Hardwired Read Free

Cowboy’s mind. In it for the ride, not for the cargo.
    He’s said it often enough. An ethic, this, a kind of purity. Half the time he hasn’t even known what he’s been carrying.
    “I don’t know if I want to hear this,” he says.
    “Don’t hear it, then.” Warren turns away and goes back to the pump. He puts on a headset and runs through some checks.
    Cowboy thinks for a moment about Arkady, the burly man who runs half the traffic across the Line these days, who exists in a strange swirl of assistants, bodyguards, helpers, techs, hangers-on of no apparent function who imitate his fashionable dress and his mannerisms. Women always present, but never a part of business. An existence cognate with what Cowboy can understand of Arkady’s mind: convoluted, filled with violent prejudices and hatreds, sudden anger juxtaposed with sudden sentimentality, suspicious in a strange, offhand Russian way, as if paranoia were a way of life, not merely a set of reasonable precautions but a religion.
    Cowboy doesn’t like Arkady, but hasn’t so far bothered to dislike him. Arkady considers himself an insider, a manipulator, but he’s outside what really counts; outside the life of the panzerboy, the mutant creature with turbine lungs and highpressure turbopump heart, crystal implanted in his skull, eyes like lasers, fingers that point missiles, alcohol throbbing through his veins... Arkady thinks he’s running things but he’s really just an instrument, an excuse for the panzerboys to make their runs across the Line and into legend. And if Arkady doesn’t understand that, his thoughts don’t count for much in the scheme of thing.
    Warren is reassembling parts of the pump, ready to run his tests, and will be busy for a while. Cowboy leaves the pool of light and walks into the blackness of the hangar. The deltas loom above him, poised and ready, lacking only a pilot to make them living things. His hands reach up to touch a smooth underbelly, an epoxide canard, the fairing of a downward-gazing radar. Like stroking a matte-black animal, a half-wild thing too dangerous to be called a pet. It lacks only a pilot, and a purpose.
    He moves a ladder from an engine access panel to a cockpit and climbs into the seat that was, years ago, molded to his body. The familiar metal and rubber smells warm up to him. He closes his eyes and remembers the night splattered with brightness, the sudden flare of erupting fuel, the mad chase as, supersonic, he bobbed and weaved among the hills and valleys of the Ozarks, the laws on his tail as he burned for home…
    His first delta was called Midnight Sun , but he changed the name after he’d figured out what was really going on. He and the other deltajocks were not an abstract response to market conditions but a continuation of some kind of mythology. Delivering the mail across the high dome of night, despite all the oppressors’ efforts to the contrary. Keeping a light burning in the darkness, hope in the shape of an afterburner flame. The last free Americans, on the last high road…
    So he’d begun to live what he suddenly knew. Accepting the half-scornful, condescending nickname they’d given him, living it, becoming Cowboy, the airjock. Answering to nothing else. Becoming the best, living in realms higher than any of the competition. He called his next delta Pony Express . And in it he delivered the mail as long as they’d let him. Till times changed, and modes of delivery changed. Till he had to become a boy instead of a jock. The eyes that could focus into the night blackness, straining to spot the infrared signature of the laws riding combat air patrol over the prairie, were now shut in a small armored cabin, all the visuals coming in through remotes. He is still the best, still delivering the mail. He shifts in his seat. The country swing fades and all Cowboy can hear in the echoing silence is the whirr of Warren’s lathe. And sense the restlessness in himself, wanting only a