Hardwired (26 page)

The data’s easy enough to find now that he knows what he’s looking for in the library crystal. Roon was born in Bonn, went to school in Leipzig and collected a degree in chemistry, then joined Tempel Pharmaceuticals I.G. in the same year it began building its first orbital drug factory. His first assignment in space was shortly thereafter, and the company kept him busy shuttling up and down for a decade or so, before the company headquarters went into orbit and Roon went up with them.

Once he was Tempel’s chairman, he pushed for independence for the Orbitals, at one point ordered his jocks into the asteroid belt in defiance of the Space Control Commission, something that took a lot of nerve considering the fact that Tempel wasn’t a major mining company and had only a few ships to send. Roon was a founder of the first Orbital Bloc Congress, second in power only to Grechko. It appears that many of the Bloc Congress programs originated with Roon, but he was willing to stay out of the spotlight and let Grechko take the heat for them. After the Rock War, Roon was behind the policy of the balkanization of the major Earth powers and the establishment of the Free Zones under Orbital supervision.

Henri Couceiro was born, of Brazilian parents, in orbit when Roon was still on Earth working to finish his degree. He was proud of the fact he’d never set foot on Earth, and one of his more controversial public statements, uttered shortly after his assumption of the chairmanship, called the planet “just another big asteroid.”

Making that statement seems to have been one of Couceiro’s few impolitic moves. The precise movements of his career seem occluded from time to time, but he seems to have spent the early period moving from place to place in the big Tempel structure as something of an executive troubleshooter, rearranging programs and structures, making executives toe the line, firing incompetents. His big break came with his becoming the head of Acceleration Group Maximum, which Cowboy is no longer surprised to discover was a liaison team with the other blocs, dedicated to decreasing the Orbitals dependence on Earth by the sharing of resources and the creation of new technologies. It was also Group Maximum that developed the military plans that led to victory for the blocs in the Rock War and the sharing of the spoils afterward.

Acceleration Group Maximum seems to have made Couceiro’s name. He stayed out of political positions after Group Maximum’s policies were put into place, concentrating instead on developing a working knowledge of the bureaucracy, eventually moving to head of the Pharmacological Division and a seat on the board. From there he arranged the board’s refusal to allow Roon to continue in his seat following his brain transfer-apparently the vote was taken after Roon’s mind was already in its crystal matrix-and the first of Roon’s demotions was assured.

Cowboy drifts out of Thibodaux’s model and thinks for a moment about Couceiro and Roon, the split between the architect of Orbital independence and the man who helped implement Roon’s schemes. He’ll have to run through the model again, picking out each man’s allies on the board and in the bureaucracy, trying to see if there might be some leverage there.

But now, to Cowboy’s surprise, there seems to be some movement in the complicated architecture of the model, red figures appearing along the eye-face lattice, pulsing in rhythm, resolving into letters that march along Tempel’s girders and supports…

COWBOYHELPRENOCOWBOYHELPRENOCOWBOYHELPRENO

Adrenaline shrieks up Cowboy’s neck. He screams and yanks the studs from his head, the interface snapping out of his mind. Looking at the silent crystal display in front of him, he sits in the Packard and hears his heart crashing in his chest. He reaches a trembling hand out of the car window and yanks the comp’s cable from the telephone.

They’ve found him, he thinks. There are people on their way to kill him, and he hasn’t brought a bodyguard with him. He looks over each shoulder, trying to decide whether to head straight back to the Dodger’s or try an evasive pattern through the mountains.

He leans back against the cushioned headrest and puts his hands on the instrument panel in front of him, straightening his arms, trying to stop the trembling. He’s got to face in again to get the car moving, but he doesn’t want to touch the studs, to see those glowing crystal letters pulsing out their message.

Cowboy moves forward and clears everything out of the car’s RAM, which should take care of any more ghostly communications from Reno, then reaches out and takes the studs in his hands. The trembling has almost gone away.

He puts them in his head. He’s heading straight back to the Dodger’s, at the fastest possible speed. He’s pretty sure he can run any pursuers off the road.

