Hardwired (41 page)

“I know. They told me while I was flying in. I took some extra evasive action just in case they had something looking for us.”

He is weary, she can see that even in starlight. There is a red line around his nose and chin where the anesthetic mask scored the flesh. He pulls off his helmet and wipes sweat away. “Something’s got to be done about that brother of yours, Sarah.”

She feels herself prickle. “He’s my problem.” Maybe they got to him, she thinks, maybe Nick has been sitting there all along, purring suggestions in to him. Maybe he just didn’t care any longer, didn’t want to exercise his new legs heading for another phone.

“Your problem may have just blown this base. Your problem may get us killed.” He reaches out a gloved hand to touch the fading bruises on her cheek. Sarah turns her head away. “He’s responsible for this,” Cowboy says.

“He’s not.” Crisply. “That was my mistake, not his.”

“He let them ambush you. Whose mistake was that?”

Sarah doesn’t answer, just shakes her head. She feels a sting behind her eyes, in her sinuses. Daud is faithless, she knows, but that doesn’t change anything within her. It doesn’t change her responsibility for the things in him that make him faithless, and it doesn’t change her own faithlessness, her attempted betrayal that put scars on her heart as well as her face.

Instead, it was her goals she betrayed, her chance to live away from this... She feels a hole in her chest, a vacuum where her purpose has been torn free.

Cowboy turns from her, holds out a hand to Maurice. “I’m glad you can be here,” he says. Maurice’s quiet, sad smile seems another face of the night. His eyes glitter like a pair of distant artificial moons. “I’m pleased to be given the chance.” He’s wearing his blue silk scarf tucked between his neck and the collar of his shirt, the faded badge of his old allegiance.

“You’re the last to arrive. I have a briefing arranged. About the Hyperion frigates and the tactics they will probably use.”

“Now? Let’s do it, then.”

Sarah follows them during the long walk to the bubble tent. They converse in a jargon-ridden aeronautical slang that seems far more opaque than necessary. The language of their secret club, she thinks, the exclusive society of those who worship speed and mechanical violence. She avoids the briefing, meaningless to her anyway, and finds instead a sandwich and a cold lemonade, then goes to her little room, strips, and stretches out on her pallet. The air tube whispers monotonously. She’s got another six hours before she’s on shift again, making missiles in the oven of the assembly trench.

Her head on her pillow, staring at the gray crook of her own elbow, she gazes back over her last weeks and tries to find the point where her loyalties changed, where she surrendered her dream... Somewhere things shifted, away from herself and Daud, toward something more complex. Survival was a simple enough goal, survival for herself and her brother–– that and flight from the mud. The new loyalties are a lot more complicated than mere survival. Cowboy’s people, the panzerboys and pilots, are not, so far as she can tell, survivors. They’re not as flamboyant in their search for extinction as the Silver Apaches, but there’s something about their quest for the absolute that gives her pause...They chase oblivion with every ride, and they rank themselves on how far they can push into the dark eye sockets of a crumbling death’s head in the sky, push and still come back... They talk about Cowboy as if he is immortal, as though his life is magic, but she knows that if he keeps stretching that fragile envelope between himself and the darkness, someday it will snap, and Cowboy will spin alone into the night.

Within a few hours all six deltas could be melted epoxide on the California desert, their pilots’ ultimate quest fulfilled, and what of Sarah’s new loyalties then? The little tent city would have lost its purpose, its center. With luck the Flash Force might give her a ride to the nearest town. Daud is weak and faithless, but she knows she can force him to accept life. She doesn’t think that’s possible with Cowboy.

He doesn’t join her that night: the briefing runs late and in early morning there’s some kind of problem with one of the jet engines that needs every experienced hand. Sarah lies on her back and stares at the ceiling, wondering if the rock will come, if she will see its glow through the tent fabric before the shock wave hits.

The rock falls in midafternoon. Sarah is working in a trench with the last of the two air-to-air missiles that are being set in their cradles, ready to be delivered to Maurice’s delta, hidden under camouflage nets a mile and a half away. She’s dressed only in a one-piece bathing suit and sneakers, her armored clothes and gun hanging from one of the bomb cradles. She’s seen Cowboy only once today with some of the other pilots at the breakfast tent. Since that time she’s seen only the three men helping with the missiles, and Maurice, who’s sitting patiently in his delta waiting for the rockets to be fed into the slots in his wings.

