Hardwired (25 page)

The caboose attached to the South African rubles fires itself toward Lagrange Point Five, while the rubles themselves peel away and head for Montevideo. Another string of data appears in the main computer of Holding Company No. 384673. The woman bends again over her deck and thinks about her next cigarette as she types.

The cabooses appear in the NewsData offices in various Orbital complexes, presenting themselves under the FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE banner as a copy of a Reuters dispatch concerning Marc Mahomed’s triumphant tour of Malaysia.

Thibodaux withdraws the rubles from the Sony Bank of Uruguay for another series of stock purchases in Chicago. There is a sheen of sweat on his upper lip. He unfaces from his deck and looks at Cowboy. “Okay,” he says. “Slug in your codes on the stocks. ”

Cowboy fires out a series of codes, then Thibodaux pops a crystal cube up from its trapdoor and hands it to him. Cowboy unfaces and takes the cube.

“Any official heat shouldn’t have been able to follow that. They should have been stopped dead when the money went into the banks as collateral for a loan– they very likely wouldn’t have been able to make the jump from following our collateral to following the money the face banks loaned us. With the long lag we put on them after that, they shouldn’t have been able to tell our real data from the caboose, and so they should have followed that. And I can’t see any way they could have got through the holding company in Uruguay, not with a human operator working through two different computers that lack an interface.” Thibodaux reaches in his pocket for a cigarette and grins. “I think you even made a profit on those stock transfers,” he says. “A couple thousand dollars, looked like.”

“It’s not official heat I’m worried about,” Cowboy says. “It’s an Orbital tracer I want to keep off my neck.”

“Even they can’t travel faster than the speed of light,” Thibodaux says. “And in any case, they would have been stopped dead in Uruguay. That program would have had to have the smarts to check every phone link at random in the whole city, just to see which one your money was moving on.” He shakes his head. “Hell, the surest thing for them to try would have been to break in and steal it during one of the transfers–– their stuff’s good enough to do it, if they put their minds to it.” He looks at Cowboy with a grin. “You’ll find out for sure, anyway, when you try to move some of that stock.”

“Yeah. Thanks.” Cowboy plans on trading all his stocks before he lets Thibodaux out of his sight, and then on putting new codes on all of them. Thibodaux has a reputation as an honest face rider, but there’s no sense in taking any chances.

Thibodaux brings down the Packard window and reaches out to stud his deck out from the phone. Cowboy faces into the car. The turbine ignites in near-silence, a vibration felt through the car’s frame.

Thibodaux frowns down at his deck. “You know, maybe there was some Orbital heat on you. There was more than one tracer, that’s for sure. I was riding with the program early on, during the first moves, and I felt them trying to hang on.”

“Yes?”

“One of them was kind of funny, though. More like a message label.” His eyes cloud for a moment, then he looks up. “Do you know anybody named Reno?”

Cowboy feels the touch of something cold on the back of his neck. He gazes at Thibodaux while fear moves through him like a wave of hydraulic shock. He shakes his head. “Reno’s dead,” he says.

“You sure? The only part of the message I could read was COWBOY CALL RENO, over and over.”

“Nothing else?”

Thibodaux grins. “Nothing I bothered to read. You hired me to move your money, not to figure out the programs that were on its tail.”

“Right.” Cowboy licks his lips, tries to drag his attention back to the traffic moving down West Alameda. He picks his opportunity and moves out between two cars.

“It was some kind of trick, I think,” Cowboy says. “They wanted me to answer so they could trace me.”

“Probably. Funny way to do it, though.”

“Funny. Reno was a funny sort of man.”

Cowboy’s pupils contract to pinpricks as he turns to face the morning sun, high above the faraway green of the Sangre de Cristos. He feels the chill crystal presence of Reno’s ghost, lost somewhere in the interface, reaching out with spidery metal fingers from which uncoil long hieroglyphic streams of data... No, he thinks. It was a trick.

Had to be.

KOROLEV RETURNS FIRE

NEW-MODEL JOVIAN DRONESCOOP ANNOUNCED

PRICES OF GAS-PLANET PLASTICS EXPECTED TO EASE

Sarah looks down at the panzer sitting abandoned in the gully. Broken branches have fallen across it, leaves have drifted beneath its lee side. Sadness riffles through her like a gusting Montana wind. Something began here, a journey in which the city and the street melted away in the late-summer sun, and she had been free to be something other than an armored dirtgirl scrabbling for her ticket.

