Cowboy’s been monitoring the newscasts and police broadcasts from the moment they turned interesting, and it seems that he’s the only one they’re looking for. There’s no mention of another person in the panzer, and that means that even if the same people who are after him want Sarah, it’s just an accident that she’s with him. His description and a description of the panzer have been delivered to the police across the country, and he’s so blazing hot that even though he’s wearing the dark wig the Dodger made him buy for his emergency pack, with a visored cap jammed down low on his forehead, he can feel the crosshairs pasted over his heart. Sarah had to talk him out of wearing a plastic belly gun, guaranteed to pass the detectors about 60 percent of the time, pointing out that there was a 40-percent chance of the gun’s getting him killed. But still he wishes he had the comforting solidity pressed against his stomach.

Sarah, on the other hand, is invisible, and Cowboy wants her with him. The enemy will be looking for a lone man, and she lowers his profile. She also knows at least some of the enemy’s faces.

Still, he figures the odds aren’t good. The Dodger’s got to get him away from this war in the East before he’s flown out in a body bag.

The tavern is called Oliver’s and it’s breathing a late-night Saturday crowd in and out with each pulse of the litejack music that’s playing seven beats against sixteen from the inside. Cowboy and Sarah watch the place for a while as neon-colored holograms waver in the windows and the music begins to play eleven against four. The local cops pass by once without showing any interest in its clientele.

“Let’s go before they come again,” Sarah says. Cowboy nods but somehow he doesn’t want to move. Sarah gives him a hard-alloy glance.

“Think of me as your bodyguard,” she says. “It’s something I know how to do.”

The tavern inhaled them. Fluorescent holograms burn Oliver’s ceiling and walls with cool, persistent fire. It is the only illumination except for a plain white spotlight trained on an expressionless man standing on the stage with five instruments plugged into his head, his monochrome shadow standing behind him like a male Medusa. He’s playing all the instruments at once, five against seven now. People ace dancing through his changes, even the zoned moving to his complex, compelling rhythms. “My heart is alloy,” he recites, “I live in boxes.” The voice is a breathless whisper that stands apart from the rest of the music, alone in ironic solitude.

Cowboy likes hearing old favorites, but mainly he’s grateful for the fact that it’s dark.

Sarah is shrugged down into her jacket and has turned off the challenging swagger, and Cowboy’s grateful for that, too. He and Sarah wander through the tavern without anyone seeming to pay any attention. There is a pay phone in a hallway leading to the toilet. Cowboy changes some bills at the bar into crystal money on a credit needle, and sticks the phone’s optional audio stud into his head. It has a thin mic that trails to the corner of his mouth for a speaker.

It is the Dodger’s wife who answers. Jutz is a wiremuscled blond woman who runs the Dodger’s ranch while he’s away, and she knows her end of the business well. She sounds as if Cowboy’s got her out of bed.

“Jutz,” he says, “is the Dodger there?”

“Cowboy,” she says, “don’t tell me where you are. They’re probably monitoring this line.” Her timbre chills his nerves like liquid helium. There is a tremor in her voice, a well-controlled fear. Suddenly the little hallway seems very small.

“What’s happened?” he asks.

“Listen carefully.” Her words are carefully spaced and enunciated to avoid her having to repeat them. Fear overtones quaver at the hard edges of her consonants. Cowboy closes his eyes and presses his forehead to the comforting, solid reality of the metal phone.

“The Dodger has been shot. They tried to kill him in his car but he managed to get away. He’s in the hospital now and I’ve got guards around him. Don’t try to visit him, and don’t call me again. Just find some safe place to hide and stay there until the situation clarifies.”

The door to the toilet opens and Cowboy flashes a look over his shoulder, feeling his vulnerability. A man with bright glazed eyes steps out and gives Cowboy a friendly smile as he passes by. Cowboy hunches into himself and whispers into the mic. “Who’s doing this?”

“Word is it’s Arkady. That he’s moving in on the other thirdmen and on the panzerboys. He wants you in particular.”

A distorted dark-haired stranger, his reflection on the bright metal phone chassis, stares at Cowboy in cold-eyed anger. “He almost got me this afternoon,” Cowboy says. “He’s fighting his war here now. And he’s given my face and name to the laws.” Cowboy feels as if gravity is suspended, as if he were in a panzer soaring off the crest of a ridge that has turned into the lip of a black and bottomless canyon.

A tone sounds on Cowboy’s aural crystal. He studs a credit needle into the phone and lets the machine take his money.

“Hide, Cowboy,” Jutz says. “We don’t know who to trust, and we can’t set up a run to get you back West. Arkady’s dealt with everybody at one time or another, and we don’t know who are his men and who’s on our side. So everyone’s running for cover.”

“Arkady’s got a bloc behind him.” Cowboy looks wildly to either side, afraid that his whisper will be overheard. “Tell everyone that.”

“Which one?” But suddenly there is a click and Jutz is gone. Cowboy knows who’s listening now. His lips pull back in a snarl.

“Too late,” he says. “I’m gone.”