And suddenly alarms are ringing. Sarah snaps upright, seeing the blank, appalled gaze on the faces of the missile assembly crew, and reaches for the submachine chopper, her armored jacket and pants. She vaults toward a small slit trench a few yards distant. She’s not going to be caught near that much explosive in a fight.

She jumps into the trench, breathless already in the unbearable heat, and reaches into her jacket pocket for the inhaler of hardfire. She can hear the whooping alarm, the sound of running feet, the rising whine of panzer engines as they begin turning over... Hardfire races along her nerves, her muscles and blood coming alive. She jams her feet into her trousers and fumbles with the zip. Then she’s paralyzed for a second as something tears apart the air over her head, as she gazes up into the blue, expecting from the sound to see the black ablative needle of an Orbital frigate aimed straight between her eyes...she sees nothing. The shock throws her against the sand wall of the trench. The air is full of grit pouring down from above. There is more tearing of the air, more shocks. Artillery, she realizes. Mortars or something, big ones. Walking their rounds up and down the base.

She sits up, coughing the grit from her lungs. The sand that coats her sweat resists the fabric of the jacket as she pulls it on. The explosives are moving away and she chances a look over the rim of the trench, blinking away the sweat and dust just in time to see the armored angular shapes of four panzers topping a ridge half a mile away, trailing dust plumes that seem to throw half the desert into the sky. Howling brightness splashes the ridge as Flash Force automated defense systems fire sheaf rockets. Behind her someone is screaming. One of the Dodger’s panzers is moving, building speed over, the flat. It shrieks as it moves behind her, and Sarah realizes it’s putting her between two fires. She throws herself flat on the surface of the trench.

A screaming in the air, concussions, the scream of metal and engines. The mortars march back and forth again, hammering the earth. The sounds seem to move away from her and Sarah chances a look again.

In front of her, slightly to the right, one of the intruder panzers is hit, black smoke gushing skyward from its aft section. A dorsal minigun turret is flashing with a basso moan. The panzer’s cargo doors are down, and men are rushing out and fanning over the surface, men in desert camouflage and black helmets. They seem to move in synch, their heads turning to scan the ground around them, one of them always looking in every direction so the unit has an ever-present 360-degree awareness, their arms and legs moving with alarming speed and efficiency. Hardwired, with crystal for small-unit combat, way out of Sarah’s league. Sarah feels gratitude they’re out of range of her machine pistol and there will be no temptation for her to shoot and draw their fire. An intruder panzer races by on her left, dust rising in a sheet. She turns as it smashes headlong into one of the parked deltas, brushing it aside like a car ramming a tricycle. The delta spins aside and moans as its spars give way. The panzer roars on, the delta’s camouflage net flapping from its bow. Then the canopy of dust reaches Sarah’s position and blots the world from view.

Panic flutters in her throat. I don’t have the crystal for this, she thinks. She drops back into her trench and reaches for the machine pistol. If anyone gets in the trench with her, she’ll kill him; otherwise, she’ll stay out of it and wait for circumstances to declare the winner. Sucking enemy bullets is all a streetgirl is worth in these situations, and Sarah knows it. It’s time to leave the defense to the Flash Force: that’s what they’re paid for. The hardfire wailing in her veins, she plants her back against the wall of the trench and points the chopper at its opposite rim. Hopes she’ll be fast enough when the time comes.

Explosions shake the planet beneath her. The crackle of small-arms fire is added to the roar of missiles and the scream of jet engines. Dust falls in clouds, dropping on her arms, gathering in her lap, coating her lashes. She keeps brushing it off the Heckler & Koch with quick movements. At one point the dust clears above her and she looks straight up and sees a delta, stalled and falling wing-down right at her. She realizes it’s Maurice from the distinctive configuration of his craft, and then she sees a glint of silver as a missile shoots above his high wing and careens into the sky. Sarah waits helplessly for the impact, for the laden epoxide body to crush her, but the delta’s aerodynamics seem to grab just enough air to keep it aloft, and the plane twists and disappears out of her vision. She braces for the impact but there isn’t one. Maurice has somehow sidestepped the missile without falling into the fatal embrace of gravity. Mortars begin plashing around her, and she huddles deeper into her jacket. Then the mortars are gone, and Sarah realizes that the volume of fire has slackened. Most of it is small arms fire now, with the occasional roar of a minigun or hammer of a machine gun. The dusty sky overhead is tainted with blue. She shifts, crouching on the balls of her feet, and risks a Look.

