Hardwired (27 page)

Cowboy watches it fall, slow regret already touching his mind. Arkady’s dead, but it was all too easy. The thirdman was in a defenseless civilian jet, up against a maneuverable armored monster. Cowboy’s nerves are still blazing, still ready for a fight, not realizing it’s already over.

He can feel Damnation Alley’s radars trying to touch him with furious microwave claws, and deep in him there is a yearning to run the Line again, feel the delta’s airframe moan with the stress of supersonic turns, dance among the lances of enemy missiles, feel the blue alcohol fires erupting behind him to drive him clear... This simple interception and destruction wasn’t worthy of
Pony Express
, wasn’t fitting as the flaming climax of a battle.

Cowboy turns the delta’s nose downward and works out his course toward Colorado. He’s done his job–– he’s taken Arkady out of the picture so that the Dodger and his allies will have a breathing space.

He takes comfort in the fact that this isn’t the final battle. Tempel backed Arkady, and they’ll return soon enough with someone else.

He’s just created a respite, and he hopes it will grant him enough time to organize his embassy to Albrecht Roon.

MARC MAHOMED TELLS YOU WHO YOU ARE

Sarah slips through the back door of the Blue Silk, seeing the cases of liquor and drugs stacked in their frozen cardboard rows. She closes the door silently and pockets the key. Her room upstairs has only a desk, a comp deck, a single chair, a plastic cooler chest, and a narrow mattress set on the floor. Music throbs up from the bar, a disconnected bass track. She’s been imitating the rat, hiding while the terrier sniffs overhead.

She pulls off her jacket and shirt, and reaches for a towel, dabbing off the sweat. She’s just been to visit Daud, spending an hour with him while he complained about the hospital and the treatment, how the therapists were working him too hard and cutting his dosage, how Jackstraw wouldn’t return his calls and had some new boy answering the phone, someone whose tone Daud didn’t like... It was a long monologue that poured out of him at every visit, like a recording set to infinite repeat. Sarah feels drained.

She throws the towel down and opens the cooler for a beer before she notices that there’s a message light on her deck.

She opens the foil bottle top with her teeth while reaching to touch the button that will display the message that Maurice has relayed up to her, and as it flashes on her monitor she can feel a rush of warmth along her nerves, as fine and real as the inhaled mist of a fine drug:

TOMORROW, THREE O’CLOCK, BLUE SILK. LEAVE MESSAGE IF YOU CAN’T MEET. RANDOLPH SCOTT.

Chapter Eleven

Cowboy sits restlessly in the back of the car and watches the wind tugging at the broken leaves of the dying palm outside the Blue Silk. White noise hisses from the radio receiver that sits on the seat next to his Flash Force driver. The dark mirrored windows of the bar reflect the baking street, the laser glowing image of the three-dimensional holographic phantom that parades the bar’s name past the eyes of passersby.

There’s another Flash Force man inside the bar, trying to sniff out an ambush. Cowboy shifts nervously in his seat and hopes the guard won’t spook Sarah, that she isn’t already dodging through the alley behind the bar with images of assassination in her head.

Two short bursts of noise crackle from the guard’s receiver as the merc in the Blue Silk breaks squelch twice, the all-clear signal delivered from the transmitter buried in his skull. The driver moves the car forward along the narrow sidewalk and parks in front of the bar. He scans the crowd once and nods, and Cowboy bursts out of the car and lopes through the cool inviting Blue Silk doors.

Sarah’s not inside the bar, only some businessmen soaking up a late lunch, a man in a wheelchair gazing down at the place where his legs used to be, and Cowboy’s Flash Force guard sitting quietly over his Canadian and water, his back to the wall, where he won’t have to watch his own spine.

Cowboy walks to the bar and orders a beer from the quiet black man with the metal eyes. By the time the beer comes he’s seen the pictures on the wall and figures he knows what the bar’s name stands for. “Did you know a man called Warren?” he asks. “He was a crew chief at Vandenberg during the war.”

“No sir,” Maurice says. “I rode my cutter out of Panama:”

“You were with Townsend? You must have done some good, then.”

“Not damn near enough.” It’s the man in the wheelchair talking, his chin jerking up with reflex pride at the mention of Townsend’s name. Cowboy looks with surprise into a pair of Zeiss eyes that glow with a twisted, grudging fury that seems less than entirely sane.

