Copyright 1986 by Walter Jon Williams Chapter One

hardfire, needing desperately to be high.

"I heard from Reno. I told you he'd be useful."

Sarah fires the torpedoes, throws her head back. Her hardwiring screams as the

neurotransmitters multiply. Reno had broken open the entire Tempel distribution net on the East

Coast, from Havana all the way to Halifax. Half their people had been assassinated within a two-

day period, the other half were running and wouldn't be doing business anytime soon. Michael's

people had raided so many warehouses they were at a loss as to where to put the stuff. News

datalines screamed the statistics on every street corner, while officials ducked for cover and

offered no comment.

"They're getting desperate," Sarah says. Her hands tremble and she reaches for the table

edge to steady them.

Friends, she thinks. When we can afford to be. She is going to have to give them the

Hetman soon. And give him as well the nature of Roon's part in the Hetman's plans, which will be

the only piece of pleasure in this sorry business.

"Michael says that Reno's given him another four months," she says. "Reno's in his tank

now. The Hetman paid for it. Have you heard?"

"Yeah. He called me from there."

Reno's tank is a crystal matrix in Havana, ready to move into a cloned body as soon as DNA

can be found to approximate his original appearance and a new body grown from it. He was beginning

to feel paranoid living in the Tempel computers, knowing that sooner or later they'd start looking

for an intruder program.

At least Reno's body and the operation is paid for in advance. When Michael falls, Reno

will be out of the way.

"Our friend in South America is almost ready," Cowboy says. "He's got the date."

Sarah feels ice form in her veins. The deadline is coming.

"When?"

"Five days from now. We figure on moving you out by bullet in three days."

"I'll have to prepare Daud," she says. "And arrange to see the Hetman."

That, she thinks, is when it will have to happen. Feed them Roon at the same time. And

then, a part of her thinks, a call through secure lines to Cowboy to let him know that he's just

crashed, that all his plans and hopes are going up in flames on some mountainside labeled Reality,

that it's time to say good-bye.

"Say hi from me," Cowboy says. Sarah remembers the way he looked a few months ago, when he

was sitting in the armored cabin of his betrayed panzer outside Pittsburgh, the fear and

bafflement and anger in his eyes...When the news comes, will the look be the same? Sarah wonders.

When we can afford to be. The operative phrase.

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After the conversation she decides that she needs the hotel bar. Her guard isn't happy but

allows it. She sails down the elevator and submerges herself in thudding litejack, shouted

conversation, dark rum served neat, a softglow high out of the bar inhaler that smooths the

hardfire jitters. She looks at the single men in the room, wondering about the possibility of

letting one come to her room, of letting the high she's feeling peak in orgasm, in the necessary

obliteration. But when one approaches her, she brushes him off. There's plenty of time.

She notices a crowd around one of the games at the other end of the bar. She picks up her

drink and wanders over, hearing the hum of laserfire, the rush of missiles. Delta, the game is

called. A black man is strapped into the seat, his head obscured by a sensory helmet that feeds

him information, letting him feel the jar of missiles cutting loose, the pull of g-stresses. A

wide-screen video unit above the machine gives other customers a glimpse of his play.

Government liteweights pounce from the sky. The sun glitters off the rotating fins of

turning missiles. Radar displays scream for attention. Liteweights dodge, leap, explode in flaring

ruin, draw charcoal fingers across the sky.

Sarah loses interest and decides to go back for another round of softglow. She turns to

step away and meets the metal eyes of a man in a wheelchair. Memory jars her.

"Is it Maurice who's playing?" she asks.

The man nods. His eyes stay on the display above his head. "Yes. It's the closest we can

come."

"Tell Maurice hi." The video cockpit gushes flame as an enemy missile strikes home.

endlessly rerunning the war he fought and lost.

Maurice tries to eject, fails, tumbles to the earth like a broken dragonfly. Before he can

raise the sensory helmet from his face, Sarah turns and drifts away with the murmuring crowd.

