State Machine

by Spangler, K. B.

  “He’s after the package!” she yelled to Hill.

  “It’s in the car! So’s Noura!”

  Hill’s voice was muffled. She snuck a quick scan behind her, and found him in the back seat of the police cruiser, holding his suit coat against the hole in Noura’s face. Good, she thought. That’ll keep them safe—

  Two shots rang out, and the headlights of the car beside her shattered.

  “Don’t!” the first gunman shouted in an unfamiliar accent, his conversational colors white in sudden dismay. “It’s the Agent!”

  Okay, Rachel thought. I’ve definitely got some immunity here. Let’s buy our backup some time.

  “I’m coming out!” she shouted, holding up her gun in a loose one-handed surrender.

  The first gunman drew down on her again, and sent a few shots into the pavement.

  “Or not,” she muttered, and reached out through the police car’s hidden receiver to the Secret Service. “Alimoren? Where—”

  “Here!” Alimoren’s voice came from behind her, and he joined her at the car. “Where’s the package?”

  “In the car. Hill’s shot; looks like an easy through-and-through. But the bullet hit Noura in the face on its way out.”

  “Dead?”

  “No,” she told him, and she added her diagnostic autoscript to her scans before she ran them over Noura. Severe damage to mandible…moderate damage to sternocleidomastoideus…severed external jugular vein… She didn’t understand most of the anatomical terms the script threw back at her, but “severed” and “jugular” never belonged in the same description. “She’s seriously injured.”

  Alimoren’s blue relief faded. “Shit.”

  “They don’t want to hurt me,” she said. “But they’ll keep me pinned down.”

  “Go behind the cars,” he said. “I’ll cover you.”

  She nodded, and started running.

  “Get Noura to a hospital!” Alimoren shouted, as he took three quick shots towards the alcove where one of the shooters had found light cover.

  “Nearest hospital!” she agreed. “Meet us there!”

  Take us there, she told that small piece of Other in her head. I don’t have time to find the directions. Get us there in one piece, and I will give you so many cookies…

  She ran in a low crouch to the police cruiser, head down and gun ready. Alimoren was drawing the fire of the two gunmen she knew about, but where there were two gunmen there were usually more…

  She popped the electronic lock on the cruiser’s front door and was safely inside before her imaginary third gunman could shoot her. Hill was banging on the Plexiglas shield with the car keys: there was an anxious moment when she couldn’t get the safety window unlocked, but between the two of them they managed to get the keys in her hand.

  Rachel peeled out, the gunmen firing at the back of the cruiser. There was a loud pop as a side view mirror shattered, and another as the rear bumper was hit.

  “Stay down!” she shouted to Hill. “They’re trying to take out the tires!”

  “Go! Go! Go!” he shouted back.

  Rachel put a couple of blocks between them and the gunmen before she eased off the accelerator. “Holy God,” she said. “That was too close.”

  “Why didn’t he shoot you?” Hill asked.

  “I’m OACET,” she guessed. “They knew who Noura was, they knew who’d be transporting her, and they knew if they shot me they’d bring every Agent in the country down on them and fuck me why am I driving?!?”

  The calm, emotionless void that let her act and react in a gunfight vanished. Rachel found herself gripping a steering wheel—a steering wheel!—and driving down a road.

  A real road with real cars and live human beings on it.

  “Oh Jesus…oh Lord…” She heard herself praying, and her brain went on a tangent to wonder if God would forgive her for being a lapsed Catholic if she accidentally ran down a bunch of politicians. “Where’s the clutch?”

  “Clutch? It’s an automatic.”

  “What? What? I can’t drive an automatic!”

  “You’re…” Hill was baffled. “You’ve been driving one!”

  “Are you kidding? I’m from Texas! We don’t do automatics in Texas! I think it’s illegal to own an automatic in Texas!”

  She was babbling. Babbling was fine. Babbling let her focus on her embarrassment, and not on the metal projectiles hurtling around them.