“I got burned early and never climbed the well,” the man says. “Crashed here in Florida. Maurice was one of the people who took out the Chinese SPS, but got burned on his way down and force-landed at Orlando.”

Cowboy turns to Maurice. He knows that only about a dozen made it back from the SPS fight.

“That was some good piloting,” he says.

“The war was over before we even left the ground. We just didn’t know it.” Maurice’s soft voice is edged with weary bitterness. Cowboy thinks of that voice coming over the controller’s speakers at Orlando, quietly calling in his mayday landing as his burning cutter draws a line of fire across the hot Florida sky.

Cowboy sips his beer. “I’m a pilot. Air jockey.”

“I thought you were.” Maurice raises a finger to his blank metal eyes. “I saw you had all the equipment.”

They talk flying while Cowboy drinks half his beer. Then he looks up at Maurice and lowers his voice. He can feel anticipation warming his nerves. “Is Sarah here? Could you tell her that Randolph Scott wants to talk to her?”

Maurice jerks his chin toward the Flash Force guard nursing his drink in the corner. “Is he yours?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Thought he might be, ah, the other people again. One moment, sir.” He turns to his cash register and punches some code on its keyboard with his fingernail. His eyes reflect an amber message on its screen.

“Okay, Mr. Scott. Go back through the door to the toilets, take the door marked PRIVATE, go up the stairs.”

Cowboy drains his beer. “Thanks. Talk to you later.”

He walks to the door without glancing in his guard’s direction and pushes through the door into the back room. He can hear the electric lock snapping shut behind him. There is a muted smell of hashish. Crates of liquor and legal drugs stand dimly around him. He walks up some narrow stairs and sees Sarah silhouetted against the light of a bare bulb on the landing.

She’s wearing a red T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off and soft white cotton jeans above her bare feet. Her hair has grown out, strand tips touching the junction of neck and shoulder. As he steps onto the landing she grins and reaches out to feel the shoulder of his armored jacket. “I see you’ve been to my tailor.”

“Jacket and two pairs of pants.”

Sarah turns and begins to move down a hallway crowded with more crates of liquor. “Let’s go to my room.” He watches her wary panther strut as he follows her.

He’s surprised at the narrowness of the little place, the lack of furnishings in the room with its white walls and bricked-over window. He takes off the heavy jacket and sits on the only chair. Sarah offers him a beer from the cooler, then sits in a half-lotus on her little mattress. She rips the foil lid off her own beer and looks at him. “So why are you in Florida, Cowboy?”

“To talk to Michael the Hetman.”

“What about?”

“A way to win the war.”

She laughs. “Good. I was afraid you were just getting sentimental.”

That game again, Cowboy thinks. Okay, he can play it well enough. “Sentimental for the Silver Apaches’ beer, maybe,” he says. He looks at her carefully. “You’re still working for the Hetman, right? Not changed sides?”

A brief shake of the head. “We’re still on the same team. The other side wouldn’t have me anyway.”

“So we’re still allies.”

Sarah allows herself a quiet smile. “Yes. I guess we are.”

Point to me, Cowboy thinks. He sips his beer. “When can you put me in touch with Michael?”

“I happen to know he’s out of town. I won’t be able to get a line to him till tonight.”

Cowboy takes a long drink of his beer, then puts the bottle down. He switches his eyes to infrared, seeing the blood burning silver in Sarah’s cheeks.

“Arkady’s dead,” he says. “I shot down his plane.”

Sarah considers this, patterns of warmth shifting across her face. “Good,” she says. “But that won’t put an end to things in your part of the world, will it?”

“Probably not, considering who was behind him. But we’ll have some time.” He clicks back to normal vision. Sarah’s dark eyes are watching him carefully.

“Time for what?” she asks.

So he tells her about Tempel, about Henri Couceiro sitting in his Lagrange habitat and looking down at Earth with cold spaceborn eyes, about Albrecht Roon feeding his mind through the crystal matrix and into a new, young body, about portfolios and offices and lattices of control, about Cowboy’s sense of the votes on the board that could be swung if certain things happened, the stockholders whose proxies held the balance of power. It’s all pure intuition, simply Cowboy’s ideas about the people he’s been studying, but he thinks he’s right about them.

The whispery cadences of hob music throb up through the floor while Sarah listens quietly in her half-lotus, barely sipping her beer. After Cowboy finishes, she stares down at the floor for along moment. “If it doesn’t work?”

“We lose more quickly than we’re losing now. We cut a deal and run.”

