The Long Run

by The Long Run (new ed) (mobi)

  He had never bothered to practice firing the thing; he had never really expected to have a target that he was willing to fire it upon.

  Safety off. What's taking the waldo so long? Stairs? It has problems with stairs? The sight popped up the instant the safety mechanism was disengaged. Trent hefted the thing up to his shoulder and waited until he saw the first flicker of motion in the doorway, and depressed the stud. The wall behind him slammed into him suddenly; a huge clap of thunder boomed around him, and for a moment he thought the bazooka had misfired. His ears were ringing and his shoulder, where he had braced the bazooka, felt as though it had been struck with a sledgehammer. The air was amazingly hot, burning his lungs. The back of his skull was sore where the recoil had slammed him into the wall.

  There was nothing in the hallway, including the hallway. A gaping hole where he had briefly seen the waldo, two meters in diameter, let Trent look directly down into the shop, through the clearing smoke, directly into the upturned features of Peaceforcer Elite Emile Garon.

  Their eyes touched for an instant. Then Trent was on his feet and moving. He yelled, "Lights off," slapped the pressure pad on the wall and sprinted up the stairs as the wall resealed itself behind him. Halfway up he shouted, "Johnny, blow the fadeaway," heard a muffled whump from downstairs and smelled the sweet, penetrating scent of the Complex 8-A as the fadeaway bomb inundated the room beneath him. He ran the rest of the way up the stairs, into his apartment. At the tub he lay down on his stomach, reached in with his right arm and pulled at one of the handles embedded in the side of the tub. The handle resisted and he pulled again, harder, and the bottom of the tub fell away, pouring the small pool down into the stairwell Trent had just come up, filling the stairwell to a height of three meters. If Garon managed to push back the correct section of wall, against the full weight of the water, he would be greeted with a small tidal wave.

  Johnny Johnny said, "Welcome home, Boss."

  Trent jumpted to his feet and ran to the workstation on the desk next to his bed. His handheld, which included Johnny Johnny's Image coprocessor circuitry, was plugged into the side of the terminal; Trent ripped it free and pushed it into the inner coat pocket of his suit. Johnny Johnny's voice came from inside the pocket. "I set up all the records to wipe on your voice command, Boss. Say, 'Kwazy Wabbit.' "

  Trent pushed the desk's upper right hand drawer, paused a second and pressed it again, twice, in quick succession. The drawer slid open and Trent took from it a small package in antistatic lining. The package contained the most compact wealth in the world, more compact than gemstones, more compact than stamps. It held six and a half terabytes--forty-five thousand Credit Units worth--of RTS, hot RAM.

  A bright thin line of light reached up from the floor and appeared before Trent's eyes. Trent said in a flatly conversational voice, "Kwazy Wabbit." His traceset was on the bench on the other side of the room, hooked into the full sensory terminal. The thought struck Trent, in the instant that the scarlet laser beam reached up through the floor and the burnished wooden floor split apart, the laser beam tracking in a rough circle around the spot where Trent stood, that the cyborg was destroying a floor it had cost him two thousand Credit Units to lay down. A startling flare of pure anger touched him, and then he reached up, grabbed the cord hanging from the roof, and pulled down the folding stairs that led to the roof, as the floor beneath him fell away. He scrambled up the stairs, three meters to the ceiling, and came up onto the gravel surface of the roof on his hands and knees, and then for the first time looked back down into the ruins of his home. Two stories beneath him, Emile Garon looked up at Trent through the hole in what had once been a two thousand CU floor.

  The cyborg leapt straight up.

  For a single fascinated, horrified moment, Trent thought the cyborg would reach the roof with that one leap. He did not quite; Garon came to a rest standing on the bottom step of the stairs. With immaculate calmness, as Garon came swiftly up the stairway, Trent withdrew his emblade, turned it on, cut the stairs free and watched Emile Garon and the stairs fall together in silence, fifteen meters down to the second floor of the shop.

  Trent came to his feet slowly, and looked around.

  His right arm was still dripping wet.

  He felt calm, in control.

