“Roland, see what you can do with this fire-control board.” Roland scrutinized the panel, tentatively fingered a few controls. “Hard to say what’s going on here,” he said. “All these systems have funny designations. What’s ‘Snatch Field Damp’ supposed to mean?”
“I can guess,” I said, amazed.
“It’s closing pretty fast. What’s your speed?”
“Point three.”
“Well, I’d advise accelerating.”
I already was. The car surged forward, pressing us into our seats.
“I think it’s at two kilometers, still closing.”
“Point three five.”
“Still closing.”
“Coming up on point four.”
“Still closing, but slower.” Roland tested a switch or two. “This says ‘Arm’ but I don’t know what it’s arming. Some very strange things here.”
“Point four.”
“Still closing.”
I floored the pedal. The engine sent furious vibrations through the wheel and into my hands and arms. A high whine, barely audible, was all that conducted through the hotwall. “Point four five.”
“Still closing, I’m afraid. Must have variable thrust. Emergency boosters. Oh, damn. Wait a minute, this must be it. ‘Antimissile Zap.’ God, this is crazy.”
“Point five.”
“Closing. Has to run out of fuel sooner or later.”
“Don’t count on it,” I said. “Point five five.”
“Still closing. About a kilometer.” Roland grunted. “G-force makes it hard to bend forward.” He strained to read the panel.
“This must be an automatic system. All right, I’ve armed it. Now what?”
It struck me that Roland should be having a little more trouble in bending forward. Our acceleration was rapid, should have been something around three Gs. But it didn’t feel like that much.
“Point six.”
“Closing, but slowly.”
Another moment. The acceleration seemed to be picking up even more. “Point six five.”
“Closing.”
“Point seven! God help us.”
“Closing. Half a klick.”
“Point seven five!”
“Closing! But barely.”
Everything was a blur outside. The car swerved murderously with every random movement of my tensed arms. “I don’t know how long I can keep this up,” I said.
“I’m working on the problem,” Roland said calmly. “All right, now, everything seems to be set, but what activates the whole system?”
“Point eight!”
“Um … wait a moment. No, that isn’t it. ‘Antimissle Zap.’ Remarkable way of putting it. What’s this? I can’t understand… ‘Eyeball’ and ‘Let George Do It.’ ” Roland looked at me, baffled. “What could that possibly mean?”
“For Christ’s sake, Roland! LET GEORGE DO IT!”
“Huh? Oh, okay.” He pressed a glowing tab and something left the rear of the car in a green flash. A few seconds later a brighter flash lit up the road behind us in a soundless concussion.
Roland studied the scanners. “No more missile,” he said with satisfaction. He turned to me and grinned. “That was easy.”
He looked back, then said with concern, “But a bigger blip is gaining on us. The interceptor, I guess. Looks like he’s on afterburners.”
“I believe,” John broke in with a solemn voice, “that we just passed the turnoff to the Ryxx Maze portal.”
Chapter 10
NOBODY SPOKE FOR a while as it sank in. We were heading straight for never-never land with exactly two alternatives: to double back on the road and confront our pursuer, or to swing out over methane-water ice and take our chances with hidden crevices, geothermal sinkholes, and occasional impact craters. I braked automatically, then wondered what I was doing, where I was going. Turn back? Give up? I saw no controls for roller supertraction and doubted that the car could negotiate a surface of metallic methane-pure water ice, maybe, but not water caged in frozen gas. Then again, I had no justification to put limitations on this buggy.
John broke the silence. “Jake? What do we do?”
All eyes were on me—Teelie eyes; that is. Darla and Winnie were talking in hushed tones. I checked the scanner. Petrovsky was gaining on us very quickly now that I had decelerated. I goosed it a little to give me more time. The road was still perfectly straight, the terrain relentlessly flat. I kept my eyes glued ahead. Sudden obstacles would be death at these speeds.
“Jake?” John reminded me softly.
“Yeah.” I exhaled, my mind made up. “John, I’m not going to stop. Don’t ask me to justify the morality of it. I can’t, except to say that I can’t possibly give myself up. I’m going to shoot the potluck portal.”
