Chapter Three
As he stands in the hot summer of eastern Colorado, a steel guitar is playing a lonesome song somewhere in the back of Cowboy’s mind.
“For the laws I have a certain respect,” he says. “For mercenaries I have none.”
Arkady Mikhailovich Dragunov stares at him for a half second. His eyes are slitted against the brightness of the sun. The whites seem yellowed Faberge ivory, and the irises, old steel darkened like a sword. Then he nods. It’s the answer he wants.
Discontent rises in Cowboy like a drifting wave of red sand. He doesn’t like this man or share his strange, suspicious, involuted hatreds. Excitement is tingling in his arms, his mind, the crystal inside his skull. Missouri. At last. But Arkady is oblivious to the grandeur of what is going to take place, wants only to fit Cowboy into place with his own self-image, to remind Cowboy again that Arkady is not just a boss but the big boss, that Cowboy owes him not simply loyalty but servitude. A game that Cowboy will not play.
“Goddamn right,” Arkady says. “We know they’re offering their services to Iowa and Arkansas. We don’t want that.”
“If they find me, I’ll do what I can,” Cowboy says, knowing that in this business, talk is necessarily elliptical. “But first they’ve got to find me. And my op plan should give me a good chance of staying in the clear.”
Arkady wears an open-necked silk shirt of pale violet, with leg-of-mutton sleeves so wide they seem to drag in the dust; an embroidered Georgian sash wound twice around his waist; and tight, polished cossack boots over tighter black trousers that have embroidery on the outer seams. His hair, at intervals, stands abruptly on end and flares with static discharges, a different color each time. The latest thing from the Havana boutiques of the Florida Free Zone. Cryo max, he says proudly. Cowboy knows Arkady couldn’t be cryo max if he spent his life trying; it isn’t in him. In fashion he is a follower, not a leader. Here he’s just impressing the hicks and his toadies.
Arkady is a big, brusque man, fond of hugging and touching the people he’s talking to; but he’s got a heart like superconducting hardware and eyes to match, and it would be foolish to consider him a friend. Thirdmen do not have cargo space for friends.
Arkady crimps the cardboard tube of a Russian cigarette and strikes a match. His hair stands on end, suddenly bright orange. Imitating the match, Cowboy thinks, as the steel guitar bends notes in his mind . . .
The Dodger, Cowboy’s manager, strolls from where the panzer is being loaded for the run. “Best make sure your craft is trimmed,” the Dodger says.
Cowboy nods. “See you later, Arkady.” Arkady’s hair turns green.
“I could see you were getting impatient,” the Dodger says as soon as they’re out of earshot. “Try not to be so fucking superior, will you?”
“It’s hard not to be when Arkady’s around.”
The Dodger flashes him a disapproving look.
“He must have to butter his ass,” Cowboy says, “to get into those pants.” He can see the lines around the Dodger’s eyes grow crinkly as he tries to suppress his laughter.
The Dodger is an older man, rail-lean, with a tall forehead and straight black hair going gray. He’s got a poetic way of speaking when the mood is on him. Cowboy likes him–– and trusts him, too, at least to a point, the point being giving the Dodger the codes to his portfolio. He might be naive, but he is not stupid.
Cowboy watches as the last pieces of cargo are stowed, making sure the panzer is trimmed, that all’s ready for the run across what the Dodger, in an evocative mood, had once christened Damnation Alley.
“What’s my cargo?” Cowboy asks. He smiles diffidently, wondering if the Dodger can see the thoughts behind his artificial eyes. The suspicions, the discontents. “Just for the record.”
The Dodger is busy cutting a plug of tobacco. “Chloramphenildorphin,” he says. “There’s going to be a shortage on the East Coast. The hospitals will pay a lot. Or so the rumors say.” He grins. “So be of good cheer. You’re going to make sure a lot of sick people stay alive.”
“Nice to be sort of legal,” Cowboy says. “For a change.”
He looks at the panzer, all angular armor and intakes, ugly and graceless compared to a delta. He owns this one but he hasn’t given it a name, doesn’t think of it in the same way. A panzer is just a machine, not a way of life. Not like flying.
Cowboy calls himself Pony Express now. It’s his radio handle, another nickname. He wants to keep the idea alive, even if it can’t take wing.
Cowboy climbs on top of the panzer, worms through the dorsal hatch, and sits down in the forward compartment. He studs a jack in his right temple and suddenly his vision is expanded, as if his two eyes were stretched around his head and a third eye surfaced on top. He calls up the maps he has stored on comp, and displays begin pulsing like strobes on the inside of his skull. His head has become a ROM cube. Inside it he sees fuel trucks spotted down the Alley, ready to move when he needs to be topped up; there is his planned route, with deviations and emergency routes marked, drawn in wide bands of color; there are old barns and deep coulees and other hiding places spotted like acne on the displays, all marked down by Arkady’s scouts.
Cowboy fishes a datacube out of his jacket pocket and drops it into the trapdoor. The display flares with another series of pinpricks. His own secret hiding places, the ones he prefers to use, that he keeps up to date with scouting forays of his own. Arkady, he knows, wants this trip to succeed; but Cowboy doesn’t know everyone in the thirdman’s organization, and some of them might have been bought by the privateers. Best to stick with the places he knows are safe. The panzer rocks slightly and Cowboy can hear the sound of footsteps on the Chobham Seven armor. He looks up and sees the Dodger’s silhouette through the dorsal hatch. “Time to move, Cowboy,” the Dodger says, and then spits his chaw over the side.
“Yo,” says Cowboy. He unplugs himself and stands up in the cramped compartment. His Kikuyu pupils contract to pinpricks as he puts his head out the hatch and looks west, in the direction of the wine-dark Rockies he knows are somewhere over the horizon. He feels, again, the strange lassitude infecting his heart, a discontent with things as they are.
“Damn,” he says. There is longing in the word.
“Yeah,” says the Dodger.
