Hardwired (38 page)

Down the slopes Cowboy can see Jimi Gutierrez walking with Thibodaux. The panzerboy and the crystal jock are lovers now, devotees of the face: Thibodaux is still here, trying to stay close to Jimi, even though his job is more or less over. No one’s raised any objection. It keeps Jimi out of people’s hair.

Cowboy’s eyes flicker at the sight of another movement and he sees Sarah coming up the slope. There’s a machine pistol on her hip, the Heckler & Koch. Her new scars are worn with the old defiance, but he can see there’s something else there, a kind of fever behind the eyes. As if there’s a fear there she hasn’t got over. Cowboy begins walking down toward her, his bootheels making crescent marks in the bed of needles.

“Sorry I couldn’t meet you,” he says. “Warren needed me for something.”

“Yeah. That’s okay. I was surrounded by security anyway. The Hetman didn’t want to take any more chances.” While she speaks she puts her arms around him, her last words breathed out against his neck. Cowboy exhales, and part of the tension he’s been feeling goes out with the stale air, seeing Sarah here, knowing she’s away from the things in Florida that have been putting their claws in her. He takes a step back and takes her chin, looks at the gouge marks on one cheek. The swelling has gone down but the bruises are still bad.

“Another fucking mistake,” she says. Her mouth twitches in anger. “Another goddamn fucking mistake.”

“Mistakes get made.”

Cowboy can see her clenched teeth: “Not by me. I can’t afford them. If it wasn’t for Reno saving my ass...” She shakes her head.

“You’re allowed to be human, Sarah,” he says.

“What I’m not allowed to be is
stupid
.” She puts her hands in her pockets, begins walking upslope. He can see the self-contempt in her as he walks by her side. “I’m keeping these scars, Cowboy. So I can look at myself in the mirror every morning and know not to be stupid today.”

“You were ambushed. It can happen to anyone. How does that make you stupid?”

She gives him a sidelong look. “Maybe I’ll tell you someday, Cowboy. But not now.”

“How’s your brother?”

She stiffens slightly, her gait slowing. “Okay. Looking for an apartment. They let him alone–– he’s not useful anymore.”

Cowboy gazes up at the smooth matte nose of
Pony Express
lying under the nets. His heart lifts. “Reno said that Cunningham might have been in that car.”

“No. Three men, one woman. None of them were Cunningham. One of them just said he was.”

“Too bad.”

She gives him a skeletal smile. “Yeah. Too bad.”

The camouflage net prints patterns on Sarah’s face, merging with the bruises. Warren squints as he looks up at her from his bench. “Sarah,” Cowboy says, “this is my friend Warren. He keeps the deltas flying.”

“Hi, Warren.”

“Howdy.” He looks at the dark bulk of the crouching delta. “Not bad for a home-built job, hey?”

Sarah grins. “Not bad.” She reaches out to touch the port canard, brushing it with her fingertips. “How do you build something like this in your backyard?”

“Out of odds and ends,” Warren says. He squints as he looks up at the dark panther shape. “The engines are ex-military. They’re the expensive part, because they’re made out of Orbital alloy and they have to be pulled for overhaul every three thousand hours or so. Everything else we make ourselves. It’s easier than it sounds–– after the war, all the recipes for hardware and the secret aerospace design software, uh, became available. We’ve avoided alloys in making the airframe and used something cheaper and almost as good–– composites made of epoxy resins and a few other things. The landing gear and some of the hydraulics are the only things made of metal.”

Cowboy points out the nearly invisible seams of the cargo doors on the delta’s smooth belly. “Deltas are made to carry cargo, and they have to have a lot of onboard fuel to get the necessary range,” he says. “So they can’t be as fast and maneuverable as a government liteweight. We try to make up for that by carrying a lot more electronics, armor, and weapons, and by using lots of redundancy in the plane’s systems.”

Sarah looks down at a rack of missiles, seeing one of them open, revealing its components to Warren’s scrutiny. “You make those at home, too?”

“Yep,” Warren says. “They’re easier than anything– everything we use can be bought in an electronics store except the propellant and the explosive, and those we brew up in a garage lab.”

“We’ve been putting those missiles together all afternoon,” Cowboy says. “That’s why I couldn’t meet you in Santa Fe.”

