Copyright 1986 by Walter Jon Williams Chapter One

"If I hear that `In it for the ride, not for the cargo' again," he says, "I'm going to

break someone's nose."

The Dodger looks at him. "You used to say that yourself."

Cowboy takes a drink of his lukewarm coffee and hopes the caffeine will keep him going for

another few hours. "Since then I've seen the light," he says.

Jimi rubs his neck muscles. Cowboy wonders if it's time to tell him about the Dodger's

chat with the executive from the Korolev Bureau, who had come up the mountain at Dodger's

invitation to discuss a united front against Arkady and Tempel. The woman had coldly refused to

deal unless the Dodger agreed to terms that would amount to total surrender-becoming a subdivision

of Korolev instead of a part of Tempel, and doing it without a fight.

Korolev's interests were not being threatened here on the ground, she'd pointed out, and

if they were to get involved, they'd want it to be worth their while. The Dodger had turned her

down and concluded Korolev was perfectly happy to see Tempel divert its funds to a war outside its

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attempted takeover of Korolev, but that the company would probably never agree to financing a

popular movement against one of the blocs, even a bloc that was an enemy.

The panzerboys would have to fight without bloc backing. Cowboy thought it was just as

well. In his view, accepting an arrangement with Korolev would have made him no better than

Arkady.

he's already turning fuzzy, and if he turns on his hardwiring, he'll blaze bright for maybe an

hour, and then after his reserves are used up he'll crash and burn. So he decides to give it one

more try and glides back into the interface, seeing the colored framework, the girders and

stanchions and interweaving lattices that represent Tempel Pharmaceuticals I.G.

Thibodaux has built this structure, a four-dimensional representation of the Tempel bloc

and its subsidiaries. Most of it's on the public record, but some of it-particularly the

connection with Arkady-is built up out of inference. The totality of it is enormous, Tempel's

skeletal cool fingers straining several thousand different dishes in search of its profit. Tempel

is so diverse that it's difficult to get a grasp on any one operation; it blends in with a hundred

more, and its tracks disappear among the others. Astronomical amounts of private-issue currency

flash through the files, pour down a thousand chutes, disappear into some nameless laundry and

then reappear elsewhere, no clue as to their origin. Names fly up for brief periods and then

disappear into the fourth dimension, moving timewise through the network, not following what

Cowboy can discern of the organizational structure. Cowboy begins following individual names,

trying to get a glimpse of the way the top people move through the net. Some guy named Marcus

Thorn, a name picked at random, begins in the experimental drugs division in old Earthside New

York, transfers to the Orbital Research Group when the main drug action climbed out of the well,

then shifts with the title of vice president of personnel to something called Acceleration Group

Maximum, run by an up-and-comer named Henri Couceiro. After six years in Maximum, Thorn shifts to

the Luna Division of the Pathology Department. There Cowboy finds another name, Liu McEldowny, who

had been with the Acceleration Group before moving to the Luna Division a year before. Just before

the Rock War, according to the movement flag in the Luna Division box, McEldowny moves back to the

Acceleration Group, stays for a month after the surrender and then heads downside to the Orbital

Freeport Control Commission, which Cowboy knows was the blocs' organizing group for setting up the

Florida, Texas, and California Free Zones.

Thorn stays on the moon for another two years, then becomes chairman of the Solar Power

Satellite Building Committee, which, despite its name, seems mainly concerned with personnel. Here

he reports to Couceiro, who has popped up again as chief executive officer of the entire

pharmaceutical Division. From the SPS Building Committee Thorn moves laterally to a vice

presidency in the Security Division before, two months later, being called to the board of

directors upon Couceiro's assumption of the chairmanship of the whole organization. On the board,

Thorn holds a number of portfolios, including Development and, once again, Freeport Control. One

of his cohorts, big surprise, is none other than Liu McEldowny.

Cowboy traces McEldowny downward through time, finds another connection with Couceiro when

the two were numbers one and five, respectively, in the Erosion Control Subsidiary, which was busy

mortgaging and then foreclosing on tens of thousands of acres of eroded Ukrainian farmland. Cowboy

wanders up the time lattice again and watches the composition of the board of directors shift,

seeing a flurry of activity around the time Couceiro became chairman, the whole board contracting

from twenty-four members to fifteen, with a minor reshuffle among those who remain. He follows

each of the departing members and discovers that three die and several of the rest are transferred

to major positions elsewhere in the company-positions that are, nevertheless, in places like

Antarctica and Ceres. Some of the others are shuttled out when they undergo a crystal-medium brain

transfer into another body, taking demotions until the board can determine if their performance

has been hampered by the transfer. Cowboy concludes that Couceiro is at this point consolidating

his hold on the board and keeping his opposition divided by sending them out into far-off

assignments in the field.