“I wish I was flying.”
“Yeah.” The Dodger looks pensive. “Someday, Cowboy,” he says. “We’re just waiting for the technology to roll around the other way again. ”
Cowboy can see Arkady standing by his armored Packard, sweating in the shade of a cottonwood, and suddenly the discontent has a name. “Chloramphenildorphin,” he says. “Where’s Arkady get it?”
“We’re not paid to know those kind of things,” the Dodger says.
“In quantities like this?” Cowboy’s voice turns thoughtful as he gazes across the gap of bright sky between himself and the thirdman. “Do you think it’s true,” he asks, “that the Orbitals are running the thirdmen, just like everything else?”
The Dodger glances nervously at Arkady and shrugs. “It don’t pay to make those kind of speculations out loud.”
“I just want to know who I’m working for,” Cowboy says. “if the underground is run by the overground, then we’re working for the people we’re fighting, qué no?”
The Dodger looks at him crookedly. “I wasn’t aware that we were fighting anybody a-tall, Cowboy,” he says.
“You know what I mean.” That if the thirdmen and panzerboys are just participating in a reshuffling of finances on behalf of the Orbital blocs, then the dream of being the last free Americans on the last free road is a foolish, romantic delusion. And what is Cowboy, then? A dupe, a hovercraft clown. Or worse than that, a tool.
The Dodger gives him a weary smile. “Concentrate on the privateers, Cowboy, that’s my advice,” he says. “You’re the best panzerboy on the planet. Stick to what you’re good at.”
Cowboy forces a grin and gives him the finger, and then closes the dorsal hatch. He strips naked and sticks electrodes to his arms and legs, then runs the wires from the electrodes to collars on his wrists and ankles. He attaches a catheter, then dons his g-suit and boots, sits on his acceleration couch and attaches cables to the collars, straps himself onto the couch. While his body remains immobile, his muscles will be exercised by electrode to keep the blood flowing. In the old days, before this technique had been developed and the jocks were riding their headsets out of Earth’s well and into the long diamond night, sometimes their legs and arms got gangrene.
Next he plugs jacks into the sockets in his temples, the silver-chased sockets over each ear, the fifth socket at the base of his skull. He pulls his helmet on over them, careful not to stress the laser-optic wires coming out of his head. He closes the mask across his face. He tastes rubber and hears the hiss of anesthetic, loud here in the closed space of the helmet.
His body will be put to sleep while he makes his run through the Alley. He is going to have more important things to do than look after it.
Cowboy does the chore swiftly, automatically. All along, there is a feeling: I have done this too often not to know what it’s about.
Neurotransmitters awaken the five studs in his head and Cowboy watches the insides of his skull blaze with incandescent light, the liquid-crystal data matrices of the panzer molding themselves to the configuration of his mind. His heart beats faster; he’s living in the interface again, the eye-face, his expanded mind racing like electrons through the circuits, into the metal and crystal heart of the machine. He can see around the panzer a full 360 degrees, and there are other boards in his strange mental space for engine displays and the panzer systems. He does a system check and a comp check and a weapons check, watching the long rows of green as they light up. His physical perceptions are no longer in three dimensions: the boards overlap and intertwine as they weave in and out of the face, as they mirror the subatomic reality of the electronics and the data that are the dying day outside.
Neurotransmitters lick with their chemical tongues the metal and crystal in his head, and electrons spit from the chips, racing along the cables to the engine starters, and through a dozen sensors Cowboy feels the bladed turbines reluctantly turn as the starters moan, and then flame torches the walls of the combustion chambers and the blades spin into life with a screaming whine. Cowboy monitors the howling exhaust as it belches fire. On his mental displays Cowboy can see the Dodger and Arkady and the ground crew watching the panzer through the blurred exhaust haze, and he watches fore and aft and checks the engine displays and sees another set of green lights and knows it’s time to move.
The howling of the engines beats at his senses. Warren’s spent the last week tuning them, running check after check, making certain they will perform beyond expectations. They’re military surplus jets, monsters. They aren’t built to ride this close to the ground, and without Cowboy’s straddling this mutant creature every inch of the way they’re going to run away with him.
Inside the rubber-tasting mask his lips draw back from his teeth and he grins: he will ride this beast across the Alley and through the web of traps set up this side of the Mississippi and add another layer of permeable sky to the distance separating him from the lesser icons of glory that are the other panzerboys, more proof that the flaming corn-alcohol throbs through his chest like blood and that the shrieking exhaust flows from his lungs like breath, that his eyes beam radar and his fingers can flick missiles forth like pebbles. Through his sensors he can taste the exhaust and see the sky and the prairie sunset, and part of his mind can feel the throbbing radio energies that are the enemy’s search planes, and it seems to him that the watchers and the escort vehicles are suddenly lessened, separated from him by more than a few hundred yards–– he will be taking the panzer over the Line, and they will not, and he looks at them from within his interface, from his immeasurable height of radiant glory and pities them for what they do not know.
At the moment the ultimate beneficiaries of his run–– the hospitals in New England, the thirdmen, his own portfolio, possibly the immeasurably distant, insanely gluttonous creatures who ride their Orbital factories and look down on the Earth as a fast-depleting treasure house to be plundered–– all these fade down long redshifting lines, as if blurred by distance and the flaming jet’s exhaust. The reality is here in the panzer. Discontent is banished. Action is the thing, and All.
He diverts a part of the jets exhaust and another set of fans whine into life, lifting the ground-effect panzer with a lurch onto its inflatable self-sealing cushion. The Pony Express will deliver the mail or know the reason why. Microwave chatter spins around his ears like gnats, and he wishes he could brush it away with his hands.
“Arkady wants to say a few words, Cowboy.” The voice is the Dodger’s, and Cowboy can tell he knows this isn’t a good idea.
“I’m sort of getting ready here,” Cowboy says.
