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hanging ragged and bloody.
Amusement rises and he laughs, and then the laugh turns to a cough and he
feels something break inside. He tastes blood in his mouth. He turns his head
to spit, and something runs down his face.
Cowboy punches the quick release and frees himself from his chute, then pulls
off his helmet and takes the dead studs out of his skull. He rolls carefully
onto his side and tries to get to his feet. He fails, spits blood, tries
again, succeeds. His left leg scraped the canopy punching out and it feels
like it's lost a lot of skin, but it doesn't seem broken. He takes a pair of
steps and laughs again, then bends over as coughs rack him, as blood fills his
mouth. He hawks it out and then straightens his shoulders defiantly.
He's landed on a rocky ridge overlooking a two-rut desert track. A column of
smoke rises a mile away, where Pony Express fell after it tore itself to
pieces battling the air. Another, vaster black pillar stands far to the north
where the wreckage of Argosy lies tangled with a delta.
A pair of sonic booms throb through the air, and Cowboy can see the infrared
signal of the two frigates circling back toward Edwards. Cowboy gives them the
finger and grins. "You lost, you bastards." He cackles and begins to hobble
down the slope.
There's a growling, whining noise coming from down the track, and Cowboy props
himself against a scalding rock and waits. It's a chrome turbine tricycle
coming to investigate the wreck.
Cowboy reaches for the pistol in his holster and fires a pair of shots into
the air. The driver's head turns and acknowledges his wave with a nod. The
trike pulls off the road and the driver begins walking up the slope.
It's a dark-skinned woman with a shaved head, some kind of bodybuilder, with
her muscles increased and shaped by hormones, her breasts as irrelevant on her
massive expanse of chest as a pair of peas. She's wearing an alloy reflective
mesh bikini top and baggy reflec trunks, with soft moccasins laced up above
her ankles. Cowboy sees freckles on her shoulders, deep beneath the dark skin,
and a necklace of bleached rattlesnake skulls. She looks at him with sea-green
eyes.
"You look in bad shape, linefoot."
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Cowboy reaches into his pocket and pulls out a half ounce of gold. "You can
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earn a second one of these if you get me to Boulder City," he says. "I don't
want to go through any Free Zone customs checks, either."
She nods. "Fair enough. But I don't think you're gonna make it that far, not
on desert roads."
"That's not your worry."
"You got a med kit someplace?"
Cowboy nods upslope. "Yeah. With my chute."
Wordlessly she moves upslope to the chute, drags it off the Joshua tree, and
weighs it down with rocks. She picks up the med kit and brings it down.
Cowboy is sitting down when she gets back, the gun hanging limp in his hand.
She takes it from him and puts it back in his holster. He almost faints with
the pain as she pulls off the top of his g-suit. She cleans up some of the
blood, disinfects the cut, tapes up his ribs, ties up his broken arm in a
sling. Then she fires some endorphin into his right biceps and the drug
whispers gracefully between his pain receptors and his efficient hardwired
nerves. He fades so fast that she has to help him down the slope to get him on
her cycle. As he mounts behind her he notices three freshly killed
rattlesnakes draped over the handlebars.
He can hear sirens from the north, and there's a billow of dust on the track,
moving closer. She wrestles the trike off the road and cuts across country,
moving slowly so as not to raise a dust cloud. The jouncing is easier on his
ribs than he thought it would be.
Occupied California extends east to Beacon Station. The trike weaves down
desert trails, up mountain ridges, drives fast across a dry lakebed. Cowboy
leans his head back against the rest and drowses. The endorphin murmurs in his
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