LIVING IN PAIN CITY? LET US SEND YOU TO HAPPYVILLE!

-Pointsman Pharmaceuticals A.G.

Andre is dressed in tailored jungle fatigues, even to the cap. His stainless-steel irises

gleam from the shadow of the brim. His inevitable pens are fixed to the breast pocket with

camouflage velcro straps.

"We don't think," he says, "that you've been entirely candid. "

Sarah cocks her hands on her hips. "Que?" she says softly.

"We think that you know more than you're giving us." His voice is soft, his inflections

unhurried. As if he's made some decision. He takes a step toward her.

Sarah's mouth is suddenly dry. She runs her corrugated tongue over her palate, sandpaper

on stone. She looks left and right, seeing patients in bathrobes and pajamas. "What do you think I

know?"

like a pair of gunsights. His calm voice drones on. "We're going to make you disappear for a few

hours. Give you a few drugs, let you talk. You won't be hurt."

Sarah tries to calm the hardfire pulsing adrenaline messages through her body. A cold

inner voice, a soulless inflection like Reno's, tells her he's got more chips, more talent. If she

fights, she'll lose. "I've got a guard, Andre. The Hetman will know."

"We have a story ready for Michael. We tried to snatch you. You got away."

She shakes her head slowly. "He's not going to believe that. "

Andre takes another step toward her, only inches away. Her flesh prickles. She can feel

his breath against her face, taste spearmint. "Turn around," he says. "Look out the window. He'll

believe the evidence-"

She can feel the hairs on her neck erect as she turns. He can hit her from here, and she

has only instinct to tell her where and when.

From the front window she can see her Maximum Law escort car stretched out by the curb,

the color of blued steel. The windows are mirrors, but she can see the driver as a vague shadow

behind the silver glass.

A girl is coming down the street in a bicycle. Brown-skinned, young, her hair in pigtails

braided with yellow ribbon. She's reclining in the bucket seat of an alloy bicycle, feet first,

low to the ground, moving fast behind an aerodynamic shield. In her lap is a woven basket with

artificial daisies plaited around the rim. She's wearing a white blouse with bright red patterns.

As she rides she laughs to herself. Her teeth are white and contrast brilliantly with her dark

face.

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And then the bicycle is skimming past and there is a thud, hardly perceptible to Sarah through the

double panes of window glass and the insulating walls of the hospital. The driver's window of her

car flies outward, brilliant bits of mirror gushing up in a sunlit expanding funnel...

"Sticky bomb with a half-second delay," Andre says. His tone is low, conversational. "Put

a shaped charge right through the window glass. I don't think your driver got out of the way. "

Sarah is suddenly aware that she hasn't been breathing. She lets the air out of her lungs,

breathes in. Neurotransmitters are multiplying, racing from her crystal. Her veins are smoking

with adrenaline. The cybersnake waits coldly, uselessly in her throat.

They're going to get it all, she thinks. She knows she won't get paid, but maybe they'll

let her live. And Daud has his ticket, that's something.

The last bit of mirror flutters to the pavement. Another car pulls up behind the Maximum

Law car. Two men in summer suits get out, walk to the shattered window. Facing the car, visible

only from the chest up as they draw pistols from their belts, they look, ludicrously, as if

they're getting ready to piss on the polished blue finish.

"Silenced pistols," Andre says. "If your driver has a head left, he's going to lose it."

Spearmint whispers coolly into Sarah's nostrils. Behind her in the room there is a low

murmur of patient conversation. The assassins zip up their pants and start walking up the drive.

Their car pulls away from the curb.

Sarah sees government liteweights bursting on the screen. Cowboy's head under the sensory

helmet. The look in his eyes, the look of someone whose dream is broken and is desperate in search

of another.

There is a smile of pleasure in Andre's voice. "We're going to wring you dry, Sarah," he

says. "You have no choice. We've bought you and we're going to have you."

