They are coming: Sarah can hear the brush of feet on the crumbling carpet. She blinks the sweat from her eyes, opens her mouth wide and tries to breathe deeply, silently. Weasel stirs in her throat, swallowing her tongue. It is possible that these two might actually have guns, and that will mean a very fast evaluation of their strength during the brief seconds they are visible to her, and perhaps a change of tactics. The drug is making her nerves leap, urging her to move. There are dim phantoms dancing at the peripherals of her vision. She forces herself to stand still.
The first one moves past, intent on the footprints, a silhouette for only a second-and Sarah sees a young man with jumpy eyes and a blond pompadour slicked forward, a sleeveless leatherjacket, tattoos on the wiry upper arms, a club–– no, a baseball bat–– hanging loosely in the left hand. And then the next appears in the frame of the doorway, and Sarah is moving.
She sends the Weasel for his eyes, a straight-out strike like a flicker of lightning, but he’s seen the movement out of the corner of one eye and manages to jerk his head around, and Weasel strikes a glancing blow to the cheekbone that leaves a red furrow... But the strike has brought his hands up high to cover, leaving him open for the thrusting kick she delivers to his midsection with all the force of her moving body. He staggers, his arms flailing. The ice-gleam of a knife reflects shards of light over the carpet, disappears into the darkness. Sarah retracts Weasel and takes a gulp of air, already spinning toward the guy with the baseball bat. Both of these boys, she realizes now, are shorter than she is; she’ll take whatever reach advantage she can.
A glance over her shoulder for a rear kick into the knifeboy’s midsection that helps to propel her forward and the knifeboy back, he landing on his tail with an eruption of breath while Sarah flies like a spear to the target; but pompadour’s too fast. The bat’s swinging in a hissing arc before the boy even sees what’s coming at him, and Sarah’s moving forward and knows she’s going to be hit. She tries to buffer it with her arm but takes it almost full force in the side, her armored jacket spreading the impact but not enough. The breath goes out of her in a rush and she slams into the wall; but as she bounces she’s already spinning inside the range of the bat. She can smell the lilac scent of the grease on the boy’s hair as she goes for his eyes with her nails.
He drops the bat, which is what she wants, and grabs her wrists, bearing down, hauling her arms apart, crucifying her for the knife from behind. His tattoos ripple as he matches her strength. She tries for his groin with her knee but he turns a hip and takes the strike on his thigh. There is a grin on his face now, partly just the rictus of combat, but Sarah can tell that he’s pleased he has a woman where he wants her, helpless, spread across his front.
She puts Weasel through his left eye and the grin becomes a bubbling scream. He falls, a bundle of random movements, blood welling up into the ruined socket. Weasel may have scarred part of the forebrain. Sarah’s already retracting Weasel to strike again, spinning just in time to block a kick and a punch from the knifeboy, but another punch strikes her breast and she feels pain crackling up her all-too-efficient nerves.
He’s wired-Sarah can tell that right away. The reflexes of a second dan or so implanted in crystal in his animal brain, hardwiring to boost his speed. But the reflexes of a five-foot-two Korean do not necessarily adapt to a six-foot Occidental without a lot of practice, and that kind of discipline is foreign to most of the streetboys Sarah has ever met... Sarah has interwoven her own reflexes with those of her chips, making the hardwired reflexes her own, integrating their patterns with Weasel.
Their fight is sharp and close, the blood from his cut cheek spattering her as they punch, grapple, butt. Weasel leaves bloody weals on his forearms as he tries to block its strikes. She comes in close and drives her forehead into his face, and then she is standing over his unconscious body as she fights for breath and listens to the sudden clamoring stillness. Stars are flickering in the extremes of her vision. The pain that her fear had denied is having its revenge. Sarah massages her breast and ribs, breathing hard, leaning for a blessed moment against the mildewed wall. She finds the knife and baseball bat...and wonders, for a moment, what kind of message she wants to leave.