  Rubber squealed on pavement, loud enough to break through her chatter and redirect her attention to the road. There were shapes—huge moving shapes—with spots of color within. These flared with various hues of yellow and red as she shot around them, drivers and passengers feeling everything from the heady flush of a near-miss to full-on road rage.

  “Turn on the siren!” Hill had finally recognized the more immediate threat didn’t come from Noura bleeding out, and was trying to force the thief into a seatbelt. The woman keened, the sound of it full of raw pain.

  Siren… That, Rachel could do; she had played with the layout of the MPD’s cruisers on previous trips, and she could trigger the siren without hunting for the command. The dome lights sparked on, and she gasped and tried to quell the sudden nausea that hit her as some of the frequencies she used to see began to resonate to the sound of the siren.

  “Peng?”

  “I’m fine!” She dropped a few of her favorite frequencies, deciding that she could either be sick and unable to see, or just unable to see, and the metal shapes lost their edges. Chryslers and Hondas turned into coupes and minivans, and their polarized glass vanished altogether.

  I’m fine, she told herself. The details didn’t matter. The space between the vehicles mattered, the speed at which the vehicles were moving mattered… Remember Frogger? This is exactly like Frogger. I was always good at Frogger.

  The siren cleared them a path, and she was starting to feel a little calmer when Hill said her name a second time.

  “Did she die?” It was a fair question. Rachel couldn’t hear Noura’s pitched whine over the sound of the siren.

  “No. Check our six.”

  “Fuck you,” she muttered. “Hard enough to do this without—aw shit.”

  Three vehicles, two SUVs and a sedan, were closing on them. The occupants were gunmetal blue.

  “Thought so,” Hill said. “They ours?”

  She threw another fast scan towards them to pick out any of the RFID tags that the MPD and federal agencies used to track their vehicles and equipment. Nothing.

  “Nope. They really want that package,” she said, and (God help us!) she goosed the accelerator.

  “Or Noura dead. Think they want her dead more than they want you alive?”

  “We’re not going to find out!” she said, and shouted over the siren: “Alimoren! If you can hear us, we’ve picked up a tail. Three vehicles. We need backup!”

  Nobody answered. Somewhere, off in the corner of her mind, pings were flooding her in waves as the collective picked up on her fear and anxiety.

  “No!” Rachel hollered through the broadest link she could find. “You can’t help me, and I need to focus! Out!”

  A car whose driver was somehow blissfully oblivious of the drama speeding towards him pulled out from a parking space. Rachel threw the wheel to the left to avoid him, and careened off of a city dump truck.

  “Fuck!”

  “Truck is fine—keep going!” Hill yelled.

  “Fuck fuck fuck! What do these people think a siren means?!”

  She tried to seize on the feeling of concrete to ground herself, but that made things worse. Each time she found a new focusing object, she was already moving past it at mind-wrenching speed.

  A mass of moving yellow metal came out in front of them. “School’s out,” she muttered. “Shitshitshitshit…”

  “Kids!” Hill gasped.

  “I’m aware!” she snapped.

  Three vehicles came around the dump truck: she made out the shapes of two SUVs and a late-model sedan, all
of them occupied by men in that gunmetal blue. She didn’t have the time to scan them weapons, but the woman who was now missing the lower part of her face was enough reason for her to assume they were armed.

  She tuned her scans forward and away, mimicking the cone of normal vision as well as she could. She fought against adding new or different frequencies, keeping her visuals as clean as possible… And everything was still a mess of speeding vehicles and jaywalkers and traffic cops and… Why did Noura have to do this after school let out?!? Rachel thought, yanking the wheel to the side to avoid what might have been a child, or a very small man, or maybe a dog walking on its hind legs—

  “Talk to Alimoren?” Hill asked, holding his phone up.

  “Now?!” Rachel shouted. “Are the two of you insane?!”

  The rear windshield exploded into flying glass. Hill was out of the line of fire, but Noura’s colors fluttered, soft and weak, as the glass peppered her body. The plastic barrier between the seats kept the safety glass from hitting Rachel, but she stomped on the gas anyhow: that windshield hadn’t broken by accident.