Susan gasped. John took it silently. Roland was preoccupied with the instrument panel.
“If you have a gun,” I went on, “I’d advise you to pull it on me right now. The portal’s coming up.”
Outlined in faint zodiacal light at the horizon, the cylinders were rising above the ice like dark angels on Judgment Day.
“Let me say this,” I continued. “I wouldn’t shoot this portal if I thought it’d be suicide. You can believe me or not. Take it for what it’s worth, but I wouldn’t do it if I thought there was no chance of getting back.”
Roland looked at me. “Of course, Jake. Everybody knows you’ll get back—if you believe the road yarns.”
“I’m grounding my belief in firmer evidence than beerhall bullshit. Again, take it for what it’s worth, but I intend to get back from the other side. In fact, I know I will.”
“How do you know?” John asked.
“Can’t explain right now. I just know.”
John looked at me intently. “Jake, I’m asking you to reconsider.”
“Sorry, John. Put a gun to my head and I’ll stop. I don’t particularly want to shoot a potluck portal, but I will if no one stops me.” It sounded crazy even to me.
Susan was quietly sobbing in the back seat.
“Threatening one’s driver,” Roland said acerbically, “at a little under Mach point seven strikes me as slightly absurd.” He turned to John. “Can’t you see that Jake’s in the Plan?”
I caught quick glimpses of John’s face in the lights of the panel as I shifted my eyes fleetingly from the road. Rare to see a man confronted with a literal test of his religious beliefs. John shook his head. “Roland, it isn’t simply a matter of—”
“Oh, come on, John,” Roland said, impatient with his leader’s recent behavior, or so it sounded. “How can you be so myopic? We’re in Jake’s Plan, he’s in ours. You can’t deny that there’s some kind of linkage here. Can you?”
“Maybe,” John said, eyes belying his words. “Possibly.” He gave up. “God, I don’t know. I really don’t know what to do.”
“I do,” Roland said emphatically. “It’s obvious. No matter what we do, our paths and Jake’s seem to cross. I say we let Jake take the lead. It’s clear his Plan is informing ours.”
Darla was pounding me on the shoulder. “Look out!”
A dark pool lay across the road. I braked hard, but it was useless. In no time we shot across the spontaneous bridge over a geothermal depression and were back on solid ice again. “Sorry, Jake. False alarm.”
“No, keep watching. I need four eyes.”
Roland was bent over the scanner again. Suddenly he spun around and peered back through the oval rear window. “Merte! I should have been watching. He’s back there!”
In the rearview mirror I saw the interceptor’s headbeams’ grow.
“Jake? Are you okay?”
No time to answer. I mashed the accelerator.
“I’ve got something on the scanner!” Roland stabbed fingers at the fire-control board. Green and red lights flickered. “Come on, George, whoever the hell you are!”
George didn’t respond. Something smacked into the rear of the car with a dull thud. I couldn’t se
e the interceptor’s lights. A dark mass covered the rear window. I knew what it was, having been on the receiving end of a tackyball before. Adhezosfero. Now the sticky mess was crawling all over the back of the vehicle, fusing and bubbling, forming an unbreakable molecular bond with the metal of the hull. Though it was close to absolute zero outside, the thing wouldn’t freeze, its chemical reactions providing heat long enough to do the job. Petrovsky was feeding us slack now until the bond formed. Then he’d start reeling us in.
“What happened to the antimissile system?” Roland wanted to know.
“Probably read the approach as a slow projectile,” I said. “Tackyball shells are fired from a mortar. Didn’t worry George any.”
But I was worried. I kept the pedal flattened, hoping to unspool all of Petrovsky’s tether line before the bond firmed up, but the boys and girls at Militia R&D had been putting in overtime. This one bonded in a few seconds. A sharp jerk, and that was it. The Russian had us hooked.
“Roland, this thing must have some beam weapons,” I said. “Find ‘em!”
“I’m looking, Jake. But these designations are in another language.”
“The language is archaic American. Read ‘em off to me!”
“Okay. Tell me what ‘Sic ‘im, Fido’ means.”