She looks from behind her shades at the Hetman’s four men who have driven from Florida with her. “Okay,” she says, “let’s get our crystal.”

She steps into the gully and taps the code into the panzer’s cargo bay. The hatch swings up with a pneumatic hiss.

The hearts lie waiting, their armor stripped away.

DEMEUREZ-VOUS AU PAYS DE DOULEUR?

LAISSEZ NOUS VOUS ENVOYER A HAPPYVILLE!

––Pointsman Pharmaceuticals A.G.

Cowboy’s awareness slides out of the eye-face when Jimi comes into the room. Jimi’s just returned from running his own stolen antibiotics to Kentucky and is coming down from the high he’s maintained for the last three days. There are bruises on his neck and arms from the pressure of the restraining straps during his high-g maneuvers, the result of a 200-mile drag race with the Nebraska heat that ended with one chopper forced down in a cornfield and a coleopter that seems to have sucked a bale of aluminum chaff into an intake and had to stagger home on one engine.

“Hope the poor bastard made it,” Jimi says. “He was a hell of a pilot.”

The exhaustion is beginning to catch up with him now, weariness showing in his posture, in his sagging eyelids. He accepts a whiskey and water from the Dodger and sags into a seat.

“I’m pleased to tell you that you got paid well for your bruises,” the Dodger says. “Your owner’s percentage and your delivery cut came out to over five million.”

Jimi is too exhausted even to reply. Cowboy knows how Jimi feels, having just come back from a four-day trip north and west, a pair of Flash Force mercenaries sharing the back seat of the Packard, standing over him as he met with panzerboys by ones and twos, trying to get them to agree to put the brakes on Arkady’s war. Some seemed willing to make the jump, but none wanted to be the first. Cowboy knows he’s got: to get some kind of organization formed, a program under way. Right now he thinks he’s making headway, but he knows a single piece of bad news can undo everything.

“If I hear that ‘I’m in it for the ride, not for the cargo’ again,” he says, “I’m going to break someone’s nose.”

The Dodger looks at him. “You used to say that yourself. All the time.”

Cowboy takes a drink of his lukewarm coffee and hopes the caffeine will keep him going for another few hours. “Since then I’ve seen the light,” he says.

Jimi rubs his neck muscles. Cowboy wonders if it’s time to tell him about the Dodger’s chat with the executive from the Korolev Bureau, who had come up the mountain at Dodger’s invitation to discuss a united front against Arkady and Tempel. The woman had coldly refused to deal unless the Dodger agreed to terms that would amount to total surrender–– becoming a subdivision of Korolev instead of a part of Tempel, and doing it without a fight.

Korolev’s interests were not being threatened here on the ground, she’d pointed out, and if they were to get involved, they’d want it to be worth their while. The Dodger had turned her down and concluded Korolev was perfectly happy to see Tempel divert its funds to a war outside its attempted takeover of Korolev, but that the company would probably never agree to financing a popular movement against one of the blocs, even a bloc that was an enemy.

The panzerboys would have to fight without bloc backing. Cowboy thought it was just as well. In his view, accepting an arrangement with Korolev would have made him no better than Arkady.

Cowboy finishes his cup of coffee and knows that another cup isn’t going to help, that he’s already turning fuzzy, and if he turns on his hardwiring, he’ll blaze bright for maybe an hour, and then after his reserves are used up he’ll crash and burn. So he decides to give it one more try and glides back into the interface, seeing the colored framework, the girders and stanchions and interweaving lattices that represent Tempel Pharmaceuticals I.G.