He unjacks and steps out of the hallway. Sarah stands watching the dance floor. He gives her the credit needle. “Call the Hetman, but make it quick,” he says. “We’re compromised here. Your bloc has its thumb on communications. ” He stands outside the short hallway and watches. Plenty of time, he thinks. They probably traced the call, but the chance of their having any people sitting within a few minutes of this particular bar are nil, and they’ve got no liaison with the local cops. It’ll take a long time to get through to anyone in this burg. But still he feels rushes of fear speeding up his spine, and his eyes count the exits. If the laws come in, he’s got his escape routes planned.

“I have what you need,” insinuates the voice from the singer, “I can keep the flames away.”

Sarah is back in less than two minutes. “Couldn’t reach the Hetman,” she says. Cowboy is already moving toward the exit. “He’s in hiding somewhere. But I talked to one of his people.” She shakes her head. “It’s chaos. There’s a war going on, but the sides aren’t very clear. Michael and most of his people seem to be safe for the moment, because he put the word out to be careful. Andrei was the only...casualty, aside from snagboys and the like. ”

Cowboy swings a fire door open and steps into an alley. His eyes adjust quickly to the light. There are rusting steel dumpsters complete with cats, and several people are sleeping uncovered in the August heat that radiates from the old concrete, glowing in Cowboy’s infrared perception. Some drunk, some looking, some just lost. Like any small-town alley.

“They said to hide,” Sarah says. “They’ll pick up the computer hearts when things cool down in this part of the world.”

“No way for us to get home?”

“None where we won’t get assassinated the second we show up in the Free Zone. No one knows who to trust.”

“Whom,” says Cowboy.

He is walking fast for the far end of the alley, fists in his pockets, trying to keep his bootsteps quiet. One of the sleeping men stirs on his threadbare blanket and calls a name. His bulging, uncovered belly gleams pale in the night.

“We’re on our own then,” Cowboy says. He steps to the end of the alley and glances left and right. A woman’s laughter echoes from the curb. He steps across the street and into another alley.

Sarah’s voice behind makes him stop in his tracks. “I found out who Cunningham works for.”

Cowboy spins in surprise. “The boy on the phone told you?”

“I told him the Orbitals were involved, and why. And he knew Cunningham, had dealt with him on some security matter. ”

The loathing in her voice is clear. Even in the darkness he can see the hatred plain in her eyes.

“It’s Tempel. Tempel Pharmaceuticals I.G.”

Cowboy hears the name and feels his heart quicken. Deep inside him he feels a howl building, a shriek of triumph like the panzer’s jets as he opens the valves of pressured alcohol. Because, however little good it will do him right now, he finally knows the name of the enemy.

 

WOHNEN SIE IN LEID-STADT? ERLAUBEN SIE UNS IHNEN NACH HAPPYVILLESCHICKEN!

-Pointsman Pharmaceuticals A.G.

 

Tempel Interessengemeinschaft, Cowboy thinks. The Fellowship of Interests Tempel. A lot of the Orbitals have I.G. after their names, and no wonder. It’s such a perfect description of their state of mind.

He and Sarah are back at the panzer, sitting on its dorsal armor while the creek ripples across the ramming prow. Sarah is cradling the machine pistol in her arms, a cold and deadly child. Clouds are moving across the stars and they are alone in the darkness.

“I don’t have any money beyond pocket change,” Cowboy says. “I usually carry some gold in the panzer, to use if I have to buy some lawmen.” He shakes his head. “But this delivery was supposed to be legal. No reason to suppose the cops would be interested.” He gives an unamused laugh. “And I was supposed to be back in Florida tonight.”

Sarah says nothing, simply shifts the weight of the machine pistol. She’s got the long suppressor on the barrel, and the thing won’t make so much as a whisper if she has to use it. He already knows she doesn’t have a dime.

“I won’t be able to access my portfolio,” he goes on, thinking aloud. “If the laws are all cooperating, Arkady and his people will be able to follow every transaction, or even freeze my action. I’ve got gold cached back in New Mexico and Wyoming, but that’s a long walk from here.”

“We’ve got the matrices,” Sarah says. Her voice seems loud after such a long silence. “They’re worth a fortune if we can move them.”

Cowboy looks up at her. “Do you know anyone you can trust with that amount of merchandise? I don’t.”

“We don’t have to sell the whole cargo. Just enough to get us where we want to go.”

Cowboy hears a mosquito dancing near his ear. His nerves are urging him to take the panzer out of here, telling him they are too near the phone that they used to call two compromised lines. But until he knows where they’re going there doesn’t seem to be any sense in moving. His fuel situation is too critical for wandering in circles.

Wait, he thinks. He looks up at the sky. Wait until the clouds move in.

He remembers the nights he flew the Pony Express through storm clouds, his crystal tuned to the weather bureau so that he could track the bad weather and hide in it, the delta diving past the rain that drummed on the canopy, through crepe blackness so complete, so tangible, that the world of the hissing aircraft, the softly glowing instrument lights, seemed to be the entirety of existence, the boundaries of the universe extending no more than an arm’s length beyond the canopy and all his memories of an earthly existence now some fond, distant, entirely irrelevant hallucination, the only other thing existing in that world, besides Cowboy and the plane living in their interface, the echo of Cowboy’s own breath in the confined space of his helmet. Remembering the sudden eruption of sheet lightning that turned the velvet sky brighter than day, the delta a matte-black needle flung against the shimmering, streaming opalescent neverending electric dream...A vision he could never share, never achieve anywhere else. A belonging, a completeness, that he could never talk about. Not even to those who flew with him. Just a shining in his eyes, aglow in his mind. And sometimes, he could tell, in the mind of others.