Sarah ducks under a wing, walks along the length of the plane, gazing up at the smooth black epoxide, her fingers trailing along the rivetless surface. Cowboy follows. “I’m flying to Nevada tomorrow morning, just before dawn. I figure to be landing just as the dawn breaks over the base.”

She steps out from under the delta’s tail, straightening and looking out over the small mountain meadow to the green peaks beyond. Cowboy follows her, watching the camouflage patterns on her hands, her face. “The Dodger’s given me a room in the back,” he says. “You could join me there tonight, if you don’t mind me getting up early.”

She gives him a sidelong grin. “I’m glad you said that, Cowboy. I had my bags put in your room.”

“That’s fair.” The tension he’s felt all day seems to whisper out of him. “Have you seen the jukebox yet?”

“The what box? Oh. No, I haven’t.”

“Let me help Warren finish up here. Then I’ll show you.”

She nods, shifts her balance to relieve the weight of the gun on her hip. “I’m guarding you now,” she says. “So don’t blow yourself up.”

“I won’t.” Cowboy watches Sarah’s profile as she looks out on the high meadow, the tall trees beyond. Sees the sudden look of what might be relief or gratitude that suddenly blazes out of her, through the cracks in her armor. He wonders briefly what it’s about.

But
Pony Express
is waiting. Cowboy turns and steps under the wing of his black polymerized obsession.

Chapter Nineteen

Sarah’s armored limo whispers across the flats of northwestern Arizona. She’s sharing the back with two Maximum Law communications specialists, who assure her that the encrypted phone link is as secure as these things ever get. It’s as good a time as any to place a call.

“Yes?” She feels her nerves begin to crackle at the sound of the voice. She tries to control her shock.

“Is Daud there?”

“Yes. Just a moment.”

There is a moment’s silence in which Sarah fights a losing war with her amazement and anger. “Hello, Sarah,” Daud says.

“Was that Nick?” she asks.

“Yeah.” She can see the way Daud’s eyes would flicker, the way they would look away. “He’s stuck here. They won’t send him back. They say he abrogated their contract when he didn’t try to stop you. As if he could have. And they made me sign away my contract after you ran. So we’re both out of money.”

“Listen. He may still be working for them.”

“Maybe he is. I don’t care. He’s stuck here and we’re going to look for a place.” Sarah can hear Daud sucking briefly on a cigarette. “His real name is Sandor Nxumalo. I still have a hard time not calling him Nick.”

Sarah can feel Daud drifting away. Tries to hold him, remembering the man’s soft body, his cynical gaze over Daud’s blind head. “Daud, I want you to be careful. He may try to get into our communications. If you need to talk to me, call from–”

“I know that. Yeah. Anything else? We were going to go look for a place.”

For a moment Sarah thinks, just a word to the Hetman and the man is dead. But Daud would know, would throw it at her. Despair trickles into her heart.

“Just be careful, Daud.” The line goes dead. She thinks how they know just how to give her brother hope, how they know, as they knew with her, that if they promise certain things there is no choice other than to obey, even though obedience means leaving them all the opportunity in the world for their inevitable betrayal.

“Daud, take care,” she says to the telephone. It cries back at her in a language she does not know. A warning, she knows, but not of what.

Chapter Twenty

A song bends steel notes through Cowboy’s mind: He calls it “Face Riders in the Sky.” PonyExpress is climbing high above the white, wheeling eye of a low-pressure system about to impact the Pacific coast; the sun glows off the delta’s black cockpit struts. The sky above is a brilliant blue, just beginning to go dark with the promise of space. Cowboy tells his helmet to lower his visor as he climbs toward the sun. He tastes anesthetic gas as he whistles through his teeth.

“Reno.” Cowboy doesn’t bother to verbalize his message, just sends it through his chips and keeps whistling. “Tell them I’m in position.”

“Roger.” Reno’s got his electronic fingers stretching across microwave relays from coast to coast, keeping the communications net together more efficiently than the Dodger’s mercenaries.

Cowboy runs automatically through the displays, seeing the engines idling at blue, the rest of the columns green. From far below he can feel California’s radars reaching out for him, touching the skin of
Pony Express
with feeble paws, not able to bounce a strong enough reflection from the delta’s rounded surfaces and absorbent antiradiation paint. These aren’t as powerful as the Midwest’s radars–– no need for them to be. They aren’t used to deltas running illegal missions high over the Pacific.

