Chapter Six
Great, Sarah thinks. A buttonhead. She knows that only people who are serious about their addictions put sockets in their brains.
It’s early morning. Cowboy is standing next to Warren and his panzer as the mechanic explains something, using his hands to diagram an auxiliary power unit that is sending spikes into the servos of an afterburner hydraulic system, explaining how Cowboy ought to avoid using it if possible. The panzer sits on broken blacktop cut by dunes, the asphalt already beginning to melt in the heat, here at the edge of the ocean just north of St. Petersburg where the gulf is turning an old housing development into a barrier reef, dark chimneys standing above the green swell to mark where fish swim among the old cinderblocks. Fore and aft are parked a pair of light trucks with warning flags–– they’ll be moving with the panzer till it reaches the interstate, as is required by law, ground-effects vehicles being able to travel very fast but having a problem with stopping.
The offshore wind plucks at Sarah’s hair. She watches the conversation from a distance, standing by the Hetman’s armored Packard with the unfamiliar weight of the Heckler & Koch on her hip.
She’s chipped in with it now, having fired 200 rounds two days before. She’s been hardwired with the generic chips for this type of weapon, but now she’s got specific data in her ROM: when fired from the hip, the burst climbs this much, pulls so much to the right; when shoulder-fired, it behaves thus. Adding the suppressor does so. All worked into her reflexes. Ready, if the time should come.
And more important, she’s survived. There’s a livid bruise on her ribs, but it was almost worth it, seeing the expression on the faces of a few of her acquaintances when she walked into the Plastic Girl for her appointment the first time she’d been there since her last meeting with Cunningham. She counted a number of double takes, a blunt stare or two, sudden whispered conversations in corners mixed with glances in her direction. People who knew her at least by sight, who’d heard of Cunningham’s offer. Who knew, perhaps, a couple of streetboys who’d met with misfortune, and whose piebald Mercury was found driven into the surf near Tarpon Springs. Who watched her in the bar mirror as she drank a rum and lime, her back to the wall– no sense in being foolish– standing with her hip cocked as if there was already a gun on it, and a smile on her face that said that she knew something they didn’t.
The boy had come, and she’d gone off with him, trailing that smile, walking in the smooth, confident stride that Firebud had taught her, walking as if there was no such thing as fear. The boy’s name was Lane. He carried the gun in the trunk of his car– if he’d brought it into the bar with him, the Plastic Girl’s detectors would have screamed an alarm that would have had him in the crosshairs of a dozen automated systems. Lane opened the rear door for her and seemed pleased when she’d asked to ride up front.
He never made his move. He’d driven south to an old farm by the Little Manatee and brought the gun out of the trunk and showed her how to strip and load it, then stood by while she chipped in. Never knowing that she had figured he was wired himself, and probably with weapons, like the Weasel, that she couldn’t see. Not knowing how ready she was, if he was false even for an instant, to fling Weasel into his face and claw for the right to remain standing, for that particular instant, on that particular patch of terran mud.
She had survived another slice of time, another Moment. She bought a bottle of rum to celebrate, and drank half of it in her hiding place–– not in Tampa’s Venice but across the bay in St. Petersburg, in a stately old office building with green deco bronze on the windows and a marble lobby scored by the spring tide. High above the city, where she could see the sun coming up over Tampa and watch it shine like spun gold on the arches that cross the bay.
Sarah has reason to be pleased. The Hetman’s advance payment is in the hospital’s account, and Daud will get a left leg tomorrow morning. Her final payment, on completion of her task, will pay for the other leg.
The surf hisses across the crumbling concrete beach. Another armored car appears, Andrei’s. The Hetman opens his door and waits.
Andrei isn’t fond of cryo max fashion, and instead dresses conservatively in denim trousers, boots, and a blue satin vest over his T-shirt. He and Michael meet, embrace, talk apart for a while, speaking in Russian. Michael insistent, Andrei reassuring. Sarah catches a word here and there. Their drivers and associates–– bodyguards, mainly–– watch from their vehicles. The Hetman is traveling in three-car convoys these days, and he’s holding his neck stiffly, a result of the armored vest under his baggy blouse. Trying to be ready for whatever it is that he smells on the wind.