“Maybe I know someone,” he says. “Maybe I know someone who’s been out of the game so long they won’t be looking for him.”

 

HEARTS AND MINDS

 

It is late afternoon. The world has paused to catch its breath, and the ice-cream streets melt slowly in the sun. The people of Pennsylvania wait in the hush for the twilight that will soften the tempered Gerber edges of their world.

The panzer is hidden in a half-flooded quarry, the old road leading to the place now overgrown by brush so thick only the badgers know the crumbling pair of ruts. Cowboy and Sarah walk down the half-rural street that is called the something-or-other pike, Cowboy with a cardboard box propped on his shoulder, shielding his face from the traffic. Sarah treads quietly behind, her footsteps smothered by the grassy verge. Another pair of refugees with their rucksacks, not worth a second glance, not even bothering to stick out a hopeful thumb.

Since midnight they’ve been heading west, winding up the Alleghenies, following the Youghiogheny River through the passes of the western Appalachians, switching afterward to the old Penn Central roadbed as it loops northwest to the city. Pittsburgh is a boomtown now after decades of decline, reviving as a transportation center and the new capital of Pennsylvania, one of the places the blocs hadn’t bothered to smash to ruins. Cowboy has seen pictures of the new capital, a granite fortress rising in halfhearted celebration of the old city’s luck, complete with a holochrome image of the Liberty Bell, the original having been mashed flat along with Independence Hall and then washed out into Delaware Bay by the rising salt tide, swirling out as gray streamers in the murky water along with the tons of stone and ash and blackened bone that had been the City of Brotherly Love.

As night faded, there was only a few hundred miles’ range in the fuel tanks, and the landscape was growing too urban for safety. After Cowboy found the old quarry, he and Sarah slept the length of the morning and then began their hike, two more walkers coming to the boomtown to find work, obviously destined to squat with the others in the shacks and cardboard boxes that circle the city, staining the green walls of the Monongahela valley with the smoke of their cookfires, haunting the city looking for work and avoiding the dark corners where people got murdered for the change in their pockets.

One of Cowboy’s old colleagues lives here in one of the city’s suburbs. Cowboy finds the address courtesy of directory assistance and wonders how much contact Reno still has with the business. He knows Reno made a lot of money in his days as a deltajock and hadn’t seemed the sort of person to lose it in the time since. If he’s entirely on the legal side now, that may even make things easier.

A wall surrounds Reno’s house, and on one side an old man with three days’ growth of beard under a torn straw hat waits next to his packstaff, smoking a cigarette and waiting for the cool of twilight before continuing his pilgrimage. Cowboy’s nerves shriek an alarm at what might be an enemy staking out Reno’s house, but he does his best to silence them. Such sights are not unusual in this or any other part of the world.

Reno’s gate is a polished chromium alloy that reflects Cowboy’s image, standing spindly and haggard next to the tall dirtgirl with the shades like an asphalt shimmer. In answer to the gate’s questions, he pulls off his cap and wig. The gate’s voice burbles in mirthless joy, the voice of something drowning. “I seem to remember seeing you on video. By all means come in. ” The gate itself is soundless as it opens.

The house is a hymn to the interface, a geometric singularity composed of crystal and expensive off-planet alloy, suggesting the linkage of the human mind with digital reality. Jagged antennas seek the sky, transparent plastic tubes, part of some heating/cooling system, writhe over the house in a complex arterial pattern, carrying brightly colored liquids of exotic properties; streams of fluid insulated by bubbles, that suggest electrons speeding through their matrix. The walkway leading to the house is paved with millimeter-thin slices of meteorite protected by hard, transparent gas-planet plastic, the shining veins of nickel and magnesium bright against the shadowy; unoxidized iron, spotted with flecks of chromium and silicon. Other meteorites stand frozen in glass on alloy pillars in the forecourt. The door is inset, more polished alloy. It opens, like the other, without sound.

“Looks like an illustration from Cyborg Life,” Sarah mutters. The dark laser-cut stone of the walls merges with bright alloy beams like the wood and plaster of a half-timbered house. Liquid-crystal art re-forms itself continually on the walls. Cowboy recognizes one of the patterns as a giant-sized schematic of one of his motor-reflex chips.

“Leave your guns in the foyer, please. I won’t touch them.” Inside the house, the voice has a smoother quality.

Sarah has insisted on carrying the Heckler & Koch in her ruck, and with a grudging smile she puts the ruck on a table. Cowboy puts his belly gun next to it. They step into the next room. Soft gelatine-filled furniture glows Cherenkov blue from internal light sources. Aquariums filled with genetically altered fish emit the same cold spidery light as a computer display. Randomly generated tones sound in pointillist pattern from concealed speakers. Reno enters the room from an alloy-rimmed door.

“Hi, Cowboy. It’s been a while.”

“Hi, Reno.” Cowboy looks at his surroundings in a studied way. “You seem to be doing well for yourself,” he says.

