"Walter Jon Williams - Hardwired" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Walter John)

someone who wants to rape away the things that keep you alive, replacing nothing, leaving only
desert. When the air defenses across the Line got too strong, the jocks switched to panzer-and the
mail still got through. The new system had its challenges, but had it been up to Cowboy he would
never have left the skies.
Now Cowboy is twenty-five, getting a little old for this job, approaching the time when
even hardwired neural reflexes begin to slacken. He disdains the use of headsets; his skull bears
five sockets for plugging the peripherals directly into his brain, saving milliseconds when it
counts. Most people wear their hair long to cover the sockets, afraid of being called buttonheads
or worse, but Cowboy disdains that practice, too; his fair hair is cropped close to the skull and
his black ceramic sockets are decorated with silver wire and turquoise chips. Here in the West,
where people have an idea of what these things mean, he is regarded with a kind of awe.
He has his nerves hardwired to the max, and Kikuyu Optics eyes with all the available
options. He has a house in Santa Fe and a ranch in Montana that his uncle runs for him, and he
owns the family property in New Mexico and pays taxes on it like it was worth something. He has
the Maserati and a personal aircraft-a "business jet"-and a stock portfolio and caches of gold.
He's also got this place, this little meadow in the Colorado mountains; another cache,
this one for memories that won't go away: And a discontent, formless but growing, that has led him
here.
He parks by the big camouflaged concrete hangar and unfaces the Maserati before the engine
gives its final whimper. In the silence he can hear the sound of a steel guitar from somewhere in
the hangar and a stirring in the grass that is the first directionless movements of the
afternoon's thermals. He walks to the hangar, unreels a jack from the lock, studs it into his
head, and gives it the code.
Past the heavy metal door there is a Wurlitzer, shiny chrome and bright fluorescent
plastic, venting some old Woody Guthrie song into the huge cathedral space. Looming above are the
matte black shapes of three deltas, their rounded forms obscure in the dim light but giving an
impression of massive power and appalling speed. Obsolete now, Cowboy bought them for little more
than the price of their engines when the face riders started using panzers.
Warren stands at his workbench in a pool of light, tinkering with a piece of a fuel pump.


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His lined face flickers blue with the video pictures Cowboy's arrival has prompted-he's got
security cameras all over the place and cares for them with the same methodical diligence with
which he keeps the deltas ready to fly.
He was a crew chief at Vandenberg on the day of the Rock War, and he did his duty knowing
that he could expect nothing for his diligence but to feel on the back of his neck, for a fragment
of a second, the overpressure of a nickel-iron missile coming down through the atmosphere,
followed by termination...but he did what he was trained to do and got his cutterjocks up to fight
for Earth against the Orbitals, wishing them well with all his heart, hoping that a few, maybe,
would say "Here's one for Warren" when they burned an enemy. But the scenario turned out different
from what he'd expected: looking up into the night sky for the meteor that had his name on it, he
saw the falling, blazing arcs all right, but it wasn't descending rocks that lit the night sky-it
was his boys and their craft, the young, bright men with their azure silk neck scarves and their
bright needle cutters, coming down in pieces, failing systems giving their last electronic cries,
blood streaking the insides of broken faceplates, ruptured oxidant tanks gushing white crystal
plumes into the near-vacuum... The last hope of Earth blown apart in the post-boost phase by the
Orbital knights.