These are not Cunningham’s people, obviously, just a couple of streetboys going for a reward, not fully understanding what league they were trying to play in. Vicious and stupid though they are, Sarah can’t really bring herself to leave a pair of bodies here in the ruined hallway, but yet it might be politic to leave an example for other streetboys who might consider trying the same thing. A pair of high-visibility object lessons in plaster casts might work wonders. The pompadour has lost part of his brain anyway, so Sarah settles for breaking his left arm with the baseball bat. The knifeboy will wake up with a pair of smashed collarbones. Sarah tosses the baseball bat through an apartment door, retrieves her pocketbook, and leaves with the keys to the Merc.
By the time Sarah climbs onto the causeway her ribs are throbbing with each step. The Mercury’s seat is patched with duct tape and scorches her thighs with its baking heat. A Miraculous Medal hangs from the rearview mirror. She has to move the seat back to give room to her long legs.
She starts the machine and races up the causeway, heading for St. Petersburg, sweeping past the gutted shells of Venice. The sea breeze gusts through the window and cools her. She can feel the hardfire wearing away, her nerves slackening, the adrenaline wave teetering on the edge of a crash, and so brings the inhaler from her pocketbook and gives herself another rush to carry her across the waters of the bay.
In front of her a city is melting in the afternoon heat. She tastes the rushing wind as she arcs high over the water. Soon, Sarah knows, she will reach the peak, begin her fall. But not just yet. For now, she wants only to keep climbing.
Chapter Five
Arnold is a young panzergirl with wiry, muscled arms and dark hair cut short around her sockets. She’s got a good reputation, has been running freelance for years. For the last two days, she’s been a member of Cowboy’s party.
It’s been a ten-day celebration, a series of binges up and down the Rockies, filled with a revolving-door succession of panzerboys, mechanics, thirdmen, retired deltajocks who could never learn the new technology...the large, loose, migratory network that likes to think of itself as the underground. They’ve been toasting their new legend, the man who opened Missouri to their midnight traffic. The party’s current location is the bar of the Murray Hotel in Livingston, Montana, and it will probably stay here for a couple of days while people move in and out, buying Cowboy drinks and trying to absorb a part of his legend.
Cowboy’s panzer is sitting in a hidden barn in West Virginia. It’s too dangerous to bring it back, even on a legitimate run on the highways without cargo, so Cowboy took the bullet train west from Pittsburgh to Santa Fe, and since then he’s been careening in his Maserati up and down the mountain states from one panzerboy watering hole to the next.
Talking to people, mostly. He’s got reasons.
“Your last run had problems, right?” he says.
Arnold grimaces into her bourbon/rocks. Country hob thuds from the dance floor, where panzerboys and local ranchers are putting more energy into sizing each other up than into dancing. Some little blond girl has laser earrings that are tracking red fire on the walls and the other dancers, on the surprised face of the bartender. Cowboy can catch glimpses of her among the dance crowd.
“Two runs ago,” Arnold corrects him. “One of the Sandman’s fuel trucks didn’t make the rendezvous. Had to hide the panzer in a fucking coulee for two days. With a town just over the next ridge. I could’ve been taken by a farmer in broad daylight.”
“The Sandman ought to have paid you a bonus for that.”
Her look is scornful. “Him? You kidding?”
“Someone,” Cowboy says quietly, “ought to’ve made him.”
The bourbon pauses en route to Arnold’s lips. She puts the glass down and looks at him. “Who did y
ou have in mind, Cowboy?”
The blond dancer’s laser earrings track a dancing spot of crimson light across Arnold’s cheek. Cowboy feigns nonchalance and signals the bartender for another round.
“Maybe we ought to’ve,” he says.
She seems surprised by the notion. “The two of us?”
“The two of us. And some others:”
Arnold glances over her shoulder, sees no one, and lowers her voice anyway. “What are you getting at?”
“Just that this business is getting real organized. The thirdmen have their networks on both coasts. They bribe people who run labs, work through cutouts. Hire people to hijack the stuff for them. They’re not on the line themselves. The distributors all work for one another. The Orbitals have half the laws in their pockets. What risks are any of those people taking?”
“None,” says Arnold. Just like Cowboy wants her to.