There is another flurry of movement on the board just two years later, directors swapping

portfolios back and forth, another director shuttling out entirely. Cowboy can see a pointer

floating in the lattice indicating a news item culled from a MediaNet screamsheet report. He

follows the pointer and absorbs the report, discovering that this latest movement represents the

collapse of an attempt by the old chairman, Albrecht Roon, to regain his office, a move that fails

by only a single vote. Before Couceiro's assumption of power Roon had been chairman for eighteen

years, before getting his brain shunted to a new body at the age of seventy-nine and being demoted

to the Asteroid Resource Commission-a major post in a bloc stronger in space transportation, but

at Tempel the equivalent of Siberia. From there Roon attempts his comeback and fails, one of his

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supporters on the board being retired permanently and replaced with one of Couceiro's people, Roon

himself being moved downside to head South American Marketing.

That suggests a major fall from grace, from chairman atop the gravity well to exile in

South America within the space of a few years. Cowboy follows Roon's career up and down the Tempel

construct, then follows Couceiro's, something he's done before. The available information doesn't

seem very forthcoming. He's going to have to dig deeper.

He lets the interface fade from his mind and discovers that the Dodger is gone, probably

for his afternoon nap, and that Jimi has fallen asleep in his chair, his drink sitting between his

thighs, collecting dew. Cowboy quietly leaves the house and gets into his Packard, then cycles up

the engine and moves down the switchback paths to the old town of Cimarron, built long ago by that

cheerful old scoundrel Lucien Bonaparte Maxwell, friend to Christopher Carson and William Bonney,

the whole town built because Maxwell owned the largest land grant in the history of the world and

thought there ought by rights to be a town on it. Cowboy studs the Packard's computer into a phone

line and starts calling libraries.

The data's easy enough to find now that he knows what he's looking for in the library

crystal. Roon was born in Bonn, went to school in Leipzig and collected a degree in chemistry,

then joined Tempel Pharmaceuticals I.G. in the same year it began building its first orbital drug

factory. His first assignment in space was shortly thereafter, and the company kept him busy

shuttling up and down for a decade or so, before the company headquarters went into orbit and Roon

went up with them.

Once he was Tempel's chairman, he pushed for independence for the Orbitals, at one point

ordered his jocks into the asteroid belt in defiance of the Space Control Commission, something

that took a lot of nerve considering the fact that Tempel wasn't a major mining company and had

only a few ships to send. Roon was a founder of the first Orbital Bloc Congress, second in power

only to Grechko. It appears that many of the Bloc Congress programs originated with Roon, but he

was willing to stay out of the spotlight and let Grechko take the heat for them. After the Rock

War, Roon was behind the policy of the balkanization of the major Earth powers and the

establishment of the Free Zones under Orbital supervision.

Henri Couceiro was born, of Brazilian parents, in orbit when Roon was still on Earth

working to finish his degree. He was proud of the fact he'd never set foot on Earth, and one of

his more controversial public statements, uttered shortly after his assumption of the

chairmanship, called the planet "just another big asteroid."

Making that statement seems to have been one of Couceiro's few impolitic moves. The

precise movements of his career seem occluded from time to time, but he seems to have spent the

early period moving from place to place in the big Tempel structure as something of an executive

troubleshooter, rearranging programs and structures, making executives toe the line, firing

incompetents. His big break came with his becoming the head of Acceleration Group Maximum, which

Cowboy is no longer surprised to discover was a liaison team with the other blocs, dedicated to

decreasing the Orbitals dependence on Earth by the sharing of resources and the creation of new

technologies. It was also Group Maximum that developed the military plans that led to victory for

the blocs in the Rock War and the sharing of the spoils afterward.

Acceleration Group Maximum seems to have made Couceiro's name. He stayed out of political

positions after Group Maximum's policies were put into place, concentrating instead on developing

a working knowledge of the bureaucracy, eventually moving to head of the Pharmacological Division

and a seat on the board. From there he arranged the board's refusal to allow Roon to continue in

his seat following his brain transfer-apparently the vote was taken after Roon's mind was already

in its crystal matrix-and the first of Roon's demotions was assured.

Cowboy drifts out of Thibodaux's model and thinks for a moment about Couceiro and Roon,

the split between the architect of Orbital independence and the man who helped implement Roon's

schemes. He'll have to run through the model again, picking out each man's allies on the board and

in the bureaucracy, trying to see if there might be some leverage there.

