Hardwired (42 page)

An explosion burns behind her eyes. The chips make the movement easy, economical. She walks a burst up his chest and watches him fall, sees the wary eyes of the Japanese as they shift away from the line of fire.

“Hey,” one of the Flash Force men says, raising his gun.

“He’s not a merc. He’s Orbital personnel.” Despite the fury burning in her veins her voice stays cool. “He’s not covered by any agreements.” The mercenary looks at her doubtfully. He’s got a little mustache with flecks of dust on it. His eyes are hollow, red-rimmed. She holsters her pistol and bares her teeth at him. “You see any more round-eyes with this group, they’re Orbitals. Where was this guy taken? Cunningham-Calvert-was probably with him.”

She can see the cords standing out in the soldier’s neck. His voice is a suppressed scream. “Who the hell are you? I don’t have any instructions––”

Behind her, she hears the rising whine of engines. She turns her back on the babbling mercenary and sees four deltas rising from hidden folds in the desert, hovering like black insects on columns of shimmering heat. Their sound begins to change as the deltas start moving forward, their needle points rising like dark fingers toward the sky.

“Hey. Who are you?” The mercenary jabbers at her. She can see the dots of sweat on his face, the staring eyes, the hands shaking as they clutch his gun. All the suppressed fear bursting forth in the violence of his question.

“Hey. I wanna know–” The man is weeping. Sarah watches the deltas rise into the sky. Her breath catches in her throat. “Dammit,” the man gasps, “you just can’t...just can’t shoot someone... That’s not...You gotta have authority.”

The man’s tears patter on his uniform, making fresh clear pathways in the dust. Sarah runs for the command tent, finds an officer, explains. It turns out the man was captured with the mortar crew, knocked out by Maurice’s rockets before he got a chance to escape.

“Calvert was probably with him,” Sarah says. “He’s running Tempel’s effort out here. You’d better find him.”

The deltas have long since vanished into the sun when two all-terrain vehicles full of Flash Force mercs move off in a trail of dust for the mortar site. Sarah rides with them, next to the officer in the back of the vehicle.

The mortars lie on the desert, four black broken tubes flung dozens of yards from where their ammo erupted under Maurice’s rockets. There’re remnants of a comm rig here, too, that kept the attackers in communication with their base. The officer searches the rough hills with enhanced eyes. He points. “Pickup and rendezvous for these guys was probably back that way,” he says, and gives the commands that send most of the Flash Force on foot toward their quarry. The two vehicles move off on either flank, hoping to drive Cunningham in toward the men on foot.

Sarah clutches the side of the vehicle as it lurches over the ground. Sweat bounces from her armored shell. Dust coats her skin. She stares at the desert, intent, her fingers on the butt of her machine pistol.

She misses the end. There’s a burst of fire from off to the left, and a crackle on the officer’s radio. He slaps the driver on the shoulder and points. The vehicle turns, accelerates in a blossoming cloud of dust.

The head shot that killed him went in through an eye and removed the back of his head, but Cunningham’s face is still recognizable. Sarah looks down from the vehicle at the dusty corpse, the broken steel spring that was Cunningham. The officer looks at her for confirmation.

“He wouldn’t have let himself be taken alive,” she says; and the officer nods and looks down at the corpse with a measure of respect.

“Put him in the back,” he says, and his troopers sling the corpse into the vehicle and then jump in themselves. Sarah watches the body as it bounces back and forth to the lurches of the vehicle.

Sarah looks at him, thinks of the last time she’d seen him, that back room in the Plastic Girl when they had said goodbye, and when Sarah had wanted more than anything else to have Cunningham’s ticket, have it at any price. Here, she thinks, was the price of it, a shallow grave on the desert floor. A mudboy come back to the Earth to die.

She glances west, into the sky. Cowboy is there, probably already grappling with the Tempel jockeys. Sarah raises a hand to her throat, a gypsy woman touching iron.

Beyond her sight, she knows, the sky is stained with fire.

Chapter Twenty-three

Alcohol shrieks through Cowboy’s heart. His epoxide skin burns at the touch of the air.
Pony Express
arcs over California, riding into the darkening face of a Mach three sky.

Cowboy’s late for the planned intercept and knows it, and so he’s hurtling as fast as he can across the roof of the world. The shuttle has only about seven minutes in the air between the ion blackout and landing at Edwards, and the deltas will have to kill it during that time. After the chase and a fight over the Mojave, Cowboy figures that he won’t have enough fuel to get back; he can only hope to bring his ship to a landing on a flat piece of desert or a dry lakebed, then call for a fuel truck to top up the tanks and give him a run for Colorado.