Sarah lets her head fall, gulps air. She knew all along, as soon as she saw Andre, that

this was going to happen, and that she was going to let it. That Andre would enjoy it. That his

stainless-steel irises would dilate with satisfaction as her struggles ceased and the drugs took

hold of her mind, as she began babbling her every thought into their cold, waiting crystal.

"Come along, Sarah," Andre says. "Time for, your ride."

It's the tone that does it. Sarah has sold herself, and she can live with that, accept the

consequences. But the idea that the man who has bought her will take such pleasure in

it...Something in her screams outrage. She remembers a droning voice, a razor, a blur of movement,

abstract patterns of red, like paint. Weasel stirs. Her chips are spitting instructions and the

neurotransmitters are multiplying along their chemical pathways before she even knows she has made

a conscious decision.

She takes a step back with her right foot, toward Andre. Her fists cock up toward her

chest, where she knows he can't see. Then her weight shifts back and she is spinning, her right

arm lashing out with a back-knuckle blow aimed at Andre's temple, the torque of her upper body

behind it.

Andre blocks it, of course. Foolish to think otherwise-he is wired himself. But when his

hands come up, she changes her movement from a blow to a sweep, gets her hands and forearm over

both his hands, driving down his guard. Follows it up with a lash from Weasel, aimed at Andre's

throat...

From somewhere there is a dry steel click, like a hammer going back...

And her weight is already shifted forward to the right foot, her left coming up in a

wheeling kick aimed high, a kick he can't even see because when it was launched Sarah's fist and

his own two hands were in the way. By the time Andre sees the blur to his right, the only thing he

can do is to try to hunch down into his shoulders and roll with it.

Too late. The kick has all of Sarah's weight behind it, all six feet three inches torqued

in by hip and shoulder and concentrated along a few square inches of Andre's reluctant skull.

Sarah's shin impacts Andre's temple with enough force to send shards of pain shrieking along

Sarah's leg. Andre falls like a sack of sugar, his every nerve misfiring. Something extrudes from

between his lips.

Sarah recovers her balance, steps forward with her left foot, and delivers a rising kick

with her right boot-tip square between Andre's eyes. Andre's head bounces back, hits the floor,

bounces again. A cybersnake flails uselessly from his mouth, a glistening metal whip looking for

something to kill. Maybe Andre is dead. Sarah doesn't care.

One eye is open, one shut. Sarah stares into the open eye, ignoring the whipping

cybersnake, seeing something wrong. The stainless-steel iris is dilated wide and there is a hole

where the pupil should be, and Sarah remembers the sound of that click. She looks down at herself,

sees the steel needle stuck in her armored jacket, and feels the fear begin, clamping on her in a

wave of nausea.

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Andre's eyes, like gunsights because they were gunsights. A spring-loaded dart gun,

snapping up into place on command, firing through the porthole pupil. Sarah reaches a hand to the

dart, pulls it out, feels a tug in her flesh. The dart is slippery and squirts from her forgers,

leaving a trace of something like oil on her fingertips. It went through the jacket, slipping

through where a blunt-nosed bullet would be stopped cold. Less than a millimeter into her flesh,

she suspects, but maybe enough.

Sarah raises her fingers to her nose, sniffs, smells a faint medicinal scent. Drugged,

then. It didn't penetrate very far, so maybe she didn't get a full dose.

"Who is that?" An elderly patient, staring through thick glasses and stammering in

outrage. Andre's cybersnake is beating itself to death against the sound-deadening carpet. Sarah

is already moving, running down a pastel corridor to Daud's room.

He's exercising, lying back on his bed while he works with the weights, letting Mslope

watch his muscles move under the pale skin. "Daud," Sarah breathes, skidding through the door.

Mslope is rising from his seat, his eyes wide with alarm. "Out," Sarah says, and she can

see pain forming in the man's eyes, the knowledge that his moment is over.

She pays him no attention. She runs to Daud, seeing the alarm entering his face. He lets

the weights go and there is a crash.

