Hardwired (17 page)

Sarah, on the other hand, is invisible, and Cowboy wants her with him. The enemy will be looking for a lone man, and she lowers his profile. She also knows at least some of the enemy’s faces.

Still, he figures the odds aren’t good. The Dodger’s got to get him away from this war in the East before he’s flown out in a body bag.

The tavern is called Oliver’s and it’s breathing a late-night Saturday crowd in and out with each pulse of the litejack music that’s playing seven beats against sixteen from the inside. Cowboy and Sarah watch the place for a while as neon-colored holograms waver in the windows and the music begins to play eleven against four. The local cops pass by once without showing any interest in its clientele.

“Let’s go before they come again,” Sarah says. Cowboy nods but somehow he doesn’t want to move. Sarah gives him a hard-alloy glance.

“Think of me as your bodyguard,” she says. “It’s something I know how to do.”

The tavern inhaled them. Fluorescent holograms burn Oliver’s ceiling and walls with cool, persistent fire. It is the only illumination except for a plain white spotlight trained on an expressionless man standing on the stage with five instruments plugged into his head, his monochrome shadow standing behind him like a male Medusa. He’s playing all the instruments at once, five against seven now. People ace dancing through his changes, even the zoned moving to his complex, compelling rhythms. “My heart is alloy,” he recites, “I live in boxes.” The voice is a breathless whisper that stands apart from the rest of the music, alone in ironic solitude.

Cowboy likes hearing old favorites, but mainly he’s grateful for the fact that it’s dark.

Sarah is shrugged down into her jacket and has turned off the challenging swagger, and Cowboy’s grateful for that, too. He and Sarah wander through the tavern without anyone seeming to pay any attention. There is a pay phone in a hallway leading to the toilet. Cowboy changes some bills at the bar into crystal money on a credit needle, and sticks the phone’s optional audio stud into his head. It has a thin mic that trails to the corner of his mouth for a speaker.

It is the Dodger’s wife who answers. Jutz is a wiremuscled blond woman who runs the Dodger’s ranch while he’s away, and she knows her end of the business well. She sounds as if Cowboy’s got her out of bed.

“Jutz,” he says, “is the Dodger there?”

“Cowboy,” she says, “don’t tell me where you are. They’re probably monitoring this line.” Her timbre chills his nerves like liquid helium. There is a tremor in her voice, a well-controlled fear. Suddenly the little hallway seems very small.

“What’s happened?” he asks.

“Listen carefully.” Her words are carefully spaced and enunciated to avoid her having to repeat them. Fear overtones quaver at the hard edges of her consonants. Cowboy closes his eyes and presses his forehead to the comforting, solid reality of the metal phone.

“The Dodger has been shot. They tried to kill him in his car but he managed to get away. He’s in the hospital now and I’ve got guards around him. Don’t try to visit him, and don’t call me again. Just find some safe place to hide and stay there until the situation clarifies.”

The door to the toilet opens and Cowboy flashes a look over his shoulder, feeling his vulnerability. A man with bright glazed eyes steps out and gives Cowboy a friendly smile as he passes by. Cowboy hunches into himself and whispers into the mic. “Who’s doing this?”

“Word is it’s Arkady. That he’s moving in on the other thirdmen and on the panzerboys. He wants you in particular.”

A distorted dark-haired stranger, his reflection on the bright metal phone chassis, stares at Cowboy in cold-eyed anger. “He almost got me this afternoon,” Cowboy says. “He’s fighting his war here now. And he’s given my face and name to the laws.” Cowboy feels as if gravity is suspended, as if he were in a panzer soaring off the crest of a ridge that has turned into the lip of a black and bottomless canyon.

A tone sounds on Cowboy’s aural crystal. He studs a credit needle into the phone and lets the machine take his money.

“Hide, Cowboy,” Jutz says. “We don’t know who to trust, and we can’t set up a run to get you back West. Arkady’s dealt with everybody at one time or another, and we don’t know who are his men and who’s on our side. So everyone’s running for cover.”

“Arkady’s got a bloc behind him.” Cowboy looks wildly to either side, afraid that his whisper will be overheard. “Tell everyone that.”

“Which one?” But suddenly there is a click and Jutz is gone. Cowboy knows who’s listening now. His lips pull back in a snarl.

“Too late,” he says. “I’m gone.”

