Copyright 1986 by Walter Jon Williams Chapter One

three freshly killed rattlesnakes draped over the handlebars.

He can hear sirens from the north, and there's a billow of dust on the track, moving

closer. She wrestles the trike off the road and cuts across country, moving slowly so as not to

raise a dust cloud. The jouncing is easier on his ribs than he thought it would be.

Occupied California extends east to Beacon Station. The trike weaves down desert trails,

up mountain ridges, drives fast across a dry lakebed. Cowboy leans his head back against the rest

and drowses. The endorphin murmurs in his mind. The trike gets onto the expressway east of Silver

Lake and the ride gets easier, the turbine screaming. Cowboy watches the working of the driver's

powerful shoulder muscles as she dodges potholes. Dead snakes flap in the wind. Amusement rises in

him again.

"Hey, lady. You're driving right into a legend, you know that?"

She gives him an incurious look over her shoulder. "I figure that legend's your own

business, man."

"I wish I could see the screamsheets."

"I wish I could see the other half of that gold. I don't suppose that's gonna happen right

now, either."

He laughs, coughs, laughs again. "You remind me of somebody. "

"Is that supposed to make me feel good?"

He laughs some more. Licks his dry lips. "You got any water?"

She hands him a plastic squeeze bottle. He fills his mouth, spits it overside, fills his

mouth again and swallows. He hands her the squeeze bottle and she clips it to the trike frame.

Cowboy leans back and closes his eyes again, feeling the cycle swerving under him like a carnival

ride. The setting sun licks the back of his neck.

With his eyes closed he can still feel the punch of the afterburners, the song of the

missiles in his crystal, the feeling of Pony Express living in his nerves, his veins. Gone now, a

wreck on the desert floor. The last of the working deltas, the last not cannibalized to make the

graceless panzers that Cowboy dislikes. He's got more reason than ever to hate them now that, for

a short while, he's been a flier again.

The endorphin patterns bright images behind his closed lids, the images of green displays

glowing deep in his mind, the sight of silver missile fins rotating against the sky, Argosy

growing larger and larger as he loops up to intercept...the sight of extinction filling the

canopy, the nearing obliteration demanded by crystal and interface...the dark wedge blotting out

the steel sky, the interception proof of his devotion to life at the speed of light...the final

impact that secures his place in the sky, his last triumphant grin drawn taut like the smile of a

skull...

Cowboy opens his eyes and draws a breath, the shriek poised in his throat. It doesn't

come. Fear dopplers along his triggered nerves. The cycle girl is weaving across night asphalt,

dodging between potholes picked out by her headlight. "Fuck," Cowboy says. He tells his nerves to

shut down again.

"You say something, linefoot?"

He gazes at the necklace of skulls, the ridged hollow rattler eyes staring at him. The

eyes of Mistress Death, whose cool and tenebrous lips brushed against his in the sky. A tremor

shakes him. "Nothing much," he says.

"That's what I thought."

"Can I have some more water?"

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He drinks half the squeeze bottle this time before handing it back. His good hand is

trembling so much he almost drops it. Pain is lurking deep in his chest, the endorphins wearing

off.

A massive shrug. "My sisters'll miss me when they miss me.

"They all got muscles like you?"

"That's why we live together, man."

She turns her head to look at him. Starlight glitters in her eyes. "You got anyplace in

Boulder City you want to go?"

"A public phone'll do. Then maybe a hotel."

"Whatever you say, linefoot."

The lights of Boulder City splay out into the night. The cycle idles while Cowboy fights

stiffness and pain, and manages to stand upright. "Right thigh pocket," he says, after a moment of

struggle. "A credit needle."

"Okay." She unzips the pocket and plugs the needle into the phone for him. He puts a stud

in his forehead and thinks Reno's number. "This is Cowboy. I'm in Boulder City."

"So are the Dodger and his people. Where have you been?"

"I'm hurt. Tell them to get a medic."

"Right away. I'm tracing your line now so I can tell them where you are."

Cowboy sags against the telephone. Pain pulses in his chest. "Hey, Reno," he says. "Did

anything come back?"

"Diego force-landed on the desert. The Orbitals got him and his delta."

Sorrow trickles into Cowboy. "Fuck. Nothing left then. I lost the Express."