Five years ago Reno’s delta had sucked a missile into its port engine over Indiana and then buried itself in some dark West Virginia hollow, sending a potential 200-million-dollar profit in pharmaceuticals skyward in a clean blue alcohol blaze. It was one of the last big delta runs and a turning point in the shift toward the use of panzers. Reno had got out of the plane before it screwed itself into Cheat Mountain, but he’d burned himself badly trying to horse the delta over the tree-crowned ridges to the landing field in Maryland, and his parachute hadn’t developed properly. Parts of him had been scraped off the trees with a shovel. In Cowboy’s world Reno’s bad luck was still talked about with respect.

Cowboy had visited him in the hospital a few times, and talked by phone once or twice a year since. Reno’s body had been put back together, Cowboy had been told, but there had been too much brain damage for it to work right; and that ruled out running the mail.

The rebuild job looks good. Arms and legs in fine working order. The blue eyes match. He looks fit in flannel pants and a Hawaiian shirt. Reno’s face is young except for the fine networking of lines around the eyes, and his teeth gleam white and even in the twilit room. The dark sockets in his head are covered by shoulder-length brown hair.

“I keep up with my portfolio,” he says. There is a strange vacancy behind his eyes.

“Reno, this is Sarah. Sarah, Reno.” They nod at each other while Cowboy puts down his box of hearts. Cowboy reaches out to shake Reno’s hand.

And it feels wrong. A little too warm, perhaps, a little too...dry. Even the best of palms are just the least bit moist. Cowboy looks down at the arm with his infrared eyes and sees that the heat distribution is uniform, which is not the case with any arm Cowboy has ever seen.

“A prosthesis,” says Reno, seeing Cowboy’s expression. “This and the two legs and other bits here and there.”

“But you could have got real legs,” says Cowboy.

Reno taps his skull. “I got real legs, but there was too much brain damage. My motor coordination was shot to hell, and my sense of touch was pretty much gone–– I’d lost too much skin, too many neurons. But Modernbody was looking for someone to test their latest prostheses. ” He shrugs. Cowboy gets an odd feeling from the gesture, as if the shrug weren’t real but rehearsed. Maybe Reno’s given this explanation a few too many times.

“The arm and legs are hardwired in. There’s a liquid-crystal computer replacing a damaged part of the brain. The feedback isn’t very good on my sense of touch, but then it wasn’t any good after the crash anyway. It’s all experimental stuff, very advanced. Light alloy, lighter than bone and muscle. I’m a lot more mobile than I used to be. And if they go into production, the experimental prostheses will be cheaper than cloning new legs and regrafting. ”

“I didn’t know,” Cowboy says.

“Modernbody pays me a nice pension,” Reno says. “It bought this house. All it costs me is a checkup every couple months, sometimes a rewiring with an improvement. And my new parts will last longer than the originals.”

The coming thing, Cowboy thinks. Live forever in a bodily incarnation of the eye-face, not limited to the speed of artificially enhanced neurotransmitters but approaching the speed of light, extending the limits of the interface, the universe. Brain contained in a perfect liquid-crystal analog. Nerves like the strings of a steel guitar. Heart a spinning turbopump. The Steel Cowboy, his body a screaming monochrome flicker, dispensing justice and righting wrongs. Who was that masked AI? Dunno, pardner, but he left this silver casting of a crystal circuit.

To Cowboy, it sounds pretty good. If they can lick that feedback problem.

Reno looks at him with his old-young eyes. Eyes that were a lot younger until that port engine spewed its molten remains into the thin air of Indiana and the horizon began to do flip-flops.

“So,” Reno says. “You people get caught in a crossfire?”

“That’s about the size of it.”

The eyes narrow. “From what I hear the crossfire extends all the way to California.”

“I’ll worry about that when I get West. After that, if you have any Tempel Pharmaceuticals stock in your portfolio, I’d sell.”

Reno frowns into one of his crystal pieces of art. “Sit down,” he says, “and tell me about it.”

They sit next to each other on a pair of armchairs while Cowboy gives a brief recapitulation of what he knows. Sarah assumes a half-lotus on a glowing nuclear blue couch, not offering comment. Staying unobtrusive, as bodyguards should.

Reno rubs his chin. “So what do you need? Transportation west? A place to hide?”

Again Cowboy has a strange feeling. As if Reno is somehow cruising on automatic pilot. That, for all his apparent helpfulness, it’s all reflex, that he’s not really interested.

“We want to sell something.” Cowboy reaches for his box of computer matrices and tears open the cover. Reno leans forward and peers into the container.

“We want to move a thousand of these,” Cowboy says. “All perfect, all Orbital quality, made for Yoyodyne by their Olivetti subsidiary. OCM Twenty-two Eighty-ones, to be precise.” There are matrices times fifteen K in the panzer, but he doesn’t want to take more of the Hetman’s property than necessary. He hasn’t forgotten whom Sarah is really working for.

“Heart crystals,” Reno murmurs. He makes a breathy sound with his lips. “So this is what that battle was over.”

Cowboy feels he has succeeded in attracting Reno’s attention.

