Going Ballistic

by Dorothy Grant

  "Flying airplanes. You know the risk factor on that?" She bared her teeth at him, and he laughed, gesturing her into the car. Blondie wasn't there, and she wondered if he was ahead or behind. “Lie down on the seat. We'll be bailing fast when we get to the exchange point."

  "Won't they be able to tell there are three people in the car?"

  "Visually, maybe not. Thermal sensors, yes, but daytime screws with thermal… and they don't know which vehicle with someone in the footwell is the one they want. Hush, now."

  He flipped a blanket over her, and she lay there, feeling the car start, stop, accelerate and turn. There was no way she'd be able to find her way back to the safe house if she had to bail now. The blanket was hot and itchy, and let pinpricks of light in through the weave.

  They passed into shadow, and Twitch yanked open his door. "Come on, out! Out! This side!" She threw off the blanket, fumbled the seat harness open, and scrambled awkwardly after him. The car had pulled into the inside lane and stopped against a bridge abutment, barely far enough from the plascrete to open the door. Twitch had scrambled over the barrier to a sleek sports car stopped in a lane headed the opposite way. She scrambled after him, gasping in the exhaust-fouled air, hurtling over the grimy concrete and landing in a crunch of broken glass. There was no room to get in on this side; she came around the front and stopped to plaster herself against the side as a semi roared past, honking, close enough for her to touch. Twitch was actually up against the passenger door of the car - as she reached him, he whirled her around, stepped out in traffic while yanking it open, and shoved her inside. She'd barely pulled her feet in when he slammed it shut, and gave a couple sharp raps on the roof. Her head snapped back as they peeled out, leaving Twitch behind.

  She looked over and saw Blondie was driving, paying full attention to the traffic and none to her as he whipped between lanes, ducked in front of cars and cut them off, and generally acted like a maniac. If he weren't so serious and concentrating so hard, she'd have thought he'd lost his mind. "Do I hide in the footwell?"

  "Too late; we've been spotted. Buckle in." The sports car had a full five-point harness like a ballistic plane, and she quickly started buckling in the straps, fighting the stiff creaking of the armorcloth. She made it just in time for the harness to hold her, head rocking hard to the side as he took an off-ramp at speed and drifted, laying rubber, around a corner and through an intersection.

  She spat a curse and he gave a short laugh, lips peeled back from his teeth. "That'll give us a few seconds gap."

  "Are you trying to kill us?" She was doing her level best to dig holes in the armrest with her fingers.

  "No, the Feds are. I'm trying to stay out of range. Hang on, headed back on the freeway." He yanked the car through another intersection, skidding onto the on-ramp. As she looked back, she saw a blue car that looked familiar nearly sliding into the side of the onramp, recovering and heading after them.

  "Blue car?"

  "That's one. There's four." He hit the carpool lane and accelerated. "Listen, about last night…”

  "It's okay." She didn't want to distract him; she knew what task saturation felt like, and if it was her turn to sit quietly while he was dealing with the controls, she might hate it, but she knew the score.

  "No, it's not." He was too busy to explain, so she waited him out. That involved weaving between cars and trucks like an air racer maneuvering around pylons, only closer and even scarier because there was no way to gain altitude and pull out. When they hit another offramp, she was expecting the turn, but this time he whipped left instead of right, taking the overpass into an industrial area. "If you get out of here…” He paused as lights and sirens lit up in his rear view mirror. "Fuck."

  "What?" She looked back in the side view mirror, not daring to turn around. Lights were flashing - and then the vehicle was slewing wildly to the side, tires squealing as the blue car roared around it. She looked back as Blondie firewalled the throttle and the engine screamed, pressing her so hard against the seat she couldn't see. A gigantic explosion sounded behind her, and as he stopped accelerating, she saw another car come out of the flying dust and debris and smoke, with a man standing halfway out of the sunroof. He was carrying something over his shoulder, pointing it at them. She shrank back in her seat. "Blondie!”