"Things have gone wrong. They tried to kidnap me." She presses her cheek to Daud's,

whispering in his ear. "If I get away, call me at the same number as last time. Randolph Scott,

Santa Fe. Don't call from here; this phone is not secure. "

"Sarah." His eyes are wide with fear. "I thought things were set. I thought-" She takes

his head in her hands and kisses him, a fierce kiss that maybe he'll remember through what is

going to come.

"I love you," she says, and is running again. Abandoning him as he cries her name again,

as he tries to catch her clothing with a hand. Sarah tries to blot out his voice. She can feel the

first delicate touch of whatever drug was on the needle, something wrong with her nerves, the

feathery pat of a kitten that has not yet unsheathed its claws.

She's mapped out the hospital and knows where to go. Down the green pastel corridor, left

at the pink pastel intersection. Daud's last cry is ringing in her ears. Her shin aches with each

step. She reaches a steel door, takes a last breath of cold air, and, keeping her silhouette low,

rolls out into the furnace of afternoon.

A truck turbine dopplers past on the limited expressway. Her brain whirls as she staggers

to her feet and runs clumsily for the truck stop behind the hospital. If she can get across the

expressway, she'll be able to lose herself in the rows of residential flats behind. The drug has

just dug in with its claws and each steps seems to wade through gelatin.

SARAH THIS IS CUNNINGHAM...SARAH YOU CANT GET AWAY

Suddenly there are amber lights above her vision. Someone's broadcasting to her on her

optical-tagged radio, her crystal translating the spoken words into moving print. She doesn't have

the control for it and can't turn it off. "Go the fuck away," she mumbles.

ALL WE WANT IS COOPERATION SARAH

She snorts her disbelief. "Go away. You're not even Cunningham I bet." A truck turbine

begins to whine by the automated fuel pump, its tone rising. Sarah shakes sweat from her eyes and

hops a low cinderblock fence, catches a foot, almost falls. Then something smashes her between the

shoulder blades and she goes down.

Concrete bites her breasts, her cheek. She has lost her breath and can't find it. Her

hands flail out, scrabble at the concrete. She realizes she's just been shot. Someone behind at

the hospital, with marksman's crystal and a pistol.

STAY WHERE YOU ARE SARAH WE WILL FIND YOU WE ONLY WANT TO HELP

"Bullshit," she says wearily. She finds that she can't stand, that she can only crawl. She

feels the touch of grit against her palms. She creeps, slithers, rolls. Feels her shoulders

tensing for the next shot.

It's only then that she realizes that it's lucky she couldn't stand up. She's been hidden

from them behind the cinderblock wall. But she knows they're sprinting for her, that the two

assassins in their summer suits will be appearing above the wall shortly.

Turbines are shrieking within an inch of her skull. Tires crunch gravel and something

comes between her and the sun. A robot tractor-trailer rig, backing slowly away from the automated

pumps. The assassins are on the other side of it, she realizes, and she rolls to her feet, falls

to one knee, staggers up again. As the truck cab passes her, still in reverse, she seizes the

safety bar and steps up onto the ladder leading to the observation cab.

The turbine whimpers. Gears clatter. The truck begins to lurch forward, almost throwing

Sarah off. She hugs the safety bar, then moves a foot up on the ladder. Moves a second foot.

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Seizes the emergency door latch and pulls on it. There is the sound of a warning buzzer, very loud

in Sarah's ears.

"This is an unauthorized entry," a voice recites. "Trespassers are subject to penalty upon

discovery."

GIVE IT UP SARAH...WE DONT WANT TO HURT YOU

"Entrance may not be made safely when the tractor is in motion. This is an unauthorized

entry. Trespassers are subject to penalty upon discovery."