"Build another. We won."

The news interests him only slightly. "Yeah?"

"Tempel crashed. We didn't need the net; all we had to do was wait for it to go below five

hundred and then start buying. Roon came out and announced to the screamsheets that he was

mounting a slate for the board, and he got so many proxies in the first five minutes that Couceiro

resigned before there could even be an election. Roon's going to shuttle up as soon as he ties up

a few loose ends. He's already announced a policy of retrenchment."

"Good for him." Talking seems to hurt more and more. "You got my location yet?"

"The Flash Force is on the way. You can hang up if you want. "

He reaches for the credit needle and yanks it out. He sticks it in his breast pocket,

pulls out a pair of half-ounce coins. "You get extra because you have such a winning personality."

The cycle girl takes the coins with a grin. She puts them in a belt pouch and swings back

aboard her saddle. "You want me to stick around?" she asks.

"I'll be okay." He looks at her dully. "Hey, you got any need for extra money? I need

someone to run messages from time to time."

She nods. "Blackwater Well Bio Station. I'm a desert ecologist."

"No kidding."

Her turbine winds up, then she gives him a last grin and accelerates away. He watches her

taillights recede to the vanishing point and closes his eyes. He hears rather than sees the long

car pull up beside him.

"Cowboy? Just put your arm around me."

Sarah's voice. He opens his eyes and sees her tall form, feels her hands touching his

clothing. He gives her a shadowy grin. "It's been a long day, huh?"

"Easy now. Just slide into the car."

"Maurice killed himself. I was planning on dying, but Maurice did it for me. Right in the

arms of Mistress Death."

"Take it easy. The other foot now."

"I was always chasing her. Didn't know it till now."

"Rest your head here, on my shoulder."

He feels warmth against his cheek, mumbles, "It's a fuck of a thing, being a legend in

your own time."

The car speeds away on silent wheels.

Chapter Twenty-four

"Are you sure you can handle this?"

"I have most of the data on Tempel we collected. And memories. Mine and his. I think I can

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do some good."

"Yeah," Cowboy says. "I always thought I could use friends in high places."

It's an old place, a one-room cabin with a cheap tile floor, old wooden furniture held

together by wire, a sagging double bed with a tufted bedspread.

Cowboy is lying in the bed, humming "Face Riders in the Sky" to himself while he watches a

video report on the Tempel crisis. The situation is at an end, the reporter says. Stock values are

rising cautiously. The Orbital Soviet has announced its confidence in Roon's administration. The

new directorate has sent Couceiro to Africa, to finally touch the planet he had seen only as a

blue and white sphere contaminating his view of the monochrome airless universe. Have fun

foreclosing on Ghana, Cowboy thinks. He reaches for his whiskey and sips it, then props the glass

on his arm cast.

He turns as his door opens and sees Sarah coming in, feeling a wave of desert heat on his

face as he looks past her, through the door, into a brown stony reach stretching all the way to

California, vanishing into a trackless blue sky.

Sarah closes the door behind her. She's dressed in a long billed cap, jeans, reflec long-

sleeved shirt. "You're awake," she says.

"Yep." He reaches for the whiskey bottle. "Join me?"

"Too early." She pulls off the cap and tosses it on the battleship-gray kitchen table.

Shakes her hair free. "The Dodger wants to see you later. Business. And his wife is flying up

later this afternoon. "

She sits beside him on the mattress. He turns off the vid control and moves over to make

room for her. He winces at the pain in his scraped leg. Sarah puts her arm around his shoulders.

He leans back against her warmth.

"They have horses here," she says. "I've never learned to ride."

"I can teach you." He looks at her profile, the turned-up nose and parabolic perfection of

the lips, the dark skin outlined in a soft haze of light from a window behind her. She turns to

him. "The broken arm won't...?"

"Not much. No."

They're on a weathered old Nevada dude ranch that the Flash Force has designated as a

backup base. Western thirdmen and panzerboys will be drifting in through the next week with the

intention of arranging a peace. Cunningham's dead and Tempel has withdrawn its backing, and

suddenly Tempel's thirdmen are floundering in the dark, surrounded by enemies with sharpened

knives.

