her and can breathe again and taste the cool and healing air.

Her chest heaves up and down, and her eyes are still full of darkness. She knows Daud is dead and that she has a task. She whips her head back and forth and tries to clear it, tries to scrabble upward from the brink, but Weasel is eating her heart and she can scarcely think from the pain. Sarah can hear herself whimper. She can feel the prickle of the carpet against the back of her neck as she raises her arms above her head and tries to drag herself along, crawling away, crawling, while Weasel throbs like thunder in her chest and she thinks she can hear her heart Crack.

Sarah comes to herself slowly, and the black circle fades from her sight. She is lying on her back and the water is still roaring in the sink. She sits up and clutches at her throat. Weasel, having fed, is at rest. She crawls back to the sink and turns the spigots off. Grasping them, she hauls herself to her feet. She still has work to do.

In her room, Princess is spread-eagled on the bed. Dead, it is easier to see the old man in her. Sarah’s stomach turns over. She should drag Princess across the bed and tuck her under the covers, delaying the moment when they find her, but she can’t bring herself to touch the cooling flesh; and instead she turns her eyes away and steps into the next room.

She pauses as her eyes adjust to the dim light, and listens to the house. Silence. She reads the amber lights above her vision, and can find only routine broadcasts. Sarah takes a pair of gloves from her belt pouch and walks to the room’s comp deck. She flicks it on, then opens the trapdoor and takes from her pouch one of the liquid-crystal music cubes Cunningham has given her. She puts it in the trapdoor and waits for the deck to signal her.

The cube would, in fact, have played music had anyone else used it. Sarah has the code to convert it to something else. The READY signal appears.

She taps the keys in near-silence as she enters the codes. A pale light flashes in the corner of the screen: RUNNING. She leans back in her chair and sighs.

Princess was a courier, bringing from orbit a liquid-crystal cube filled with complex instructions, instructions her company dared not trust even to coded radio transmissions. Princess would not have known what she carried, though presumably it contained inventory data, strategies for manipulating the market, instructions to subordinates, buying and selling strategies. Information worth millions to any competitor. The crystal cube would have been altered to a new configuration once the information was removed to the company computer–– a computer sealed against any outside tampering, but which could presumably be accessed through the terminals in the corporate suites.

Sarah also has no clear idea what is on the cube she is carrying. Some kind of powerful theft program, she presumes, to break its way through the barriers surrounding the information so that it can be copied. She does not know how good her program is, whether it’s setting off every alarm in Florida or whether it’s accomplishing its business stealthily. If it’s very good, it will not only copy the information, but alter it as well, planting a flow of disinformation at the heart of the enemy code, perhaps even altering the instructions as well, sabotaging the enemy’s marketing patterns.

While the RUNNING light blinks, Sarah stands and goes over every part of the suite she might have touched, stroking anything that could retain a print with her gloved fingertips. The house, and Princess, are silent.

It is eleven minutes before the computer signals READY. Sarah extracts the cube and returns it to her belt. She has been told to wait a few hours, but there is someone dead in the next room and every nerve screams at her to run. She sits before the comp deck and puts her head between her legs, gulping air. For some reason she finds herself trembling. She battles the adrenaline and her own nerves, and thinks of the tickets, the cool dark of space with the blue limb of Earth far below, forever out of reach.

In two hours she calls a cab and walks down the cold, echoing stair. The security man nods at her as she walks out: his job is to keep people from coming in, not to hinder their leaving. He even gives her the inhaler back.

She takes a dozen cabs to a dozen different places, leaving the satin jacket in one, cinching her waist in tighter and removing the suspenders in another, in a third reversing her T-shirt and her belt pouch, both now glowing yellow like a warning light. The jockey persona is gone, and she is dirt again. She finishes her journey at the Plastic Girl, the place still running flat-out at four in the morning. As she enters, the sounds of dirt life assault her, and she takes comfort. This is her world, and she knows all the warm places where she can hide. She takes a room in the back and calls Cunningham. “Come and get your cube,” she says, and then orders rum and lime.

By the time he arrives, she’s rented an analyzer and some muscle. He comes in alone, a package in his hand. He closes the door behind him.

“Princess?” he asks.

“Dead.”

Cunningham nods. The cube is on the table before her. She holds out a hand. “Let’s see what you’ve got,” she says.

She checks three vials at random and the analyzer tells her it’s chloramphenildorphin, purity 99.8 percent or better. She smiles. “Take your cube,” she says, but he plugs it into the room’s deck first, making sure it has what he wants. Then he puts it in his pocket and heads for the door.

“If you have another job,” she says, “you know where to find me.”

He pauses, a hand on the knob. His eyes, flicker. She receives an impression of sadness from him, as if he were mourning something newly dead.

He is an earthly extension, Sarah knows, of an Orbital bloc. She doesn’t even know which one. He is a willing tool and an obedient one, and she has fed him her scorn on that account, but that doesn’t disguise what they both know–– that she would give all the contents of the packet, and everything else besides, if she could have his ticket, and on the same terms.

“I’ll be on the ramp in an hour,” he says. “Going back to orbit. ”

She gives him a grin. “Maybe I’ll be seeing you there,” she says.

He nods, his eyes on hers. He starts to say something, then turns himself off again, as if he realizes it’s pointless. “Be careful,” he says, and leaves without another glance. One of her hired muscle looks in at her.

“It’s clear,” she says. The muscle nods.

She looks at the fortune in her hand and feels suddenly hollow. There is a vacuum in her chest where the joy should be. The drink she has ordered tastes as flat as barley water, and a headache throbs in time to the LED light burning in her forehead. She pays off her hired muscle and takes a cab to an all-night bank, where she deposits the endorphin in a rented box. Then she takes the cab home. The apartment hums softly, emptily. She finds the control to her LED and turns it off, then throws her clothing in the trash. Naked, she steps into her room and sees the holo of Princess on her night table. Hesitantly, she reaches out to it, then turns it face down and falls into the welcoming blackness.