But now, to Cowboy's surprise, there seems to be some movement in the complicated

architecture of the model, red figures appearing along the eye-face lattice, pulsing in rhythm,

resolving into letters that march along Tempel's girders and supports...

COWBOYHELPRENOCOWBOYHELPRENOCOWBOYHELPRENO

Adrenaline shrieks up Cowboy's neck. He screams and yanks the studs from his head, the

interface snapping out of his mind. Looking at the silent crystal display in front of him, he sits

in the Packard and hears his heart crashing in his chest. He reaches a trembling hand out of the

car window and yanks the comp's cable from the telephone.

They've found him, he thinks. There are people on their way to kill him, and he hasn't

brought a bodyguard with him. He looks over each shoulder, trying to decide whether to head

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straight back to the Dodger's or try an evasive pattern through the mountains.

He leans back against the cushioned headrest and puts his hands on the instrument panel in

front of him, straightening his arms, trying to stop the trembling. He's got to face in again to

get the car moving, but he doesn't want to touch the studs, to see those glowing crystal letters

pulsing out their message.

Cowboy moves forward and clears everything out of the car's RAM, which should take care of

any more ghostly communications from Reno, then reaches out and takes the studs in his hands. The

trembling has almost gone away.

He puts them in his head. He's heading straight back to the Dodger's, at the fastest

possible speed. He's pretty sure he can run any pursuers off the road.

Time to find out, anyway.

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Michael the Hetman lights a cigarette with a match that trembles. His eyes are deep and

rimmed in red. "Too bad," he said. "I was afraid my source might not be genuine. I'm sorry I was

right."

prickling the down on her arms. She stuffs her hands in her pockets to control her own shaking.

Her mouth is dry and longs for the touch of cool citrus; tastes instead the dry refrigerated air

of the Hetman's study.

Michael reaches for a squeeze bottle of vodka, lets it fall in a thin silver stream into a

pair of glasses. "It seemed worth a chance," he says.

Sarah has spent the night huddled in a doorway with only her heartbeat for company, that

and the taste of her own sweat. Earlier she'd been waiting with five other people for the Laffite

snagboy that was supposed to come by with an attaché case of pharmaceuticals and only a single

amateur guard, but either the information was part of a setup or the snagboy had smelled something

in the air, because suddenly there were two big armored cars wailing down the street with muzzles

pointing from the black reflective windows, gunfire echoes ringing from the hard surfaces of the

buildings as teflon-coated bullets drilled the concrete and turned brick to powder. The people

inside the cars were hardwired and fast, and though Sarah was careful enough to choose a post with

an escape route, it was still only luck that she got away, the cars chasing others while she ran

through a night that had become a shadowy monster with humid compost breath and infrared scanners

for eyes, its laugh like the chatter of an automatic weapon. The fight had lasted only a few

seconds. The rest of the night hours were spent in the doorway, feeling the moist urban grit of

the sweating wall against her cheek, waiting while the cars patrolled the broken streets, looking

for survivors.

She should put some money down on tonight's body count. It's going to be higher than

usual.

throat, a cold alcohol fire. "It could have bought me another week," Michael says, and sits in a

deep chair of chrome and black leather. He looks at her with his liquid spiderwebbed eyes.

"I've got it worked out," he says quietly. "I've got eight months before everything falls

apart. Your bringing back those crystal hearts gave me one of those months."

He leans back in the chair, gazing at the dark acoustic tiles of the ceiling. Even holding

the arms of the chair his hands tremble. "Tempel cut off my sources, but I can get by with

hijacking for a while, bribery, running things out of my labs-all that and what I have stored. As

soon as the war started I borrowed as much as I could, because I knew my credit would never be as

good. I wanted to be in debt to a lot of people, I wanted me to be worth something to them alive.

"

Sarah closes her eyes, seeing night, sudden movement, spotlight glare, the sheen of laser

"I can fight the war unimpaired for six months," Michael says, his soft accent the only

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sound in this soundproofed fortress. "After that I won't be able to pay off the police anymore,

and then they'll start raiding me. Income will start to decline. After seven months I won't be

able to pay my Maximum Law guards and I'll have to hire nonprofessionals. Sooner or later one of

my friends will decide I'm hurting him too badly just by staying alive."

Sarah opens her eyes to see Michael looking at her, an amused expression on his face.

"You're the only one I can trust with this," he says. "You're the only one who can't

betray me. They want you, too."

"I can't help, Hetman," she says. "I can't change reality."

"I know you can't," the Hetman says. His gaze turns from her, becoming the eyes of a

gambler focused on the wheel as he waits for the silver ball to find his slot. "We can just keep

moving," he says. "Just keep things in the air. And when they fall"-he gives a little shrug-"we'll

try to run, and we can hope we no longer matter enough for them to come after us."