Time to find out, anyway.

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Michael the Hetman lights a cigarette with a match that trembles. His eyes are deep and rimmed in red. “Too bad,” he said. “I was afraid my source might not be genuine. I’m sorry I was right.”

“Those people were good,” Sarah says. Fear rushes along her nerves in little packets, prickling the down on her arms. She stuffs her hands in her pockets to control her own shaking. Her mouth is dry and longs for the touch of cool citrus; tastes instead the dry refrigerated air of the Hetman’s study.

Michael reaches for a squeeze bottle of vodka, lets it fall in a thin silver stream into a pair of glasses. “It seemed worth a chance,” he says.

Sarah has spent the night huddled in a doorway with only her heartbeat for company, that and the taste of her own sweat. Earlier she’d been waiting with five other people for the Laffite snagboy that was supposed to come by with an attaché case of pharmaceuticals and only a single amateur guard, but either the information was part of a setup or the snagboy had smelled something in the air, because suddenly there were two big armored cars wailing down the street with muzzles pointing from the black reflective windows, gunfire echoes ringing from the hard surfaces of the buildings as teflon-coated bullets drilled the concrete and turned brick to powder. The people inside the cars were hardwired and fast, and though Sarah was careful enough to choose a post with an escape route, it was still only luck that she got away, the cars chasing others while she ran through a night that had become a shadowy monster with humid compost breath and infrared scanners for eyes, its laugh like the chatter of an automatic weapon. The fight had lasted only a few seconds. The rest of the night hours were spent in the doorway, feeling the moist urban grit of the sweating wall against her cheek, waiting while the cars patrolled the broken streets, looking for survivors.

She should put some money down on tonight’s body count. It’s going to be higher than usual.

Sarah takes the glass of vodka from Michael’s hand and lets it ease slowly down her throat, a cold alcohol fire. “It could have bought me another week,” Michael says, and sits in a deep chair of chrome and black leather. He looks at her with his liquid spiderwebbed eyes.

“I’ve got it worked out,” he says quietly. “I’ve got eight months before everything falls apart. Your bringing back those crystal hearts gave me one of those months.”

He leans back in the chair, gazing at the dark acoustic tiles of the ceiling. Even holding the arms of the chair his hands tremble. “Tempel cut off my sources, but I can get by with hijacking for a while, bribery, running things out of my labs–– all that and what I have stored. As soon as the war started I borrowed as much as I could, because I knew my credit would never be as good. I wanted to be in debt to a lot of people, I wanted me to be worth something to them alive.”

Sarah closes her eyes, seeing night, sudden movement, spotlight glare, the sheen of laser holograms reflecting off the polished, speeding hood of a rushing car.

“I can fight the war unimpaired for six months,” Michael says, his soft accent the only sound in this soundproofed fortress. “After that I won’t be able to pay off the police anymore, and then they’ll start raiding me. Income will start to decline. After seven months I won’t be able to pay my Maximum Law guards and I’ll have to hire nonprofessionals. Sooner or later one of my friends will decide I’m hurting him too badly just by staying alive.”

Sarah opens her eyes to see Michael looking at her, an amused expression on his face.

“You’re the only one I can trust with this,” he says. “You’re the only one who can’t betray me. They want you, too.”

“I can’t help, Hetman,” she says. “I can’t change reality.”

“I know you can’t,” the Hetman says. His gaze turns from her, becoming the eyes of a gambler focused on the wheel as he waits for the silver ball to find his slot. “We can just keep moving,” he says. “Just keep things in the air. And when they fall”– he gives a little shrug– “we’ll try to run, and we can hope we no longer matter enough for them to come after us.”

Sarah looks into the vodka glass, seeing it reflect Michael’s dark refrigerated interior. Try not to matter, she thinks, perhaps they won’t notice and they’ll let you live. Matter the way Michael and Cowboy matter and they’ll take you down. Only the rats survive, never the lions. And rats never guard each other’s back.