JUST LIE DOWN WHERE YOU ARE WE WILL FIND YOU

"Shut up." The truck lurches through another gear change. Pavement is moving by at a

faster rate. Sarah's vision contracts, her head swimming with the drug. Her arms tense on the

safety bar, pulling her up. Pain cries through her arms, her spine. She kicks out and hauls

herself blindly into the cab, draws a breath, reaches behind her to pull the cab door shut. She

can hear the solid chunk of electromagnets drawing shut a pair of metal bolts. The turbine howl is

muffled.

"This is an unauthorized entry. You have been secured in the cabin until the tractor

reaches its destination, where you will be turned over to the authorities. If this is a genuine

emergency, you may contact the police on the red telephone located on the dashboard."

The message repeats itself. Sarah gives herself over to pain. She can feel blood trailing

warmly down her neck. She coughs phlegm from her throat, spikes of pain driving into her back,

where the shot blunted itself on her armored jacket.

WE SAW YOU GETTING INTO THE TRUCK WE ARE COMING AFTER YOU

Sarah fumbles for her inhaler, finds it, triggers another round of hardfire. Her heart

goes mad, trying to pound its way out of her chest, but pain and the new round of stimulant fights

whatever drug was on Andre's needle and helps to clear her head.

THAT TRUCK IS A ONE-WAY RIDE TO ORLANDO...ORLANDO IS OUR TOWN SARAH

Sarah's vision clears slowly. She's lying across a pair of bucket seats in front of an

instrument board filled with green glowing lights. The observation cab is where safety inspectors

ride, or where emergency operators work the truck if the tractor's crystal brain isn't working.

There are no controls as such-the truck's supposed to be worked through the face. Sarah looks

across the panel and under the seats, fails to find a headset. The truck's owners apparently don't

want stowaways running off with their truck. Not that she knows how to drive a turbine-tractor

anyway.

blurring posts of the limited highway, the shining, stubby radio beacons that control the robot

traffic. The tires whine over concrete. A hovercraft, its props throbbing, soars by at 200 miles

per hour in the fast lane. She swipes at the blood running down her neck. Presses a button and

feels a blast of hot air that soon turns cold. Her head is almost clear. Time to figure a way out

of this. She brushes sweat from her eyes and looks at the instrument panel.

Green gauges glow coldly. The red phone on the instrument panel beckons her. She pulls the

phone from its cradle and listens, hearing the normal dial tone. She leans back, the tone moaning

in her ear, and wonders who she wants to talk to.

The Hetman, she decides. Maybe he can arrange for some of his cops to pick her up on the

way. He won't have got any of the recordings yet, and she can try to figure a way to explain those

later.

hours, the normal shifting of interface addresses to prevent monitoring. She calls the Gold Coast

Maximum Law number and starts as the telephone screams at her. Whoever owns the phone isn't about

to pay for a transatlantic call.

SARAH WE ARE JUST BEHIND YOU WE ARE COMING UP

She slams the phone down, looks wildly in the rearview mirrors. Sees only a hovercraft

coming up on the left. "Fuck you, Cunningham, " she mutters, and reaches for the phone again.

WE ARE GOING TO HAVE TO BLOW YOUR DOOR LOOK FOR COVER SARAH

She presses Reno's number and scans the rearview mirrors again. Adrenaline flows through

her blood. She snaps upright, represses an urge to bounce the phone off the windscreen. There's a

long black car coming up on the right, racing along the expressway's shoulder. It's a car she

recognizes.

The voice on the phone bubbles in her ear. "This is Reno."

Sarah's voice sounds like the shriek of a cornered animal. She can scarcely recognize it

as her own. "Reno, this is Sarah! I'm trapped! They've killed my guard and now they're after me!"

The car is coming up fast on the edge of the expressway. The road is limited to robot

traffic, and cars are forbidden here because the trucks and hovercraft can't see them, but the car

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should be safe enough on the shoulder. Sarah sees a flash of color near the car.

Reno's voice doesn't change expression. "Sarah, where are you?"

Sarah tries to calm her runaway heart, takes a deliberate breath. "I'm in a robot truck on

the limited expressway, moving from Tampa to Orlando. They're following in a car." Sarah can see