They make the world go around, so central that the nickname “heart” isn’t out of place, for if the hearts stopped, the body would die. Computer cores made of liquid-crystal that can re-form itself in any configuration, creating the ultimate efficiency for any particular piece of cybernetic business that needs doing, shifting from storage of data to moving it to analyzing it and then altering to a form most efficient for acting on the analysis. Hearts that can make minds, from little bits of brightness in Cowboy’s skull that let him move his panzer, to larger models that create working analogs of the human brain, the vast artificial intelligences that keep things moving smoothly for the Orbitals and the governments of the planet.

All in miniature potential, here in the cardboard box.

“Forty hearts per box,” Cowboy says. “The other boxes are in a safe place. You get thirty percent for being our thirdman. ”

Reflected crystals gleam like rubies in Reno’s eyes. “Let me check the market,” he says.

He touches two places on the midnight-black table in front of him and a comp board glows in the interior, projecting its colors onto Reno’s face. From underneath he slides a black box wired to the comp in the table and a box of crystal memories. He slips a memory cube into the trapdoor of the box, then unspools a stud from the box and puts it into his temple. He presses some of the keys on the deck face and leans back in his chair.

The fish tanks bubble in the far-off humming distance. Reno’s expression softens, then hardens again. He is flying the face for a long time. Then his eyes flick to Cowboy, and his eyes show surprise.

“Tempel stock has gone up twelve points since noon.” Reno’s voice is dreamy, reluctant to unfuse with the interface. “They’re moving against Korolev, a major takeover attempt. Korolev’s vulnerable right now–– they’ve made a lot of bad moves.” Cowboy sees Sarah’s startled expression from the corner of his eye and knows she understands more of this than she’s been letting on, and that he’ll have some questions for her later. But Reno’s voice drones on from his chair.

“Tempel is strong in pharmaceuticals and mining, but their aerospace division is weak. Acquisition of Korolev would strengthen them. The market seems to be saying Tempel will win, but my guess is that it won’t be a sure thing. Korolev has a lot of resources to call on...and they’re so secretive there are bound to be some things Tempel doesn’t know about.”

Cowboy pictures the two Orbital giants grappled in their electronic conflict, using the paper value of the shares as leverage against each other, feeding on data more precious than gold, artificial intelligences and corporate minds scheming to manipulate the streams of numbers. Buying stock and futures through third parties they hoped no one knew they controlled. Both sides had resources that were almost unlimited, and victory would go to the most subtle, the one who manipulated the other through the most blinds, who had a better comprehension of the other’s weaknesses. Reno seems to fade away, his mind moving back into the interface, sucking data through the filter of the memory box. Cowboy sneaks a look at Sarah and sees her, like Reno, turning inward, absorbed for a moment in her own inner landscape. Assembling a picture more complete than Cowboy’s. He wishes she’d give him some of what she knows.

Reno unfaces. The glowing colors in the deep ebony table fade. He puts his crystal memory back in its file and takes a breath. “The borders are fading,” he says. The voice is still dreamy, his eyes trancelike, staring a thousand yards into some internal landscape. “After the war, demarcation was clear–– victors, vanquished, victims. Blocs agreed not to compete in certain areas, formed cartels to dominate other markets. Agreed-upon areas of exploitation. Sharing of data. Competition limited to nonvital areas.

“But the war created a lot of vacuums. Vacuums in power, in distribution, in information flow. The Orbitals got sucked into them, and there things weren’t so neat. The borders were...less well defined. There the winners and losers weren’t so easy to see. Now the blocs are tangled in those areas and the result is that the lines of demarcation are undergoing some adjustment. The system is beginning to undergo stress, to radiate fracture lines. Events taking place in the ill-defined areas are having consequences in the rest of the system. A little pressure put here and there, at a critical point...it could make a big difference.” His eyes shift abruptly to face Cowboy.

“That, of course, isn’t my concern,” he says. “I’m planning on keeping in the middle, on the node of the standing waves. I’ve got some information and I’ve got a good sense of how things move. I can ride things out.”

“Keeping in the middle gets you in the crossfire, Reno,” Cowboy says. “Just like Sarah and me.”

“You were never in the middle, Cowboy. None of the deltajockeys ever were. The thirdmen strive for the middle, but rarely reach it.” Reno’s eyes are chill as he raises his prosthetic arm. “I’m in the middle. I’m in the middle by my nature, half one thing, half another. I can stand on the node and see the waves rising and collapsing around me. The deltajocks collapsed, Cowboy. You swam off to ride another wave, but it’s going to collapse, too.”

Who is speaking? Cowboy wonders. Reno or that mass of crystal lodged in his skull? Reno is living in the eye-face every moment now, and Cowboy wonders if he’s lost himself in there, if too much of his personality has been sucked into the machine part of him, if control has shifted from his brain to the crystal.

Whiteout, it’s called. Rapture of the comp. It’s not supposed to happen to people like Cowboy and Reno, not to users who know the score, who fly the interface across the terrain of the real world, but it’s a hazard for the theoretical types, artificial intelligence people and physicists, those who are lost in abstracts most of the time. They can confuse the electron image with the reality it images, diffuse themselves through the information net, race at the speed of light along its patterns until their egos fade away, become so thin as to become intangible.

With a shiver Cowboy realizes that Reno is a ghost, a vacant-eyed collection of habits that have lost any purpose except to feed the crystal in his head with the data it needs. Whatever remains of the deltajock is pure reflex.

