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…
And then he’s bottoming out over the Sierras, the mountains’ green fingers reaching up to tag him but falling short, and Cowboy is hauling back and feeding alcohol to the burners again. His crystal has built the necessary routines to keep Pony Express on the wire. There’s not much room in his head for anything else, and he looks up into the blue sky, his vision returning to seethe shuttle a vast shadow in the sky, beset by black shapes that swoop and dart like swallows. The speed of the fight has slowed down and its cubic volume decreased; Cowboy can see it all from his point of low vantage. There are only three frigates now, and one of them seems to be damaged and keeping its distance. One of the deltas is staggering away, trailing fire, the other doggedly staying in the fight, dodging Orbital missiles. There are only seconds left before the shuttle crosses the Sierras and drops to a landing at Edwards.
Pony Express arcs upward. A tone sounds in Cowboy’s crystal; he fires a heat-seeker automatically, but his artificial eyes are fixed on the Argosy. More tones sound, and the delta jars with each missile it launches. A frigate trails flame and tumbles to an encounter with a mountain, but Cowboy’s mind is full of control surfaces, blazing crystal, knowledge of engine and surface heat, eager weapons systems, the compelling flood from the electron world pouring into his mind at the speed of light... He’s a creature of the interface now, his brain a processor. His black wings shudder in torment. The spars that are his ribs moan. Heat flashes through his black epoxy skin. His heart threatens to explode as it feeds alcohol to the engines. The target fills his narrowed vision. He rolls and sprays the shuttle’s belly with minigun rounds, but he’s out of ammunition in a few seconds and all his missiles are gone. The shuttle is battered, but it’s a tough ship, still on target for landing. The mountains drop away and Cowboy sees nothing but desert rolling on to the brown horizon.
Neurotransmitters fall on crystal, electrons pour from Cowboy’s sockets at the speed of light. Control surfaces bite the air, howl in anger. The interface demands a certain solution, and the decision is taken without conscious volition. But somewhere in Cowboy’s mind there is a realization that this is the necessary and correct conclusion to his legend, to use himself and his matte-black body as the last missile against the Orbital shuttle and win for himself a slice of immortality, a place in the mind of every panzerboy, every jock…
Cowboy accepts the decision of his crystal. A bark of triumphant laughter bursts from his lips as the shuttle grows larger and larger in his vision.
A black fragment intervenes, spiraling between Cowboy and his target. Cowboy recognizes Maurice’s distinctive delta, sees the damage on wing and fuselage, Maurice’s sky-blue helmet in the cockpit, its opaque face mask fixed on the juncture of his delta’s course and the shuttle...Argosy explodes as Maurice drives his delta into the juncture of wing and fuselage.
Cowboy’s crystal is coping with the impact of alloy shuttle parts vaporizing themselves on the delta’s battered skin before Cowboy realizes that his own death is no more, that it’s been usurped by Maurice, and by the time that’s brought home to him, the shuttle and Maurice are well in his wake, rubble spilling to an impact with the Mojave, stirred by the wind of his passing but no longer a thing that can interact with his own destiny. Anger rises in his mind at the thought of his fate being stolen.
“Target destroyed. This is Cowboy. It’s done.” He’s crossed miles of desert during the course of his short transmission. He doesn’t pay any attention to the acknowledgment. There are still two frigates behind him, both crying for vengeance. He’s out of weapons and has only a few thermite decoys left. He hauls in a tight turn to the south, dodging out over the desert, the delta invading his mind again as the unstable craft vibrates, his correction of the control surfaces lagging behind as he begins his high-stress maneuver. But there’s a frigate right behind, its laser blowing away more sensors, heating the delta’s polymerized skin, seeking a weak place in the armor... Cowboy dodges one missile, then another, tries to sideslip the frigate while triggering a thermite decoy. His crystal is humming a warning that there are only a few minutes of fuel left.
The frigate tries to follow the nimble delta but can’t, overshooting; but a missile pulls harder g’s, and Cowboy, with his burned rear sensors, hasn’t seen it. It runs up one of his twin Rolls-Royce engines, and suddenly Pony Express is unstable again, venting droplets of molten alloy as it slews across the sky. Cowboy’s mind adjusts control surfaces, fuel flows, balances. Fury explodes in him. He looks for the target and finds it, hauling Pony Express in a tight S-turn to head straight for the frigate and knock it bodily out of the sky... But with one engine gone the delta has lost its acceleration, and Cowboy can’t catch the Orbital frigate. Another laser lances into Pony Express from behind, the crippled frigate coming up for the kill.