“I know that.” Shortly, sounding as if his mouth is full of tobacco: “Arkady thinks it’s important.”
Cowboy concedes, watching the green lights, seeing maps flash behind his eyes. “Whatever Arkady wants,” he says.
Arkady has the mic too close to his lips. His p’s and b’s sound like cannon shots. Put the damn headset on your head, Cowboy thinks in irritation. That’s what it’s for, not to hold it to your fucking mouth.
“I’ve got a lot at stake here, Cowboy,” Arkady says. “I’ll be in the plane and with you all the way.”
“I am comforted as hell to hear that, Arkady Mikhailovich.” Cowboy knows Arkady will have paid off a lot of his costs with the other thirdmen, who wanted the Missouri privateers broken as much as he did.
There is a pause on the other end as Arkady digests this:
“I want you to come back,” Arkady says. Cowboy can hear the sounds of temper as if from far away. The thirdman’s voice drums on and on, every plosive a barrage. “But I fixed up that machine for a reason, and I don’t want you to come back without it. And I don’t want you to come back without having used it. Understand? Those fucking privateers are gonna get what’s coming to ’em.”
“Ten-four,” Cowboy says, and before Arkady can ask what the fuck ten-four is supposed to mean, Cowboy opens his throttles and the howl, heard with utter clarity over Arkady’s mic, buries Arkady’s speech beneath its alcohol shriek. Though he can’t hear Arkady anymore, Cowboy is fairly certain that the distant yammering he’s hearing through his sockets contains a fair amount of abuse. He smiles.
“Adios, muchachitos.” Cowboy laughs, and takes the panzer off the road. The farmer here, a friend of free enterprise and true, is getting paid for his wheat being trampled every so often, and Cowboy is going to have a clear run for the Line. The radar detectors pick up only weak signals from far away and Cowboy knows no one’s looking at him.
The beast roars like the last lonely dinosaur and trembles as it gains way. Mental indicators climb their columns from blue to green to orange. Ripe wheat straw flies out behind in a plume. Cowboy has a steel guitar playing a lonesome cadenza somewhere in his mind. He cranks up the flame and is doing over a hundred when he blazes through some poor citizen’s bobwire and crosses the Line.
His lidar is forward-looking and strictly limited: it’s to keep him out of pits and gullies and let him know when there might be a house or vehicle sitting in his way. It sends out a fairly weak signal and it shouldn’t be detected by anything unless the detector is so close the first contact would be visual anyway. Kansas has most of its defenses out this way, and if he trips anything, it should be now.
The horizon is a blur of dark emptiness marked by an occasional silo. Any enemy radars are far away. The moon rises and the engines howl and Cowboy keeps his speed in check so as not to raise a dust signature that might be picked up on radar. He wants to save his systems for the real test. Missouri. Where the privateers crouch in the sky, snarling and ready to spring. Cattle scatter from the panzer’s scream. Robot harvesters sweep through the fields, standing like stately alien sentinels in pools of brilliant light, moving alone, unable to detect the panzer as it sweeps across the land. Cowboy gets a stronger radar signal to the north and knows a picket plane is coming his way. The panzer’s absorbent camouflage paint sucks up radar signal like a thirsty elephant, but Cowboy slows and turns, lowering his infrared profile and making a wide swing away from any trouble. The picket plane moves on, undisturbed. Mobile towers loom up like Neolithic monuments, awesomely expensive derricks built to inject a special bacteria into the bedrock below the eroded topsoil, bugs that will break down the stone and make new soil. Another eroded farm foreclosed by an Orbital bloc–– no small farmer could afford to replace topsoil this way. Cowboy suppresses a desire to ram the derricks and snarls at them instead.
The panzer crosses the Little Arkansas south of McPherson, and Cowboy knows he’ll make it across Kansas without trouble. The defenses are behind him. The only trouble will come if he rides right across the track of a state trooper when crossing a road, and even then the authorities will have to somehow scramble a chopper in time. He doesn’t think it will happen.
And it doesn’t. In the deep violet shadow of some crumbling grain silos near Gridley the panzer sweeps out of the darkness and scares the bejesus out of the sleeping kid in the cab of the fuel truck. Cowboy cycles his engines down and waits for the sweet cool alcohol to settle into the tanks. Already he can feel the pulsing radars questing out from the Missouri line. Stronger than anything he’s seen yet. The privateers are not going to be easy.
“They’re undercapitalized, Cowboy,” Arkady had told him. “They can’t afford to lose any equipment. They’ve got to score a lot of successes right away and get some cargo. Otherwise they’re in trouble.”
Since the Rock War, the U.S.A. had been balkanized far beyond the wildest dreams of the old states’ rights crowd. The so-called central government no longer had its hands on interstate commerce and the result was a wild rush to impose tariffs all across the Midwest. In the West, close to the spaceports in California and Texas where the finished goods came down from the factories in orbit, the borders were free, but the Midwest saw no reason why it shouldn’t profit from anything crossing its territory. A heavy duty was slammed on goods that passed through the states en route to elsewhere.
Which left the Northeast out of luck, as far as the distribution of Orbital-built products was concerned. They got some from the spaceports in the Florida Free Zone, but the Free Zone was under bloc control, and the Orbitals like to keep the market hungry for their product. Artificial scarcity was the name of the game, and the Northeast paid with its dwindling wealth for the scraps the Orbitals doled out. The West had more to offer the Orbitals, and the goods were cheaper and more abundant there–– cheap enough to ship them to the markets in the Northeast at a fat profit, so long as there wasn’t much duty to pay along the way.
And so the first atmosphere jocks rode their supersonic deltas across the Alley with their midnight loads of contraband. And the Midwest responded, first by sending up radar planes and armed interceptor aircraft, then, when the action shifted from planes to panzers, by strengthening their ground defenses.