  “They really want her dead,” she said. Focus on the road focus on the road focus on the road oh God oh God… She whipped the wheel to the left. Tires shrieked as she crossed two lanes, and she pointed the car towards an empty street.

  “Wrong way!” Hill shouted, pointing at something. She was dimly aware of the white arrow within the black rectangle. “Where are you going?”

  “That’s a great question!” Rachel shouted back. They were lucky: the narrow road stayed clear until they were back in the main streets.

  “Shit!” Hill was pointing again, this time at the second SUV, now driving straight towards them. “Peng! It’s them!”

  “Aww!” Rachel hauled on the steering wheel again. The old plastic was slick beneath her hands, and the wheel kicked back on her as she tried to get them out of the path of the second SUV. The car skidded sideways, the momentum yanking it closer to the SUV before Rachel could hit the accelerator again. Luck was still with them; somehow she pointed them between a flock of taxis, and they were back in the slow lane before the other two cars managed to pin them in.

  She took another right—If I keep taking rights, we’ll end up back where we started—and this time, their luck ran out. A minivan tried to get out of her way by crossing two lanes of traffic, its driver a bright spot of sickly yellow terror. Rachel swerved to avoid it, driving over the curb and onto the sidewalk. She heard metal tear apart as the rear bumper was ripped from the cruiser.

  “Peng!” Hill shouted.

  “Yelling is not helping!” she shouted back at him.

  Her scans brought back the peripheral image of Hill with his phone pressed to his ear. “Next left! Next left!”

  Left was a blur of energy. It was another main road, at least six lanes across, its drivers too committed to making the light to yield the right-of-way to a police car. She drove the heel of her hand into the horn again and again, trying to clear them a path before they reached the intersection.

  Between that and the siren, it must have worked—Did the lights just turn red on the other three streets?—as the intersection was suddenly clear in a cacophony of blaring horns and squealing tires.

  She slowed as she took the left, hoping to catch her bearings. Howard University Hospital. The name came to her as if she had planned to drive to that particular hospital all along, and suddenly knew she needed to backtrack the way they had come.

  “We’re headed in the wrong direction,” she said. “Tell Alimoren we’re going to Howard. Put backup between us and the hospital.”

  Her subconscious twitched, and she knew the sedan had navigated the intersection. Rachel realized she was no longer paying attention to the cars, just their occupants; she could tell a bus from a pickup truck by the number of people and where they were sitting in their featureless hunks of plastic and chrome. Every time that gunmetal blue appeared, she jumped and tried to take evasive action.

  Traffic grew tight, bottlenecked by a couple of cars whose drivers had tried to pull to the side to make way for her, but had somehow managed to merge into a cluster of fenders instead. The sedan closed the distance as Rachel leaned on the horn, trying to blast the congestion out of her way.

  “Can’t do it!” she shouted.

  “Bike lane!” Hill shouted back.

  She couldn’t help but turn and gape at him, horrorstruck at the idea of putting the cruiser among unprotected blotches of color that moved too fast to predict. “Absolutely not!”

  “Go go go!”

  “No!” She slammed on the brakes and spun the cruiser around, and then drove the cruiser straight towards the sedan. The gunmetal blue shape in the driver’s seat went white and yanked the sedan out of her path.

  “Chicken, motherfucker! Chicken!” she howled with glee, and put the cruiser on a straight shot towards the hospital.

  “You’re crazy!” Hill yelled.

  “Yeah, probably!”

  One of the SUVs reappeared, and Rachel gasped aloud as she realized the gunmetal blue in the passenger’s seat was carrying a large rectangular object that shone with literal gunmetal. She skipped the cruiser back across the road before they could get a shot off, but Hill was close enough to make out the weapon.

  “Assault rifle!” he called, leaning over Noura’s bloody form to shield her.

  “Seatbelt! Get in your seatbelt!” she shouted.

