Hardwired (7 page)

“I had the ticket,” Sarah whispers.

Outside she can see the mud boiling under the lunatic sun. All Earth’s soil, looking for their tickets, plugging into whatever can give them a fragment of their dream. All playing by someone else’s rules. Sarah has her ticket, but the rules have turned on her like a weasel, and she must shred the ticket and spread it on the street, spread it so she can watch the machines hum and hiss and keep what she loves alive. Because there is no choice, and the girls have no option but to follow the instructions and play as best they can.

Chapter Three

As he stands in the hot summer of eastern Colorado, a steel guitar is playing a lonesome song somewhere in the back of Cowboy’s mind.

“For the laws I have a certain respect,” he says. “For mercenaries I have none.”

Arkady Mikhailovich Dragunov stares at him for a half second. His eyes are slitted against the brightness of the sun. The whites seem yellowed Faberge ivory, and the irises, old steel darkened like a sword. Then he nods. It’s the answer he wants.

Discontent rises in Cowboy like a drifting wave of red sand. He doesn’t like this man or share his strange, suspicious, involuted hatreds. Excitement is tingling in his arms, his mind, the crystal inside his skull.
Missouri. At last
. But Arkady is oblivious to the grandeur of what is going to take place, wants only to fit Cowboy into place with his own self-image, to remind Cowboy again that Arkady is not just a boss but the
big
boss, that Cowboy owes him not simply loyalty but servitude. A game that Cowboy will not play.

“Goddamn right,” Arkady says. “We know they’re offering their services to Iowa and Arkansas. We don’t want that.”

“If they find me, I’ll do what I can,” Cowboy says, knowing that in this business, talk is necessarily elliptical. “But first they’ve got to find me. And my op plan should give me a good chance of staying in the clear.”

Arkady wears an open-necked silk shirt of pale violet, with leg-of-mutton sleeves so wide they seem to drag in the dust; an embroidered Georgian sash wound twice around his waist; and tight, polished cossack boots over tighter black trousers that have embroidery on the outer seams. His hair, at intervals, stands abruptly on end and flares with static discharges, a different color each time. The latest thing from the Havana boutiques of the Florida Free Zone. Cryo max, he says proudly. Cowboy knows Arkady couldn’t be cryo max if he spent his life trying; it isn’t in him. In fashion he is a follower, not a leader. Here he’s just impressing the hicks and his toadies.

Arkady is a big, brusque man, fond of hugging and touching the people he’s talking to; but he’s got a heart like superconducting hardware and eyes to match, and it would be foolish to consider him a friend. Thirdmen do not have cargo space for friends.

Arkady crimps the cardboard tube of a Russian cigarette and strikes a match. His hair stands on end, suddenly bright orange. Imitating the match, Cowboy thinks, as the steel guitar bends notes in his mind…

The Dodger, Cowboy’s manager, strolls from where the panzer is being loaded for the run. “Best make sure your craft is trimmed,” the Dodger says.

Cowboy nods. “See you later, Arkady.” Arkady’s hair turns green.

“I could see you were getting impatient,” the Dodger says as soon as they’re out of earshot. “Try not to be so fucking superior, will you?”

“It’s hard not to be when Arkady’s around.”

The Dodger flashes him a disapproving look.

“He must have to butter his ass,” Cowboy says, “to get into those pants.” He can see the lines around the Dodger’s eyes grow crinkly as he tries to suppress his laughter.

The Dodger is an older man, rail-lean, with a tall forehead and straight black hair going gray. He’s got a poetic way of speaking when the mood is on him. Cowboy likes him–– and trusts him, too, at least to a point, the point being giving the Dodger the codes to his portfolio. He might be naive, but he is not stupid.

Cowboy watches as the last pieces of cargo are stowed, making sure the panzer is trimmed, that all’s ready for the run across what the Dodger, in an evocative mood, had once christened Damnation Alley.

“What’s my cargo?” Cowboy asks. He smiles diffidently, wondering if the Dodger can see the thoughts behind his artificial eyes. The suspicions, the discontents. “Just for the record.”

The Dodger is busy cutting a plug of tobacco. “Chloramphenildorphin,” he says. “There’s going to be a shortage on the East Coast. The hospitals will pay a lot. Or so the rumors say.” He grins. “So be of good cheer. You’re going to make sure a lot of sick people stay alive.”