The thirdmen will be talking with the Dodger. The panzerboys are planning to talk with

Cowboy. His plan of a panzerboy association seems to be taking shape. Maybe it can hold the peace

together, if thirdmen who cause their neighbors grief suddenly find they can't get transport to

the East for their action.

The voice doesn't sound right. It has a kind of tremor, an echo maybe-as if two voices

were speaking, not entirely in synch.

"Reno?" Cowboy says. "You okay?"

"I'm into the big crystal here, Cowboy. My God, the plans these people have! They've got

the next thousand years in their pocket...but there's a funny quality to it. They know the shape

they want the future to take, but they don't know what they want themselves to be. They're up

here, and they're lost. Once their obedience to Earth gave them meaning, and then their struggle

against it, but now they don't know what to do. They're too distracted by their structures. They

got their independence, but they don't know what it means, and they're looking for the things that

will give it meaning. Some are after dominance-of the planet, each other...Do you know they're

stockpiling nerve gas up here? In case other blocs attack? They're that crazy. Some are lost in

dreams of bigger and better hardware-as if the machines they create will give them the definition

they lack. The others are content to be parts of the structure, to take their form from their own

corporate ecological niche. Content to be programmed by the others.

"They're vampires, Cowboy. They're sucking up Earth's blood, because that's what keeps

them alive, but they don't know what living is for."

"My capacity for pitying those people is a bit limited," Cowboy says.

"Pity," says the voice, "is not what they need."

Sarah looks at Cowboy carefully. He's sunburned and battered, but after a night's sleep

the tension that's been a part of him for the last few days has eased; the fevered intensity

dissipated. He shifts against her and winces. "Need some painkiller?" she asks.

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Cowboy raises his glass of whiskey. "This is all the painkiller I need right now."

"Maybe I'll join you after all." Sarah reaches for the bottle and drinks. "I just talked

to Michael. He offered me a sort of a job."

"What sort of job?"

"Adviser, I guess you'd say. Counselor-that's the old term. He says he trusts my

connections. And my instincts."

"Glad he's noticed." Cowboy rubs his bristles. "You going to take it?"

"Probably." A taut wire of amusement vibrates through her. "It'll get me off the streets."

She grins and raises the bottle again. Drinks.

She'll check into a hospital, she thinks, get herself some more crystal. The full

Santistevan hardwiring, independent of hardfire. Firearms. Small-unit tactics. And not just

streetgirl stuff, either; she wants chips for accounting, shipping, stock market manipulation. The

stuff she'll need in her new position as the Hetman's counselor.

"You'll travel," he says.

She cocks an eye at him. "Yes. So will you. We can see each other." Because, she thinks,

what they have is a wartime thing, a fusion made under pressure... With the pressure gone, things

may fall apart. Because there are things she knows and can't tell him, because she's lived a life

that, whatever he thinks, he doesn't really want to know about. Because he has his own ideas of

the world and his place in it, and she can't understand them. They will have to ease carefully

into the peace, into each other, and know it might not work in the absence of the things that

brought them together. There ought to be room for that, the coming apart. Or the other. Especially

the other.

She takes another drink. "You promised to show me the autumn aspens. And all I've seen is

this fucking desert. You owe me."'

"Daud," he says. She feels coldness touching her at the name, at the inflection he gives

it. Knowing, the both of them, that Daud is responsible for yesterday's catastrophe, that there

are broken hulks on the stony Nevada plain, shards of aircraft lying under the protective waves of

the Pacific, men wrapped in canvas and covered by thin desert soil, all with Daud's smoking

signature. Cowboy won't forget that, and his code does not treat treason lightly.

"I'm buying him a ticket." Lightly, hiding the dread in her. "Getting him away."

"What if he doesn't go?"

Reassurances freeze in her throat. Because it is Daud's nature to betray, and she has felt

the sting of his betrayals all her life, hardened herself to them, told herself it was only

because he was weak, that he needed to betray in order to know he was trusted, and she had always

forgiven him... But the forgiveness had infected her somehow, as if forgiving Daud made it easier

to forgive her own treacheries. She doesn't want Daud around, not a living reminder of her own

capacity to betray the things she cares for.

She can't stop loving him. She knows that. What she can stop is trying to be him.

"He'll go," she says. "I won't give him a choice."

Cowboy's eyes are hard as flint. "I won't, either."