“Cowboy? Are you busy?” Reno’s distant voice, bubbles rising slowly in crystal.

“Just circling. Waiting for our friends.”

“I found out something. I’ve been poking around in the crystal here at the labs.”

“Isn’t that likely to cause, ah, a termination of your contract?”

“I’m bored, Cowboy. There’s nothing to do here.”

“It’s dangerous, Reno.”

“No. Their outside defenses are pretty strong, but once you get into their system, their security isn’t very good. Their stuff would have been adequate ten years ago, when they set up, but now it’s easy enough to break. I borrowed an intrusion program from our Maximum Law friends when they weren’t looking.”

Cowboy thinks what could happen if the lab people discover the tampering and freeze Reno’s crystal. An unavoidable accident, they’ll say. “You’re taking chances, friend,” he says.

“I had a good idea of what I was looking for, once I saw how this place is put together. It isn’t exactly a black lab, but they’re into a lot of gray areas. That’s how come Michael knew about them, and knew they’d take someone like me, just a mind over the phone without a body. They’re used to dealing with customers who have a lot of money for one reason or another, and who want to appear with a new face and identity.”

“Even more reason to stay out of their comp, I’d say.”

“Have you ever heard of Project Black Mind?”

Cowboy thinks for a moment while he runs over the engine and weapons displays. “No,” he says finally. “Can’t say as I have.”

“I’m not surprised. I never heard of it, either, before I got in here. It’s an intruder program of the worst sort. Developed by the U.S. network security people just before the war. The same people who set up this lab, years ago. And who are still running it.”

No surprise, Cowboy thinks. Intelligence types like to keep their fingers in many pies. Used to run lots of interface banks to launder money for their operations, and when the face banks made money, they looked for places to invest. When their government was flattened by the blocs, they just kept on doing what they knew best.

“Okay. So what does it do?”

“Sets up a mind in crystal. Then goes into another mind, a live mind, and prints the first mind on top of it. Imposes the first personality on the second. Backs up the program.”

Cowboy feels the crystal in his head turn cold. This time he forgets not to vocalize, blurting into the mic in his face mask. “God, why? What good would it do? The guy wouldn’t have the target’s memories to draw on, or anything. ”

“He might, he might not. Brain transfer is an inexact science. ”

“There are safeguards. No program can jump from crystal into someone’s head.”

“Black Mind says different.”

Cowboy thinks of someone swarming into his mind through his sockets, destroying his memories, his personalities. His body, whatever remained of his brain, turning into the puppet of someone else. Worse, Cowboy thinks, than what Roon is doing to those kids.

“Fuck,” Cowboy says. Horror clutches at his heart. “Stay the hell out of that crystal, Reno. We don’t want to have anything to do with this.”

“The intelligence people intended to use Black Mind against the Orbitals. The plan was to have a few fanatic assassin types intrude on the minds of key Orbital personnel. If all went well, they’d start giving orders that would leave the Orbitals open to a preemptive attack from Earth. They’d suicide if they were discovered–– the original assassins would still be alive down on Earth, remember. Even if the plan didn’t work perfectly, at least the key Orbitals would go psychotic or something, and there would be confusion at the top. Nobody would dare use the eye-face for communication. It was a good plan.”

“So what went wrong?”

“The Orbitals preempted the plan and attacked before Black Mind could be put into operation. But the point is, Cowboy–– Black Mind is still here. It’s sitting in the computers of this lab, and maybe other labs. Blacker labs. The Orbitals–– hell,
anybody
–– could get hold of it. We’ve got to wipe it out.”

“Shit, yes.”

“After this run, I’m going to start looking. Find out who else might have Black Mind hiding somewhere.” There is a pause. Reno’s tone changes. “The shuttle’s on time, Cowboy. You should see its signature at about two-seven zero.”

Cowboy turns his head to port, sees a brightness in the darkening sky. “Confirmed, Reno. High and to port, about eight o’clock.”
Pony Express
begins a slow bank to the left. Engines cycle from blue to green. Cowboy can feel his veins opening as the alcohol fuel pours through them. Black Mind is forgotten in an instant as Cowboy’s electronic nerves extrude into the delta, into the wings and engines, the smooth composite skin studded with sensors and the cold cybernetic hearts of the missiles that wait, shrouded protectively by the curved black wings.