Cowboy turns to look over his shoulder, shrieks in rage at the infrared vision of more missiles boring in. He drops thermite and dances out of the way, but it feels as if his control is eroding. The maneuvers are making the delta more difficult to handle, and the rough ride is glitching up more systems. There are red and orange lights all over his remaining engine display. An Orbital laser punches out a panel, melts a spar. Pony Express lurches, recovers. More missiles are on the way. Cowboy tries to haul the delta around for the ramming maneuver again, but the controls won’t answer any radical course changes.
He can feel Pony Express moaning with the strain. He knows the delta might be tough enough to survive the missile that will take out the remaining engine, that he might be able to land it on the desert if he doesn’t lose any more control surfaces. Data swarms into his brain, the craft telling him that it’s capable of surviving. The missile comes nearer. There are no more decoys to drop. A steel guitar plays sadly in his mind. Cowboy gazes up into the sky and sees only emptiness.
Rockets flame as he rides up and out of the delta. A wall of wind smashes his face mask. Sky and earth tumble. He screams with the pain that suddenly surges up from his body, no longer masked by the anesthetic and by the demanding swarm of data from his sockets. Suspended in the air, his brain swimming, he never sees the final impact as Pony Express slams into the desert. His body has not fully awakened when he lands. Fortunately the desert is still; his chute collapses and drapes itself over a Joshua tree. The hot desert air scalds his throat with every breath. Pain shrieks at him in ever-insistent tones. He knows some ribs have gone, probably when he was wrestling Pony Express after the laser burned his comps, and his left forearm apparently failed to clear the cockpit when he punched out, and it’s now hanging ragged and bloody. Amusement rises and he laughs, and then the laugh turns to a cough and he feels something break inside. He tastes blood in his mouth. He turns his head to spit, and something runs down his face.
Cowboy punches the quick release and frees himself from his chute, then pulls off his helmet and takes the dead studs out of his skull. He rolls carefully onto his side and tries to get to his feet. He fails, spits blood, tries again, succeeds. His left leg scraped the canopy punching out and it feels like it’s lost a lot of skin, but it doesn’t seem broken. He takes a pair of steps and laughs again, then bends over as coughs rack him, as blood fills his mouth. He hawks it out and then straightens his shoulders defiantly.
He’s landed on a rocky ridge overlooking a two-rut desert track. A column of smoke rises a mile away, where Pony Express fell after it tore itself to pieces battling the air. Another, vaster black pillar stands far to the north where the wreckage of Argosy lies tangled with a delta.
A pair of sonic booms throb through the air, and Cowboy can see the infrared signal of the two frigates circling back toward Edwards. Cowboy gives them the finger and grins. “You lost, you bastards.” He cackles and begins to hobble down the slope.
There’s a growling, whining noise coming from down the track, and Cowboy props himself against a scalding rock and waits. It’s a chrome turbine tricycle coming to investigate the wreck. Cowboy reaches for the pistol in his holster and fires a pair of shots into the air. The driver’s head turns and acknowledges his wave with a nod. The trike pulls off the road and the driver begins walking up the slope.
It’s a dark-skinned woman with a shaved head, some kind of bodybuilder, with her muscles increased and shaped by hormones, her breasts as irrelevant on her massive expanse of chest as a pair of peas. She’s wearing an alloy reflective mesh bikini top and baggy reflec trunks, with soft moccasins laced up above her ankles. Cowboy sees freckles on her shoulders, deep beneath the dark skin, and a necklace of bleached rattlesnake skulls. She looks at him with sea-green eyes.
“You look in bad shape, linefoot.”
Cowboy reaches into his pocket and pulls out a half ounce of gold. “You can earn a second one of these if you get me to Boulder City,” he says. “I don’t want to go through any Free Zone customs checks, either.”
She nods. “Fair enough. But I don’t think you’re gonna make it that far, not on desert roads.”
“That’s not your worry.”
“You got a med kit someplace?”
Cowboy nods upslope. “Yeah. With my chute.”
Wordlessly she moves upslope to the chute, drags it off the Joshua tree, and weighs it down with rocks. She picks up the med kit and brings it down.
Cowboy is sitting down when she gets back, the gun hanging limp in his hand. She takes it from him and puts it back in his holster. He almost faints with the pain as she pulls off the top of his g-suit. She cleans up some of the blood, disinfects the cut, tapes up his ribs, ties up his broken arm in a sling. Then she fires some endorphin into his right biceps and the drug whispers gracefully between his pain receptors and his efficient hardwired nerves. He fades so fast that she has to help him down the slope to get him on her cycle. As he mounts behind her he notices three freshly killed rattlesnakes draped over the handlebars.
He can hear sirens from the north, and there’s a billow of dust on the track, moving closer. She wrestles the trike off the road and cuts across country, moving slowly so as not to raise a dust cloud. The jouncing is easier on his ribs than he thought it would be.