  A series of jolts, fast and strong, ran through the steering wheel and into her hands, and she realized they had taken fire.

  “They’re too close!” Hill was still curled protectively over Noura, a hand on her head to keep her steady. “Shake ‘em!”

  “Aw hell!” Rachel shouted.

  The same intersection that had saved their lives once before came up in front of them, the cars just starting to untangle themselves from the chaos she had created. Traffic was moving slowly, but it was moving, with enough space for a police cruiser to navigate if it had an excellent driver…

  We are fucked, Rachel thought to herself.

  She couldn’t see Hill at all; he was a foggy shade of white panic.

  She put her life in the hands of the collective, and drove straight at the intersection.

  The lights changed without warning, and Rachel wiggled the cruiser through the traffic as confused and angry drivers stopped dead in their tracks.

  Hill whooped.

  She couldn’t explain. Not without confessing to Alimoren and anyone listening that Agents were hacking into the traffic system to protect one of their own. Hopefully, the changes to the system would be lost in the confusion of the chase.

  The SUV couldn’t make it through the intersection in time, but the sedan was smaller. It leapt through the traffic like a wolf after a rabbit, and Rachel caught another glimpse of metal in the arms of the man riding shotgun—

  Three streaks of white shot down from the sky, so intense they burned across the inside of her mind. They drove themselves into the sedan’s engine block in a perfect WHUMP, the three sounds coming so close together that they blurred into a single booming noise.

  “Wha—” Hill hauled himself upright. “Was that—”

  “Yup!” Rachel realized she was grinning like a wild woman. She let her scans slip behind her to watch the sedan slow down, its motor turned to so much slag by the anti-materiel rifle. “The cavalry is here!”

  Two down, one to go…

  “Who’s shooting?” Hill asked.

  Good question. Rachel wished she could spare a moment to process the environment, but she and her implant were tag-teaming survival skills. Instead, she shouted, both aloud and through the link: “Who’s out there?!”

  “Me and Ken,” a woman’s voice replied in her mind.

  Relief washed over Rachel. “Hippos,” she said to Hill. “It’s the Hippos!”

  “You hit?” he asked, and she had to check his colors to see concern and confusion warring to understand what he meant.

>   “Was I shot?” she replied. “No! Use more words!”

  “What?”

  “Talk more! The Hippos can hear us!” A large shape loomed out of a side street. She spun the wheel, hard. Metal ground against metal as she raked the police cruiser against a car. Beside her, Hill’s pain-red surged as his bad shoulder cracked against the divider. “Hold on!” she shouted at him, and took another right turn into traffic.

  Horns blared, and Hill hollered something fierce as she realized she had gone the wrong way down another one-way street.

  This wasn’t an underused side street. Four lanes of traffic were trying to pull off of the road for her, but they had all been moving at a goodly clip and she hadn’t given them enough warning. You’re gonna kill people if you keep this up! she swore at herself, and spun the wheel again. The police cruiser slid across two lanes before she got it under control, with Hill shouting at her from the back seat that she had gone the wrong way.

  “I know!” she roared, as she fought to bring the cruiser’s nose around. “That is not useful information!”

  Rachel stomped on the gas, and the car leaped forward. She felt a sudden, almost overpowering need to head back the way she came, so she took the next couple of rights as fast as she could.

  “We shook one!” Hill called.

  She threw a scan behind her, and found a single SUV trying gamely to keep pace.

  “What’s this ‘we’ shit?!” she shouted back at him, and Hill started to laugh.

  The lights were in Rachel’s favor, and the intersection in front of them was a wide open space. She wasn’t ready for the second SUV to come rocketing out of the side street and slam into the rear of the cruiser.

  The car spun again. This time, Rachel had no hope of bringing it under control; the cruiser was a rear-wheel drive, and the collision had broken something important. She turned into the skid and waited until the spinning had stopped.

  She couldn’t hear anything but the siren and the pounding in her head. When she was able to throw her scans around, she checked on the SUVs; men were emptying out of the two cars and marching towards the cruiser.