And now, in Missouri, by licensing privateers. The states were unable to keep up with the changes in smuggling technology, and so they decided instead to license a local corporation to chase the contraband for them. The fact that the Constitution authorized only the federal government to grant letters of marque and reprisal had been ignored; the Constitution is a dead letter anyway, in the face of Orbital superiority.
The privateers are authorized to shoot to kill, and in addition to a hefty bounty are rewarded by ownership, free and clear, of whatever contraband they can secure. Reports spoke of impressive arrays of airborne radar, of heat sensors and weird sound detectors and aircraft full of sensing missiles and bristling with guns.
From Gridley Cowboy moves slowly northeast, taking his time, mapping the flying radar arrays. They are drone aircraft, ultralights under robot control, solar-powered to stay aloft forever, rising with the sun and gliding slowly earthward at night, only having to return to base for servicing every couple of months or so. They are in constant microwave communication with computers on the ground, ready to scramble aircraft if anything suspicious pops up. They are so light that radar-homing missiles can’t find them to shoot them down, and antiradiation homers would be spotted as they climbed, in plenty of time for the arrays to switch off before the missile arrives.
Cowboy is aiming for the wide area between New Kansas City and the Ozarks. People in the Ozarks are friendly, he knows, with a tradition of resistance to the people they call “the laws” that goes back at least to Cole Younger, but the terrain is too restrictive. Cowboy wants a fast run over the flat. The fact that this part of the state is where the privateers have concentrated their defenses is just a pleasant coincidence.
The sensor drones are turning lazy circles in the air as they glide downward on battery power, and Cowboy thinks he sees a pattern building that will allow him to slide into a blind spot that might last until he’s fifty miles the other side of the Missouri border. As his panzer slides down the crumbling banks of the Marais des Cygnes and tears across flat mudbanks and muddy water, it extrudes a directional antenna and spits a coded message to the west, to where Arkady and the Dodger wait in Arkady’s aircraft, turning its own circles over the plains of eastern Colorado.
The answering signal comes quickly, a strong broadcast to Arkady’s people on the Kansas– Missouri border. There are other panzerboys out there, standing ready by their vehicles, waiting for the word... and when they receive it, their own panzers will hit the plains, moving swiftly and then stopping, tearing through fields in zigzag patterns, sending dust signatures aloft, tracking radar and infrared patterns across the computer displays of the privateers. The laws will have to expend a lot of effort tracking them down and apprehending them. And when found, the decoy panzerboys will surrender meekly enough---since they carry no contraband and will only be fined for the amount of bobwire they flattened during their runs, and maybe do a little time for reckless endangerment. Arkady will cover the fines and legal fees, as well as their generous salaries. If the worst happens, their widows and orphans will have the benefit of insurance. It’s well-paid work, and a training ground for ambitious panzerboys who want to run the Line.
But after the signal to the other panzerboys comes the Dodger’s voice, dry as the Portales plains. “Arkady Mikhailovich would appreciate a little more information, here, Cowboy,” he says. “He wants to know why you didn’t report earlier. ”
“They can trace a message these days, Dodger.”
The Dodger is silent for a while, getting a lecture from Arkady no doubt, and when his voice returns, it is less good-humored. “A squirt transmission via microwave is next to untraceable,” he says. “Arkady says you should have reported when you got past the Kansas Defenses.”
“Sorry,” Cowboy says cheerfully. “But I’m damn close to the Missouri line right now and I would just as soon not have to keep up this conversation while I’m trying to work.”
There is another pause. “Arkady reminds you that he has a big investment in your panzer, and he wants to be kept informed of what his investment is doing.”
“I aim to give him a nice return on his money,” Cowboy says. “I don’t plan to waste time with a lot of chatter. I’ve got a window right now, and I’m taking it. See you.” And he switches off, making a note to send Arkady some worry beads from the East when he gets there.
The panzer climbs out of the Marais des Cygnes and increases its speed as it begins its run east. The drumming of corn on the bow increases to a steady hammer. Engine gauges are running orange to red. Green lights everywhere else. Steel guitars sing like angels in the mind and Missouri wails a siren song in accompaniment. Delivering the mail is a splendid thing. The decoy panzerboys are causing a stir, and more radar arrays are being turned on, the ones unused so far in the hope their sudden appearance will catch the smugglers by surprise.
Cowboy’s blind spot is still a blank. He throws caution to the wind and decides to red out the engines. A half-heard message from his body signals he is being punched back in his seat, but he’s got other things to think about. The panzer is airborne half the time, tearing up the low hills and flying over the crests, throwing corn and scattering wire, its voice a madwoman’s wail.
Neurons flicker in Cowboy’s mind, pulsing their messages to his crystal, keeping the craft stable as it punches up and down. He’s deep into the face as the control surfaces invade his mind, riding the wire edge of stability, skating the brink. Cowboy knows there will be deep bruises under his restraining straps, even through the padding.
He crosses the Missouri line between Louisburg and the rusting monument to the Marais des Cygnes Massacre. Parched Missouri is waiting for rain, and his dusty rooster tail is towering a hundred yards, but there’s no one to see it. The control surfaces are getting used to the buffeting they’re taking, and the movement is easier.
And then radar pulses from directly above as a new sensor drone is switched into the array. Cowboy’s blind spot has become pistol-hot and the dust signature must look like a flaming arrow in the night. Cowboy is shutting systems down from red to orange to amber and trying to make himself smaller, but the radar is right overhead and there’s no way to get out of its way. He slows down the lunging panzer and dives over the banks of the South Grand. His water plume is a lot lower than the dust and he wonders if he’s made a successful evasion, but then other airborne arrays begin to flick into existence in the nearby sky and he knows what’s going to happen. His own radar shows a fishing rowboat frozen in place on the still water, and the panzer lunges for the bank, avoiding it. He cools the engines from amber to green-best to save fuel for later. He decides it’s time to listen to what the laws have to say and switches on his police-band antenna. The privateers’ transmissions are coded but the state cops’ are not, and with a part of his expanded mind he listens to their calls of frustration as they try, with four-wheel vehicles, to follow the panzerboys as they whip their way across country. Occasionally a privateer controller comes on the air to give them advice. Cowboy has the impression that the state laws are somewhat reluctant to cooperate with free-lance mercenary enforcement, something he more or less suspected.