Occupied California extends east to Beacon Station. The trike weaves down desert trails, up mountain ridges, drives fast across a dry lakebed. Cowboy leans his head back against the rest and drowses. The endorphin murmurs in his mind. The trike gets onto the expressway east of Silver Lake and the ride gets easier, the turbine screaming. Cowboy watches the working of the driver’s powerful shoulder muscles as she dodges potholes. Dead snakes flap in the wind. Amusement rises in him again.
“Hey, lady. You’re driving right into a legend, you know that?”
She gives him an incurious look over her shoulder. “I figure that legend’s your own business, man.”
“I wish I could see the screamsheets.”
“I wish I could see the other half of that gold. I don’t suppose that’s gonna happen right now, either.”
He laughs, coughs, laughs again. “You remind me of somebody. ”
“Is that supposed to make me feel good?”
He laughs some more. Licks his dry lips. “You got any water?”
She hands him a plastic squeeze bottle. He fills his mouth, spits it overside, fills his mouth again and swallows. He hands her the squeeze bottle and she clips it to the trike frame. Cowboy leans back and closes his eyes again, feeling the cycle swerving under him like a carnival ride. The setting sun licks the back of his neck.
With his eyes closed he can still feel the punch of the afterburners, the song of the missiles in his crystal, the feeling of Pony Express living in his nerves, his veins. Gone now, a wreck on the desert floor. The last of the working deltas, the last not cannibalized to make the graceless panzers that Cowboy dislikes. He’s got more reason than ever to hate them now that, for a short while, he’s been a flier again.
The endorphin patterns bright images behind his closed lids, the images of green displays glowing deep in his mind, the sight of silver missile fins rotating against the sky, Argosy growing larger and larger as he loops up to intercept...the sight of extinction filling the canopy, the nearing obliteration demanded by crystal and interface...the dark wedge blotting out the steel sky, the interception proof of his devotion to life at the speed of light...the final impact that secures his place in the sky, his last triumphant grin drawn taut like the smile of a skull…
Cowboy opens his eyes and draws a breath, the shriek poised in his throat. It doesn’t come. Fear dopplers along his triggered nerves. The cycle girl is weaving across night asphalt, dodging between potholes picked out by her headlight. “Fuck,” Cowboy says. He tells his nerves to shut down again.
“You say something, linefoot?”
He gazes at the necklace of skulls, the ridged hollow rattler eyes staring at him. The eyes of Mistress Death, whose cool and tenebrous lips brushed against his in the sky. A tremor shakes him. “Nothing much,” he says.
“That’s what I thought.”
“Can I have some more water?”
He drinks half the squeeze bottle this time before handing it back. His good hand is trembling so much he almost drops it. Pain is lurking deep in his chest, the endorphins wearing off.
“Are your people going to miss you?” he asks.
A massive shrug. “My sisters’ll miss me when they miss me.”
“They all got muscles like you?”
“That’s why we live together, man.”
She turns her head to look at him. Starlight glitters in her eyes. “You got anyplace in Boulder City you want to go?”
“A public phone’ll do. Then maybe a hotel.”
“Whatever you say, linefoot.”
The lights of Boulder City splay out into the night. The cycle idles while Cowboy fights stiffness and pain, and manages to stand upright. “Right thigh pocket,” he says, after a moment of struggle. “A credit needle.”
“Okay.” She unzips the pocket and plugs the needle into the phone for him. He puts a stud in his forehead and thinks Reno’s number. “This is Cowboy. I’m in Boulder City.”
“So are the Dodger and his people. Where have you been?”
“I’m hurt. Tell them to get a medic.”
“Right away. I’m tracing your line now so I can tell them where you are.”
Cowboy sags against the telephone. Pain pulses in his chest. “Hey, Reno,” he says. “Did anything come back?”
“Diego force-landed on the desert. The Orbitals got him and his delta.”
Sorrow trickles into Cowboy. “Fuck. Nothing left then. I lost the Express.”
“Build another. We won.”
The news interests him only slightly. “Yeah?”
“Tempel crashed. We didn’t need the net; all we had to do was wait for it to go below five hundred and then start buying. Roon came out and announced to the screamsheets that he was mounting a slate for the board, and he got so many proxies in the first five minutes that Couceiro resigned before there could even be an election. Roon’s going to shuttle up as soon as he ties up a few loose ends. He’s already announced a policy of retrenchment.”
“Good for him.” Talking seems to hurt more and more. “You got my location yet?”
“The Flash Force is on the way. You can hang up if you want.”
He reaches for the credit needle and yanks it out. He sticks it in his breast pocket, pulls out a pair of half-ounce coins. “You get extra because you have such a winning personality.”