“These comp hearts are hot,” Cowboy says. “You might want to sit on them for a while.”

Reno shakes his head. “I’m not even going to sell them, not for a long time. I’ll put them in a vault and use them as collateral for a loan from a face bank. I’ll use the loan to enrich my portfolio, and by the time I’ve played with the money for a while, I’ll be able to pay back the loan and then move the comp hearts onto the market. By then this war will be history. ”

Cowboy leans back in his chair. Reno seems to be thoroughly out of his trance now, and his plan for making use of the crystal seems as safe as any.

“You can move the hearts right to my place till I can rent a vault,” Reno says. “I’ve got a double system of security here. The first one can be taken out if people know how. The second–– well, they won’t be looking for it. Anyone coming over my wall is going to get a firefight.”

“Cowboy,” Sarah says. He is startled by her voice, having got used to her as a silent half-lotus on the periphery of his vision. “We’re going to need to get a truck to move the hearts here.”

“Use mine,” Reno says. “It’s in the garage.” He fishes in his pocket, brings out a key, a tiny crystal on the end of a stainless-steel needle. “This’ll have the codes. I’ll open the garage door and gate from here.” He looks from Sarah to Cowboy. “Do you people need a meal?”

“No,” Sarah says, and again Cowboy is surprised by the determined edge in her voice. “We should be getting back to the panzer. I don’t like leaving the Hetman’s cargo alone.”

Reno points with his left hand. The fingertips are trembling. “Through there. Right, end of the hall. Kitchen’s on the left if you change your mind.” He reaches under the table, takes out a stud, puts it into one temple. His other hand reaches for the memory box. “I’ve got to talk to some people. See how much I can raise on this.”

“Be careful,” Sarah says. Reno pays no attention. His eyes are already abstracted. Cowboy rises from his chair.

Sarah uncoils herself like an angry cat, her dark eyes intent on Reno, her spine arched. She stalks away and Cowboy can see the ridged muscles on her arms. She comes back with her ruck and Cowboy’s gun, and Reno doesn’t react.

“Your friend’s crazy, Cowboy,” she says later as they take the truck south through the bright early evening. “His brain is so white I almost had to put on my shades to look at him. ”

Cowboy is driving the truck through the interface, feeling the hydrogen fuel cook in its turbine, the tires moving over the softening asphalt. “I know,” he says. “He had a bad wreck.”

“Now he thinks he’s sitting on a node at the center of the cosmic dataflow,” she says. “What happens if the celestial matrix tells him to turn us in?”

“He’s an old friend,” Cowboy says, unsettled. “We don’t operate that way.”

“What if he does?” Sarah demands. “Tempel would happily give him two thousand crystals instead of the single K we’re giving him. And it wouldn’t be a seventy-thirty split, either.”

Cowboy feels his anger rising. “If he’s a traitor, we’re hardly any worse off, are we? I don’t notice your friends offering to help.”

Sarah’s quiet fury is her only answer. Cowboy feels it as a silent, almost tangible radiation for the rest of the ride.

 

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCES RIOT IN LENINGRAD DATANET

KOROLEV I.G. OFFERS NO COMMENT ON SAFEGUARD QUESTION

 

In the four A.M. darkness Cowboy brings the panzer out of the quarry and he and Sarah load a thousand crystal hearts into Reno’s light truck. Mosquitoes whine along their spiral tracks, aiming for wrists, necks, the hollow behind the ear. Sarah has made it clear she’s going to scout Reno’s neighborhood before she’ll let the truck drive in.

The scouting turns out not to be necessary.

Fear moves like ammonia ice in Cowboy’s veins as, from half a mile away, he sees the smoke rising like a slow gray phantom over Reno’s house, the cloud’s underside glowing the color of blood. Police wagons slice past, their sirens whooping up and down the register. Sarah rolls down the window, and a distant rattle of fire echoes hollow from the slate hills.

“That second defense system,” Cowboy says. Something flares orange on the underside of the cloud and a second later Cowboy hears a muffled thump, and he can feel his teeth drawing back as anger pours through him like alcohol fire. He hauls the truck around and shoots hydrogen to the turbine, feeling himself pressed back in the seat. He skids around a curve and the cargo thumps in the back. If he can get to the panzer in time, he might be able to get Reno out, the Pony Express to the rescue…

“Cowboy,” Sarah says. “Slow down. We don’t want them checking our registration.”

“I’m going to pull Reno out with the panzer.”

Sarah moves toward him, her eyes glittering like diamonds. “Reno’s blown, Cowboy. All he can do now is get us killed. They’ll be ready for a panzer. They know what yours does by now. That turret gun won’t surprise them.”

“There’s a chance.”

She grips his arm and he can feel the pain skate along his nerves. “He’s alone, Cowboy,” she says. “And so are we.”

Cowboy can hear regret in Sarah’s voice, and it surprises him.

“We’re alone,” she repeats. “Just like we’ve been since we left the Free Zone. The only difference is that now we know it for sure.”

There is a flash from behind them and the smoke turns opalescent, shot through with white fire. Cowboy feels the heat of it on his neck. There can’t be anything left after that, he knows. The turbine, seemingly of its own accord, lowers the pitch of its quiet howl.