The radars seem to be circling more randomly now, as if they’ve lost him at least part of the time. The panzer is into Johnson County before Cowboy detects a radar boring toward him from the east, low enough to be attached to an aircraft. He triggers the explosive bolts that release the shrouds covering his weapons pods; the panzer will be less aerodynamic now and will require watching at speed. Cowboy cycles his engine displays from green to blue and makes a wide swing to the south, hoping to avoid the craft, and for a moment it seems to be working; the aircraft continues on to the north, but then suddenly it jinks, swooping directly for the panzer. Cowboy feels a wave of alcohol leaping through his heart as the engine displays rocket up to red, the panzer shuddering as it spits flame. For a moment it tries to climb aloft, the wind humming through the weapons pods like the southeast trades through a windjammer’s rigging, but gravity pulls hard on its vector and the panzer crashes down onto its cushion. As the indicators max out, Cowboy looses a radar decoy missile and kicks the panzer into a shuddering left turn, its starboard side scraping soil as the panzer mashes its cushion down. The missile continues on a straight course, its wide wings extended, keeping low to the ground. It has no radarabsorbent paint and so its signature should look about the size of an absorbent panzer; and its exhaust should attract anyone looking at infrared.
Cowboy kicks on the afterburners and makes tracks for the Father of Waters. Behind him he can see flashes in the night sky as the aircraft fires off its weaponry at his decoy. He hopes there are no citizens below: those sheaf rockets look really unpleasant.
There are no explosions he can see; the privateer aircraft continues its course for a while, slowing, and Cowboy slows, too, minimizing his infrared signal. Strong radar pulses are still coming from right overhead. Cowboy hears from the state laws that two of the decoys have been caught, which means more resources available for chasing him. The privateer is beginning to circle back in his direction, and Cowboy sees the strange silhouettes of a metal forest on the horizon; he changes course again and dives into it.
It’s a forest of rectennas, miles wide, receiving the low-energy microwave coming down from a solar power satellite high above, a burning fixed star in the heavens that symbolizes the prostrate Earth’s dependence on the Orbital power. Cowboy threads his way neatly through the metal web on night vision alone. He’s probably confused any signal the enemy radars are getting, but the privateer craft is still getting closer. The panzer emerges into a clearing, where a metal maintenance shack rusts on its slab of concrete, and in that brief moment Cowboy fires a chaff rocket straight up and dives among the alloy trees once more.
The chaff rocket climbs three miles and bursts, and suddenly Cowboy’s gear is picking up radar signals and low-energy microwaves bouncing from everywhere. The chaff, wafting gently down from altitude, is composed of aluminum strips, one out of ten of which are implanted with a minichip and a tiny power source that records and then plays back any radio signal it receives. On Cowboy’s radar displays it looks as if a vast radio Christmas tree has suddenly bloomed above the prairie. The people controlling the power grid are probably going crazy. Once out of the rectenna forest, Cowboy kicks in the afterburners again. The aircraft’s signal is lost in all the chaff and he figures it’s time to run. His computer maps show a riverbed ahead. It seems a good time to go fishing.
The riverbed is dry and winding, but it leaves the enemy craft far behind. There’s a lot of coded radio traffic flying around, each message echoed by the chaff as it slowly flutters down. There’s a frantic quality to it, and there’s one message from the privateers that requests assistance from the state cops, broadcast in the clear and repeated with endless, echoing lunatic efficiency by the chaff. Cowboy grins and climbs out of the riverbed, running northeast.
It looks as if the chase craft are all down and fueling because he’s well across the Missouri north of Columbia before he runs into any more trouble. He is expecting it, cooling his engines on green and utilizing cover, because the police radios are telling him another two of his decoy panzerboys have been taken and the rest driven to ground. Suddenly there’s radar pulsing from directly overhead again and another radar dopplering in from the northwestern horizon, as if it’s just hopped up from somebody’s airfield. Cowboy slows and turns away: no good. He looks for a piece of extensive woods and can’t find one, and suddenly there’s another radar signature arcing in fast from the south. He fires another chaff rocket and alters course once again. The two seem confused for a moment by the chaff, but then the southern one corrects its course, followed by the northern craft. The southern craft has probably spotted him on infrared and is vectoring the other one in.
Targeting displays flash like scarlet madness in the interior of Cowboy’s mind. A snarl from his throat echoes the amplified roar of the combustion chambers, and the panzer gouges earth as it spins right, toward the oncoming southern radar source. Cowboy turns his own radar off to discourage homing missiles and navigates on his visual sensors alone, his mind making lightning decisions, neurotransmitters clattering against his headswitches like hail, the interface encompassing the whole flashing universe, the panzer and its systems, the corn thundering under the armored skirts, the blithering chaff, the two hostile privateers burning out of the night. His craft threatens to leave the Earth; its bones moan with stresses and the weapons pods shriek in the wind. The air is full of dismembered corn. Two fences are flattened, and the tall silhouette of a silo spears the blackness, the panzer’s optics making it seem to curl in toward him, threatening. He can see the enemy now, a conventional helicopter speeding toward him at tree level, its minigun flashing. He fires an antiradiation homer right between the privateer’s eyes just as the Chobham over his head begins to ring to the sound of cannonfire. Sparks flood his exterior displays and he flinches as he loses an eye.
Then he is past, and through the armor and the bucking of the vehicle he can hear the roar of the chopper as its blades flog apart the overhead sky. The antiradiation homer missed: too much chaff confusing things, or the copter got its radars off in time. But now there’s another sound; the tone of a heat-seeker asking its permission to fly, and Cowboy triggers the bird and hauls the panzer to the left, feeling as from a dim distance the lurch as the craft slaloms over a hillcrest in a spray of corn dust; sliding sideways on its cushion.
