Copyright 1986 by Walter Jon Williams Chapter One

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

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crumbling track over which he roars on his cushion of air, coordinating his video track with the

readout on his forward-looking radars, the instantaneous radio 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

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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 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 fieldmice 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, seeing 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

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, even 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.

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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."

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

all."

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.

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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.

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

hack 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