He feels grit between his skin and his face mask, biting his skin. Little mementoes in the shape of dust particles, remembrances of a long hot afternoon in a slit trench, crouched with the Dodger as the Orbital mortars walked up and down and the deltas died in a storm of jet-powered Chobham. Not his kind of fight, not something he was chipped for.

Now it’s time for revenge. Already he can feel pulsing radar energies directed downward from the dome of the sky. Seven distinct pulses, two frigates in the lead, crashing through the atmosphere with their wings drawn in, their ablative skin trailing fire. Point men, clearing their path of anything that may have survived the Orbital strike into Nevada. Then the shuttle, marked by its more powerful radars, trailing by twenty miles. Two more pairs of frigates behind, each at a twenty-mile distance.

“This is Cowboy. We’ve acquired the target.”

While his ground people acknowledge, Cowboy snarls the contempt for the Orbitals’ amateur setup. The laws never seem to learn that a fighter craft using radar gives its position away to a passive detection system long before the radar itself will ever see anything. The Orbitals will probably see Cowboy on infrared long before they pick him up on radar.

The deltas howling toward the Orbitals are also in pairs, Cowboy in the lead with his wingman Andy, a former deltajock, two miles above and behind, trailing to port. The two ex-Space Force people, Diego and Maurice, flying second string twenty-five miles behind.

Coded Orbital transmissions rain against Cowboy’s crystal. The brown rim of California drops into the sea. The frigates ahead are bright infrared bullets foreshortening toward Cowboy’s brain. He pulses a signal to Andy, and
Pony Express
begins to jitter through the sky, the airframe quaking, trying to dance away from the frigate’s lasers. The delta buckets up and down, yawing, correcting, yawing again. Cowboy runs through the checks and finds that his systems are surviving the atmospheric hammer. Through his skin he feels an additional pulse of microwave, then a second–– Orbital radar-homers on their way. He drops a decoy missile that should give out a strong radar image.

He fires an antiradiation-homer just to discourage the frigates from using their radar sets, and an instant later hears confirmation from Andy that his wingman’s done the same. His sensors go wild for a second, proof that he’s just jittered across a laser track, and gives a death’s-head grin to the sky and the alloy intruders. Some people aren’t coming back from this, and he figures it should be the Tempel men. It’s time someone gave them a comeuppance.

There’s a glimpse of silver over his canopy as the radar-homer draws past at a converging rate of eight times the speed of sound. Cowboy bellows inchoate defiance into his face mask. There’s a flash of infrared off his port bow, and Andy reports, “We hit one, C’Boy!”–– and then
Pony Express
is shuddering in the frigates’ slipstream, shedding thermite flares to discourage heat-seekers. There’s nothing between it and the shuttle.

His nerves wail in triumph, taut like the strings of a steel guitar. The dorsal minigun slams into the air and begins its roar, spitting out a steel wall in the path of the target.

Argosy
’s a smaller and more maneuverable craft than the other shuttle that
Pony Express
met in the sky, but the delta can still fly rings around her.

Missiles are coming from behind, radar-homers whipping in tight converging loops from the frigates. Cowboy keeps his minigun firing while dropping radar decoys and sideslipping the missiles. He’s flying right-wing-down at the end of his maneuver, the translucent Pacific blue beneath him, a surface geometry of tinted depthless glass...and then the shuttle’s there, a giant black-nosed shadow with visible sonic shock waves moving like spiderwebs over its giant wings, gone in an instant but burning its image into Cowboy’s gunsight eyes. Cowboy’s tried to stitch her with his minigun, but it doesn’t look as if there’s been much damage.
Pony Express
does flip-flops in the
Argosy
’s slipstream, the vast sonic boom moving through its spars like an earthquake through California soil, making a sound too deep to be heard by anything but gut and bone...

Cowboy feels the crystal in his head burning hot as he controls his ship, twisting it, pointing the nose up, cutting in the air brakes and throttling back.
Pony Express
slows as if it’s hit a sea of honey in the sky. Cowboy’s neck muscles clamp down against the g-forces draining blood from his brain. Then Cowboy drops the nose and feeds more fuel to the engines as he triggers missiles that will loop and follow the shuttle.