He unjacks and steps out of the hallway. Sarah stands watching the dance floor. He gives her the credit needle. “Call the Hetman, but make it quick,” he says. “We’re compromised here. Your bloc has its thumb on communications. ” He stands outside the short hallway and watches. Plenty of time, he thinks. They probably traced the call, but the chance of their having any people sitting within a few minutes of this particular bar are nil, and they’ve got no liaison with the local cops. It’ll take a long time to get through to anyone in this burg. But still he feels rushes of fear speeding up his spine, and his eyes count the exits. If the laws come in, he’s got his escape routes planned.

“I have what you need,” insinuates the voice from the singer, “I can keep the flames away.”

Sarah is back in less than two minutes. “Couldn’t reach the Hetman,” she says. Cowboy is already moving toward the exit. “He’s in hiding somewhere. But I talked to one of his people.” She shakes her head. “It’s chaos. There’s a war going on, but the sides aren’t very clear. Michael and most of his people seem to be safe for the moment, because he put the word out to be careful. Andrei was the only...casualty, aside from snagboys and the like. ”

Cowboy swings a fire door open and steps into an alley. His eyes adjust quickly to the light. There are rusting steel dumpsters complete with cats, and several people are sleeping uncovered in the August heat that radiates from the old concrete, glowing in Cowboy’s infrared perception. Some drunk, some looking, some just lost. Like any small-town alley.

“They said to hide,” Sarah says. “They’ll pick up the computer hearts when things cool down in this part of the world.”

“No way for us to get home?”

“None where we won’t get assassinated the second we show up in the Free Zone. No one knows who to trust.”

“Whom,” says Cowboy.

He is walking fast for the far end of the alley, fists in his pockets, trying to keep his bootsteps quiet. One of the sleeping men stirs on his threadbare blanket and calls a name. His bulging, uncovered belly gleams pale in the night.

“We’re on our own then,” Cowboy says. He steps to the end of the alley and glances left and right. A woman’s laughter echoes from the curb. He steps across the street and into another alley.

Sarah’s voice behind makes him stop in his tracks. “I found out who Cunningham works for.”

Cowboy spins in surprise. “The boy on the phone told you?”

“I told him the Orbitals were involved, and why. And he knew Cunningham, had dealt with him on some security matter. ”

The loathing in her voice is clear. Even in the darkness he can see the hatred plain in her eyes.

“It’s Tempel. Tempel Pharmaceuticals I.G.”

Cowboy hears the name and feels his heart quicken. Deep inside him he feels a howl building, a shriek of triumph like the panzer’s jets as he opens the valves of pressured alcohol. Because, however little good it will do him right now, he finally knows the name of the enemy.

WOHNEN SIE IN LEID-STADT? ERLAUBEN SIE UNS IHNEN NACH HAPPYVILLESCHICKEN!

                 
-Pointsman Pharmaceuticals A.G.

Tempel Interessengemeinschaft, Cowboy thinks. The Fellowship of Interests Tempel. A lot of the Orbitals have I.G. after their names, and no wonder. It’s such a perfect description of their state of mind.

He and Sarah are back at the panzer, sitting on its dorsal armor while the creek ripples across the ramming prow. Sarah is cradling the machine pistol in her arms, a cold and deadly child. Clouds are moving across the stars and they are alone in the darkness.

“I don’t have any money beyond pocket change,” Cowboy says. “I usually carry some gold in the panzer, to use if I have to buy some lawmen.” He shakes his head. “But this delivery was supposed to be legal. No reason to suppose the cops would be interested.” He gives an unamused laugh. “And I was supposed to be back in Florida tonight.”

Sarah says nothing, simply shifts the weight of the machine pistol. She’s got the long suppressor on the barrel, and the thing won’t make so much as a whisper if she has to use it. He already knows she doesn’t have a dime.

“I won’t be able to access my portfolio,” he goes on, thinking aloud. “If the laws are all cooperating, Arkady and his people will be able to follow every transaction, or even freeze my action. I’ve got gold cached back in New Mexico and Wyoming, but that’s a long walk from here.”

“We’ve got the matrices,” Sarah says. Her voice seems loud after such a long silence. “They’re worth a fortune if we can move them.”

Cowboy looks up at her. “Do you know anyone you can trust with that amount of merchandise? I don’t.”

“We don’t have to sell the whole cargo. Just enough to get us where we want to go.”