Encourage Daud in one last betrayal, then. Of Nick. If Nick exists, if he hasn't already

betrayed Daud by using him for Tempel's purposes. A final betrayal. To save his own life.

The phone purrs quietly in its cradle. Sarah answers it.

"This is Reno, Sarah." He's still acting as switchboard operator, coordinating the

fragments of the net that are still in operation, keeping communications open with the various

panzerboys and thirdmen who will be visiting the ranch in the next few days.

"I have a call from Roon," Reno says. "He wants to talk to the two of you."

"Tell him to fuck himself."

"He says it's business."

She looks at Cowboy. "It's Reno. Roon wants to talk to us."

To her surprise there is a grim light in Cowboy's eyes, as if he were expecting this.

The voice is smoother now, more in control of itself. The echo effect has vanished.

"The Orbital Soviet is unhappy, Cowboy. Couceiro was someone they liked, someone they

could understand. They didn't like him being brought down by a bunch of mudboys."

Cowboy grins and reaches for his bottle of whiskey. "What are they going to do about it?"

"They can't change the rules on stock trading. The system's too big, and they're making

too much money from the situation as it is, by their own manipulations. And they know they'll just

drive the stock market underground if they try to restrict it-communication's just too

uncontrolled, any face bank could run a market just by telephone.

"No, Cowboy." The voice is calm. "What they're going to do is put you out of business."

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Ice touches Cowboy's flesh. "Oh?" he says. "How do they plan to do that?"

"They've decided that the existence of black markets, along with the way the Orbitals are

competing to supply them, is a danger... It's creating too many uncontrollable elements. So

they're going to legitimize the markets. Later this session they're going to have one of their

tame legislators introduce a bill in the Missouri legislature to repeal their tariff restrictions.

That'll create a Missouri-Kentucky corridor across most of the Midwest. Once Missouri goes, the

other states will fall like dominoes. The panzerboys just won't be needed anymore."

"What can you do to stop it?"

"Nothing. It's the Orbital Soviet's decision."

Despair trickles into Cowboy's veins. That's the end, then, all that he and the Dodger

fought for. Abolished with a swipe of the Orbital pen.

"You've got warning now," the voice says. "You can make your preparations."

"I don't see myself as a long-distance trucker. I've been an outlaw too long."

"You're rich. You'll think of something. Look, the U.S. won't be balkanized anymore. You

can take credit for that. Things are going to be a lot easier in the Northeast."

We weren't running the Line, Cowboy thinks, for the Northeast. Or for the money. That was

what Arkady and the thirdmen never understood, always thinking we could be bought, that we would

respond to economic pressure. And that's what the Orbitals don't understand, what their crystal

world models can't figure. That we'd have run the Alley for nothing. Because it was a way to be

free.

"I know." How long did he expect it to last? Cowboy wonders. Perhaps not even this long.

He had always thought it would end in some Midwest cornfield, the government choppers coming in

waves, pouring rockets down, breaking through the Chobham, the panzer coming apart piece by piece.

Or in some moonless supersonic sky where the laws waited to pounce, their radars reaching out to

touch him with radiant fingertips... He hadn't expected this, to be informed of his obsolescence

in a recovery bed on some sweaty Nevada dude ranch. That all he had done, the legend he had built,

was only to put him out of business.

He laughs. A retired panzerboy, he thinks. An absurdity.

Amusement trickles through him. There is a lightness in his limbs, as if gravity has

eased. He thinks of the world curving away below him, dark behind him flecked with stars, the limb

of twilight below, the land before the canopy burning green and brown in the light of the

sun...the boundaries that encompassed the Alley gone, gone along with the armored borders of his

life, the zones with their internal customs inspectors, their armed forces and restricted areas,

the ever-narrowing tunnel down which he was hurled at the speed of light toward whatever violent

climax awaited him at the end. The legend that he had embraced, because he had never been able to

embrace life.

He's free, he realizes. And he's got friends in high places.

He figures another chapter in the legend's going to start right about now.

Cowboy feels nerve warmth flaring in his limbs, a warning signal. He thinks he knows

what's going to happen. He reaches across Sarah, unspools a stud from the phone, plugs it into his

temple. "Reno," he says, talking into the wire-thin mic fixed on the stud. "Stay on the line. I

want you to hear this bastard."