“Spell it!” He did, and I stopped him in the middle of it. “Christ Almighty! It must mean attack or fire or something. Hit it!”
Roland did, and nothing happened.
“It has to have a target!” I screamed. “Find the aiming waddyacallit!”
“The what?”
The road behind lit up blue-white with the Russian’s retrofire, and we slid forward in our seats. Roland and John hit the windscreen, and I took the padded steering column in the chest, but I kept my leg stiffened and drove the pedal down, finding new depths of power down there. My foot seemed to sink through the floorboards.
The car lurched, then acceleration took us the other way, sending us sprawling back on the cushioned seat. I shot a look in the back. Susan, Darla, and Winnie were a tangle on the floor, Susan’s bare foot sticking up comically.
A tug-of-war began, the interceptor’s retro engines against the growling power of the Chevy’s unfathomable motor. But the Russian had his moves down pat. He paid out line and let me pull, then cut retros and ate the slack up plus more, reeling me in like a deep-sea catch. He was out-maneuvering me and I knew it. And when he had us up close enough, he’d squirt us down with Durafoam under high pressure, spin us into an immobilizing cocoon—one hell of an effective technique against even a vehicle that can outgun you, if you can get close enough. Roadbugs aside, when the cops want to snare you, they get down to business. No Roadbug would save us now.
I only had one countermove. The fish has sharp spines, so be careful where you touch. I considered the consequences for a second or two, then drove the brake pedal against the floor. The move caught the big man up short and he shot past us, dragging the slack length of the graphite whisker line along.
It all happened very quickly. The invisible line pulled taut and yanked our ass-end around into a fishtail, but in the process the hardened glob of tackyball slid free from the back of the car. It was too late for Petrovsky. He lacked time or the presence of mind to cut the line free. His headbeams swung around to blind me, then continued the circuit into a wild spin. Something strange was happening at our end. I felt an unseen force fight against the fishtail, some kind of stabilizing inertial field. I was countersteering sharply, but it wouldn’t have been enough. We were traveling broadside to the road, but something shoved us back. Petrovsky’s vehicle kept spinning, trailing wisps of hot vapor from its rollers, cold gas from its yaw/antispin jets, but it was hopelessly out of control and went whirling off the roadbed, past the shoulder and onto the ice.
In the middle of it all we ghosted through a holo sign. The words were repeated cinematically over kilometers and were projected large enough to straddle the road. The Highway Department wanted no mistake.
WARNING!
UNEXPLORED PORTAL AHEAD! POSSIBLE INTER-EPOCHAL JOURNEY PROCEED AT OWN RISK
WARNING!
UNEXPLORED PORTAL …
The interceptor began to break up as it spun, wrapping itself in a deadly cat’s cradle of the trailing line, the ultrastrong, superthin fiber slicing through hull metal like fine wire through cheese. Pieces flew in all directions, some skittering across the road into our path. I couldn’t dodge them, too busy counter-counter-steering against the return fishtail to the left, again being helped by the strange force. We straightened out, then re-rebounded to the right again, not as far this time, the oscillations damping with each cycle.
A big chunk of stabilizer foil tumbled across the road, just missing us. I caught sight of the shapeless mass of tackyball bouncing along behind the cop car like a useless anchor dragged over frozen sea, its weight pulling the line into a lethal snarl. As I fought for control I saw the flashing red commit markers ahead. Blind spots, burned in by the cop car’s intense headbeams, swam in front of my eyes, and I wasn’t sure where road ended and ice field began. The interceptor was pacing us; spinning and sliding over close-to-frictionless surface, heading straight for the portal but wide of the commit markers.
I finally regained control and found that we were on the shoulder near Petrovsky’s vehicle, with our left rollers on the ice and the right marker dead in our path. I wheeled to the left as sharply as I dared. The interceptor was a rotating pile of junk now, throwing off pieces of itself with abandon… Then it exploded, or seemed to, but I knew it was Petrovsky’s ejection seat. He’d never make it, was too near the markers, doomed to be sucked in by the cylinders. Across the glossy hood of the Chevy, sudden highlights flared, reflections of Petrovsky’s descent-rockets igniting. We shot past the right commit marker, missing it by a hair.