  Trent did not have the vaguest idea what to do next. One jump would bring Garon back up to the third floor; another would take him up through the opening in the roof that the folding stairs had once filled. Trent walked to the side of the roof and looked over the edge; in the front of the building a pair of Peaceforcer cars were parked, autoshots and masers trained on the front entrance to the shop. The west side of the building was also covered by a PKF vehicle. The south side overlooked the small alleyway that led out behind the shop, and was completely empty.

  He was three stories up and there was no way down.

  When Trent turned away from looking down into the alley, Emile Garon was pulling himself up through the stairwell exit. He was injured; something had actually cut through the phenomenally tough false skin that covered every exposed area of his body, and blood trickled down his cheek. His black hair was pale with plaster dust.

  Trent said, "You're hurt."

  Garon stood slowly, glancing warily around the roof to see if further surprises awaited him. "An Elite cyborg is fairly heavy, M. Trent. We do not fall well and we do not like heights." He stood still, like a 'bot, just looking at Trent. "What now?"

  Garon was six meters away from Trent, standing right next to the hole in the roof where the stairs had been. Without giving himself time to think about it, Trent took a slow step backward. "I suppose you want me to surrender?"

  "If you would."

  Trent took another step, and this time Garon did follow him, took a step away from the stairwell, from Garon's only way off the roof. "I'd rather not," said Trent.

  "I do not want to hurt you, child. I was right about you; you are a precious thing, Trent. You will not be brain-drained if you cooperate, I promise," said Garon softly. "The Unification would hardly waste your unique skills."

  Trent took another step backward, and another. "I don't doubt it, Emile. I was a slave through most of my childhood because of the Unification's unwillingness to waste my unique skills."

  The Peaceforcer approached him across the roof. "How old are you now, Trent?"

  "Eighteen." The back of Trent's right heel touched the lip of the small rise that ran around the perimeter of the roof.

  "And it was you," said Emile with what Trent thought honest wonder in his voice, "seven years ago, in the InfoNet. You were eleven years old."

  "Yeah." Trent did not dare look behind himself.

  "So young, to have done so much. I shall," he told Trent, "plead for leniency in your case."

  Trent took a long, deep breath. His nerves steadied, and everything came into focus. "Well, there are advantages to being young." Garon was still too close to the stairwell.

  The Peaceforcer came a step closer. "Oh?"

  "Agility," said Trent. How long would it take Garon to reach the ground? "And I'm told we heal fast."

  Garon had covered nearly half the distance between the stairwell and Trent. He stopped quickly, in mid-step. "We are three stories up, child. Please don't."

  Trent looked up, at the gray, cloud covered sky. There was the faintest suggestion of mist in the air, of dampness. It was as though he stood outside of himself, and watched without interest as his body prepared to do something very dangerous. His eyes came back down from heaven, and stared straight at the Peaceforcer Elite. "Catch me," he said softly, "if you can."

  The cyborg came toward him in a blur of motion so fast Trent barely saw it. He pushed with his toes, and went backward, out over the edge and into the empty air.

  * * *

  10.

  Something brushed against the sole of his right foot.

  He turned in midair and almost made it, struck the ground and rolled into the fall. He came out of it moving, with
a shrill grating pain in his right knee, moving at almost a dead run down the alleyway toward the garage, half a block away.

  He did not slow, did not dare look back. He could hear odd sounds from far down the alleyway--what did a two-hundred kilo Peaceforcer Elite running across a ferrocrete alleyway sound like?

  Trent ran faster, ran until his knee threatened to give way. He reached the garage at the end of the alleyway, slapped the pressure pad once, so fast the pad had no time to ID his palm, waited a moment and then touched it again more slowly. The garage door curled open from the ground up, slowly; Trent dropped to his belly and wriggled through under the opening door, came back up again and made his way to the car, keeping most of his weight on the left leg.

  The car was a '61 Chandler MetalSmith Mark III.

  With a steering wheel.

  It was the same car Carl Castanaveras had owned before his death, before the car itself had been proscribed, along with all other manually operable vehicles, by the Unification Council. Possession of an unmodified Chandler MetalSmith Mark III, inside TransCon's Automated Traffic Control Regions, was good for five to fifteen years in a Public Labor Works Battalion.