LOVELY AND WAITING FOR YOU

TERRY’S TOUGH ’N’ TENDER

NOW

SIt is still night when she awakens to the sound of the door. “Daud?” she asks, and is answered by a groan.

He is wrapped in a sheet and covered with blood. Jackstraw holds him up, panting, his neck muscles straining. “Bastard,” he says.

She picks Daud up like a child and carries him to her bed. His blood smears her arms, her breasts. “Bastard went thatch,” Jackstraw says. “I was only gone a minute.”

Sarah arranges Daud on the bed and unwraps the sheet. A whimpering sound forces its way up her throat. She puts her hand to her mouth. Daud is striped in blood–– the thatch must have used some kind of weighted whip. Weakly, he tries to move, raises a hand as if to ward off a blow.

“Lie back,” Sarah says. “You’re at home.”

Daud’s face crinkles in pain. “Sarah,” he says, and begins to cry.

Sarah feels tears stinging her own eyes and blinks them away. She looks up at Jackstraw.

“Did you give him anything?” she asks.

“Yeah. Endorphin. First thing.”

“How much?”

He looks at her blankly. “Lots. I don’t know.”

“You weren’t supposed to leave the next room,” she says.

His eyes slide away. “It was a busy night,” he says. “I was only gone a minute.”

She turns her eyes back to Daud. “It took more than a minute for this,” she says. “Get the fuck out.”

“It’s not–”

There is a savage light in her eyes. She wants to tear him but she has other things to do.

“Get the fuck out,” she repeats. He hesitates for another instant, then turns away.

She cleans the cuts and disinfects them. Daud cries silently, his throat working. Sarah looks for his injector and finds it, loads it with endorphins from his cache, and guesses at a dosage. She puts it in his arm, and he says her name and goes to sleep. She watches for a while, making sure he hasn’t taken too much, and then puts the covers over him and turns down the light.

“Just lie back,” she says. “I’ve got the price of your ticket.” She leans down to kiss his beardless cheek. The bloody sheet goes in the trash.

Daud normally sleeps on the convertible sofa in the front room, and after making sure he is asleep, she moves to the other room and, without bothering to open the sofa, lies down on it. The room hums, and for a long while she listens.

TAMPA’S TOTALS OVERNITE, AS OF 8 THIS MORNING–

TWELVE FOUND DEAD IN CITY LIMITS…

LUCKY WINNERS COLLECT AT ODDS OF 5 TO 3

The explosion has enough force to throw the sofa against the far wall. Sarah feels a hot rush of wind that tears the breath from her throat, the elevator sensation of the world falling away, and then a final impact as the wall comes up. Screams are ricocheting from every corner, all the screams that Princess never uttered. There are fires licking like red laserlight.

She heaves herself to her feet and runs for the other room. She can see by the light of the burning bed. Daud is sprawled in a corner of the room, and parts of his body are open and other parts are on the walls. She is screaming for help, but alone she manages to get the burning bedding through the hole in the wall.

Outside, the hot tongues of morning are rising in the east. She thinks she can hear Daud call her name.

BODY NEEDING WORK?

WE DELIVER

The ambulance driver wants payment in advance, and she opens her portfolio by comp and transfers the stock without questioning the prices he gives her. Daud dies three times before the driver’s two assistants can get him out of the apartment, and each time they bring him back the prices go up. “You got the money, lady, and he’ll be fine,” the driver tells her. He looks at her nakedness with appreciative eyes. “All kinds of arrangements can be made,” he says.

Later, Sarah sits in the hospital room and watches the doctors work and is told their rates of payment. She will have to make plans to convert the endorphin quickly, within a few days. Machines attached to Daud hiss and thump. The police surround her and want to know why someone would fire a shaped charge at her apartment wall from the building across the street. She tells them she has no idea. They have a lot of questions, but that seems to be the most frequent. Eventually she puts her head in her hands and shakes her head; and they shuffle for a while and then leave.

She wishes she had the inhaler: she needs the bite of hardfire to keep herself alert, to keep her mind functioning. Thoughts hammer at her. If Cunningham’s people had been in her apartment, they would have known that she had slept in the back room, Daud in the front. They waited till the lights went down and she had the time to get to sleep, then fired with a weapon that would smash through the wall and scatter burning steel through the inside. They hadn’t trusted that she wouldn’t tell someone or that she wouldn’t try to use the pieces of knowledge she had gained as leverage for some shifty little dirtscheme of her own.

Who would I tell
? she wonders.

She remembers Cunningham at that last moment in the Plastic Girl, the sadness in him. He had known. Tried, in his way, to warn her. Perhaps the decision had not been his; perhaps it had been made over his objection. What did the Orbitals care for one more dirtgirl when they had already killed millions, and kept the rest alive only so long as they were useful currency?

The Hetman glides into the room on catlike feet. He wears a gold earring, and his wise, liquid eyes are surrounded by the spiderwebs of the old hustler’s dirtbound life. “I am sorry, mi hermana,” he says. “I had no indication it would come to this. I want you to understand.”

Sarah nods numbly. “I know, Michael.”

“I know people on the West Coast,” the Hetman says. “They will give you work there, until Cunningham and his people forget you exist.”

Sarah looks up at him for a moment, then looks at the bed and the humming, hissing machines. She shakes her head. “I can’t go, Michael,” she says.

“A bad mistake, Sarah.” Gently. “They will try again.”

Sarah makes no reply, feeling only the emptiness inside her, knowing the emptiness would never leave if she deserted Daud again. The Hetman stands for an uncomfortable moment, then is gone.