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ROCKETS BELIEVED USED IN SMUGGLING

Pony Express
, a piece of the night in motion, glides along its parabola like a bow over a violin, making delicate music. Cowboy’s in the eye-face again, feeling the cold air whispering over the matte-black fuselage of the delta, his nerves thrilling to the wind-whisper of liberation as he lofts high over the Rockies. His metal eyes search the night sky for infrared signatures. This isn’t a mail run. Cowboy is hunting.

He had driven home like a madman after the day in Cimarron, feeling Reno or whatever was behind Reno clawing its way up his back like a rush of adrenaline. He’d seen no one that day, no one following, not even a suspicious glance. No sign of an enemy in the next two weeks. He hasn’t faced into a telephone since. Whatever was behind that message, it is more than Cowboy wants to deal with.

An amber blip flashes in Cowboy’s radar display, and Cowboy looks at it carefully. One of the rare commercial flights, he concludes, it’s too high to be Arkady’s plane.

The delta cuts neatly through the air, its vast power muted, under careful control.

Arkady’s plane is small and the
Pony Express
radars aren’t very efficient and have a limited range–– until now Cowboy’s been much more interested in detecting the location of enemy radars than in using his own. But he knows Arkady’s up here somewhere. The airfield receptionist, on the Dodger’s payroll, has passed on the information that his plane took off just before sunset, and that he was on it, his hair still rising and changing colors every few seconds.

Neurotransmitters tickle Cowboy’s crystal, and the
Pony Express
banks and sweeps eastward over Medicine Bow. Electronic ears are extended for the sound of microwave transmissions. Distant radars pulse weakly on the delta’s absorbent skin. Inside the seamless black hood of his helmet Cowboy can hear only the echo of his own breath, taste only rubber and anesthetic gas. Cowboy’s mind rejoices, feeling the delta’s power vibrating under his control. His nerves tingle pleasure. It’s been too long since he possessed the sky.

A silver-white dot moves against the wheeling star field and Cowboy looks closer. It’s an infrared signature all right, and he tilts the delta’s nose upward to give his forward-looking radars a peek, g-forces tugging at the skin around his eyelids. An amber dot appears on the displays, outlines uncertain. Cowboy pictures himself as a falcon, narrowing its wings as it prepares to move upon its distant prey.

A steel guitar plays in Cowboy’s mind as he floods the engines with fuel, the big plane climbing toward the diamond stars. The whimper of wind turns to a hiss. Cowboy’s spine can feel delicate vibrations moving fore and aft along the plane’s structure as the frame absorbs the additional stress. Arkady is blind to this, he thinks, and can’t know what it’s about. Can’t come near the top, thinks only in terms of money and fashion, the cryo max clothes that he hopes will buy him a ticket into the world where things really happen, and all the while the panzerboys are building and living their legend and Arkady is frozen outside, trying to pretend he matters. The infrared signature is nearer, glowing white in Cowboy’s vision. Two engines. He’s above and behind the target now, at the top of along parabolic arc, and he lowers the delta’s nose and throttles back, the engine noises dying away almost entirely, left far behind in the craft’s wake.

The target is very close now. Cowboy lowers
Pony Express’s
flaps, feeling the plane fight the brakes, jarring. The infrared signature is close, cat’s eyes in the night. Cowboy takes his eyes off infrared and can see the dark silhouette nearing him. He has to be certain this is the right one.

Neurotransmitters flick a switch, and electrons race along the cable to snap on the quartz-iodide brightness of his landing lights. Suddenly the night is afire with the form of a white fuselage pinstriped with blue. Arkady’s plane, the right configuration. Cowboy can see heads peering out the windows. The plane cocks one wing up and tries to fall away.

Too late. The plane is already exhaling, air gushing through the holes in the fuselage made by Cowboy’s humming dorsal minigun turret. A wing breaks away, an engine flares and breaks into pieces, spitting fire and melting alloy.
Pony Express
arcs over the falling craft, turning cockpit-down so Cowboy can watch it fall away. He knows impact the earth somewhere on the Nebraska line, falling amid a tumbling hail of thirty-millimeter casings while Arkady’s hair stands on end every few seconds, turning orange, green, blue in pointless fashionable sequence…