A five-ton truck, with its own escort, appears at the verge of the trees, lumbers down to the sand. The Hetman returns to the air conditioning of his Packard. The conversation between Cowboy and Warren ends, and they shake hands. Warren moves to his own car and drives off. The truck drops its loading gate and Cowboy begins supervising the transfer of the cargo. The Hetman, a figure of shadow behind his reflective armored glass, gives a wave, or a blessing, and then his car and escort pull out. Sarah stands alone, feeling the asphalt ooze beneath her boots.
She watches, trying to see what is important. Powerful people, she knows, have their own rituals, their own ways of doing things. A different stance, a different style. Firebud had shown her that, drilling into her the difference between the way a dirtgirl moves and the way a jock glides through her space.
The difference intrigues Sarah. She knows there are hierarchies building here on this corroded old thoroughfare, that power is being exchanged and validated. But she doesn’t know what is important and what is not. Warren and the buttonhead shake hands, while Andrei and Michael give each other the abrazo. Does the embrace confer greater respect, or is the more elaborate ritual necessary in the more shadowy world of the thirdmen, where friendships exist as convenience dictates and alliances can crumble like Venice on a high tide, where more effort is necessary to convey the sincerity of one’s allegiance? Or perhaps it’s just a Russian thing. She doesn’t know.
The hydraulics of the panzer’s cargo bay hiss as the gate closes. The buttonhead is staring out to sea, watching America crumbling into the Gulf. Sarah walks forward.
“My name is Sarah,” she says.
Pupils like pinpricks turn to her. “Flattest damn country I ever saw.” Sunlight gleams from the silver that decorates his head sockets. He frowns.
“Are we moving?” Sarah asks.
“It’s time, I guess,” he says. “I’m Cowboy.”
“I know.”
Cowboy looks at her without any particular friendship. This dirtgirl’s only an inch or so shorter than his six feet four inches, and she walks with a kind of arrogant strut that calls more attention than is strictly necessary to the gun she’s wearing. Despite the mirrorshades, her face has a kind of clarity to it that he likes, a single-minded purposefulness like an old cutthroat razor that has been whetted half away but is still sharp enough to slice edelweiss; but though she probably came by those scars honestly enough, he doesn’t like the way she uses them as part of an attitude, as if every glance was a challenge and every scar a dare. But still there’s no reason to dislike her, so he concludes that things will be all right if she doesn’t keep trying to prove things to herself all the rest of the day.
“This way,” he says, and climbs the frontal slope of the panzer.
He doesn’t turn and offer a hand as she climbs the sunbaked armor, and with Sarah that’s a point in Cowboy’s favor. The silken fingers of claustrophobia touch her nerves as she sees the interior, the passenger and control spaces crammed between the two engines, slabs of Chobham Seven armor, hydraulic and fuel lines. Rows of green and red lights glisten like a faraway Christmas. The place smells of stale air, hydraulic fluid, male humanity. There is, as it turns out, no passenger seat, only a narrow cot with straps that are intended to secure the passenger during high-g turns.
In a scabbard near the hatch is a carbine, one of the light alloy ones, all metal and plastic, that look like they started out as golf clubs. “There’s a headset in there for you,” Cowboy says. “So you can listen to the radio or whatever.” He points at a cabinet door. “Chemical toilet,” he says. “Not what you’re used to.”
“Thanks.” What she’s used to is an old scrub bucket in a marble ruin in St. Petersburg, but she doesn’t say it. She takes off the gun and rolls into the bunk, putting the Heckler & Koch in a far corner and raising the netting. She wonders what Cowboy has in mind for after the delivery, if he intends they should share the bunk. If that’s what he means to do, he has a surprise in store.
The panzer, she decides, is a place only a junkie could love. A cozy cybernetic womb of masculine scent, soft blinking lights, the studs that feed one’s addiction. Whatever Cowboy’s is, she doesn’t want to know. Porn mainlined to the forebrain, electric orgasms courtesy of induction, screaming synthetic highs circuited to the mind, technicolor power fantasies jabbed right into one’s primal need. Sarah looks at the headset with sudden distrust. It might be tuned to Cowboy’s channel, and if so, she isn’t interested.