Dawn is just climbing over the Appalachians. The asphalt is already beginning to melt.

 

Chapter Eight

 

TAMPA’S TOTALS OVERNIGHT, 28 FOUND DEAD IN CITY LIMITS…

LUCKY WINNERS PAY OFF AT 15 TO 1

POLICE BLAME RECORD HEAT WAVE

 

The cooling panzer engines crackle, sounding like someone knocking on the armor. Images of heat dance in slow motion on Sarah’s retinas.

“Tell me about Korolev,” Cowboy says. Sarah looks at him in surprise.

“You knew something about Korolev that Reno didn’t know,” Cowboy insists. His expression is intent, angry. “If I know it, I have a better chance of staying alive. I need you to tell me. I have a right.”

They have come another hundred miles west through the slate hills and have found a dry brush-covered gully to hide in, this one across the Line in Ohio, sitting in old National Forest land amid timber too old and rotten to harvest. It’s the end of the line for the panzer, the fuel tanks laden with little more than alcohol dew.

Sarah sits down on the passenger bunk. A seven-millimeter casing rolls across the metal floor as she straightens her foot, and she thinks of the sounds of fire echoing from the Pennsylvania ridges, that last white-heat flash that ended it. The screamsheets report that an armed party of unknown origin tried to break into Reno’s place, got caught by his defense systems. Then the cops arrived and got fire from both the intruders and the automatics, and took out everything before it was clear what was going on. No survivors.

“Korolev Fellowship of Interests,” Cowboy reminds her. Sarah can feel the words weighing on her shoulders like steel.

“All right,” she says. Images flicker in her mind, Firebud’s scornful violet eyes, the company patches on the zonedancers at the Aujourd’Oui, that last amber statement, RUNNING, burning forever in the corner of Danica’s display as Sarah listened to the slow-dripping moments.

“All right,” she says again. She feels the intensity of Cowboy’s gaze and surrenders to it. History, she thinks. It doesn’t matter anyway. “It was a penetration operation,” she tells him, “targeted against the Korolev computer in Tampa. The outside security on the comp was too strong to break, so I was supposed to use this Korolev courier to get me into their compound and put a program into their system from there, once we got past the safeguards. I figured it was a data raid, but it looks as if it was sabotage. The program was aimed at smashing up Korolev’s strategies, trying to weaken them for the takeover.”

“What did the courier get out of it?”

Sarah feels Weasel throb, a heavy presence in her throat. She looks at Cowboy, daring him to react.

“He thought he was going to get laid. What he got was dead.”

Cowboy holds her gaze. “Okay,” he says.

“He deserved it.”

“I never said he didn’t.”

In the end it is Sarah who drops her gaze. She plucks at the old wool blanket on the bed and smells the dense unmoving air, the sweat and chemical toilet and hot metal. Even the open dorsal hatch doesn’t stir the air here.

“How’d you meet this Cunningham?” Cowboy asks.

“The Hetman gave him my name. I think they did business from time to time.”

“Now they’re trying to kill each other.”

She shrugs. “It’s business. Nothing personal. Cunningham isn’t the type to mix the two, and even if he were, his company wouldn’t let him.”

Cowboy picks up his helmet from the back of his seat, holds it loosely in his hands. “Is it connected, do you think? Tempel’s moving on the thirdmen and on Korolev at the same time?”

“I don’t know. Could they be weakening Korolev by attacking you?”

“I can’t see how. Nobody in this country uses Korolev engines or parts. My engines are Rolls-Royce turbines made under license by Pratt and Whitney.”

Sarah leans back against the bulkhead and closes her eyes. She can still hear the roaring of the turbines, the vibration of the metal. Behind her eyelids Sarah can still see the amber message, RUNNING. She shakes her head.

“I don’t see how it can be connected,” she says.

“I’ve got to get out West, Sarah. I’ve got resources there.”

She cocks an eyebrow at him. “Buried treasure?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact. And friends.”

Sarah says nothing, just closes her eyes.

“Are you coming?” Cowboy asks. He sounds impatient. “Or are you going to try to get back to the Occupied Zone?”

“My brother’s in Florida. I’m supposed to be taking care of him.”

Cowboy stirs on his foam couch. “How old did you say he was?”

“I didn’t say. But he’s twenty.”

“Then he can take care of himself.”

Sarah opens her eyes and sneers. “You seem to need me to take care of you, Cowboy.”

In one singing movement that is too fast for her eyes to follow, Cowboy slams his helmet down on his armrest. “I’m a target, damn it! They’re looking for me! If I’m with you, it changes my profile. I’m safer.”

Sarah laughs and shakes her head. “All that means is that I’m standing next to a target. Forget it, Cowboy. I can draw fire on my own.”

He looks at her with his jaw muscle working. And to her surprise there’s a hopeless look in his eyes, a vacancy filled only with desperation. “I’ll pay you,” he says. “Your standard rates for a bodyguard job. Payable when we get to Montana. ”

“Standard rates and a ticket to Florida,” she says automatically, while her mind clicks into gear and she wonders whether she really wants this job. She thinks of Daud lying under the Christmas green LEDs of his automated bed, his eye dull with endorphins, waiting for Jackstraw who would not come, having no one to turn to but the sister he fears. Wanting his old magic to return, the place in the street that was his own, knowing it was gone now because the rules have changed for him as well as for Sarah, that he will have to find a new pattern, a new source for what he needs... She doesn’t want him to be alone, having nothing to look into but the nullity of the endorphin haze.