Now the real race began. We had to beat the wreckage of the interceptor to the cylinders, get through the aperture before the horrendous implosion that would happen as the mass of the wreck was torn atom-from-atom by the portal’s tidal claws. The wreck was veering outward now. There was a chance it could move far enough out to miss hitting the right lead cylinder directly, make a wide looping geodesic before it spiraled into the zone of destruction, before it flashed to filaments of plasma falling into the ultracondensed mass of the cylinders. The delay might be only a fraction of a second, but it might be enough.
It was all happening within seconds, but to me the flow of things was gummed up into a languid slow motion. Endlessly, the wreckage wheeled in the icy night, the sweep of its headbeams like some haunted lighthouse on an arctic shore. I looked for the guide lane, the white lines marking the safe corridor through the aperture, but couldn’t see them. Red lights blared from the instrument panel.
“Jake? Jake, what’s happening?” Sam’s voice was faint, far away.
The guide lane was suddenly under me and we weren’t dead center. Our left wheels were over the white line. I corrected sharply, thinking this was the end, we’ve had it, you just don’t do this and live, and then felt the car rising on its right wheels as greedy fingers of force closed over us. We were up on two wheels, the car riding diagonally to the roadbed … and somehow in those few fractions of a second I reacted unthinkingly, wheeling hard right and tramping on the accelerator…
And then time jarred back to normal flow and it was wham! back on four wheels, shooting down the dark corridor of the safe lane, the cylinders black-on-black beside us, and then a brilliant flash that blinded me, followed by an explosion of sound as we hit air and the car’s engine shouted in my ears. I saw light, pure and golden and warm; then my pupils contracted and the field of vision split into an upper band of light blue and a lower one of blue-green. Someone was leaning over my shoulder, and I felt hands over my hands on the wheel.
“Jake, slow down!”
Darla was helping me steer. I braked, trying not to panicstop to avoid skidding. I was half-blind now but could see the road, a strip of black ov
er blue-green. The Skyway was suspended over water and there were no guard rails. A few seconds later and I could see that the elevation was minimal. We were on a causeway crossing shallow water.
But our speed was still fantastic. Land ahead, an island or a reef, coming up fast. The road looked like it ended there, but I wasn’t sure. I could see other vehicles parked on the island. I mashed down on the brake and the tires wailed like hellhounds, the back end floating from side to side. We began to drift toward the shoulder and I let up on the brake to straighten out, then started pumping the pedal, but the shore was coming at us fast. I quit pumping and stood on the brake, the sounds of the tires splitting my ears, the sky, sea, and land heaving around us. Darla was no help now—I was fighting her as well as the wheel. I pushed her back and took over, my vision nowhere near normal but adequate in the bright sunlight. We were down to a mere 150 miles per hour, but the shore of the island was upon us. We shot past a wide beach, still on the Skyway, and blurred through a narrow strip of land until we reached the opposite shore and another beach. The road picked up the causeway again and headed out to sea.
Not far from the beach the road began a gradual dip until it sank beneath the deep water beyond the breakers.
My stiffened body was perpendicular to the brake pedal, and I braced myself by pulling backward on the steering wheel. The back end was fishtailing but I didn’t countersteer, couldn’t, counting on the mysterious force to set us aright. It did, and with a final screaming chorus from the tires we skidded to a stop a few meters from the gentle waves washing across the width of the roadway.
Nobody moved for a long while. I sat there letting warm sunlight soothe my face, not feeling much of anything else. I was numb, my arms like dead things in my lap, my body limp and useless. From outside came the strange croaking cries of seabirds and the sound of water lapping against the sinking road.
Presently, someone moaned. Susan. I made an effort and looked over the back of the seat. Susan was down there somewhere, as was Winnie. Darla was sitting up looking dazed, relieved, glad to be alive, amazed to be alive, and totally exhausted, all at once. Our eyes met and a flicker of a smile crossed her lips. Then she closed her eyes and tilted her head back. Roland and John began to pick themselves up from the floor-decking. It took time.
Starrigger Page 16
