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

Steel and flaming aluminum alloy storm on the Chobham. In the end Cowboy counts fourteen wrecks on the runway verge. He mashes down some more fence and follows the Salt River to the Father of Waters, crossing between Locks 21 and 22, unmolested by things that fly in the night. Though the sun is long gone, even from deep in Illinois he can still see the western horizon glowing red. He suspects he will hear no more of privateers.
The Illinois defenses face north against a breed of blond, apple-cheeked panzerboys who run butter and cheese across the Line from Wisconsin, and Cowboy expects no trouble. As he gentles the hovercraft up to a fueling barge on the Illinois River, Cowboy decides it's time to face the music and extrudes a directional microwave antenna and points it at the western horizon.
"Pony Express here," he says. "Sorry to be a little late with the report, but I got myself an antenna shot away." There is a kind of angry growl of static in reply, b's and p's like magnum rounds, and Cowboy grins as he turns down the volume and talks right over the voice.
"I'm not picking you up very well, but that's okay," he says. "I'm in Illinois right now, and I thought I'd mention that I've just about run out of Alley and that in the last twenty-four hours I've accounted for sixteen aircraft belonging to those undercapitalized bastards. You can read it in the papers tomorrow. Save me some copies for my scrapbook."
The buzzing sound in his ears is miraculously stilled, and Cowboy grins again. "Adios," he says, and he turns off the radio and sits in sweet and blissful silence while he watches the fuel gauges climbing upward, toward where he floats in the sky, a distant speck in the eyes of the other panzerboys, so high in the steely pure azure that to the mudboys and dirtgirls of Earth he is invisible, an icon of liberation. He has not simply run the Alley, he has beaten it, smashed the new instrument of oppression, and left it a mass of half-melted girders and blackened plexiglas amid a pool of flaming fuel and skyrocketing ammunition.
Kentucky is a state that figures to make more money from free-spending thirdmen and panzerboys than they can from taxing what they do, and it's an easy ride across Egypt to the Ohio. Burning across the river, he encounters none of the riverine patrol hovercraft that Ohio has out this way. Cowboy follows some nameless little creek up into the free state until it comes to a farm road, and then he makes another radio call explaining where he is.
What he's doing is legal in Kentucky, but the state does not appreciate large potentials for sudden violence within its borders, so all the stuff in the weapons pods is very much against the law. Cowboy has to wait up his little farm road for a crew to come along and pull them from the vehicle, and while he waits he takes the torn postdated check from his pocket and looks at it for a long while. By the time a truck full of mudboys comes bouncing along the corrugated road, he's got things figured out.
It matters, he decides. It matters where the chloramphenildorphine is coming from and it matters who bankrolls Arkady. In Cowboy's hand is something that represents an obscure, indefinable debt to an anonymous pair of Alley rats, a debt as hard and cutting as Solingen steel, and the obligation is simply to find out.
It is no longer enough to be the best. Somehow, as well, it matters to be wise. To know on whose behalf he wields the sword.
And if he discovers the worst? That the thirdmen are masks worn by the Orbital power?
Then another debt is called. The interest alone is staggering, will take years to pay. But he's called himself a citizen of the free and immaculate sky too long to accept the notion that his world of air has bars on it.
There is a polite knock on the hatch, and he puts the check back in his pocket. The mudboys are telling him it's time to move. Somewhere in his mind, a steel guitar is singing...