The chopper dies in a flame of blazing glory, scoring the field in an eruption of fuel and weaponry. The silo stands in rearview like a tombstone, flickering red. There is mad chatter on the radio, a scrambled microwave screaming, still recognizably human, amplified and echoed to the point of yammering lunacy by the falling chaff. The privateer coming from the northwest has just seen what happened to his comrade. The panzer is trying to turn on a reverse camber, skidding on a bed of corn silk as gravity and momentum try to turn it over. Cowboy can feel the spin of the gyros in his head, trembling as the hovercraft rides the brink.
The privateer craft wails overhead with a banshee shriek and Cowboy can see its underbody reflecting the red flickering of its comrade’s pyre. A coleopter, turbines throbbing inside the rotating shrouds that top the stubby wing tips. It’s a light jet fighter that can take off vertically and hover, combining the best qualities of a subsonic pursuit craft and helicopter, though at a considerable expense in fuel consumption. Cowboy hopes to find a window to launch another missile, but the blazing fuel just over the rise is confusing his sensors and the coleopter suddenly banks into a swift turn, scattering thermite decoys that burn like miniature parachute suns, and the window that fluttered open for a second is gone. The panzer hurls itself above the rise again and skates along the edge of the red glare cast by the scattered chopper, heading for the spire of a silo in the distance.
Plans flicker through Cowboy’s liquid-crystal switches with the fluid electric grace of heat lightning. The smartest thing for the privateer to do is to keep the panzer in sight and guide others in without risking itself. In that case, Cowboy will have to go after the coleopter; but on the other hand, radar is still hopelessly confused and the coleopter can’t sort out the infrared signal of the panzer from that of the wreck, and this is Cowboy’s chance to fly. He decides to cycle up to red and run for the safety of Egypt on the other side of the Mississippi.
But the privateer pilot must have eyes like singularities, devouring worlds, or there’s some remarkably fine equipment on the ’opter–– maybe one of those sound detectors?–– because the coleopter comes out of its bank and heads right for the panzer’s exhaust. No error. Cowboy cuts in the afterburners and hopes there’s some cover just over the horizon. His antiradiation homers won’t work in the chaff, and neither will his radar-directed missiles. He can’t get a good infrared signature from the coleopter’s bow and so the heat-seekers won’t be lucky, either. The terrain is irregular, and suddenly the corn is replaced by hemp, high as an elephant’s eye and bursting with resin. That will make the ground less slick than the corn did, maneuver less critical. The enemy pilot is burning right for him in apparent anger over what happened to his friend, and Cowboy knows he can use that anger as an aikido master uses his opponent’s kinetic energy against him–– but first the engines have to max red, afterburners bleeding alcohol fire, and the panzer has to take some punishment.
Cowboy is airborne as he floats across the crest of a rise, and a tug on the controls slews the skimming panzer to starboard just as the coleopter triggers a weapons pod and half a dozen shaped-charge rockets set the hemp ablaze. There is pounding on the Chobham, and a blaze of red lights on Cowboy’s displays tells him that one of his own weapons pods has been penetrated by a jug-sized minigun round that’s wiped out a couple hundred K’s worth of advanced electronics. The sensors aiming his own minigun are shot away just as he decides to trigger some rounds. The neurotransmitters clattering against Cowboy’s brainchips are smoking with the sour tang of adrenaline, and the coleopter pilot seems to have tempered anger with caution because he’s matching speed without overshooting, and so Cowboy has no choice but to rocket on across the good earth of Missouri, building momentum, jinking left and right, clawing against the hemp for the leverage that will send his enemy cartwheeling to the mat. The minigun hammers, hammers. The panzer’s sensors flare and die.
And then Cowboy opens new floodgates of alcohol and his engines cry in anguish as in calculating fever he slams in his thrust reversers. Even through its chemical slumber his body wails as the straps dig in. Half the comp displays are frozen in utter shock. The coleopter staggers as it tries to maintain its position, but it’s too close to the earth to stall in hope of losing momentum and its flaps are already fully deployed. The pilot knows what’s going to happen and is loosing thermite flares even before his half-controlled and thoroughly doomed craft whispers overhead and the tone sounds on Cowboy’s aural crystal. Cowboy’s missiles leap from his remaining pod, the port turbine explodes with red energy, and the coleopter whimpers in metallic pain and corkscrews in.
The panzer flees across the red-scored night. Egypt is near, but so is the dawn.
Staggering systems reawaken; Cowboy gentles the engines and manages to keep them alive. Time to find a place to hide and wait out the day.
Cowboy gets across another fifty miles of country before being reined in by dawn and the sense of an approaching wave of enemy. There are thousands of abandoned farms and barns here, old privately owned places that couldn’t compete with the Orbital-controlled agriplexes and their robot farms. Cowboy knows of quite a few where the old buildings, next to the robot-farmed cornfields, remain empty.
A new taste comes through the face mask as Cowboy’s body is reawakened. A barn appears on his sensors, one of the long, narrow type, rectangular in cross section, designed to store baled hay in the days before the Orbitals built their big warehouses, one for every hundred farms. Carefully, with gentle precision, he shoulders aside the heavy double doors and guides the panzer into the concrete-walled barn. He remembers, just before he shuts off the engines, that he forgot to send Arkady a message.
Well, let him watch the news and find out that way. Cowboy will just tell him he couldn’t get a signal through all the chaff.
With a touch of regret, Cowboy unfaces. Waves of delayed pain flame into his mind as the displays slip into night. His body is bruised and aching and slick with sweat. He takes the carbine from its scabbard and pops the hatch.
The barn smells like must and unburnt hydrocarbons. Cowboy turns the Kikuyu eyes to infrared and scans the barn. He can hear the scuttle of rats. With his hardwired nerves he can fire the carbine with perfect accuracy at anything the eyes can see.
