"Michael Swanwick - Dogfight" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

Bets were being made, being covered. The kickers were producing the hard stuff, the old stuff,
libertyheaded dollars and Roosevelt dimes from the stampand-coin stores, while more cautious bettors
slapped down antique paper dollars laminated in clear plastic. Through the haze came a trio of red
planes, flying in formation. Fokker D Vhs. The room fell silent. The Fokkers banked majestically under
the solar orb of a two-hundred-watt bulb.

The blue Spad dove out of nowhere. Two more plunged from the shadowy ceiling, following closely. The
kickers swore, and one chuckled. The formation broke wildly. One Fokker dove almost to the felt,
without losing the Spad on its tail. Furiously, it zigged and zagged across the green flatlands but to no
avail. At last it pulled up, the enemy hard after it, too steeply and stalled, too low to pull out in time. A
stack of silver dimes was scooped up. The Fokkers were outnumbered now. One had two Spads on its
tail. A needle-spray of tracers tore past its cockpit. The Fokker slip-turned right, banked into an
Immelmann, and was behind one of its pursuers. It fired, and the biplane fell, tumbling.

"Way to go, Tiny!" The kickers closed in around the table.

Deke was frozen with wonder. It felt like being born all over again.

Frank's Truck Stop was two miles out of town on the Commercial Vehicles Only route. Deke had
tagged it, out of idle habit, from the bus on the way in. Now he walked back between the traffic and the
concrete crash guards. Articulated trucks went slamming past, big eight-segmented jobs, the wash of air
each time threatening to blast him over. CVO stops were easy makes. When he sauntered into Frank's,
there was nobody to doubt that he'd come in off a big rig, and he was able to browse the gift shop as
slowly as he liked. The wire rack with the projective wetware wafers was located between a stack of
Korean cowboy shirts and a display for Fuzz Buster mudguards. A pair of Oriental dragons twisted in
the air over the rack, either fighting or fucking, he couldn't tell which. The game he wanted was there: a
wafer labeled SPADS&FOKKERS. It took him three seconds to boost it and less time to slide the
magnet which the cops in D.C. hadn't even bothered to confiscate across the universal security strip. On
the way out, he lifted two programming units and a little Batang facilitator-remote that looked like an
antique hearing aid.


He chose a highstack at random and fed the rental agent the line he'd used since his welfare rights were
yanked. Nobody ever checked up; the state just counted occupied rooms and paid.

The cubicle smelled faintly of urine, and someone had scrawled Hard Anarchy Liberation Front slogans
across the walls. Deke kicked trash out of a corner, sat down, back to the wall, and ripped open the
wafer pack.

There was a folded instruction sheet with diagrams of loops, rolls, and Immelmanns, a tube of saline
paste, aDd a computer list of operational specs. And the wafer itself, white plastic with a blue biplane
and logo on one side, red on the other. He turned it over and over in his hand: SPADS&FOKKERS,
FOKKERS&SPADS. Red or blue. `He fitted the Batang behind his ear after coating the inductor
surface with paste, jacked its fiberoptic ribbon into the programmer, and plugged the programmer into
the wall current. Then he slid the wafer into the programmer. It was a cheap set, Indonesian, and the
base of his skull buzzed uncomfortably as the program ran. But when it was done, a sky-blue Spad
darted restlessly through the air a few inches from his face. It almost glowed, it was so real. It had the
strange inner life that fanatically detailed museum-grade models often have, but it took all of his
concentration to keep it in existence. If his attention wavered at all, it lost focus, fuzzing into a pathetic
blur.