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slick than the corn did, maneuvers less critical. The enemy pilot is burning
right for him in apparent anger over what happened to his friend, and Cowboy
knows he can use that anger as an aikido master uses his opponent's kinetic
energy against him-but first the engines have to max red, afterburners
bleeding alcohol fire, and the panzer has to take some punishment.
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Cowboy is airborne as he floats across the crest of a rise, and a tug on the
controls slews the skimming panzer to starboard just as the coleopter triggers
a weapons pod and half a dozen shaped-charge rockets set the hemp ablaze.
There is pounding on the Chobham, and a blaze of red lights on Cowboy's
displays tells him that one of his own weapons pods has been penetrated by a
jug-sized minigun round that's wiped out a couple hundred K's worth of
advanced electronics. The sensors aiming his own minigun are shot away just as
he decides to trigger some rounds. The neurotransmitters clattering against
Cowboy's brainchips are smoking with the sour tang of adrenaline, and the
coleopter pilot seems to have tempered anger with caution because he's
matching speed without overshooting, and so Cowboy has no choice but to rocket
on across the good earth of Missouri, building momentum, jinking left and
right, clawing against the hemp for the leverage that will send his enemy
cartwheeling to the mat. The minigun hammers, hammers. The panzer's sensors
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flare and die.
And then Cowboy opens new floodgates of alcohol and his engines cry in anguish
as in calculating fever he slams in his thrust reversers. Even through its
chemical slumber his body wails as the straps dig in. Half the comp displays
are frozen in utter shock. The coleopter staggers as it tries to maintain its
position, but it's too close to the earth to stall in hopes of losing momentum
and its flaps are already fully deployed. The pilot knows what's going to
happen and is loosing thermite flares even before his half-controlled and
thoroughly doomed craft whispers overhead and the tone sounds on Cowboy's
aural crystal. Cowboy's missiles leap from his remaining pod, the port turbine
explodes with red energy, and the coleopter whimpers in metallic pain and
corkscrews in.
The panzer flees across the red-scored night. Egypt is near, but so is the
dawn.
Staggering systems reawaken; Cowboy gentles the engines and manages to keep
them alive. Time to find a place to hide and wait out the day.
Cowboy gets across another fifty miles of country before being reined in by
dawn and the sense of an approaching wave of enemy. There are thousands of
abandoned farms and barns here, old privately owned places that couldn't
compete with the Orbital-controlled agriplexes and their robot farms. Cowboy
knows of quite a few where the old buildings, next to the robot-farmed
cornfields, remain empty.
A new taste comes through the face mask as Cowboy's body is reawakened. A barn
appears on his sensors, one of the long, narrow type, rectangular in cross
section, designed to store baled hay in the days before the Orbitals built
their big warehouses, one for every hundred farms.
Carefully, with gentle precision, he shoulders aside the heavy double doors
and guides the panzer into the concrete-walled barn. He remembers, just before
he shuts off the engines, that he forgot to send Arkady a message.
Well, let him watch the news and find out that way. Cowboy will just tell him
he couldn't get a signal through all the chaff.
With a touch of regret, Cowboy unfaces. Waves of delayed pain flame into his
mind as the displays slip into night. His body is bruised and aching and slick
with sweat. He takes the carbine from its scabbard and pops the hatch.
The barn smells like must and unburnt hydrocarbons. Cowboy turns the Kikuyu
eyes to infrared and scans the barn. He can hear the scuttle of rats. With his [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]