  It was capable of true flight, and on the ground it was the fastest hovercar anyone had ever built.

  Trent had the canopy raised and was inside the car before the garage door was a quarter of the way up. One finger touched the ignition, brought the fans up and the MetalSmith rocked once and then lifted smoothly forty centimeters above the floor of the garage. The same procedure brought the turbines up with a smooth, deep-throated hum, feeding fuel to the turbojets at the rear of the car.

  The garage door was nearly halfway open.

  The steering wheel unlocked with a smooth click. Even in '61 a carcomp had been mandatory equipment, but on every machine Chandler had built until '64, the carcomp had not even turned itself on until instructed by its operator.

  Trent did not intend to turn the carcomp on; it was certain to disapprove of his driving. Trent had just finished activating the impact field, glanced up once again through the nearly open garage door, out at the empty alleyway, had the brief flash of a thought what could possibly be taking him so long and then the Peaceforcer's AeroSmith descended gently, straight out of the sky, and came to a halt hovering above the pavement not twenty meters away from Trent. The Metal-Smith's canopy began vibrating instantly; Garon was trying sonics. A pair of autoshots were tracking him as well, and Trent did not wait to see anything further; he punched the throttle to full acceleration.

  The autoshots could not have been set for full automatic; Garon had time for only a single blast. The pellets struck the MetalSmith's canopy, cracked it slightly, and then the MetalSmith hammered into the Peaceforcer vehicle, twisted Garon's car until Garon's left front fender was smashed tightly into the side of the alleyway, and the car itself blocked Trent's passage out of the alleyway. Trent did not hesitate, did not give himself time to think about it; he lit the Metal-Smith's turbojets at redline and the MetalSmith hung on Garon's vehicle for a second, and then leaped up like a living thing and shoved its way straight up and over the top of the AeroSmith.

  In his worst nightmares Trent had never expected to drive the MetalSmith; he had purchased it on Booker Jamethon's advice, for use in the event that he ever needed to make a high speed run across the water.

  The alleyway let out onto Ryerson; the car hit the street at seventy kph, and Trent tried to make a left turn. He had never driven a vehicle of any description at such speeds; the MetalSmith yawed, lifted its right side to direct its fans against the vehicle's direction of travel, climbed up onto the slidewalk and smashed into the front of a closed beauty parlor.

  In a PKF patrol vehicle across the street, a single Peaceforcer looked startled. Trent barely glanced at him as he used the nose jets, pulled back from the beauty shop and drove slowly and carefully along the slidewalk until he reached a spot where he could bring the car back down onto the street.

  In older action sensables made before manually operable vehicles had been outlawed, Trent remembered scenes where the hero or heroine had driven madly through crowded streets at two hundred or two hundred and fifty kilometers per hour. For the first time he wondered how they'd done it; the Peaceforcer behind him, making a U-turn to follow him down Ryerson, promptly smashed into a cab. Trent reached Flushing, turned right onto Flushing and joined the flow of vehicles moving evenly down the street. He drove briefly east, made a left on Williamsburg and another onto Kent, following as closely as he was able the driving patterns of the carcomp controlled vehicles around him.

  Johnny Johnny's voice said softly, from inside Trent's coat, "What's happening, Boss?"

  Two AeroSmiths appeared in the view from Trent's rear holocams, moving north on Kent, hovering five meters above the flow of street traffic. "Bad stuff, Johnny." The Peaceforcer vehicles were gaining on him. They had not seen him yet, but it was only a matter of moments. One of the vehicles had a smashed front left fender: Garon. "Really bad stuff."

  Johnny Johnny said, "Oh."

  "I really don't like this," said Trent under his breath. AeroSmiths such as the Peaceforcers used were not properly speaking hovercars; they were aircraft that could drive in traffic. Taking to the air was not necessarily a bright way to lose his pursuit.

  But the uncompleted Hoffman Spacescraper was only eight blocks away.