The cycle girl takes the coins with a grin. She puts them in a belt pouch and swings back aboard her saddle. “You want me to stick around?” she asks.
“I’ll be okay.” He looks at her dully. “Hey, you got any need for extra money? I need someone to run messages from time to time.”
She nods. “Blackwater Well Bio Station. I’m a desert ecologist.”
“No kidding.”
Her turbine winds up, then she gives him a last grin and accelerates away. He watches her taillights recede to the vanishing point and closes his eyes. He hears rather than sees the long car pull up beside him.
“Cowboy? Just put your arm around me.”
Sarah’s voice. He opens his eyes and sees her tall form, feels her hands touching his clothing. He gives her a shadowy grin. “It’s been a long day, huh?”
“Easy now. Just slide into the car.”
“Maurice killed himself. I was planning on dying, but Maurice did it for me. Right in the arms of Mistress Death.”
“Take it easy. The other foot now.”
“I was always chasing her. Didn’t know it till now.”
“Rest your head here, on my shoulder.”
He feels warmth against his cheek, mumbles, “It’s a fuck of a thing, being a legend in your own time.”
The car speeds away on silent wheels.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“Are you sure you can handle this?”
“I have most of the data on Tempel we collected. And memories. Mine and his. I think I can do some good.”
“Yeah,” Cowboy says. “I always thought I could use friends in high places.”
It’s an old place, a one-room cabin with a cheap tile floor, sad wooden furniture held together by wire, a sagging double bed with a tufted bedspread.
Cowboy is lying in the bed, humming “Face Riders in the Sky” to himself while he watches a video report on the Tempel crisis. The situation is at an end, the reporter says. Stock values are rising cautiously. The Orbital Soviet has announced its confidence in Roon’s administration. The new directorate has sent Couceiro to Africa, to finally touch the planet he had seen only as a blue and white sphere contaminating his view of the monochrome airless universe. Have fun foreclosing on Ghana, Cowboy thinks. He reaches for his whiskey and sips it, then props the glass on his arm cast.
He turns as his door opens and sees Sarah coming in, feeling a wave of desert heat on his face as he looks past her, through the door, into a brown stony reach stretching all the way to California, vanishing into a trackless blue sky.
Sarah closes the door behind her. She’s dressed in a long billed cap, jeans, reflec long-sleeved shirt. “You’re awake,” she says.
“Yep.” He reaches for the whiskey bottle. “Join me?”
“Too early.” She pulls off the cap and tosses it on the battleship-gray kitchen table. Shakes her hair free. “The Dodger wants to see you later. Business. And his wife is flying up later this afternoon.”
She sits beside him on the mattress. He turns off the vid control and moves over to make room for her. He winces at the pain in his scraped leg. Sarah puts her arm around his shoulders. He leans back against her warmth.
“They have horses here,” she says. “I’ve never learned to ride.”
“I can teach you.” He looks at her profile, the turned-up nose and parabolic perfection of the lips, the dark skin outlined in a soft haze of light from a window behind her. She turns to him. “The broken arm won’t...?”
“Not much. No.”
They’re on a weathered old Nevada dude ranch that the Flash Force has designated as a backup base. Western thirdmen and panzerboys will be drifting in through the next week with the intention of arranging a peace. Cunningham’s dead and Tempel has withdrawn its backing, and suddenly Tempel’s thirdmen are floundering in the dark, surrounded by enemies with sharpened knives.
The thirdmen will be talking with the Dodger. The panzerboys are planning to talk with Cowboy. His plan of a panzerboy association seems to be taking shape. Maybe it can hold the peace together, if thirdmen who cause their neighbors grief suddenly find they can’t get transport to the East for their action.
*
The voice doesn’t sound right. It has a kind of tremor, an echo maybe–– as if two voices were speaking, not entirely in synch.
“Reno?” Cowboy says. “You okay?”
“I’m into the big crystal here, Cowboy. My God, the plans these people have! They’ve got the next thousand years in their pocket...but there’s a funny quality to it. They know the shape they want the future to take, but they don’t know what they want themselves to be. They’re up here, and they’re lost. Once their obedience to Earth gave them meaning, and then their struggle against it, but now they don’t know what to do. They’re too distracted by their structures. They got their independence, but they don’t know what it means, and they’re looking for the things that will give it meaning. Some are after dominance–– of the planet, each other... Do you know they’re stockpiling nerve gas up here? In case other blocs attack? They’re that crazy. Some are lost in dreams of bigger and better hardware–– as if the machines they create will give them the definition they lack. The others are content to be parts of the structure, to take their form from their own corporate ecological niche. Content to be programmed by the others.
