ISBN 0-356-14872-6 (UK hbk)

"Corporate Orbital blocs tyrannize a balkanized Earth of flooded wastes and vast slums filled with zonedancers, panzerjocks, dirtgirls, buttonhead and nihilist cults, where city lotteries give prizes for guessing each night's murdered dead. Yet the worst excesses of the plastic-bodied, implanted, overdosed meat hustlers can't match the evil outside the gravity well. The blocs control contraband and commerce; they spread recombinant plagues just to market the cures. But now the criminal underworld and guerrilla underground have merged: there is a single chance to shift the balance of power, foment a corporate crisis, and hit the Orbitals with a short, nasty war. A war fought by commandos as lethal as their killing machines -- because they are themselves becoming machines, hardwired.

"Cowboy : the ex-jet fighter pilot; a smuggler with metal eyes and infrared vision, who dreams of Old West glory while riding the shattered highways, his brain circuitry hardwired to his 300mph armoured aircar. His lover Sarah : the assassin whose cyborg weapons coil about her heart; whose only life goal is to get her drug-addict brother Daud out of a planetary ghetto and safely off-world. Reno : a human consciousness trapped in the electronic interface between information and eternity. And Albrecht Roon : the tycoon cast down from orbit, who molests children while tapping their brains; whose crystal dream is to crawl back up the gravity well and evolve a slave race of microchip zombies.

"Theirs will be a war fought at Mach-3 with delta jets and military space shuttles; fought with computerized stock fraud and instant data-flow; fought with media hype and hologram ads. Desperate times call up desperate heroes hardwired to stop the Orbital heavens from turning Earth into hell." [jacket blurb, UK hbk, 1987]