  "I see it." He whipped the wheel hard over, yanking up the parking brake, and all four tires squealed as they slewed hard left. She hadn't even realized they were coming up on a T-intersection, and could only stare at her window getting closer and closer to the plascrete warehouse wall. Something exploded directly behind them, the force of it hitting her like a fist as the air was filled with debris, and all the windows cracked and shattered. Her shoulder felt like something fiery and sharp had clawed her, and she gasped for breath, feeling sucker-punched.

  The car was lurching, making terrible noises as it rolled further down the block, and slowing down. Blondie reached over, and hit the release on her harness. "See the green dumpster ahead?"

  "Got it!"

  "When we're even with it, roll out of the car, and hide behind it until they're past. Wait three minutes to shake any pursuit, then head downhill. There's train tracks; you can follow them to the port. There'll be taxis there; just grab one. Don't take the damn train! Got it?"

  "Roll even with dumpster, hide three minutes, downhill to tracks, taxi, no train." Even with the car slowing down, it was coming up all too fast.

  "Good. Get going." He slapped her on the shoulder, and she shoved the door open, took a deep breath, and tried to dive out of the car. Her first fear was that her feet would hang up; that was lost in the bone-crunching impact as she skidded badly along the pavement, and she only managed to roll by sheer luck and momentum before ending up against a wall.

  Gasping, crying, shaking, she crawled and scrambled behind the dumpster. Even with the ringing in her ears, she could hear the cracks of gunfire, and screams of tortured metal and squeal of rubber, and another explosion. A car went past at high speed, and then another, firing. There was a crumpling sort of crunching noise of a car impacting something more solid than itself, and more gunfire. Then it was quiet.

  She didn't know how long she'd waited; she could access her implants, but she hadn't checked the timestamp when it had all started. All she knew was that she hurt, all over. The armorcloth might have protected her from cuts, but it didn't do a damn thing for the bruises. But after long enough, she crawled and limped away from the dumpster, down the nearest alley, headed downhill.

  Her pants were completely shredded, the armorcloth showing through, so she ducked from one alley to another, and took off the remains, putting on another pair - also dress pants. She'd have dug for the track suit pants, but her left arm hurt too much. A quick check of her jacket showed it had a slice in the fabric, slightly scorched, that was damp with a dark stain. When she put her hand to it, it came away red with blood. Checking the shirt underneath, she realized that her shoulder not only stung, it actually hurt a whole lot more when she tried to lift it. There was a small first aid kit in the bag; she tried to wipe down her shoulder with antiseptic and slap a seal on it. The shirt would have to stay on; she wasn't going to stand out in an alley like a fool, trying to take it off. Pants and everything else went back in her pack - no sense leaving evidence - and she headed downhill.

  As she passed an office parking lot, she found a pizza delivery car pulled up, the driver hustling back with several folded bags under his arms. "Hey, where you headed next?"

  "Sorry, lady, I'm out! Got to head back to the restaurant!"

  "What's it worth to you to give me a ride to the nearest train station on the way there?" She pulled out her wallet, and flicked a twenty-mark note out. "I got two interviews today, and my ride ain't shown up. By the time a taxi makes it all the way out here, well, you know."

  "Hell, that's on my way." He waved her forward. "Come on."

  "Thanks, man. I really appreciate it." She added a second twenty, and handed them to
him as he came around to shut the door for her. The car was saturated with the scent of garlic and tomato, and she wanted to just go limp and breathe it in. It wasn't right to go from terrified to hungry so fast, but her stomach had other ideas than her head.

  "I gotta warn you, I got a lead foot." He said, as she buckled in. "Course, your buddy brought you in on his bike, so maybe it won't be so bad." He gestured at her hands, still in the gloves, and at her hair, which was coming out of its braids all over.

  "Hey, I'm not going to complain!" She grinned, and did not laugh at him as he actually stopped at the stop sign before pulling out. Instead, she pulled her sleeves back and started pulling off the gloves. Where she was going next, they would be more out of place than the silly epaulets.

  18

  "What's eating you? You look like you're nervous as hell." The cabbie grinned at her through his scraggly beard, clearly just trying to be friendly.

  "Job interview." She bared her teeth back at him in the best imitation of a grin she could manage. "And it's been one of those days of everything going sideways."