Cowboy strips unself-consciously and attaches the electrodes and a rubber urine collector. Sarah thinks of Daud, his insensate and lacerated flesh, no more human than an oozing, fresh-killed slab of pork. She tries to shrug deeper into her alcove. Pain chooses this moment to crawl over her ribs. She closes her eyes and puts her head on a naked pillow.
Pumps begin throbbing, hydraulic links hissing. There is the whine of a starter and the shriek of an engine. A lurch as the panzer rises on its cushion, a flutter in her stomach as it wheels and begins to move toward the highway. Sarah shifts in the bunk and the pain in her side fades. Weariness rises like a mist and she feels the tension drain out of her. She is cushioned in someone else’s armored fantasy, being carried to someone else’s destination. Her own armor, for the moment anyway, is superfluous.
The sound of the engine seems more and more distant. Sarah feels sleep beginning to ooze into her mind. It is, she realizes, someone else’s job to get her through this next Moment. She decides to go to sleep and let him get on with his work.
Cowboy’s deep in the face, paying no attention to Sarah once he’s shown her the fixtures. Keeping watch on the columns of green, the video views of the exterior of the panzer. He keeps the escort aware of his intentions, listens to their chatter. Balances the panzer while it runs on only one engine, saving fuel as long as its speed is harnessed to that of the escort.
Once onto the interstate he says adios to the escort and starts the second engine. The surface is pitted and holed, the concrete of some bridges crumbled down to the rebar. Anything with wheels hugs the rightward lane and moves slowly, cursing the chuckholes. The ground-effect panzer rides smoothly on its air cushion, crossing the outer lanes of traffic to the two inner lanes reserved for vehicles moving over a hundred miles per hour.
Cowboy reds out the engines, mindful of his passenger and accelerating slowly until he’s moving at over 200. He’s a lot faster than the bigger cargo-carrying ground-effect jobs and slaloms around them with ease, hearing through his armor the low-dopplered sounds of their saluting horns as he torches past. The slow-moving automobiles are stationary objects. Trees are a continuous green blur. His concentration narrows to the tunnel ahead and the one behind, to the crumbling track over which he roars on his cushion of air, coordinating his video track with the readout on his forward-looking lidar, the instantaneous photon echo, the fluorescent abstract images that might be anything, clouds or boxes or the spectra of subatomic particles in scintillators, superimposed onto his video display and resolving into other vehicles, the guardrail, stands of trees, the outskirts of sprawling cities impacted by war.
The border flashes by–– no customs on the Georgia side but a long line of traffic going the other way into the American Concessions, waiting to pass inspection. He refuels in South Carolina and again in Virginia, robot pumps finding the fuel intakes, engaging without need for human intervention, without even a glance from the bored operator sitting in his bulletproof tower. It’s early afternoon when he crosses the Maryland line and leaves the interstate, finds a patch of flat ground at a rest stop and deflates the cushion, waiting for his escort. He pulls off his helmet and unjacks.
Sarah, to his surprise, seems to be asleep. He had almost forgotten her existence. He disengages the urine collector, which he hasn’t used, and pisses into the chemical toilet. Then he steps up the ladder to open the dorsal hatch and bring in some fresh air. He looks out at the rolling green countryside, the wide crumbling interstate slicing across it, eroding like an artery.
He said good-bye to Cathy two nights before. She had left his life the way she’d entered it, climbing out the eighth-floor window of his hotel room in Norfolk, grinning up from under the brim of the white Stetson he’d given her as she worked her way toward the four inches of brackish tide creeping over East Main. They’d said some things about keeping in touch, but he thinks if they meet again it will be another accident. He doesn’t spend much time in Virginia and she won’t be due for another furlough till next year. It’s pointless to plan that far ahead. The laws might catch him in that time, or the sea might claim her. Best to have a clean farewell.