Cowboy hears a mosquito dancing near his ear. His nerves are urging him to take the panzer out of here, telling him they are too near the phone that they used to call two compromised lines. But until he knows where they’re going there doesn’t seem to be any sense in moving. His fuel situation is too critical for wandering in circles.

Wait, he thinks. He looks up at the sky. Wait until the clouds move in.

He remembers the nights he flew the
Pony Express
through storm clouds, his crystal tuned to the weather bureau so that he could track the bad weather and hide in it, the delta diving past the rain that drummed on the canopy, through crepe blackness so complete, so tangible, that the world of the hissing aircraft, the softly glowing instrument lights, seemed to be the entirety of existence, the boundaries of the universe extending no more than an arm’s length beyond the canopy and all his memories of an earthly existence now some fond, distant, entirely irrelevant hallucination, the only other thing existing in that world, besides Cowboy and the plane living in their interface, the echo of Cowboy’s own breath in the confined space of his helmet. Remembering the sudden eruption of sheet lightning that turned the velvet sky brighter than day, the delta a matte-black needle flung against the shimmering, streaming opalescent neverending electric dream...A vision he could never share, never achieve anywhere else. A belonging, a completeness, that he could never talk about. Not even to those who flew with him. Just a shining in his eyes, aglow in his mind. And sometimes, he could tell, in the mind of others.

“Maybe I know someone,” he says. “Maybe I know someone who’s been out of the game so long they won’t be looking for him.”

HEARTS AND MINDS

It is late afternoon. The world has paused to catch its breath, and the ice-cream streets melt slowly in the sun. The people of Pennsylvania wait in the hush for the twilight that will soften the tempered Gerber edges of their world.

The panzer is hidden in a half-flooded quarry, the old road leading to the place now overgrown by brush so thick only the badgers know the crumbling pair of ruts. Cowboy and Sarah walk down the half-rural street that is called the something-or-other pike, Cowboy with a cardboard box propped on his shoulder, shielding his face from the traffic. Sarah treads quietly behind, her footsteps smothered by the grassy verge. Another pair of refugees with their rucksacks, not worth a second glance, not even bothering to stick out a hopeful thumb.

Since midnight they’ve been heading west, winding up the Alleghenies, following the Youghiogheny River through the passes of the western Appalachians, switching afterward to the old Penn Central roadbed as it loops northwest to the city. Pittsburgh is a boomtown now after decades of decline, reviving as a transportation center and the new capital of Pennsylvania, one of the places the blocs hadn’t bothered to smash to ruins. Cowboy has seen pictures of the new capital, a granite fortress rising in halfhearted celebration of the old city’s luck, complete with a holochrome image of the Liberty Bell, the original having been mashed flat along with Independence Hall and then washed out into Delaware Bay by the rising salt tide, swirling out as gray streamers in the murky water along with the tons of stone and ash and blackened bone that had been the City of Brotherly Love.

As night faded, there was only a few hundred miles’ range in the fuel tanks, and the landscape was growing too urban for safety. After Cowboy found the old quarry, he and Sarah slept the length of the morning and then began their hike, two more walkers coming to the boomtown to find work, obviously destined to squat with the others in the shacks and cardboard boxes that circle the city, staining the green walls of the Monongahela valley with the smoke of their cookfires, haunting the city looking for work and avoiding the dark corners where people got murdered for the change in their pockets.

One of Cowboy’s old colleagues lives here in one of the city’s suburbs. Cowboy finds the address courtesy of directory assistance and wonders how much contact Reno still has with the business. He knows Reno made a lot of money in his days as a deltajock and hadn’t seemed the sort of person to lose it in the time since. If he’s entirely on the legal side now, that may even make things easier.

A wall surrounds Reno’s house, and on one side an old man with three days’ growth of beard under a torn straw hat waits next to his packstaff, smoking a cigarette and waiting for the cool of twilight before continuing his pilgrimage. Cowboy’s nerves shriek an alarm at what might be an enemy staking out Reno’s house, but he does his best to silence them. Such sights are not unusual in this or any other part of the world.

Reno’s gate is a polished chromium alloy that reflects Cowboy’s image, standing spindly and haggard next to the tall dirtgirl with the shades like an asphalt shimmer. In answer to the gate’s questions, he pulls off his cap and wig. The gate’s voice burbles in mirthless joy, the voice of something drowning. “I seem to remember seeing you on video. By all means come in. ” The gate itself is soundless as it opens.