  "Oh, yeah, yeah, I getcha. I'd offer ya a toke, but you probably got a piss test coming up, yeah? You need one of the clean packets?" He grinned, and hooked a thumb back at the trunk. "I can hook you up."

  "Nah, nah, I'm good on that." She waved her hand, and blew out a breath, rubbing sweaty palms on her pants. "I got this. I got this." Given the firefight behind her, she'd better nail it; there was no guarantee that the safe house would still be safe even if she could find her way back.

  "You'll do great, lady." He nodded. "I know. You got it."

  I got your tip, is what you mean, she thought. But she nodded, and played the part of nervous job applicant for the next few minutes, until they pulled up to the cargo side of the airport. She had him drop her off at the FBO, the private non-airline terminal where small planes came and went.

  She hadn't been in an FBO in years, not since she'd gone through conversion. Walking back into the smell of engine oil, small prop exhaust, floor cleaner, popcorn and coffee brought a smile to her face. The kid behind the counter looked up with a smile, and she grinned at him. "Where's your weather terminal?"

  "Right over there." He hooked a thumb at the desk in the corner. "Let me know if you need fueling!"

  "Will do." She smiled, and sat down to call up the local plans. They always asked for an airplane's tail number, and she hesitated for a moment, realizing it would be a very bad thing to put in her last flight. Fortunately, she could see a plane at the pump, and its tail number was jauntily displayed in red on white. Easy enough; she used that to call up the local weather patterns. It was a beautiful day, so far away from the polar jet stream that the land was more influenced by tropical weather patterns than polar, and the weather that always happened where ocean met land.

  She blinked at that, and wondered. Yes, by the advertising posters on the wall, they did have beaches here. She hadn't been to a beach since the last sunburn on the Spice Coast, years ago. What would it be like to be one of the tourists playing in the waves, instead of the pilot carrying them there? Michelle looked down at her pale hands, and grimaced. She'd stick out like a lighthouse beacon, as pale as she was. Shaking her head, she went back to looking at weather fronts.

  When she got up from the computer and hitched her pack over her shoulder, the kid was headed to the hangar for supplies while talking on a headset paired to his handbrain, ordering catering for an outgoing plane. It was the perfect time to slip out, unnoticed, and go for a walk in the sunshine, headed down the ramp access road to the cargo outfits. She stopped to take off her jacket and wrap it around her waist, too. When she picked up the pace to an easy jog, she became invisible: another pilot trying to get in a little exercise in the late morning, between bouts of sitting for hours at a time. The sun was shining out of a brilliant blue sky, with scattered cirrus clouds wisping in the prevailing winds at two zero thousand, and a light and variable wind out of the southwest. It felt so good to move, out in the sunshine and the air that smelled of tarmac and jet exhaust, green grass from the verge and hot concrete, with the roar of planes taking off from the nearby end of the runway. This was where she belonged, and the world she understood.

  On the other side of the fence, the cargo planes were distinctly uglier than passenger planes; the rows of windows were absent, and instead of beautiful advertising and logos, the planes were in the cheapest, basic white coat, or splotchy paint coats of primer and whatever was cheapest and on hand at the time of repair. One or two were old passenger buybacks, with their rows of windows that only looked in on boxes and igloos full of breakbulk cargo, if they hadn't been replaced with metal patches. Forklifts moved cargo back and forth on the ramp, unloading trucks moving things up from the port, or elsewhere around the country, and filling them back up with goods from further away. Official Federation interdiction or not, they were plenty busy; they must have built plenty of trade agreements and networks in defiance of the Parliament's degree that everything in every country they ruled must be regulated and approved through them.

  She angled into the parking lot, bypassing the official lobby entrance to punch in the code the chief pilot had given her at the bar into the pad at the side entrance gate. The light flicked to green and it unlocked. She let herself in, daring to hope that if that had worked, the rest of the offer with a lead for a job was also true. At the back of the building, the hangar door was open, with several planes pulled up on the ramp and one inside for maintenance. The air was filled with power tools’ whine and chatter, the hammering drone of the air compressor, and the smell of oil, exhaust, and burnt metal from a welder going in the corner. She walked around various projects, nodding as needed at the mechanics. The walls were completely lined with tool chests, workbenches, machines, and parts racks; it was a far cry from clean, but well-lived in, well-used, and cared for. That was a far better test of the operation than any sniff test eyeballing up front in the lobby or on the gouge sites; happy mechanics meant things were running well in the rest of the operation.