He’s just performed what’s known in the trade as a yo-yo, which should bring him out behind the
Argosy
in the classic kill position, but the maneuver’s cost him speed and it will take him a while to catch up. He can feel Orbital breath on his neck. The next pair of frigates are dropping on him like falcons, a classic bounce, their big rockets giving them faster acceleration than any delta can hope for. Cowboy’s still jinking even in his dive after
Argosy
, but a laser burn blows some of the rear sensors and he can see heat-seekers on his trail, bright needles rotating through the sky.

He and Andy have planned for this. After passing the shuttle, Cowboy yo-yoed right while Andy did another yo-yo to the left, presenting the frigates with two separate and diverging targets. The frigates opted to keep together and bounce the leader, but that’s left Andy free. He sweeps out of his yo-yo with the frigates right in front of him and his crystal humming with the sound of heat-seekers asking for a target, and he drops a pair of missiles that turn one frigate into a dazzling eruption of fuel and flashing oxidant, tumbling alloy scraps and burning insulation. The other frigate breaks away, dropping thermite decoys, leaving Cowboy free. But there are still missiles after him, distracting him from the vast target just ahead. He drops more thermite and suddenly there’s a rattle on the armor, metal vaporizing on the Chobham. Someone’s spent minigun rounds, falling from on high.

Suddenly Andy is gone. His delta is tumbling and breaking up into a sheet of flame, and all Cowboy knows is that for a few seconds there’s a weird electronic
EEEEEEEEEEE
noise wailing distantly in one ear, the sound of a radio broadcasting the melting of its own components... Cowboy thinks that Andy may have sucked a minigun round into an intake, but he’ll never know. Other things are attracting his attention.

He’s still getting radars pulsing from six enemy craft, so that means the frigate struck with the antiradiation missile is still in the game. The
Hyperion
-class is tough, Cowboy knows; the missile may just have bounced off its ablative shield. That means five frigates against three deltas, and one of the deltas has only two missiles.

Blackness fills his vision as Cowboy nears the shuttle, as his heart labors to keep his brain supplied with oxygen in the face of his acceleration. The shuttle is a big target directly ahead, but two more frigates are swooping at him from on high–– their acceleration is appalling–– and suddenly there are more missiles coming at him than he can deal with. Systems shriek as he sideslips, fires antiradiation-homers, pops the minigun targets again, and tries to put a wall of thirty-millimeter rounds in front of the frigates... He’s close enough to the nearest to see the bright splashes of hits, but suddenly there are red lights flashing in his mind, the dorsal minigun signaling it’s out of ammo. More red lights are layered onto his perceptions as a laser vaporizes some hydraulics and
Pony Express
begins to vent control fluids into the atmosphere, and then there’s an even bigger red light, this time outside the canopy, as one of the antiradiation missiles finds a home. The target frigate simultaneously loses parts of a control surface and its aerodynamics, and runs into a solid wall of unforgiving air, coming apart in about a tenth of a second... The other frigate jitters away, punctured with minigun hits, trying to get its redundant systems on line. Cowboy redlines the engines and feels his head punched back onto its rest. He’s lost some of his control surface, but his computer seems to be compensating. He’s only got about three minutes left before the shuttle touches the desert floor.

The leading frigates have looped and are boring back for him; the two other deltas, Maurice and Diego, have yo-yoed around, and the rear two frigates are trying to bounce them... They’re smarter than their friends and have split, each going after a single target. Cowboy launches radar-homers for the shuttle, a big slow target right on the horizon. He pops the belly turret and fires for the two frigates right ahead, and suddenly one of them– maybe the one weakened by a head-on encounter with an antiradiation missile– is erupting in smoke. He sees the hot flare of rockets as the pilots eject, but suddenly there’s a laser lance punching through his polymerized flesh, and
Pony Express
begins to die.

Crystal systems boil and explode in the heat of coherent light and the delta becomes unstable as both the main fly-by-wire comp and its backup bubble and fade. Cowboy shrieks as control systems invade his head. The delta’s aerodynamics are superb, but at this speed anything that tries to maneuver is inherently unstable, and anything that doesn’t is a target. Cowboy’s fighting his craft, making minute adjustments, and even though he’s coping with them one by one, there are more oscillations coming in than he can deal with. The air turns hard, and the delta shudders, losing more systems, and begins to corkscrew toward the ground. Agony is trying to crawl up out of Cowboy’s anesthetized body. He’s blind but for the news from his displays, hydraulics, and airflow, punctured systems and reluctant control surfaces. He’s lost his view of the target and he howls in protest. Dimly there’s a feeling of the earth coming up…