But a job at this point would bring in some money, maybe make a down payment on Daud’s replacement eye. Getting to Montana probably won’t take appreciably longer than moving to Florida, and once she’s paid, she can get past the border checks into the Occupied U.S. with fewer problems than if she were penniless. The Free Zone cops don’t like to let in paupers.

With the fighting in Florida there will be work, but it might be too dangerous to go there right now: the Hetman might give her to Cunningham as part of a peace treaty. Business, of course, nothing personal. So–– best to take Cowboy up on his offer.

And the look in his eyes has something to do with it, too, touching a part of her she doesn’t want to think about. A part, she thinks, that doesn’t want the next stage of the journey to be a lonely one.

Sarah haggles for a while about her “standard rate,” not wanting Cowboy to think he was getting her easy. Cowboy ends up paying a little more than he would have otherwise, not as much as she suspects she could have got. In the end she stands up and shrugs. “Okay. You’ve got yourself a bodyguard. Now what have you got to eat?”

“Lurp rations are all that’s left. Freeze-dried. Enough for three, four days.”

Sarah grimaces. “Freeze-dried soy. My favorite.”

“Unless you want to hold up a bank and buy the real.”

“It’s an option.” She grins. She presses her hands to the metal of the low ceiling and pushes upward, feeling her muscles flex and strain, suddenly impatient to be on her way. Good to get outside of this Chobham box again, breathe some air. Good to have a direction to walk in, even if the goal was someone else’s.

“It was a bank that killed Reno,” Cowboy says. “He was trying to raise money on those hearts, and whoever he was dealing with must have tipped off Tempel.”

If you knew where to look in the interface, you could find banks disguised as something else, trading companies or some kind of broker, that offered unusually high rates of interest and didn’t inquire too deeply into the source of the cash, that either didn’t report their transactions as required by law or cheerfully accepted a false name for their customers if they did. Uninsured, of course– sometimes the banks vanished overnight along with their depositors’ funds. This was accepted as one of the risks of that kind of speculation, but it didn’t happen often. And sometimes the bank was just reforming under another cover, and the depositors would be contacted later.

“If the Orbitals are into the thirdman network, then they can be running a dozen eye-face banks and no one will know it,” Cowboy says. “Maybe that’s the connection. Maybe the thirdmen are using Korolev’s banks and Tempel wants to take everything out.”

Cowboy’s speculation seems particularly pointless right now. Sarah begins field-stripping the Heckler & Koch. She plans on taking it in her rucksack. Montana might turn out to be full of somebody’s army, and if it is, she wants all her parts in working order.

 

NOON RAID ON ARKANSAS BORDER HIDEOUT

Panzergirl Dies After Refusing Surrender

Fortune in Electronics Confiscated

M.B.I. Denies Use of Napalm

 

Shining across a sky the color of wet slate are the constellations of control, the Orbital factories, satellites, and power stations. A few early stars offer feeble competition. Sarah is deep in her own interface, her body oiled with sweat. Kicks thrust out, sword hands and fists flicker like heat lightning in the moist summer air. She conjures faces in front of her, aids to concentration as she wills her strikes into the imagined heart of the phantoms. She spins, cocks a leg, looks over her shoulder, spears an enemy. Beaten-down timothy provides sure traction for her bare feet. She’s keeping Weasel hidden for the moment–– no sense in giving away a surprise. Cowboy watches from the shadow of an elm, its leaves brown with the blight. He’s tired from having walked most of the day, with a short ride or two to break the monotony. They’re still in Ohio, keeping to the back roads, where the heat can’t find them. They were hoping to find an old farmhouse to camp in but it appears that Ohio’s been tearing them down so as to discourage transients.

“You’re really into that, aren’t you?” Cowboy offers. Sarah doesn’t answer, merely strikes with elbows and hands against enemies to either side. Fighting an army of ghosts that rise before her, faces without names, as devoid of identity as Cunningham, their voices a rattle of dead tree limbs in the sluggish wind. Power flows through her muscles like quicksilver, and she flings herself into a sunburst of motion, spinning, kicking, leaping, her arms a blur.

And then stillness, poised in her stance, a hologram frozen in motion, while the army of ghosts fades. Sweat trickles the length of her brows. The heavy air seems thick as honey in her throat. On the decaying surface of the road, fifty yards away through some bushes, a truck bounces across some potholes. Sarah waits for the sound to fade entirely from the deepening night. She turns and faces Cowboy, gives him a smile. “Now I’ll eat,” she says.

“Aren’t you supposed to bow or something?” He pulls a foil packet out of his ruck and tosses it to her. Her nerves are still in overdrive and she plucks the packet from the air as if it was in slow motion. She sits in front of Cowboy in a half-lotus and tears the packet open.

Cowboy is looking at her with his dark artificial eyes. He’s taken off the cap and wig, and they lie on the grass beside him. “Do you have crystal for that?” he asks. “Or did you come up the hard way?”

She grins wolfishly and tears at a strand of meat analog. “A little of each,” she says.