Free Wolf Time (Voice of the Whirlwind) by Walter Jon Williams

WOLF TIME
    Speakers in the hospital ceiling chimed a series of low, whispery, synthesized tones, tones scientifically proven to be relaxing. Reese looked down at the boy in the hospital bed and felt her insides twist.
    The boy was named Steward, and he’d just had a bullet removed that morning. In the last few days, mad with warrior zen and a suicidal concept of personal honor, he’d gone kamikaze and blown up the whole network. Griffith was dead, Jordan was dead, Spassky was dead, and nobody had stopped Steward until everything in L.A. had collapsed entirely. He hadn’t talked yet to the heat, but he would. Reese reached for her gun. Her insides were still twisting.
    Steward had been lied to and jacked over and manipulated without his knowing it. Mostly it had been his friend Reese who had done it to him. She couldn’t blame him for exploding when he finally figured out what had happened.
    And now this.
    Reese turned off the IV monitor so it wouldn’t bleep when he died, and then Steward opened his eyes.
    She could see the recognition in his look, the knowledge of what was about to happen. She might have known he wouldn’t make it easy.
    “Sorry,” she said, and raised the gun. What the hell else could she say? Maybe we can still be friends, after this is over?
    Steward was trying to say something. She felt herself wring out again.
    She shot him three times with her silenced pistol and left. The police guards didn’t look twice at her hospital coat and ID. Proper credentials had always been her specialty.
    *
    CYA. Reese headed for Japan under a backup identity. Credentials her strong suit, as always. On the shuttle she drank a star beast and plugged her seat’s interface stud into the socket at the base of her skull.
    She closed her eyes and silently projected the latest scansheets onto the optical centers of her brain, and her lips twisted in anger as for the first time she found out what had really gone down, what she’d been a part of.
    Alien pharmaceuticals, tonnes of them, shipped down under illegal cover. The network had been huge, bigger than Reese, from her limited perspective, had ever suspected, and now the L.A. heat had everything. Police and security people everywhere, even in the space habitats, were going berserk.
    All along, she’d thought it was friends helping friends, but her friends had jacked her around the same way she’d jacked around Steward. The whole trip to L.A. had been pointless— they had been stupid to send her. Killing Steward couldn’t stop what was happening, it was all too big. The only way Reese could stay clear was to hide.
    She ordered another drink, needing it badly. The shuttle speakers moaned with the same tuneless synthesized chords as had the speakers in the hospital room. The memory of Steward lying in the bed floated in her mind, tangled in her insides.
    She leaned back against the headrest and watched the shuttle’s wings gather fire.
    *
    Her career as a kick boxer ended with a spin kick breaking her nose, and Reese said the fuck with it and went back to light sparring and kung fu. Beating the hell out of herself in training only to have the hell beaten out of her in the ring was not her idea of the good life. She was thirty-six now and she might as well admit there were sports she shouldn’t indulge in, even if she had the threadware for them. The realization didn’t improve her mood.
    Through the window of her condeco apartment, Reese could see a cold wailing northeast wind drive flying white scud across the shallow, reclaimed Aral Sea, its shriek drowning the minarets’ amplified call to prayer.
    Neither the wind nor the view had changed in months. Reese looked at the grey Uzbek spring, turned on her vid, and contemplated her sixth month of exile.
    Her hair was black now, shorter than she’d worn it in a long time. Her fingerprints were altered, as was the bone structure of her face. The serial numbers on her artificial eyes had been changed. However bleak