Columns of smoke rise from the broken desert floor. She sees four smashed panzers within her range of vision, as well as the crumpled delta, a gutted Flash Force limo, and the fuel truck, broken and burning brightly. Bodies dot the landscape, most of them in the bright coveralls worn by the Dodger’s people. She doesn’t see anyone moving, but there’s fire chattering from somewhere.

A black peregrine falls out of the sky, and she recognizes Maurice’s delta, flame shooting from its wings as it launches rockets. She hears the explosions but can’t see what he was shooting at. Then the delta soars up into the sky again.

Sarah drops back to the trench floor and tries to wipe the sweat and dust from her face, feeling it smear. Weariness wars in her with the hardfire; she’s exhausted herself simply with the effort of living through the attack. Daud, she thinks dully, brought this down on them with only a phone call. She can feel her fingers tightening on the butt of her machine pistol, her jaw muscles clenching. She pictures Weasel scoring Daud’s soft new flesh, flickering for his false blue eyes. Hears Daud’s panicked evasions as she makes her own calculated strikes…

The delta whines overhead. All fire has died away. She can hear cars and trucks moving. She shakes herself free of her vision and peers out of the trench again, seeing men in camouflage armor and black helmets rising from the ground with their hands over their heads, Flash Force people moving out in vehicles to round them up. Mercenaries, she thinks angrily. When they capture one another they have agreements that allow for fair treatment and parole of prisoners. Not like the world she lives in, where no mistakes are allowed.

“Technical personnel report to their team leaders.” A bullhorn brays from the direction of the command tent. “We need a head count.” Sarah rises from the trench. The next half hour is an exhausted blur of motion, sweating labor performed around scenes of horror, all the while expecting to hear again the alarms, the sounds of another attack.

Maurice brings his delta in, and Sarah wrestles her pair of missiles out of the trench toward his craft. Other armorers are running up to reload the miniguns. She learns it was Maurice who saved the fight, the only pilot in his delta when the attack came. He’d flown over the ridge and blown away the mortars that were ranging on the deltas, and then helped to take care of the attacking panzers. Two of the deltas were destroyed on the ground, the rest–– dispersed behind ridges or hills, protected by camouflage–– survived, partly because the two defending panzers stood in the way and took most of the enemy rockets.

Maurice is standing in the cockpit when she arrives. “Maurice,” she says. Her heart is hammering wildly. “Where’s Cowboy? Have you heard?”

“He’s okay. He and the Express both. Spent the fight in a slit trench. ”

Sarah breathes easier, tries to smile.

“It’s okay, Sarah,” Maurice says. “We’ll bring the shuttle down.” His reassurance seems weaker when Sarah sees that the two missiles she’s putting in his wings are the only ones he’s got.

“I’m okay.” Jimi Gutierrez is brought past in a stretcher improvised from a blanket. His skin is blackened, both legs are burned away at the thigh, Somehow he’s still conscious. He’s smiling, the braces on his teeth gleaming in the burned and shredding face. “I’m okay, I still got my sockets.”

Sarah waves to Maurice and runs back to the command tent. It’s down but it’s being propped up, its contents hastily readied for evacuation. Things are being packed up and moved, and the wounded have to be delivered to a hospital in Vegas. As Sarah jogs over the stony desert, she passes a pair of surviving enemy panzerboys being executed by a couple of the Dodger’s techs. The machine-pistol fire echoes off distant hills. The panzerboys, like Sarah, are not subject to the professional courtesies offered between mercenary groups. The rest of the surviving attackers, Japanese mercs flown in overnight by suborbital shuttle, stand in emotionless sweating lines as they’re stripped of their armor and weapons. She sees a slight, blond figure standing among them and freezes.

It’s one of Cunningham’s two associates, the smaller one. There are abrasions scoring half his face, blood trickling onto his white undershirt. One arm is bound up, red soaking through the improvised bandage. “Sarah,” he says.