And the eyes can see two people, huddled under some ancient straw in a concrete corner.
Cowboy pauses for a moment, straining to find the signature of weapons, and then, keeping the carbine in his hand, he reaches below for a trade pack.
The cooling engines give out metallic crackles, and the doorframe, behind, is silvered with approaching dawn. Cowboy drags himself out of the hatch and climbs down the long frontal slope of armor, his boots sliding in the sticky hemp resin.
“Where you folks from?” he asks.
“New York. Buffalo.” The voice is young and scared. Cowboy nears them and sees a pair of ragged kids of sixteen or so, a boy and a girl, the both of them huddled in a single sleeping bag atop a small pile of old straw. A pair of threadbare rucksacks sits in a forlorn heap near them.
“Heading west?” Cowboy asks.
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m going east. Bet you’re tired of living on a diet of roasting ears,” Cowboy says. He lofts the trade pack and it thumps on concrete next to the pair. They flinch at the sound. “There’s some real food in there, freeze-dried and canned. Some good whiskey and cigarettes. And a check postdated to next Monday, for five thousand dollars.”
There is silence, broken only by the sound of breathing and the scuttle of rats.
“In case you don’t get the picture,” Cowboy says, “the check will only be good if I finish my run.”
The two look at each other for a moment, then at Cowboy. “You don’t have to pay us,” the boy says quietly. “We wouldn’t–– we’re from the East, you know. We know what you’re doing. I wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for some bootleg antibiotics.”
“Yeah. Well. Just consider the money a goodwill gesture,” Cowboy says, and turns away to place some remote sensors outside and close the barn doors.
Time for a rest.
Back in the panzer the cabin smells of sweat and adrenaline. Cowboy takes off the g-suit and removes the electrodes, then gives himself a sponge bath from one of his jerricans. He eats some prepared food that’s heavy on protein, drinks something orange-flavored and packed with replacement electrolytes. He rolls into the little bunk.
The adrenaline still has him pumped up and all he can see behind his closed lids are the burning afterimages of maps and displays and engine grids climbing toward orange, of exploding fuel and rockets flaming through the night with pyrotechnic abandon. And, somewhere behind the neon throbbing visions, a little claw of resentment.
It has always been enough to run the Alley, to mesh his soul with throbbing turbopumps and wailing afterburners, bringing the mail from one free zone to another. There was an ethic in it, clean and pure. It was enough to be a free jock on a free road, doing battle with those who would restrict him, keep him bound to the Earth as if he were nothing more than a mudboy. It hadn’t mattered what he was carrying. It was enough to know that, whatever the state of the rest of the country, the blue sky over his own head was the air of freedom.
But of late there has been a suspicion that adherence to the ethic may not be enough. He knows that while it is one thing to be a warrior noble and true, it is another to be a dupe.
Suppose you are an Orbital manufacturer, interested in keeping control of your markets on the planet. You’ve won all the political control that is necessary, and you’ve kept prices high by controlling supply. But still, you’re smart enough to know that where there is scarcity, black markets will develop. Most of the stuff–– the drugs and a lot of the hardware, anyway, if not the special alloys–– can still be made Earthside, but more expensively.
If you know that the black market will develop anyway, why not develop it yourself? You can keep the thirdmen supplied with a trickle of product, enough to make themselves rich. You can afford enough muscle to keep the competition down, and in the meantime you are not only dominating the legitimate market, you are controlling supply in the underground as well. You can create and supply a demand in two separate markets, the legitimate and illegitimate.
Where does Arkady get his cargo? The question was beginning to have an important sound to it.
But now the adrenaline has burned out of Cowboy’s body and his aches are dragging him down. He won’t find any answers in a deserted barn in Missouri and his thoughts have become muddled. It’s time to slip under the narrow wool trade blanket, marked with the line that means its value had once been equated with a beaver pelt, and prepare his mind and body for the last lunge across the Alley.
It’s late afternoon before he wakes, and finds the kids gone. The postdated check flutters from one of the panzer’s aerials. Cowboy plucks it from the spike and looks at it for a while, wonders about ethics and debts, symbols and actions, and the thing that in olden times they called honor. Somewhere near here, he knows, two young people walk beneath another piece of free and lucid sky.
He does his chores, replacing the sensors that were blown away by the privateers, scraping off most of the hemp resin along with the corn and wheat chaff that’s adhered to it, spraying antiradiation paint over the dings in the Chobham. The minigun has really given the craft a working over, and it’s lucky more systems weren’t breached. He doesn’t have much in the way of weapons left, but then there’s only a few miles to the Big Muddy.
He sits in his padded couch and goes into the eye-face, listening to his sensors for a few minutes. Traffic seems normal. But then, as the day wanes, there’s a lot of talk to and from some airport tower in the neighborhood. The place must be only a few miles away because he can hear each syllable clearly. The chatter is uncoded and seems innocuous, but a lot of the aircraft seem to have the same prefixes. Cowboy begins to find this interesting.
Suppose you were a privateer commander angry over a couple of losses the previous night. Suppose you’d worked out that the panzer you were chasing was beaten up, possibly disabled, and in any case couldn’t have made it over the Mississippi before dawn. Suppose you wanted to get some revenge for your friends who had been burned beyond recognition in a Missouri cornfield the previous night.
You’d concentrate your forces on the airfield nearest to where the panzer is waiting for nightfall, and you’d have some picket planes move over the area with the best in detection technology, and the rest would be sitting on the runway apron ready to vector in on the panzer once it’s spotted, and turn it into a lightly armored grease spot in some scorched little piece of prairie. That’s what you’d do.
Cowboy puts a map on the display and finds something called the Philadelphia Community Airport only four miles away. It’s far too small to have this kind of traffic coming in and out, and it’s just over a ridge and through some woods. Cowboy begins to smile.