Thibodaux has built this structure, a four-dimensional representation of the Tempel bloc and its subsidiaries. Most of it’s on the public record, but some of it–– particularly the connection with Arkady–– is built up out of inference. The totality of it is enormous, Tempel’s skeletal cool fingers straining several thousand different dishes in search of its profit. Tempel is so diverse that it’s difficult to get a grasp on any one operation; it blends in with a hundred more, and its tracks disappear among the others. Astronomical amounts of private-issue currency flash through the files, pour down a thousand chutes, disappear into some nameless laundry and then reappear elsewhere, no clue as to their origin. Names fly up for brief periods and then disappear into the fourth dimension, moving timewise through the network, not following what Cowboy can discern of the organizational structure. Cowboy begins following individual names, trying to get a glimpse of the way the top people move through the net. Some guy named Marcus Thorn, a name picked at random, begins in the experimental drugs division in old Earthside New York, transfers to the Orbital Research Group when the main drug action climbed out of the well, then shifts with the title of vice president of personnel to something called Acceleration Group Maximum, run by an up-and-comer named Henri Couceiro. After six years in Maximum, Thorn shifts to the Luna Division of the Pathology Department. There Cowboy finds another name, Liu McEldowny, who had been with the Acceleration Group before moving to the Luna Division a year before. Just before the Rock War, according to the movement flag in the Luna Division box, McEldowny moves back to the Acceleration Group, stays for a month after the surrender and then heads downside to the Orbital Freeport Control Commission, which Cowboy knows was the blocs’ organizing group for setting up the Florida, Texas, and California Free Zones.

Thorn stays on the moon for another two years, then becomes chairman of the Solar Power Satellite Building Committee, which, despite its name, seems mainly concerned with personnel. Here he reports to Couceiro, who has popped up again as chief executive officer of the entire pharmaceutical Division. From the SPS Building Committee Thorn moves laterally to a vice presidency in the Security Division before, two months later, being called to the board of directors upon Couceiro’s assumption of the chairmanship of the whole organization. On the board, Thorn holds a number of portfolios, including Development and, once again, Freeport Control. One of his cohorts, big surprise, is none other than Liu McEldowny.

Cowboy traces McEldowny downward through time, finds another connection with Couceiro when the two were numbers one and five, respectively, in the Erosion Control Subsidiary, which was busy mortgaging and then foreclosing on hundreds of thousands of hectares of eroded Ukrainian farmland. Cowboy wanders up the time lattice again and watches the composition of the board of directors shift, seeing a flurry of activity around the time Couceiro became chairman, the whole board contracting from twenty-four members to fifteen, with a minor reshuffle among those who remain. He follows each of the departing members and discovers that three die and several of the rest are transferred to major positions elsewhere in the company-positions that are, nevertheless, in places like Antarctica and Ceres. Some of the others are shuttled out when they undergo a crystal-medium braintransfer into another body, taking demotions until the board can determine if their performance has been hampered by the transfer. Cowboy concludes that Couceiro is at this point consolidating his hold on the board and keeping his opposition divided by sending them out into far-off assignments in the field.

There is another flurry of movement on the board just two years later, directors swapping portfolios back and forth, another director shuttling out entirely. Cowboy can see a pointer floating in the lattice indicating a news item culled from a MediaNet screamsheet report. He follows the pointer and absorbs the report, discovering that this latest movement represents the collapse of an attempt by the old chairman, Albrecht Roon, to regain his office, a move that fails by only a single vote. Before Couceiro’s assumption of power Roon had been chairman for eighteen years, before getting his brain shunted to a new body at the age of seventy-nine and being demoted to the Asteroid Resource Commission– a major post in a bloc stronger in space transportation, but at Tempel the equivalent of Siberia. From there Roon attempts his comeback and fails, one of his supporters on the board being retired permanently and replaced with one of Couceiro’s people, Roon himself being moved downside to head South American Marketing.

That suggests a major fall from grace, from chairman atop the gravity well to exile in South America within the space of a few years. Cowboy follows Roon’s career up and down the Tempel construct, then follows Couceiro’s, something he’s done before. The available information doesn’t seem very forthcoming. He’s going to have to dig deeper.

He lets the interface fade from his mind and discovers that the Dodger is gone, probably for his afternoon nap, and that Jimi has fallen asleep in his chair, his drink sitting between his thighs, collecting dew. Cowboy quietly leaves the house and gets into his Packard, then cycles up the engine and moves down the switchback paths to the old town of Cimarron, built long ago by that cheerful old scoundrel Lucien Bonaparte Maxwell, friend to Christopher Carson and William Bonney, the whole town built because Maxwell owned the largest land grant in the history of the world and thought there ought by rights to be a town on it. Cowboy studs the Packard’s computer into a phoneline and starts calling libraries.