“They’re vampires, Cowboy. They’re sucking up Earth’s blood, because that’s what keeps them alive, but they don’t know what living is for.”
“My capacity for pitying those people is a bit limited,” Cowboy says.
“Pity,” says the voice, “is not what they need.”
Sarah looks at Cowboy carefully. He’s sunburned and battered, but after a night’s sleep the tension that’s been a part of him for the last few days has eased; the fevered intensity dissipated. He shifts against her and winces. “Need some painkiller?” she asks.
Cowboy raises his glass of whiskey. “This is all the painkiller I need right now.”
“Maybe I’ll join you after all.” Sarah reaches for the bottle and drinks. “I just talked to Michael. He offered me a sort of a job.”
“What sort of job?”
“Adviser, I guess you’d say. Counselor–– that’s the old term. He says he trusts my connections. And my instincts.”
“Glad he’s noticed.” Cowboy rubs his bristles. “You going to take it?”
“Probably.” A taut wire of amusement vibrates through her. “It’ll get me off the streets.” She grins and raises the bottle again. Drinks.
She’ll check into a hospital, she thinks, get herself some more crystal. The full Santistevan hardwiring, independent of hardfire. Firearms. Small-unit tactics. And not just streetgirl stuff, either; she wants chips for accounting, shipping, stock market manipulation. The stuff she’ll need in her new position as the Hetman’s counselor.
“You’ll travel,” he says.
She cocks an eye at him. “Yes. So will you. We can see each other.” Because, she thinks, what they have is a wartime thing, a fusion made under pressure... With the pressure gone, things may fall apart. Because there are things she knows and can’t tell him, because she’s lived a life that, whatever he thinks, he doesn’t really want to know about. Because he has his own ideas of the world and his place in it, and she can’t understand them. They will have to ease carefully into the peace, into each other, and know it might not work in the absence of the things that brought them together. There ought to be room for that, the coming apart. Or the other. Especially the other.
She takes another drink. “You promised to show me the autumn aspens. And all I’ve seen is this fucking desert. You owe me.”
“Daud,” he says. She feels coldness touching her at the name, at the inflection he gives it. Knowing, the both of them, that Daud is responsible for yesterday’s catastrophe, that there are broken hulks on the stony Nevada plain, shards of aircraft lying under the protective waves of the Pacific, men wrapped in canvas and covered by thin desert soil, all with Daud’s smoking signature. Cowboy won’t forget that, and his code does not treat treason lightly.
“I’m buying him a ticket.” Lightly, hiding the dread in her. “Getting him away.”
“What if he doesn’t go?”
Reassurances freeze in her throat. Because it is Daud’s nature to betray, and she has felt the sting of his betrayals all her life, hardened herself to them, told herself it was only because he was weak, that he needed to betray in order to know he was trusted, and she had always forgiven him... But the forgiveness had infected her somehow, as if forgiving Daud made it easier to forgive her own treacheries. She doesn’t want Daud around, not a living reminder of her own capacity to betray the things she cares for.
She can’t stop loving him. She knows that. What she can stop is trying to be him.
“He’ll go,” she says. “I won’t give him a choice.”
Cowboy’s eyes are hard as flint. “I won’t, either.”
Encourage Daud in one last betrayal, then. Of Nick. If Nick exists, if he hasn’t already betrayed Daud by using him for Tempel’s purposes. A final betrayal. To save his own life.
The phone purrs quietly in its cradle. Sarah answers it.
“This is Reno, Sarah.” He’s still acting as switchboard operator, coordinating the fragments of the net that are still in operation, keeping communications open with the various panzerboys and thirdmen who will be visiting the ranch in the next few days.
“I have a call from Roon,” Reno says. “He wants to talk to the two of you.”
“Tell him to fuck himself.”
“He says it’s business.”
She looks at Cowboy. “It’s Reno. Roon wants to talk to us.”
To her surprise there is a grim light in Cowboy’s eyes, as if he were expecting this.
*
The voice is smoother now, more in control of itself. The echo effect has vanished.
“The Orbital Soviet is unhappy, Cowboy. Couceiro was someone they liked, someone they could understand. They didn’t like him being brought down by a bunch of mudboys.”
Cowboy grins and reaches for his bottle of whiskey. “What are they going to do about it?”
“They can’t change the rules on stock trading. The system’s too big, and they’re making too much money from the situation as it is, by their own manipulations. And they know they’ll just drive the stock market underground if they try to restrict it– communication’s just too uncontrolled, any face bank could run a market just by telephone.”
“No, Cowboy.” The voice is calm. “What they’re going to do is put you out of business.”
Ice touches Cowboy’s flesh. “Oh?” he says. “How do they plan to do that?”