Chapter Four

The city is melting, its outlines blurring in the August heat, the buildings swaying. Sarah closes her eyes and rests her temple against the cool metal frame of the window. Images of flame pulse orange and red on the backs of her eyelids. Just below the window frame, the cool air seems to whisper, to urge her in a strange, occluded tongue toward some course of action. She does not know what it wants. She shakes her head, feeling exhaustion beating at her.
"Cunningham's people are offering money for you, mi hermana." It is the soft voice of the Hetman. "I have let it be known that anyone who accepts their offer is no longer my friend. But that can only go so far. There are many who will do their job for them. And they have only to keep a watch on Daud. "
Sarah opens her eyes. The city melts. "I know," she says.
She turns to face him. They are standing in a corner of the hospital waiting room, a circular chamber cantilevered high above the city in a corner of the hospital tower, its mirrored windows facing in a dozen directions like multiple insect eyes. A vid set blithers in a corner, stared at without interest by two Cuban women, sisters, each with vast makeup eyes and eyebrows painted like wings. Their father is in the last stages of viral Huntington's, his mind gone: he thinks they are harpies, come to eat his liver while he is chained to the rock of his disease. Passively they await his dying at a distance. Near them a young man cries softly into a succession of paper tissues. Twisted pastel colors litter the floor near his feet like broken flowers.
Michael's eyes are watery, red-rimmed. His gestures are jangled. Sarah suspects he's coming down from something.
"I have a job for you," he says. "It's not even illegal, and it pays in gold, very well." He names a sum, and from the size of it Sarah knows it has a high risk factor. Michael is an honorable man, at least as thirdmen go, but charity is not one of his traits.
Sarah walks to a chair and lets herself sink in it. Orange plastic cushions, trying to be cheerful. She puts her head down. The air is heavy with the smell of stale cigarettes.
"Who will I be working for?" Hopelessly.
Daud lies in a room a few doors away amid the blinking eyes that are the LEDs of his machines. He is conscious now, pain masked by doses of endorphins far greater than he took even at the height of his addiction. His body is striped by bright pink tissue, all factory-new, including a whole lower arm. His legs are still swathed in gel, awaiting transplant of tissue and muscle. And the transplants await new funds.
Sarah is running low on chloramphenildorphin. It was supposed to be scarce and in high demand, but a new source appeared just when she needed to pay for Daud's first bills, the price plummeted. Normally she would have waited for the price to rise again, but the hissing, machines that kept Daud alive were indifferent to market conditions... She had to put the 'dorphin on the street, even at the lowest value in months. She wonders if Cunningham had somehow arranged it.
She is poison now, and knows it. Her usual sources of income are gone. Normally she works as a bodyguard, but who wants a guard who will draw fire? And as for the special jobs...she hasn't had an offer. There is word that she comes tangled up with matters no one else wants to touch, that her profile is far too high. She can make a few street deals, move things for other people who don't want to move their action personally, but that won't pay for the hospital and would also expose her, keep her too much in the public view, never knowing if any of the people she is hustling for will be eager to collect Cunningham's reward.
So. "Who will I be working for?" As if the answer mattered.
Michael the Hetman stares out the window, his face bleached by the sun. "For me," he says. "There is a job..." He screws up his face and shrugs. "There is maybe something wrong with it. I can't tell. Everything seems right, but the feeling is wrong. I want you to watch it for me."
Sarah looks up at him, wondering if this is another oblique warning like the one from Cunningham. As if Michael is maybe finding her too hot to shelter anymore, taking too much pressure from the people he does business with. Wants to move her out where she will be a target.
"Who's dealing?"
As if that answer mattered. She would have to take the job no matter how bad it smelled.
"I've taken delivery of a new shipment," Michael says. He frowns and moves to the next chair. His calf-high soft, leather boots creak as he sits. "Crystal computer matrices," he says thoughtfully. "Fifteen thousand of them. High quality, from a source that's never delivered so well before. New boys just reaching the big markets, maybe. Or maybe thirdmanning for someone else. I can't tell."
"You want me to guard it?"
"Yes. Among other things." The Hetman sighs and rubs his chin. "Normally it would take me some time to move that kind of quantity. Months. But now there's someone up north, in Pennsylvania, who approached Andrei, wanting matrices in quantity. Will pay well for them." His liquid eyes turn to Sarah. "I can think of no reason not to sell. Andrei wants the deal badly. But there are too many coincidences here, mi hermana."
Andrei, Sarah knows, is one of the Hetman's lieutenants. She watches as Michael fumbles in his pocket for a Russian cigarette,
"Someone may be trying to set me up, but I can't think who, or why." Crimping the end. Lighting it with a match that trembles. His hands are liver-spotted, old man's hands. "These people I'm dealing with are small men, and if they hijacked the cargo they wouldn't last long. Unless they have protection. But no one has that kind of strength, and right now I'm friends with everybody here on this coast. No sign that anyone's getting their moves ready. So maybe you'll be working for me for nothing."
"You don't feel that, Hetman," Sarah says. "Or you wouldn't be hiring me. Not at that price."
He gives her a long, expressionless glance, his eyelids jittering a nervous reply to Sarah's words, the cigarette smoke drifting ceilingward. Behind them the video begins to hype some new cocaine substitute, guaranteed nonaddictive, the audio filled with the tasteful hissing of compressed gases, the delighted exclamations of a young couple obviously in love. The cigarette flutters in the corner of Michael's mouth as he speaks.
"I'm hiring a panzerboy," he says. "If they're trying for a hijack and expecting to be able to knock out a truck, they'll be surprised. Andrei is handling the deal, the money. He'll have friends to protect him, but I want you to ride along in the panzer. Watch the deal, watch the panzerboy. You're hardwired for firearms?"
"Pistols and machine pistols." She shrugs. "Guns have no style," she says.
He smiles, a little wistful. As if he has heard this declaration many times, and knows that guns always seem to matter in the end. "I will get you a Heckler and Koch, sevenmillimeter. You will practice with it?"
"When are we running?"
"Saturday."
"I'll practice tomorrow. If you can get me the gun by then."
"I will send a boy to meet you, take you to the range, then collect the gun when you are chipped in with it. Meet you when?"
"Tomorrow. The Plastic Girl, noon."
The Hetman draws on his cigarette and nods. Sarah can see the reflection of the vid in his eyes, hears the jarring resumption of a South American comedy, the canned laughter raucous in reply to shrill Spanish. "I hope I am wrong about this, mi hermana," says Michael. His voice is filled with Russian sadness that is no less genuine for its being theatrical. "I would be sorry to see another war. Just when things seem a little settled."
A war would mean work for Sarah; but she doesn't want it either. She knows that the only important war is already over, and that both she and Michael have already lost it, that any fighting here in the American Concessions is over the scraps the Orbitals had left behind, not thinking them worth the bother.
The Hetman rises to his feet. His hands make nervous movements. Sarah rises with him.