"Whatever you say, Cowboy."

"I've got a few other things I want you to do," he says. Reno listens quietly as Cowboy

tells him. He can feel Sarah shift in surprise as he leans across her.

"Yeah, Cowboy," Reno says. "I see your point."

"Cowboy?" Sarah says. "What file are you talking about? Do I-"

"I'll tell you later," Cowboy says.

Roon's voice, when it comes, makes his hackles rise. Sarah grows tense beside him. He

remembers cold alloy corridors, images of children floating in darkness, hologrammed ceilings

glowing with Orbital settlements reflecting stellar light. A cold smile that smelled of corpses.

"Cowboy. Sarah. You are to be congratulated. The plan was a great success. It was blessed,

and so are you."

"Thanks," Cowboy says. He takes a hearty drink of whiskey, grimaces as the fire goes down

his throat. Feeling his heart pounding in his chest, a cold sweat rising on his forehead. A deep

sickness in his gut, anticipation...

"Sarah," Roon says, "I want you to come into the sky with me." The voice is like a silken

icicle caress. "I want someone to head my security team. I can't trust Couceiro's people. "

Cowboy watches the scars whiten on Sarah's face, tautening under her cynical smile. "You

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want me to be your Cunningham?" she asks.

"Cunningham wasn't his real name. But yes, I want you to do the same job for me that

Cunningham did for my predecessor. Your files say that you have the potential. Come to the sky,

Sarah. Look down at the planet of our birth. Then help me shape its future. " The lyrical words

are somehow more terrifying coming from the emotionless, crystal voice, the cold rapture of the

deepening, triumphant madness. "Be the means of my communion with the planet, Sarah," he says.

"The instrument by which I possess it. The human extension of my crystal."

Cowboy sees Sarah's lips curl. "No, Mr. Roon" she says. "That's not my kind of action."

Still, there is a trace of hesitation in her voice, as if she's bidding farewell to a cherished

dream, having found its price.

"You will condemn yourself," Roon says. "History will allow freedom only to raptors, not

to the creatures on which they feed. Stretch your wings, Sarah. I will give you blood for your

Weasel to feed on. "

"No," Sarah says. Her eyes are stone. "It's not for me."

"I regret your decision, Sarah. Cowboy, I hope you will be more sensible." Cowboy's mouth

feels dry. He licks his lips.

"What are you offering?" he asks.

"A place. You have talents that extend beyond those of a pilot. You have a predator's

instinct, you can spot weakness and act on that knowledge. You saw Couceiro's weakness and knew

how to bring him down. I want you to give me that talent of yours, Cowboy."

"No. It's not my sort of work."

"You are dangerous." The cold judgment turns Cowboy's veins cold. "You have brought down a

powerful man, and neither he nor his friends will forget. I offer you my protection."

"No," Cowboys says. "It's no secret, what I did. Other people could do it. Things will

change."

"Your decision is that of a weakling. You are a fool." There is a frozen second in which

Cowboy can almost hear the decision being made somewhere in Roon's crystal. "Still, you are

dangerous. Perhaps too dangerous to be allowed to roam at will."

The crystal burns in Cowboy's skull. He had known this all along, that this would come.

Because the Orbitals could not allow a free man to exist, once they noticed him.

"Reno, are you there?" Cowboy says.

"Yes, Cowboy."

"Hand this Texan's ass to him."

There is a scream in Cowboy's socket, a scream composed partly of the Black Mind program

that's shrieking down the link at the speed of light, partly of the noise that is coming from

Roon's throat as Reno climbs over the safeguards in his crystal and begins to write himself over

Roon's mind. Cowboy can see the puzzlement in Sarah's eyes as she hears the noise coming from the

phone she holds. Cowboy takes the stud from his temple and the screaming fades away. Sarah looks

at. him.

Cowboy reaches over and takes the phone from her hand. Over the whine of data he can hear

far-off moans, cries, whimpers. He laughs.

He puts the phone down on the bed between them and explains. There is a smile in Sarah's

eyes, an answering chord struck in resonant steel.

They listen together till the sounds stop, and they can hear Reno's voice coming over the

phone. Cowboy feels as if he's been on a long night flight, and now, through his skin sensors,