“They’ve decided that the existence of black markets, along with the way the Orbitals are competing to supply them, is a danger... It’s creating too many uncontrollable elements. So they’re going to legitimize the markets. Later this session they’re going to have one of their tame legislators introduce a bill in the Missouri legislature to repeal their tariff restrictions. That’ll create a Missouri-Kentucky corridor across most of the Midwest. Once Missouri goes, the other states will fall like dominoes. The panzerboys just won’t be needed anymore.”
“What can you do to stop it?”
“Nothing. It’s the Orbital Soviet’s decision.”
Despair trickles into Cowboy’s veins. That’s the end, then, all that he and the Dodger fought for. Abolished with a swipe of the Orbital pen.
“You’ve got warning now,” the voice says. “You can make your preparations.”
“I don’t see myself as a long-distance trucker. I’ve been an outlaw too long.”
“You’re rich. You’ll think of something. Look, the U.S. won’t be balkanized anymore. You can take credit for that. Things are going to be a lot easier in the Northeast.”
We weren’t running the Line, Cowboy thinks, for the Northeast. Or for the money. That was what Arkady and the thirdmen never understood, always thinking we could be bought, that we would respond to economic pressure. And that’s what the Orbitals don’t understand, what their crystal world models can’t figure. That we’d have run the Alley for nothing. Because it was a way to be free.
“Cowboy?” The voice wavers for a moment. “You did good, you know. We all did.”
“I know.” How long did he expect it to last? Cowboy wonders. Perhaps not even this long. He had always thought it would end in some Midwest cornfield, the government choppers coming in waves, pouring rockets down, breaking through the Chobham, the panzer coming apart piece by piece. Or in some moonless supersonic sky where the laws waited to pounce, their radars reaching out to touch him with radiant fingertips... He hadn’t expected this, to be informed of his obsolescence in a recovery bed on some sweaty Nevada dude ranch. That all he had done, the legend he had built, was only to put him out of business.
He laughs. A retired panzerboy, he thinks. An absurdity.
Amusement trickles through him. There is a lightness in his limbs, as if gravity has eased. He thinks of the world curving away below him, dark behind him flecked with stars, the limb of twilight below, the land before the canopy burning green and brown in the light of the sun...the boundaries that encompassed the Alley gone, gone along with the armored borders of his life, the zones with their internal customs inspectors, their armed forces and restricted areas, the ever-narrowing tunnel down which he was hurled at the speed of light toward whatever violent climax awaited him at the end. The legend that he had embraced, because he had never been able to embrace life.
He’s free, he realizes. And he’s got friends in high places.
He figures another chapter in the legend’s going to start right about now.
*
Cowboy feels nerve warmth flaring in his limbs, a warning signal. He thinks he knows what’s going to happen. He reaches across Sarah, unspools a stud from the phone, plugs it into his temple. “Reno,” he says, talking into the wire-thin mic fixed on the stud. “Stay on the line. I want you to hear this bastard.”
“Whatever you say, Cowboy.”
“I’ve got a few other things I want you to do,” he says. Reno listens quietly as Cowboy tells him. He can feel Sarah shift in surprise as he leans across her.
“Yeah, Cowboy,” Reno says. “I see your point.”
“Cowboy?” Sarah says. “What file are you talking about? Do I–”
“I’ll tell you later,” Cowboy says.
Roon’s voice, when it comes, makes his hackles rise. Sarah grows tense beside him. He remembers cold alloy corridors, images of children floating in darkness, hologrammed ceilings glowing with Orbital settlements reflecting stellar light. A cold smile that smelled of corpses.
“Cowboy. Sarah. You are to be congratulated. The plan was a great success. It was blessed, and so are you.”
“Thanks,” Cowboy says. He takes a hearty drink of whiskey, grimaces as the fire goes down his throat. Feeling his heart pounding in his chest, a cold sweat rising on his forehead. A deep sickness in his gut, anticipation…
“Sarah,” Roon says, “I want you to come into the sky with me.” The voice is like a silken icicle caress. “I want someone to head my security team. I can’t trust Couceiro’s people. ”
Cowboy watches the scars whiten on Sarah’s face, tautening under her cynical smile. “You want me to be your Cunningham?” she asks.
“Cunningham wasn’t his real name. But yes, I want you to do the same job for me that Cunningham did for my predecessor. Your files say that you have the potential. Come to the sky, Sarah. Look down at the planet of our birth. Then help me shape its future.” The lyrical words are somehow more terrifying coming from the emotionless, crystal voice, the cold rapture of the deepening, triumphant madness. “Be the means of my communion with the planet, Sarah,” he says. “The instrument by which I possess it. The human extension of my crystal.”