When he turns around, Sarah is awake and rolling down the netting on her bunk. Half asleep, she seems a lot less hard.
“Want some lunch?”
She nods, running her fingers through her hair. He opens a locker and brings some sandwiches out of the cooler. “What would you like to drink? Coffee? Orange juice? Ice tea?”
“Iced tea.” She swings her legs out of the bunk, accepts the cool plastic container, peels off the top. “Gracias.”
Cowboy leans against the ladder and opens a sandwich. He can hear birds calling through the open hatch. “Were you brought up speaking Spanish?” he asks.
“Spanglish, anyway. My father was part Cuban, part Gypsy. My mother was an Anglo.” Now that she’s awake, Cowboy notices, her cooler personality seems to be taking control, the look in her eyes abstracting off somewhere, not turning dreamy but seemingly involved in some intent calculation. The words “father” and “mother” seem to have some kind of negative charge, as if stripped of any emotional content.
“Did you lose them in the war?” Cowboy guesses.
She gives him a quick glance, as if sizing him in some way. “Yes,” she says. The answer comes too quickly and Cowboy can’t entirely believe it, but also can’t figure out why she’d bother not telling the truth.
Sarah bites a sandwich and looks at him in surprise. “This is real ham,” she says. “Not soy or anything.”
Cowboy swallows chicken salad. “Pony Express riders eat only of the best,” he says.
Cowboy conceals his amusement as Sarah gobbles down two more sandwiches. Jet engines and throbbing props doppler past on the freeway. There are some apricots for dessert. Cowboy looks at his watch. Their escort is a few minutes late.
“Mind if I look out the hatch,” Sarah asks. “I’ve never seen this part of the world.”
“It’s a nice-looking part. Civilized kind of country.”
She straps on the machine pistol. Cowboy watches her.
“You hardwired for that?” he asks.
“Hardwired and chipped.” Her look is challenging again, as if he had somehow questioned her competence.
“That’ll be useful,” he says, pretending he’s glad to know he’s so well protected. “Do you have the full Santistevan or an Owari?”
She gives him a glance, then dons her mirrorshades. Armor, he thinks, for the emotions, like the jacket, the strut, the attitude. “Owari,” she says. That means the hardwiring needs a trigger, usually an inhaled chemical streetnamed hardfire, before it will work efficiently. His own more expensive job triggers on a command from his crystal.
Sarah squeezes past him in the corridor, climbs the short ladder, and props her arms on the edge of the hatch, watching through the heat shimmer of the cooling engines the low green hills, the close-packed corn across the road, a square white farmhouse that looks like something off a postcard.
“I have the Santistevan,” Cowboy says. His voice comes up muffled through the hatch.
“What do you need it for? You do your driving through the face. ”
“I used to fly deltas. We needed arms, legs, fingers, crystal, eyes, everything.”
Sarah hadn’t realized that Cowboy was that much a veteran. He must be good at this if he’s survived so long. She thinks of Maurice, the West Indian cutterjock with his old-model metal eyes and the military Chip sockets on his wrists and ankles, his pictures of dead comrades on the wall. Lost in a past that was brighter than all his futures put together. She wonders if that is Cowboy’s fate, retreating to some cool memory grotto when he finally bashes his panzer up against something that won’t move aside for him, when the last bit of hope dies.
“I knew you had the eyes,” she says. “Standing there in bright sunlight this morning without having to squint.”
Shadows of cloud drift across the quiet landscape. Corn rustles in its rows. She finds herself oddly off-balance in this pastoral scene, not knowing what to expect. Her life is bounded by concrete, steel, ruins, flooded lands, the sea...This long green horizon promises softness, melody, ease.
Sarah glances up, seeing the silver power stations in the sky, keeping watch on the planet for their masters, and then from over one of the low hills comes a robot harvester, a vast alloy machine with a cybernetic heart. No human tills this soil, and no human owns it: the pretty white frame house is either the residence of some employee who supervises the planting of this part of Pennsylvania, or the house no longer belongs to the farm at all, owned by a family that no longer controls the fields that begin just outside their window.