  She found the office sign next to the break room and bathroom, pointing up. Nobody looked twice when she ducked into the bathroom, locking it, and she looked around the little space in surprise. It was cleaner than she'd expected for a bathroom in a hangar. The tiles were well worn and a few cracked, but the grout was clean and the place didn't stink. She took the opportunity to relieve herself, wash up, and quickly rebraid her hair, so it didn't look like she'd escaped a madhouse. Or, apparently, a motorcycle. Shrugging the jacket on, she let herself out and took the stairs up to the landing.

  Unlike a passenger outfit, the chief pilot's office was next to the chief mechanic's, showing their near-equal importance in keeping the cargo flowing. The frosted window showed the light was on, and a little hand sign by the door was turned to "in." Michelle took a deep breath, let it out, and ran her hands over her hair to smooth it down one last time. Job interviews were something best done with lots of researching the company, and studying the interview gouges. She hadn’t done any of that. She didn't even have a real ID on her. She was just going to have to tackle it, head on. With another deep breath, she knocked on the door.

  "It's open!" a voice called.

  In the light of the regular office sunpaint, she might have had a hard time recognizing the chief pilot without the jacket slung over a coat hook on the wall. He was a bear of a man, with unruly red hair threaded with silver, big barrel chest straining an ironed dress shirt without epaulets, and sleeves rolled up to display heavily muscled and tattooed forearms. Even sitting at his desk, surrounded by paperwork, he was still imposing, with a truly impressive frown. He didn't recognize her, but he recognized her jacket, and that was enough to make him give her a quick jerk of his head, indicating she should come in. "What can I do for you, ma'am?"

  She came in, closed the door, and leaned against it. Drawing a deep breath that smelled of hot oil, paperwork, and coffee, she gave it her best shot. Despite her
best intentions, her voice came out soft and a uncertain. "When we crossed paths a few nights ago, down at the Happy Landings, you mentioned you have an opening for a pilot around here?"

  He nodded, and stood up, looking her up and down. "Someone shot you." He looked from the bloody rip on her shoulder to her face, locking eyes. "Did they follow you here?"

  "No. I ditched 'em in the alleys before I hit the train station." At a rising bushy eyebrow, she explained, "Didn't take the train, just caught a taxi there to the FBO. Checked weather, and when nobody else showed up, hoofed it over here." If that left a step or two out, it was enough.

  "Good." He held out a massive hand. "Russ Pearl."

  "Amber Porter." She smiled as she gave him back the name he'd given her, and gave as good a grip as she could.

  He flipped her hand over, and ran a callused thumb over her wrist, pulling back the nuskin to reveal the port there. She reflexively yanked her arm back, only to find his hold as firm as a rock. "What are you running?" He pinged her, looking from her wrist to her face.

  "Starlink 61's." She kept her voice steady, despite the feeling of vulnerability his hold and an open port gave her, and sent back her system specs.

  He grunted, and let the nuskin close back over her port, then let her hand go. She did not jerk it away, but she did stuff her hands in her jacket pockets, letting the shielding cut any traces or further pings he might try to send. "Now, Miss Porter, we have a… friend in common. Since he's in town, I took the liberty of asking if he'd recommend you."

  She blinked, and nodded warily. Given the fake ID in her wallet this morning, it had to be either Grunveld or one of the team. "Yes, sir?"

  "He said we could skip the sim session, as you're a good stick." That was one of the best compliments you could get on your flying from another pilot. She wondered if Grunveld really had said that… or if he just meant he knew who she was, and that she'd gotten the last flight down in one piece. "I won't, of course, but high praise from him. He also said you rub along all right with vets." He was watching her for her reaction, and she nodded. "I don't like hiring civilians; they run away to the airlines as soon as there's an opening."