  And Peaceforcers Elite did not like heights.

  He brought the fans up to one half, and the MetalSmith surged upward, into plain sight of the pursuing Peaceforcers; snapped the MetalSmith's wings open, hit the rear turbojets at full, and headed for the Hoffman Spacescraper.

  It was a long, slow climb, eight blocks north and three kilometers straight up, with the Peaceforcers gaining on him all the way. A small fleet of AeroSmiths followed the lead pair: nearly fifteen cars full of Peaceforcers. Trent's teeth ached; Garon and the car with him had their sonics on him. The MetalSmith was still too far away for the sonics to be dangerous; but they made the car's canopy buzz, made his teeth hurt.

  He thought about turning the MetalSmith's radio on and listening in on the PKF, but couldn't think of anything that it would gain him. They knew where he was, he knew where they were.

  The spacescraper grew with agonizing slowness, from a distant landmark to a towering monolith that blocked out half of Trent's sky. The tiny squares on the spacescraper's sides became huge offices; people inside were flocking to the windows to watch the drama that the Boards had notified them was unfolding.

  At two kilometers' height Trent was only thirty meters from the side of the spacescraper. The MetalSmith could not go straight up; Trent took it around the spacescraper, began circling the two square block-wide spacescraper as the MetalSmith rose, lazy loops that took the MetalSmith up some three hundred meters per circuit. The AeroSmiths had no such limitation; they reached the same altitude as the MetalSmith while Trent was still two hundred meters below the level where the spacescraper's exterior walls ceased. The Peaceforcers did not fire upon him with their autoshots; they kept the sonics focused on the car, and Trent felt himself becoming drowsy.

  Two hundred meters ... one-forty ... eighty meters left. Trent found himself yawning. If I just close my eyes for a moment, he thought, I can rest and then....

  The walls were gone.

  Trent brought the MetalSmith around in a slow, gentle loop, smiling dreamily, and at over a hundred and fifty kilometers an hour flew straight into the superstructure of the Hoffman Spacescraper.

  The voice nagged at him and wouldn't stop.

  Trent could not remember having ever experienced any pain to match what greeted him on his return to awareness. The knee he had injured earlier was hurt worse now, a grinding flare of agony that outstripped even the pain from when he was thirteen and the Temple Dragons had taken turns beating him.

  The car was half on its side, jammed in between a pair of twisted girders. The canopy was shattered; jagged pieces still hung in the frame, but most of
it was gone.

  "Boss! Damn it, Boss, what's happening? I'm stuck in the goddamn handheld and I can't see a thing! Boss? Talk to me, Boss, I'm getting scared and--"

  Trent said blurrily, "Be quiet." Johnny Johnny's voice cut off immediately. Trent remembered the impact field cutting in as the car struck; it was still turned on, making breathing difficult, movement all but impossible. He reached forward, under the dash, touched the emergency release and suddenly he could breathe again.

  The quick cold rush of air into his lungs brought him the rest of the way back. His vision cleared, and he became aware of where he was. He moved carefully, pulling his damaged right leg out from beneath the dashboard and climbing up through the shattered canopy.

  He was three kilometers above the surface of the world, up where the winds were fierce and cold. The finished sections of the spacescraper were ten floors beneath him. The MetalSmith had penetrated twenty meters into the structure of the spacescraper, twenty meters away from the long drop to the Earth below.

  From twenty meters away, from Emile Garon's vehicle, hovering just outside the twisted hole the MetalSmith had torn into the side of the spacescraper, the sonics struck Trent like a blow. Trent did not even think about what he was doing; he pulled himself the rest of the way out of the MetalSmith while he was still able, out into the maze of girders. There was no floor, only a mass of intersecting beams and girders, and a drop of ten stories to the roof of the last floor where construction had been finished. He lay down on a girder, hung by hands that were already growing numb from the sonics, and dropped down five meters to the next level.

  He struck the beam hard; the world went away again.

  He came back to the world to find himself staring at the rough gray plastisteel surface of the girder he was clutching.

  The thought came to Trent slowly.

  There was a maglev at the center of the spacescraper.