Sarah looks into the vodka glass, seeing it reflect Michael's dark refrigerated interior.

Try not to matter, she thinks, perhaps they won't notice and they'll let you live. Matter the way

Michael and Cowboy matter and they'll take you down. Only the rats survive, never the lions.

And rats never guard each other's back.

ORBITAL COPS RAID TEXAS WAREHOUSE

HOME-BUILT WEAPONS PLANT UNCOVERED

ROCKETS BELIEVED USED IN SMUGGLING

Pony Express, a piece of the night in motion, glides along its parabola like a bow over a

violin, making delicate music. Cowboy's in the eye-face again, feeling the cold air whispering

over the matte-black fuselage of the delta, his nerves thrilling to the wind-whisper of liberation

as he lofts high over the Rockies. His metal eyes search the night sky for infrared signatures.

This isn't a mail run. Cowboy is hunting.

He had driven home like a madman after the day in Cimarron, feeling Reno or whatever was

behind Reno clawing its way up his back like a rush of adrenaline. He'd seen no one that day, no

one following, not even a suspicious glance. No sign of an enemy in the next two weeks. He hasn't

faced into a telephone since. Whatever was behind that message, it is more than Cowboy wants to

deal with.

An amber blip flashes in Cowboy's radar display, and Cowboy looks at it carefully. One of

the rare commercial flights, he concludes, it's too high to be Arkady's plane.

The delta cuts neatly through the air, its vast power muted, under careful control.

Arkady's plane is small and the Pony Express radars aren't very efficient and have a limited range-

until now Cowboy's been much more interested in detecting the location of enemy radars than in

using his own. But he knows Arkady's up here somewhere. The airfield receptionist, on the Dodger's

payroll, has passed on the information that his plane took off just before sunset, and that he was

on it, his hair still rising and changing colors every few seconds.

Neurotransmitters tickle Cowboy's crystal, and the Pony Express banks and sweeps eastward

over Medicine Bow. Electronic ears are extended for the sound of microwave transmissions. Distant

radars pulse weakly on the delta's absorbent skin. Inside the seamless black hood of his helmet

Cowboy can hear only the echo of his own breath, taste only rubber and anesthetic gas.

Cowboy's mind rejoices, feeling the delta's power vibrating under his control. His nerves

tingle pleasure. It's been too long since he possessed the sky.

A silver-white dot moves against the wheeling star field and Cowboy looks closer. It's an

infrared signature all right, and he tilts the delta's nose upward to give his forward-looking

radars a peek, g-forces tugging at the skin around his eyelids. An amber dot appears on the

displays, outlines uncertain. Cowboy pictures himself as a falcon, narrowing its wings as it

prepares to move upon its distant prey.

A steel guitar plays in Cowboy's mind as he floods the engines with fuel, the big plane

climbing toward the diamond stars. The whimper of wind turns to a hiss. Cowboy's spine can feel

delicate vibrations moving fore and aft along the plane's structure as the frame absorbs the

additional stress. Arkady is blind to this, he thinks, and can't know what it's about. Can't come

near the top, thinks only in terms of money and fashion, the cryo max clothes that he hopes will

buy him a ticket into the world where things really happen, and all the while the panzerboys are

building and living their legend and Arkady is frozen outside, trying to pretend he matters.

The infrared signature is nearer, glowing white in Cowboy's vision. Two engines. He's

above and behind the target now, at the top of along parabolic arc, and he lowers the delta's nose

and throttles back, the engine noises dying away almost entirely, left far behind in the craft's

wake.

The target is very close now. Cowboy lowers Pony Express's flaps, feeling the plane fight

the brakes, jarring. The infrared signature is close, cat's eyes in the night. Cowboy takes his

eyes off infrared and can see the dark silhouette nearing him. He has to be certain this is the

right one.

Neurotransmitters flick a switch, and electrons race along the cable to snap on the quartz-

iodide brightness of his landing lights. Suddenly the night is afire with the form of a white

fuselage pinstriped with blue. Arkady's plane, the right configuration. Cowboy can see heads

peering out the windows. The plane cocks one wing up and tries to fall away.

Too late. The plane is already exhaling, air gushing through the holes in the fuselage

made by Cowboy's humming dorsal minigun turret. A wing breaks away, an engine flares and breaks

into pieces, spitting fire and melting alloy. Pony Express arcs over the falling craft, turning

cockpit-down so Cowboy can watch it fall away. He knows it will be at least half an hour before it