“We put ourselves on the line, Arnold,” Cowboy says. “For piecework. We’re work for hire. Sometimes we have agents working for us, like the Dodger, but if the Dodger cuts a deal that isn’t enforced, he can’t do anything about it. We’re weaker than these other people, and sometimes we pay for it. You spent two days hanging your ass in a damn coulee, and none of it was your fault.”
The bartender brings the new round. Arnold looks over her shoulder again. “I don’t know if I should listen to this, man,” she says. “I’m in it for the ride, not the cargo.”
“I’m just suggesting that the people who take the risks ought to have something to say about what goes on.”
“You’re talking union.”
“Nope. An association of independents. Just to keep the thirdmen up to the mark. To remind them that if it weren’t for people like us, they wouldn’t have their limos, their mountain homes, their cryo max.” Cowboy jabs a finger into the bar to help make his point. “We’re the ones in the field making legends while the thirdmen are knocking back cinnamon vodka in their padded bar chairs. ”
Arnold grins at him. “Cinnamon vodka? Cryo max? You got a particular thirdman in mind?”
Cowboy figures she isn’t ready, just yet, for what he has to say about Arkady. “Not me,” he says.
She shifts closer to him, leaning her elbow on the padded bar. “If it weren’t you saying this, C’boy, I’d turn around and walk right out of this bar. ”
He smiles. “Lucky it’s me, then.”
Her artificial eyes look into his. “How many people have you told about this?”
“Maybe half a dozen. I’m not broadcasting it.”
“You better not be. Shit.” She tosses off the last of her bourbon, then reaches for the new glass. “I still think I ought to walk out of here.”
“Walk then.”
She looks at him again, bites her lip. He holds her gaze for a long moment. She drops her eyes.
“I’ll think about it,” she says. “That’s all I’m saying.”
“Think about it as long as you need to. Think about it next time you have your ass on the line in some coulee.”
She shakes her head, laughs. “If it weren’t you, Cowboy...”
He grins, sips his drink. “It is me,” he says. “It’s lucky I exist. ”
Arnold’s warning look appears suddenly as a pop-up minigun. She puts a hand on his arm.
“Not so lucky for some people, if this actually works.”
“I know. ”
“If those people find out about this, you won’t live twenty-four hours. ”
“I told you. I’m being careful.” He swallows bourbon. “Who else do you think I should talk to? Who’s safe?”
She looks over the room, chewing her lip. Red laserlight flickers in her eyes. “Vlemk, maybe. Ella. Soderman. Not Penn, he’s too close to Pancho.”
“Jimi Gutierrez?”
Arnold shakes her head. “Hard to say what that boy thinks. He’s too crazy for his own good. He’s got good instincts, but maybe he likes to talk too much.”
A few more names come up, and Cowboy vetoes them. Arnold seems to take comfort from the fact that he doesn’t take her every suggestion, that he really is being discreet.
The hob thuds to a finish, and dancers begin to disperse. Cowboy finishes his drink.
“Think about it. Talk to me later,” he says. “Right now, I think I’ll dance.”
“Yeah. Talk to you later.” Her eyes abstracted, her face muscles tense. Thinking hard.
He walks up to the girl with the laser earrings. She’s wearing a strange uniform coat across her shoulders and she doesn’t look like one of the locals, but he’s never seen her with the panzer crowd before. She looks up at Cowboy as he approaches, and he notes the curly hair, the inhaler in her hand. She fires a pair of torpedoes up her snub nose, then holds out the inhaler.
“Snapcoke,” she says. “Want some?”
He takes the inhaler. “Is snapcoke your name?” he asks.
She gives a short, wired laugh. “Might as well be. But my name’s Cathy. ”
The snapcoke numbs his nose and fires his nerves. Music begins to slam from the walls.
Cathy turns out to be a surprisingly energetic dancer, doing leaps and kicks that have her laser earrings dancing red on the walls. They dance the next two dances, then Cowboy offers to buy her a drink. While they walk to the bar, he asks her about the uniform coat.
“I’m a lieutenant in the Coast Guard,” she says.
Cowboy’s surprised. He didn’t think the Coast Guard existed anymore. “No shit,” he says. “Tell me more.”
It turns out she runs a lifesaving cutter out of Norfolk, plucking unlucky sailors from the forty-foot steel-gray chop off Hatteras. She’s on a three-week furlough, hitching across the West and free-climbing vertical mountain walls just for fun.