Cowboy sees Sarah’s lips curl. “No, Mr. Roon” she says. “That’s not my kind of action.” Still, there is a trace of hesitation in her voice, as if she’s bidding farewell to a cherished dream, having found its price.
“You will condemn yourself,” Roon says. “History will allow freedom only to raptors, not to the creatures on which they feed. Stretch your wings, Sarah. I will give you blood for your Weasel to feed on. ”
“No,” Sarah says. Her eyes are stone. “It’s not for me.”
“I regret your decision, Sarah. Cowboy, I hope you will be more sensible.” Cowboy’s mouth feels dry. He licks his lips.
“What are you offering?” he asks.
“A place. You have talents that extend beyond those of a pilot. You have a predator’s instinct, you can spot weakness and act on that knowledge. You saw Couceiro’s weakness and knew how to bring him down. I want you to give me that talent of yours, Cowboy.”
“No. It’s not my sort of work.”
“You are dangerous.” The cold judgment turns Cowboy’s veins cold. “You have brought down a powerful man, and neither he nor his friends will forget. I offer you my protection.”
“No,” Cowboys says. “It’s no secret, what I did. Other people could do it. Things will change.”
“Your decision is that of a weakling. You are a fool.” There is a frozen second in which Cowboy can almost hear the decision being made somewhere in Roon’s crystal. “Still, you are dangerous. Perhaps too dangerous to be allowed to roam at will.”
The crystal burns in Cowboy’s skull. He had known this all along, that this would come. Because the Orbitals could not allow a free man to exist, once they noticed him.
“Reno, are you there?” Cowboy says.
“Yes, Cowboy.”
“Hand this Texan’s ass to him.”
There is a scream in Cowboy’s socket, a scream composed partly of the Black Mind program that’s shrieking down the link at the speed of light, partly of the noise that is coming from Roon’s throat as Reno climbs over the safeguards in his crystal and begins to write himself over Roon’s mind. Cowboy can see the puzzlement in Sarah’s eyes as she hears the noise coming from the phone she holds. Cowboy takes the stud from his temple and the screaming fades away. Sarah looks at him.
Cowboy reaches over and takes the phone from her hand. Over the whine of data he can hear far-off moans, cries, whimpers. He laughs.
He puts the phone down on the bed between them and explains. There is a smile in Sarah’s eyes, an answering chord struck in resonant steel.
They listen together till the sounds stop, and they can hear Reno’s voice coming over the phone. Cowboy feels as if he’s been on a long night flight, and now, through his skin sensors, whispering over the crystal, caressing his nerves, he feels the warm touch of the sun.
THE END
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Bonus
Excerpt from Voice of the Whirlwind
by Walter Jon Williams
L.A. Night. Steward looked down from the window of his descending aircraft and saw a web of Earthbound stars that marched from the mountains right into the rising ocean, stars that blurred with heat shimmer and promise.
The plane began to buffet as its plastic and alloy skin changed configuration, braking from supersonic to landing-approach speed. Below, Steward could feel Los Angeles reaching up for him with mirrored fingers.
He smiled. At home, though he’d never been here before.
*
Steward put the package in his pocket. He was to deliver it to Spassky in LA tomorrow evening.
“Beer in the refrigerator,” Griffith said. “Make yourself at home.”
Lightsource’s apartment in Flagstaff was furnished in a utilitarian way, very like a hotel room: bed, sturdy chairs, video, refrigerator, cooking range—just like a hundred other apartments in the same building, most owned by corporations. Steward sat on one of the chairs. He felt scratchy brown fabric against the backs of his arms.
Griffith stubbed out his cigarette and disappeared into the bathroom. Steward watched a silent vodka ad on the vid. The vodka was photographed so that it looked like liquid chrome. Griffith reappeared after running the sink for a while. The Welshman took a Negra Modelo longneck from the kitchenette refrigerator and twisted off the foil top. “Want some?” he asked.
Steward shook his head. He watched as Griffith walked to a cloth-covered chair placed next to the vid. He sat down, sipping at his dark Mexican beer.
Steward took a breath. “Tell me about Sheol,” he said.
Griffith looked at him for a long moment. “I don’t like to talk about it,” he said. “You know that.”
“You said you would.” Steward felt a kind of pressure on his neck, like a brush of wind from distant exploding stars. “I need to know what it did to—to the Captain. What I became, out there.”
Griffith looked away. “I know. I wasn’t trying to weasel out. I was just telling you this was going to be hard.”
“Okay. Sorry.”
Griffith’s voice was low. The words came slowly. “I don’t think you can know. Even if I tell you. It was just…not a thing you can understand secondhand.”