By dusk he’s strapped in his couch and has the engines sweetly warming. He reverses them gently and backs out of the barn, then moves at low speed across some half-rusted bobwire and along the length of the ridge, not quite daring to put his radar signature, however briefly, on top of it. There’s a dirt road here and he finds it, threads along it through a grove of pine that carries with it a memory of the smell and the sound of sweet breezes, the soft pillow of needles underfoot. He leaves the road and moves through a damp bottom, where the sound of his engines is muffled by leaves and moss. Then, moving in a roundabout track, he climbs a woody plateau, nudging young pine, until his expanded vision sees a little radar tower silhouetted against the sunset.
They are all there, a dozen or more warcraft squatting like evil metal cicadas, sunset flames reflecting off their polished bodies, the barrels of their guns, the pointed noses of the weapons in their pods. The airships have slogans and cartoons painted on their noses, evocative of swift mechanical violence, warrior machismo, or the trust of the gambler in the instrument of his passion: Death from Above, PanzerBlaster, Sweet Judy Snakeyes, Ace of Spades. There are a few techs walking about on the apron, tools in their hands. Cowboy permits himself a moment of adrenaline triumph before he cuts loose.
As the panzer trembles on the verge of the clearing Cowboy has a brief image of a runner poised on splayed fingertips, his feet in the blocks, his flesh molding the sinew in which the coiled energy waits, a faultless perfection, for the end of stillness. He unleashes the power and a covey of quail burst like scattershot from before the panzer’s oncoming bow. The engines cycle from murmur to thunder to shriek, and Cowboy can see the techs stand for a moment of frozen horror as the panzer lunges from the trees, mashing down a fence like an armored cyclone, a piece of roaring mechanical vengeance straight from the Inferno–– and then the men in coveralls scatter, crying warning.
Too late. The armored panzer is traveling at over a hundred across the flat ground before it brushes aside the first helicopter. The panzer is heavier by far and the Ace of Spades folds like the hollow death-white abandoned skin of an insect. Cowboy’s popped up his minigun turret from beneath its armored cover and has it firing behind him into the wreckage, sparking off the fuel. Sweet Judy Snakeyes crumbles in front of the armored skirts, then a coleopter named Death from Above, then another called Hanging Judge. Through one of his sensors he catches a glimpse of pilots tumbling out of the airport lounge, coffee cups still in their hands, eyes and mouths wide as they watch the conflagration. Then burning fuel begins to set off ammunition and the pilots drop their drinks and scatter like the quail for cover.
Steel and flaming aluminum alloy storm on the Chobham. In the end Cowboy counts fourteen wrecks on the runway verge. He mashes down some more fence and follows the Salt River to the Father of Waters, crossing between Locks 21 and 22, unmolested by things that fly in the night. Though the sun is long gone, even from deep in Illinois he can still see the western horizon glowing red. He suspects he will hear no more of privateers.
The Illinois defenses face north against a breed of blond, apple-cheeked panzerboys who run butter and cheese across the Line from Wisconsin, and Cowboy expects no trouble. As he gentles the hovercraft up to a fueling barge on the Illinois River, Cowboy decides it’s time to face the music and extrudes a directional microwave antenna and points it at the western horizon.
“Pony Express here,” he says. “Sorry to be a little late with the report, but I got myself an antenna shot away.” There is a kind of angry growl of static in reply, b’s and p’s like magnum rounds, and Cowboy grins as he turns down the volume and talks right over the voice.
“I’m not picking you up very well, but that’s okay,” he says. “I’m in Illinois right now, and I thought I’d mention that I’ve just about run out of Alley and that in the last twenty-four hours I’ve accounted for sixteen aircraft belonging to those undercapitalized bastards. You can read it on the screamsheets tomorrow. Print me some copies for my scrapbook.”
The buzzing sound in his ears is miraculously stilled, and Cowboy grins again. “Adios,” he says, and he turns off the radio and sits in sweet and blissful silence while he watches the fuel gauges climbing upward, toward where he floats in the sky, a distant speck in the eyes of the other panzerboys, so high in the steely pure azure that to the mudboys and dirtgirls of Earth he is invisible, an icon of liberation. He has not simply run the Alley, he has beaten it, smashed the new instrument of oppression, and left it a mass of half-melted girders and blackened plexiglas amid a pool of flaming fuel and skyrocketing ammunition.
Kentucky is a state that figures to make more money from free-spending thirdmen and panzerboys than they can from taxing what they do, and it’s an easy ride across Egypt to the Ohio. Burning across the river, he encounters none of the riverine patrol hovercraft that Ohio has out this way. Cowboy follows some nameless little creek up into the free state until it comes to a farm road, and then he makes another radio call explaining where he is.
What he’s doing is legal in Kentucky, but the state does not appreciate large potentials for sudden violence within its borders, so all the stuff in the weapons pods is very much against the law. Cowboy has to wait up his little farm road for a crew to come along and pull them from the vehicle, and while he waits he takes the torn postdated check from his pocket and looks at it for a long while. By the time a truck full of mudboys comes bouncing along the corrugated road, he’s got things figured out.
It matters, he decides. It matters where the chloramphenildorphine is coming from and it matters who bankrolls Arkady. In Cowboy’s hand is something that represents an obscure, indefinable debt to an anonymous pair of Alley rats, a debt as hard and cutting as Solingen steel, and the obligation is simply to find out.
It is no longer enough to be the best. Somehow, as well, it matters to be wise. To know on whose behalf he wields the sword.
And if he discovers the worst? That the thirdmen are masks worn by the Orbital power? Then another debt is called. The interest alone is staggering, will take years to pay. But he’s called himself a citizen of the free and immaculate sky too long to accept the notion that his world of air has bars on it.
There is a polite knock on the hatch, and he puts the check back in his pocket. The mudboys are telling him it’s time to move. Somewhere in his mind, a steel guitar is singing . . .