It’s the same as the city, Sarah knows, the same hierarchy of power, beginning with the blocs in their orbits and ending with people who might as well be the field mice in front of the blades of the harvester, pointless, countless lives in the path of a structure that can’t be stopped. She feels the anger coiling around her like armor. The chance to rest, she thinks, was nice enough while it lasted. But right now another fragment of time must be survived.
Three vehicles coil off the interstate, two flying red warning flags. Time for business.
“Our escort,” she says, and raises a hand in greeting.
Andrei has flown up from Florida with his guards and has rented a car along with the panzer escort. He leans a head out of the window as he drives onto the verge, and Sarah tells him all’s well. Behind Andrei the harvester mows corn in its efficient, mindless fashion.
She slams the hatch down and dogs it, sees Cowboy already in his seat, inserting studs into his sockets. Pumps begin to throb. Sarah rolls herself into the bunk as the starter wails. She hesitates for a moment as she looks at the headset, then takes it in her hands and presses it on, one hand guiding the featherweight mic on its hair-thin wire to its place at the corner of her mouth.
Distant music bounces indistinctly in her head, some radio program from far away. There is a selector switch above her ear and she turns it, hearing more music, voices hammering in some Russian dialect, a startlingly clear vid of some glittery drama set in, of all things, an African circus. A turn of the switch and she’s into Cowboy’s interface, jerking with surprise as the green walls of Pennsylvania rise on all sides of her, interwoven with columns, numbers, bright neon colors that are the panzer monitors, all of it seemingly painted on the inside of her skull, overlaid with the data of her eyes and ears. She’s walled out from Cowboy’s mind, a passive observer only, barred from the crackle of decision as Cowboy guides the panzer along the road. It’s less vivid than it would be if she were getting it fed through sockets, like Cowboy, straight to the optical centers of her brain, but still the input is overwhelming, stunning her with its complexity, and she almost rips the set off her head to end the fluorescing burst of sensation.
But she’s used to headsets and what they do, and after a moment settles in. She’s been in simulations of things more complicated than this: orbital maneuvers, auto races, combat. Voices echo in her head, Cowboy chatting with the escort, and she can feel, secondhand, the impacts of his decisions in the twitches of the big rudders, the movement of the jets, the emphasis placed on certain of the displays. After a while Sarah decides it isn’t very interesting.
The panzer travels across twenty miles of decaying road, Sarah seeing a series of hills rising in the west, misty gray and shadowed in cloud. But here is a stake planted by the road with a pair of fluorescent orange streamers, marking the place to turn off. The escort trucks pull onto the grassy shoulder, the drivers waving their temporary good-byes. Andrei’s limo slides into the turnoff. The panzer wallows across a ditch and follows.
The meet turns out to be at another picturesque farmhouse set among shade trees. The others are waiting–– an unarmored ground-effects truck sitting under its four-bladed propellers and a pair of men leaning against a dark blue Subaru limousine. Cowboy’s attention seems to switch to the terrain: there are close-up amplified views of the windows of the house, selected spots behind the trees, the low ridge of ground to the left.
Sarah, her mind strobing colors, reaches blindly into her pocket, finds her inhaler, triggers it once up each nostril. Her nerves burn with electric light.
The panzer moves next to the truck and spins, keeping its jet exhaust away from the truck’s crew while training the off-load ramp toward the truck. Then the engines die and the panzer settles down onto its deflated cushion.
“Keep the headset, Sarah. Cowboy’s voice pulses into her aural centers. “You can talk to me.”
“Can you cut me out of your displays? she asks. “They’re too distracting.”
Abruptly the video dies, the bright colors fading with only the lightest persistence. Sarah shakes her head and rolls out of the bunk. She zips her jacket to the throat and checks the pistol on her hip. She looks at Cowboy, the helmeted figure sitting motionless beneath the shimmering red and green, and hesitates for a moment at the bottom of the ladder.
“Cowboy, she says. “I think you should know something. The Hetman thinks we’re being set up.”
He turns in his couch and she can see his dark plastic eyes looking at her from under the brow of the helmet. “Thanks, Sarah, he says. “But I figured that from the fact that I’m here at all.”
