Free Hardwired by Walter Jon Williams

panzerboys, more proof that the flaming corn-alcohol throbs through his chest like blood and that the shrieking exhaust flows from his lungs like breath, that his eyes beam radar and his fingers can flick missiles forth like pebbles. Through his sensors he can taste the exhaust and see the sky and the prairie sunset, and part of his mind can feel the throbbing radio energies that are the enemy’s search planes, and it seems to him that the watchers and the escort vehicles are suddenly lessened, separated from him by more than a few hundred yards–– he will be taking the panzer over the Line, and they will not, and he looks at them from within his interface, from his immeasurable height of radiant glory and pities them for what they do not know.
    At the moment the ultimate beneficiaries of his run–– the hospitals in New England, the thirdmen, his own portfolio, possibly the immeasurably distant, insanely gluttonous creatures who ride their Orbital factories and look down on the Earth as a fast-depleting treasure house to be plundered–– all these fade down long redshifting lines, as if blurred by distance and the flaming jet’s exhaust. The reality is here in the panzer. Discontent is banished. Action is the thing, and All.
    He diverts a part of the jets exhaust and another set of fans whine into life, lifting the ground-effect panzer with a lurch onto its inflatable self-sealing cushion. The Pony Express will deliver the mail or know the reason why. Microwave chatter spins around his ears like gnats, and he wishes he could brush it away with his hands.
    “Arkady wants to say a few words, Cowboy.” The voice is the Dodger’s, and Cowboy can tell he knows this isn’t a good idea.
    “I’m sort of getting ready here,” Cowboy says.
    “I know that.” Shortly, sounding as if his mouth is full of tobacco: “Arkady thinks it’s important.”
    Cowboy concedes, watching the green lights, seeing maps flash behind his eyes. “Whatever Arkady wants,” he says.
    Arkady has the mic too close to his lips. His p’s and b ’s sound like cannon shots. Put the damn headset on your head, Cowboy thinks in irritation. That’s what it’s for, not to hold it to your fucking mouth.
    “I’ve got a lot at stake here, Cowboy,” Arkady says. “I’ll be in the plane and with you all the way.”
    “I am comforted as hell to hear that, Arkady Mikhailovich.” Cowboy knows Arkady will have paid off a lot of his costs with the other thirdmen, who wanted the Missouri privateers broken as much as he did.
    There is a pause on the other end as Arkady digests this:
    “I want you to come back,” Arkady says. Cowboy can hear the sounds of temper as if from far away. The thirdman’s voice drums on and on, every plosive a barrage. “But I fixed up that machine for a reason, and I don’t want you to come back without it. And I don’t want you to come back without having used it. Understand? Those fucking privateers are gonna get what’s coming to ’em.”
    “Ten-four,” Cowboy says, and before Arkady can ask what the fuck ten-four is supposed to mean, Cowboy opens his throttles and the howl, heard with utter clarity over Arkady’s mic, buries Arkady’s speech beneath its alcohol shriek. Though he can’t hear Arkady anymore, Cowboy is fairly certain that the distant yammering he’s hearing through his sockets contains a fair amount of abuse. He smiles.
    “Adios, muchachitos.” Cowboy laughs, and takes the panzer off the road. The farmer here, a friend of free enterprise and true, is getting paid for his wheat being trampled every so often, and Cowboy is going to have a clear run for the Line. The radar detectors pick up only weak signals from far away and Cowboy knows no one’s looking at him.
    The beast roars like the last lonely dinosaur and trembles as it gains way. Mental indicators climb their columns from blue to green to orange. Ripe wheat straw flies out behind in a plume. Cowboy has a steel guitar playing a