“Nice to be sort of legal,” Cowboy says. “For a change.”

He looks at the panzer, all angular armor and intakes, ugly and graceless compared to a delta. He owns this one but he hasn’t given it a name, doesn’t think of it in the same way. A panzer is just a machine, not a way of life. Not like flying.

Cowboy calls himself Pony Express now. It’s his radio handle, another nickname. He wants to keep the idea alive, even if it can’t take wing.

Cowboy climbs on top of the panzer, worms through the dorsal hatch, and sits down in the forward compartment. He studs a jack in his right temple and suddenly his vision is expanded, as if his two eyes were stretched around his head and a third eye surfaced on top. He calls up the maps he has stored on comp, and displays begin pulsing like strobes on the inside of his skull. His head has become a ROM cube. Inside it he sees fuel trucks spotted down the Alley, ready to move when he needs to be topped up; there is his planned route, with deviations and emergency routes marked, drawn in wide bands of color; there are old barns and deep coulees and other hiding places spotted like acne on the displays, all marked down by Arkady’s scouts.

Cowboy fishes a datacube out of his jacket pocket and drops it into the trapdoor. The display flares with another series of pinpricks. His own secret hiding places, the ones he prefers to use, that he keeps up to date with scouting forays of his own. Arkady, he knows, wants this trip to succeed; but Cowboy doesn’t know everyone in the thirdman’s organization, and some of them might have been bought by the privateers. Best to stick with the places he knows are safe. The panzer rocks slightly and Cowboy can hear the sound of footsteps on the Chobham Seven armor. He looks up and sees the Dodger’s silhouette through the dorsal hatch. “Time to move, Cowboy,” the Dodger says, and then spits his chaw over the side.

“Yo,” says Cowboy. He unplugs himself and stands up in the cramped compartment. His Kikuyu pupils contract to pinpricks as he puts his head out the hatch and looks west, in the direction of the wine-dark Rockies he knows are somewhere over the horizon. He feels, again, the strange lassitude infecting his heart, a discontent with things as they are.

“Damn,” he says. There is longing in the word.

“Yeah,” says the Dodger.

“I wish I was flying.”

“Yeah.” The Dodger looks pensive. “Someday, Cowboy,” he says. “We’re just waiting for the technology to roll around the other way again. ”

Cowboy can see Arkady standing by his armored Packard, sweating in the shade of a cottonwood, and suddenly the discontent has a name. “Chloramphenildorphin,” he says. “Where’s Arkady get it?”

“We’re not paid to know those kind of things,” the Dodger says.

“In quantities like this?” Cowboy’s voice turns thoughtful as he gazes across the gap of bright sky between himself and the thirdman. “Do you think it’s true,” he asks, “that the Orbitals are running the thirdmen, just like everything else?”

The Dodger glances nervously at Arkady and shrugs. “It don’t pay to make those kind of speculations out loud.”

“I just want to know who I’m working for,” Cowboy says. “if the underground is run by the overground, then we’re working for the people we’re fighting, qué no?”

The Dodger looks at him crookedly. “I wasn’t aware that we were fighting anybody a-tall, Cowboy,” he says.

“You know what I mean.” That if the thirdmen and panzerboys are just participating in a reshuffling of finances on behalf of the Orbital blocs, then the dream of being the last free Americans on the last free road is a foolish, romantic delusion. And what is Cowboy, then? A dupe, a hovercraft clown. Or worse than that, a tool.

The Dodger gives him a weary smile. “Concentrate on the privateers, Cowboy, that’s my advice,” he says. “You’re the best panzerboy on the planet. Stick to what you’re good at.”

Cowboy forces a grin and gives him the finger, and then closes the dorsal hatch. He strips naked and sticks electrodes to his arms and legs, then runs the wires from the electrodes to collars on his wrists and ankles. He attaches a catheter, then dons his g-suit and boots, sits on his acceleration couch and attaches cables to the collars, straps himself onto the couch. While his body remains immobile, his muscles will be exercised by electrode to keep the blood flowing. In the old days, before this technique had been developed and the jocks were riding their headsets out of Earth’s well and into the long diamond night, sometimes their legs and arms got gangrene.