“I’m going to Yellowstone tomorrow. I’m climbing Medlicott Dome.” She looks at him. Her earrings dazzle his eyes. “Want to watch?”
“I don’t think I have any other plans.”
But just then a new wave of panzerboys swarms into the bar, just arrived from setting up a run across the Dakotas. One of them is Soderman, and Cowboy particularly wants to talk to him. He buys Cathy some more snapcoke and apologizes.
“Business. You know.”
She shrugs. “See you later, maybe.” And fires a pair of torpedoes to keep herself company.
Soderman’s reaction is a lot like Arnold’s. He looks at Cowboy with a respect tempered with an uneasiness very close to fear. “I don’t know about this,” he says. “If it were anybody but you...”
Cowboy’s heard this from just about everyone he’s talked to, and it’s doing wonders for his sense of self-esteem. He figures he’s got enough prestige to put the machine together and make it run, that enough panzerboys will think he’s making sense to join the association. But he also knows the thirdmen won’t like this at all, that they might consider it a regrettable necessity to make sure Cowboy doesn’t come back from his next run. So he’s spreading the word. Quietly. Hoping to make the thing a reality before certain people find out about it.
When he finishes talking to Soderman, he looks out on the dance floor for Cathy and doesn’t find her. These athletes, he thinks, they keep sensible hours. So he dances with Arnold and a couple of the local girls, and he accepts a white Stetson somebody wants to hand him. He tips it back on his head and walks up to his third-floor room.
A few minutes after he turns on his light there’s a knock on his window. He’s surprised to see Cathy’s grinning face peering in, her snub nose pressed to the pane. She’s freeclimbed the brick wall, hanging by fingers and bare toes. He opens the window to let her in. “I like the hat, ”she says. Her sneakers hang around her neck by their laces, and she’s stuffed a small bottle of bourbon in one of them. Cowboy closes the window, and about fifteen seconds later they’re in bed together.
She’s got a compact, well-muscled body, and he’s surprised by her strength. “I hang by my fingernails a lot,” she says. “You’ll see tomorrow, if you
join me.”
So the next day Cowboy moves his party to the Yellowstone, and he watches in hopeless terror as Cathy spends most of the day free-soloing the granite face of Medlicott Dome, her boots hanging in space while she supports herself by her fingertips. She doesn’t even use safety lines.
When she comes down, Cowboy goes to hug her and is appalled by the state of her hands, the broken nails, the blood running down her wrists... He picks her up and carries her to a sink, runs hot water and soap, then bathes her hands. “You do this for fun?” he asks.
Her eyes smile up at him. “I do everything by the book when I’m on my cutter,” she says. “I’ve got the crew to think about. But out here I like to climb everything without a safety line.”
She puts her hands on his shoulders. He can feel soap and water soaking through his shirt. “Everything I can,” she repeats, and she climbs up his front to kiss him, wrapping her wet hands around his neck as her tongue slides deliberately into his mouth. She’s small enough so that he can hold her without strain, and they complete the carnal act standing up, occasionally banging into bathroom fixtures. Later that night her unhealed cuts break open, and in the morning Cowboy finds bloodmarks on his chest and back.
A couple of days later Cowboy finds he can’t watch as she climbs New Dimensions, so he spends the day in the hotel bar with his friends, keeping the party going. Cathy comes back in the early evening with a burrito in one broken hand and an inhaler of snapcoke in the other. They spend the night climbing each other, exploring chimneys, faces, crevasses. Cowboy thinks she’s perfectly crazy.
It’s not a bad party, though.
A week later Cowboy watches as a giant moon walks its slow patrol in the blue midafternoon sky, bracketed at this point of its beat by a pair of silver dots, power satellites in GEO, feeding their junk into the scarred veins of Earth. Below, the aspens writhe up the Western Slope, trying to caress the gibbous face, doomed by gravity to fail. Everything in orbit around Earth is assumed hostile, the aspens therefore are collaborators. It’s an inescapable conclusion, sad but true. Cowboy shakes his head in sorrow and drinks another mescal.
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