Sarah looks at him for a moment, surprise shimmering in her mind, and then she nods and pops the hatch, climbing the ladder while slipping on her shades. Sullen faces look back at her from the windows of the truck. She slips the Heckler & Koch from its holster and holds it just below the rim of the hatch. The farm smells of fuel, hot metal, and lubricant.
Sarah can feel her shoulder blades tense, as if in anticipation of a shot. Flame runs along her nerve paths. The Hetman sensed something wrong here, and she knows his antennae are good. Her interior landscapes are urban and she’s not used to this kind of terrain, but she decides Cowboy’s eye was intelligent enough and flicks her gaze to the farmhouse windows, the trees, the ridge behind them, then back to the farmyard.
The principals seem to be Andrei and a thin black man dressed in a gray silk suit. He wears a knit wool cap pulled over his dreadlocks and a Cantinflas mustache, just a strip of hair on either side of his mouth with most of the upper lip shaved. The abrazo is absent from their greeting, just a handshake and a quick, murmured discussion of business. The black man turns back to his car and gives an order, and two of his associates, one white, one black, open the trunk and bring out a heavy metal trunk. There is a jolt of recognition in Sarah’s mind, thinking she’s seen the white man before, but they’re both wearing straw sun hats and big shades and she’s met so many big guys without necks in her life that she can’t be sure about this one. They look like men who spend a lot of time working with weights, but the trunk has them breathing hard by the time they get it to the middle of the yard.
The black man bends to open the trunk. Andrei squats down on his heels and inspects the contents while the black man stands back. Under the Cantinflas mustache is a superior smile. Sarah can feel sweat trickling down her spine. Her gaze jumps from the yard to the faces of the men in the truck, to the yard again, then to the ridge behind, then to the windows of the farmhouse. Lace curtains flutter in the windows. She tries to remember if she’s ever seen lace curtains in anything but pictures.
Andrei straightens and turns to give a signal to someone in his car, who raises a hand mic to his lips. Cowboy’s voice rings in Sarah’s head as he acknowledges, and then there’s a gush of hydraulics as the panzer’s armored cargo gate swings open.
Sarah’s gaze flicks to the windows, the truck drivers, to Andrei and the black man walking toward the panzer. Things have separated too much for her to keep good watch. Her nerves are sparking like strings of fireworks. She forces the muscles in her arms to relax. She can feel her own sweat on the pistol grip of the Heckler & Koch.
Andrei and the black man step into the panzer. The black man will be opening boxes at random, checking the seals, checking that the comp matrices are there. Sarah’s eyes; flicker like lightning, ridge to truck to windows. She licks, her lips, tasting salt.
The two men leave the panzer and walk into the yard. Andrei’s two guards come out of their car to carry the gold payment into the trunk. The black man picks at a grease spot in the elbow of his silk suit as he walks toward his Subaru. On the far side of the truck a door opens, and the two men move to get out, to transfer the cargo.
Wrong, Sarah thinks. One of them at least should get out on this side.
“Cowboy... ” she says, eyes flickering madly, neurotransmitters firing along their paths, her mind trying to encompass the yard as the gold thuds down into the trunk, as the black man steps casually behind his car, as his two associates bend to reach into the Subaru.
The air is sliced apart by a rushing, hissing sound, and Sarah sees a silver needle leaping from the upper story of the farmhouse, arrowing straight to Andrei’s car. To Sarah’s hardwired senses it moves slowly, and her mind has plenty of time to scream as Andrei’s windshield caves in, as the rocket burrows into the car and turns into a widening bubble of fire that erupts from the interior, and Sarah thinks, Daud. The bubble touches Andrei and his men and the three are thrown down as if there were no bones in their bodies at all. The scream builds in Sarah’s mind, but she is already moving.