Sarah looks at him. “So long as you know when to cut, Cowboy. Daud and I aren’t planning to commit seppuku with you, and I don’t think the Hetman will, either.”

“You can pull out whenever you want. I can’t stop you, and I won’t try.”

She looks at him for a long while, her face intent, then she nods. “Just so you know.”

Sarah uncoils her long legs and stands, moving to the bricked-up old window, leaning a shoulder against its sill and gazing into the distance as if the frame still held glass. “Do you think we can win this war, Cowboy?” she asks. Softly, almost as though she’s talking to herself.

“Yes. If Roon gives us what we need.”

“I wasn’t planning for a win. I just wanted to hang on long enough to get Daud a ticket into orbit. Then...” She shakes her head. “It didn’t seem to matter what happened after. I would have tried to run, I suppose, when our side fell apart. ”

“A place in the sky. That’s what you want?”

Sarah turns to face him, her body slumped against the wall. “Shit, man. I sold my soul for a ticket. Turned out the people I sold it to didn’t even want it. Too dirty for them, I guess.” A bitter skeleton’s grin twists across her face. “They’ll take Daud, though, if he comes with enough cash. They’ll wrinkle their noses at the smell, maybe, but they’ll take him.”

“Is that what he wants?”

A shutter falls across her face. “That’s what’s best. If he stays with me, he’ll die.”

Cowboy feels the chill bottle in his hands, the condensation trickling down his thumb. “You might not be doing your Daud a favor sending him up the well, Sarah,” he says. “Those aren’t our people up there.”

She laughs. “Our people, Cowboy, are losers. They lost twelve years ago and they haven’t stopped losing yet.”

Cowboy feels his jaw muscles. tautening, his hands turning into fists. He looks at Sarah.

“We can win this one,” he says.

Sarah raises her eyes, looking at him for a long moment. A long bass line threads up from the bar to fill the silence. “Yes,” she says. “We might. For once we might come out ahead.”

Cowboy can almost see Sarah’s hackles rising at the sight of the two Flash Force guards, but she greets them with a terse nod and steps out of the bar into Cowboy’s rented car, her head turning each way to look at the slow-motion figures moving down the shadowed street. Cowboy follows her into the back of the car and the driver smoothly pulls away from the curb.

“Secure phone,” he says, wishing he was faced into the car and driving himself, but the driver glides easily through the traffic, his eyes flickering to the mirrors to check for tags. He heads for a public phone standing by an old twenty-four-hour bank, where they will be covered not only by the Flash Force but by the bank’s own security system. Sarah leaves the car, jingling change in her pockets. She leans into the phone, punches numbers, talks in an undertone.

She gives Cowboy a ragged smile as she steps into the car again. “He was getting high with some of his Russian friends, but he said he’d see you tomorrow morning. I figured in the morning he’d either be hung over or still in orbit, so I made an appointment for the afternoon. He’ll be more receptive then, I think. Suit you?”

“To the ground,” Cowboy says. Sarah closes the door and the automatic security locks chunk shut with the cold sound of impervious alloy, the closing of the cage called Security.

“Take you back to the Blue Silk?” Cowboy asks. “Or shall I buy you dinner first?”

Sarah’s eyes flicker to the Flash Force people in the front seat, forming a question.

“In my room at the Ritz Flop,” he says. “They won’t let me out in public anyway.”

She leans back in the padded seat, her fingers sliding along the grain of the simulated leather. “Fine,” she says. The flywheel engages smoothly and the car slides away from the crumbling curb.

Glittering alloy alternates with obsidian glass at the Ritz Flop, a smooth series of parabolas, half buried, low and close to the ground without a single straight line anywhere, a Lagrange world come to terms with gravity. In Cowboy’s room, like the others, there are no right angles, only smooth curves meeting one another like clouds in a dream of night flight. The dark wood in the furniture turns out, at a touch, to be cool alloy, vibrating faintly against Cowboy’s fingertips, as if with a fast hummingbird life existing in the ultrasonic, just beyond the realm of human perception.

He snaps on the computer on the headboard of the bed and orders western beef, guaranteed not to have been plexgrown in a vat, and a bottle of Cryo White. One of the Flash Force shadows comes in with room service and Cowboy can see Sarah’s scowl as their meal passes its electronic examination. She seems to relax after the guard leaves, shrugging out of her jacket, shaking her hair. She looks at the dark gray matte of the curved ceiling.