Next he plugs jacks into the sockets in his temples, the silver-chased sockets over each ear, the fifth socket at the base of his skull. He pulls his helmet on over them, careful not to stress the laser-optic wires coming out of his head. He closes the mask across his face. He tastes rubber and hears the hiss of anesthetic, loud here in the closed space of the helmet.

His body will be put to sleep while he makes his run through the Alley. He is going to have more important things to do than look after it.

Cowboy does the chore swiftly, automatically. All along, there is a feeling: I have done this too often not to know what it’s about.

Neurotransmitters awaken the five studs in his head and Cowboy watches the insides of his skull blaze with incandescent light, the liquid-crystal data matrices of the panzer molding themselves to the configuration of his mind. His heart beats faster; he’s living in the interface again, the eye-face, his expanded mind racing like electrons through the circuits, into the metal and crystal heart of the machine. He can see around the panzer a full 360 degrees, and there are other boards in his strange mental space for engine displays and the panzer systems. He does a system check and a comp check and a weapons check, watching the long rows of green as they light up. His physical perceptions are no longer in three dimensions: the boards overlap and intertwine as they weave in and out of the face, as they mirror the subatomic reality of the electronics and the data that are the dying day outside.

Neurotransmitters lick with their chemical tongues the metal and crystal in his head, and electrons spit from the chips, racing along the cables to the engine starters, and through a dozen sensors Cowboy feels the bladed turbines reluctantly turn as the starters moan, and then flame torches the walls of the combustion chambers and the blades spin into life with a screaming whine. Cowboy monitors the howling exhaust as it belches fire. On his mental displays Cowboy can see the Dodger and Arkady and the ground crew watching the panzer through the blurred exhaust haze, and he watches fore and aft and checks the engine displays and sees another set of green lights and knows it’s time to move.

The howling of the engines beats at his senses. Warren’s spent the last week tuning them, running check after check, making certain they will perform beyond expectations. They’re military surplus jets, monsters. They aren’t built to ride this close to the ground, and without Cowboy’s straddling this mutant creature every inch of the way they’re going to run away with him.

Inside the rubber-tasting mask his lips draw back from his teeth and he grins: he will ride this beast across the Alley and through the web of traps set up this side of the Mississippi and add another layer of permeable sky to the distance separating him from the lesser icons of glory that are the other panzerboys, more proof that the flaming corn-alcohol throbs through his chest like blood and that the shrieking exhaust flows from his lungs like breath, that his eyes beam radar and his fingers can flick missiles forth like pebbles. Through his sensors he can taste the exhaust and see the sky and the prairie sunset, and part of his mind can feel the throbbing radio energies that are the enemy’s search planes, and it seems to him that the watchers and the escort vehicles are suddenly lessened, separated from him by more than a few hundred yards–– he will be taking the panzer over the Line, and they will not, and he looks at them from within his interface, from his immeasurable height of radiant glory and pities them for what they do not know.

At the moment the ultimate beneficiaries of his run–– the hospitals in New England, the thirdmen, his own portfolio, possibly the immeasurably distant, insanely gluttonous creatures who ride their Orbital factories and look down on the Earth as a fast-depleting treasure house to be plundered–– all these fade down long redshifting lines, as if blurred by distance and the flaming jet’s exhaust. The reality is here in the panzer. Discontent is banished. Action is the thing, and All.

He diverts a part of the jets exhaust and another set of fans whine into life, lifting the ground-effect panzer with a lurch onto its inflatable self-sealing cushion. The Pony Express will deliver the mail or know the reason why. Microwave chatter spins around his ears like gnats, and he wishes he could brush it away with his hands.

“Arkady wants to say a few words, Cowboy.” The voice is the Dodger’s, and Cowboy can tell he knows this isn’t a good idea.

“I’m sort of getting ready here,” Cowboy says.

“I know that.” Shortly, sounding as if his mouth is full of tobacco: “Arkady thinks it’s important.”

Cowboy concedes, watching the green lights, seeing maps flash behind his eyes. “Whatever Arkady wants,” he says.

Arkady has the mic too close to his lips. His
p’s
and
b
’s sound like cannon shots.
Put the damn headset on your head,
Cowboy thinks in irritation.
That’s what it’s for, not to hold it to your fucking mouth.

“I’ve got a lot at stake here, Cowboy,” Arkady says. “I’ll be in the plane and with you all the way.”