The machine pistol is up and already tracking onto the Subaru. She touches the trigger and the gun rattles, jarring her as she braces against the armor of the hatch. There is an echo to the scream in her mind but she pays it no attention. The bullets from the machine pistol make a metallic spunk-spunk-spunk sound across the trunk of the Subaru, and then the two men bent over by the rear door catch the rest of the burst, and the black man drops like a nerveless bundle of rags and his associate falls backward, arms thrown up over his head, one big hand holding the stock of an automatic shotgun. Spent rounds clatter like falling icicles on the Chobham armor. Sarah shifts and fires again, hearing more spunk-spunk sounds. The white man is sheltered behind an armored door.
The scream in her mind has become the scream of the starters, the big jets beginning to turn, and Sarah almost leaps out of her skin as a slab of armor just aft of her suddenly slams open and a turret rises with jackhammer quickness. There is an insistent hooting sound, a warning siren, as the cargo gate hisses shut. Cowboy’s voice is clamoring in her head, “Behind you, Sarah,” and she wheels around in the hatch and sees one of the two truck drivers peering out from behind his ground-effects craft, ready with a pistol to shoot her in the back. The Heckler & Koch yammers in her hands. She sees the fear in the man’s eyes as he pulls his head back, as the bullets climb spunk-spunk-spunk toward him.
Kawham-kawham. Sarah turns again at the sound of an automatic shotgun concussing the air and sees dust leaping into the air around Andrei as the buckshot strikes. Andrei’s body doesn’t even twitch. The white man is firing over the Subaru’s hood. A harsh purr resounds near Sarah’s ear as the gun in the panzer’s turret opens fire. Thirty-millimeter casings fountain into the sky, and Sarah looks up to see the entire second story of the farmhouse leap into the air in a storm of dust, as if every inch of paint had shed off the wood at the same instant. The turret gun tries to track down to the Subaru but fails–– the realization snaps into Sarah’s mind that the gun is meant to fire at aircraft and can’t depress to ground targets. She snaps some rounds at the man behind the Subaru, but the bolt locks back and she has to reach for another clip, and she has to turn around again to watch the gunman behind the truck. The panzer gives a lurch as it rises onto its cushion. Engine din fills the air.
The upper story of the farmhouse is riddled, a round every few inches. Whoever fired the rocket can’t have survived. Sarah slams a new clip into the machine pistol by feel, swaying across the hatch as the panzer begins to move. It’s moving right across the yard, the armored bow heading the Subaru. Sarah crouches as the man with the shotgun begins to turn, as the shotgun keeps firing kawham-kawham. Pellets rattle off the armor. The man begins to run.
The panzer strikes the limo dead-on, pushing it ahead as if it were of no more weight than a bicycle. The man darts to one side, trying awkwardly to bring up the shotgun. He’s lost his hat and shades. Sarah can feel her chips urging her to stand in the hatch, to bring the machine pistol up in both hands and trigger it . . .
The white man spins as he falls, and Sarah can see the flaring agony in his eyes at the exact moment of her own jarring leap of recognition, and she knows she’s met this particular man before, that she’s looked into those eyes in the rearview mirror, as this particular white man drove Cunningham’s car down the neon streets to her apartment. Cunningham’s big assistant.
Then the panzer smashes the Subaru against the farmhouse and it crumples like a tin can, the panzer bounding off, heading for the ridge, its speed building. Cowboy’s voice is ringing in her mind. “Get down inside, Sarah, you’ve done all you can.” Sarah is still staring aft in shock, staring at the smoking, scattered tableau where Cunningham’s driver lies like a sack of meal.
The turret gun begins to moan again, able to depress now that the panzer’s climbing the ridge, and the unarmored ground-effects truck is riddled, the fuel tanks erupting in washes of flame. No sign of the two men who drove it; they’re probably both chunks of shredded meat on the other side. Cunningham’s man, she thinks. And the rocket. Daud.
The minigun is still firing as Sarah numbly climbs down the hatchway, trying to protect herself against the wild swings of the panzer. She dogs the hatch down over her head and dives for the bunk. Seven-millimeter casings roll jingling across the metal deck.
“Time to hide, Sarah.” Cowboy’s voice comes both in her head and ears. “Time to find a deep hole and hide.”
You can’t, she wants to say. You can’t hide from them.
She pulls the headset off, closes her eyes, and tries to escape into blackness.