cover.
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 on the screamsheets tomorrow. Print 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
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 on the screamsheets tomorrow. Print 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
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