Steward just watched him. On the vid, a small child was choking on a piece of food at a birthday party. Adults moved in silent, screaming panic; other children were crying. Colors from the silent drama bled over Griffith’s face. Without looking up, Griffith flung an arm up and snapped off the picture. He looked up. He was pale. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I know.”
Steward waited. Saying nothing.
“First thing to realize,” Griffith said, “is that the psychological dimension isn’t all there is. It’s not just a matter of forgetting, or learning to adjust. I got married when I came home. She was a nice lady. Had herself, her life the way she wanted it. Knew where she was going. We tried to have kids, and each time it was a miscarriage…and that turned out to be lucky, because they were all monsters. My genes are all screwed up. From what happened out there. There were biological and chemical weapons that fucked with chromosomes. A lot of the medicines we took with us were experimental Coherent Light Pharmaceuticals, and the manuals that gave the dosages were just guessing. Some didn’t work, some had side effects. Some broke chromosomes. Coherent Light didn’t care. The Icehawks were an experiment, too, and even if we failed, we’d generate some interesting data.”
Griffith put a hand on his chest. “I’m marked, wherever I go, by what happened on Sheol. Not just in my mind, but on the microscopic level, in the little bits of DNA that made me. Poisoned. I could die of some new kind of cancer, and that would be Sheol. Or some kind of chemical I’d breathed in years ago could strip the myelin sheathing from my nerves, and I’d be crippled. That would be Sheol, too. It’s happened to other survivors. Like we’re all carrying little time bombs inside us.” Griffith was sweating. He wiped his brow with the back of his hand. “That’s something I can’t forget, that I’m carrying those little bombs. And the bombs keep reminding me of everything else.” He looked up at Steward. “You’re lucky, you know? You don’t have that stuff in your body.”
“Can’t you get a new one?”
“I didn’t buy the clone insurance, the way you did. I didn’t have family. I just took my hazardous duty bonus and had a big party the week before we took off. And now I can’t afford a new body.” Griffith looked at him. “You knew that,” he said.
Steward pointed a finger at his temple. “Not this memory. These are old recordings.”
Griffith breathed out, a harsh sigh. “Yeah. I keep forgetting. That you’re so much younger than I am. Even if you were born before me.”
*
Ardala leaned back on pillows. She was wearing a white T-shirt, smoking a Xanadu. Guys was open, lying unread on her stomach. “Two thousand Starbright,” she said. “Not bad for a day’s work.”
“Not bad,” Steward agreed. He had one of her cram books open in front of him, but he hadn’t looked at it in a while.
Ardala drew up a leg, scratched a bare calf. “I assume this is against the law.”
“It isn’t. I used your comp and checked the library.”
“If it isn’t illegal, then it’s dangerous.”
Steward frowned. “Maybe so. Griffith says not.”
Ardala handed Steward the Xanadu. He inhaled. “How well do you know Griffith?” she asked.
“At one time, very well.”
She sat up, leaned toward him, propping her elbows on her knees. “He’s changed a lot. You said so.”
“Yes.”
“So it’s dangerous.”
Steward shrugged and handed the cigarette back to Ardala. She looked at it in her hand and ignored it. “What was the company he worked for?”
“Lightsource, Limited.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know it, but I’ll check my files. I should be able to find out something about it.”
Steward shrugged again. Ardala’s green eyes narrowed. “You act,” she said, “as if you don’t care whether or not your old friend is going to fuck you over.”
“He’s giving me something else I want.”
She put the cigarette to her lips, inhaled, made a face at the discovery that it had gone out. She dropped it in an ashtray. “He’s giving you a chance to get into space, right? Money? Lotta good it’ll do if you’re dead.”
He looked at her. “Sheol,” he said.
The word seemed to hang in the air for a long moment, like honey dropping from a spoon. Ardala shook her head and fell back to the pillows. “It’s like you want to give Sheol a second chance to kill you. As if it wasn’t bad enough the first time.”
He reached out, put a hand on her knee. “I can’t do anything about whether the job’s dangerous or not. All I can do is be ready. I’m ready.”
She turned her head away. He could see her throat working. “Dead man,” she said. “A fucking dead man.”
Steward took his hand back, gazed down at the book. “I’ll be back in a day or so,” he said.
Ardala was still looking away. “So you say.”
*
“At the beginning it was easy. Sheol was pioneered by Far Ranger, but Coherent Light got the Icehawks into the Wolf 294 system before anyone else. Mobilized, declared hostilities Outward, and went. Only the male Icehawks were sent Outward; the women’s battalions were kept in-system to guard against sabotage and maybe try some themselves. The women weren’t happy about it—what were they trained for, anyway?—and a lot of the men were pissed off because they got separated from their girlfriends.