Dry as the Nevada air might be, the beer was so cold that a fine mist already clung to the glass bottle. Reggie suddenly realized how thirsty the desert was. He shook his head, declining the offer nonetheless. "What brings you to the Church of the Stellar Light, Wire?"
The Wire shrugged. "My guys are tense. I brought them down here for a little fun in the sun."
Reggie looked into his eyes in disbelief. The Wire wasn't a dummy. "You knew the BKM would show up."
The gang leader looked up at the skycars from beneath bushy gray eyebrows. "Yeah. I figured a little polishing the old shooters would be good for 'em, and once they saw the opposition, they'd cool down." He smiled again. "So now we aren't shooting each other."
It was a revelation. The Wire had counted on the BKM to calm down his own people!
"How many days left, Wire?"
The Wire answered instantly. "Eighteen."
There was a long pause. Reggie said softly. "It gets to your people to, huh?"
"Yeah." The Wire took a last deep swig from one of the beers, dropped the empty bottle on the ground. He waved the other one at Reggie. "See ya 'round." He turned and walked back to his followers.
Reggie now had a very different angle on his story than he'd had before.
Music blared forth. A fight would have been quieter.
Reggie turned from the noise and the two distinct crowds that now overfilled the desolate countryside. He trotted up the hill, cutting a little to the west. It took a long time, and he was sweating by the time he arrived, but eventually he made it to the far side of a large boulder. Out of the line of projection of the loudspeakers, he found an oasis of quiet. He opened his palmtop, linked to Mercedes. One of the side benefits of working with her on the contract at her father's house had been that he'd gotten her email address. He hoped she'd answer his request for a realtime chat.
"Mr. Oxenford," Mercedes voice sounded suspicious and irritated from his computer's tiny speaker. "What do you want now?"
"I want you to save me. Please," he begged, holding his palmtop close to his lips and shouting—though he was out of range of the bands, even the wind here whipped loudly.
"Save you?"
"I'm at the Stellar Light Revival on Lake Mead," he continued. "I am being destroyed by the Twin Mysteries of the Pyramids and the Crop Circles."
"What are you talking about?"
Reggie smiled. "Meet me and I'll tell you." When Mercedes did not respond, he continued on a pleading note. "If you don't rescue me, I shall go mad. And deaf as well," he said.
There was a long pause. At last, the tinkle of laughter came through his palmtop. "Well, it's too late to save you from going mad. But I guess it would be a shame if you went deaf. How do I save you?"
* * *
Having turned off the cooling in his apartment, the stifling air had now grown too warm. Chan Kam Yin wiped his forehead where a thin bead of perspiration had taken shape. He hardly noticed the heat, or the sweat, or his own action to brush it away. He had entered mental overdrive. The whole world narrowed down to a few lines of text on his screen.
It had taken him countless hours to find the pattern. But he had it now. Anonymous identities danced the markets, making purchases in a certain size range, clustered over an extended but nonetheless well-defined time interval. The anonymous clusters tended to buy positions where the odds were against them. Even more interesting, they tended to win. If they weren't controlled by the Predictor, they were controlled by someone just as good for the Dealer's purposes. He knocked out a simulation of what would have happened in the past couple of weeks if he'd ridden the predictions of these anonymous clusters. The ride generated pure wealth. Pushing himself for one last effort, he found an open 'cast with the same pattern in place. He moved into play. Success. He had just locked his own fate to that of the Predictor.
The Dealer sat back, relaxing in perfect satisfaction. He rubbed the crick in his neck; someday, he promised himself, he'd get ergonomic furniture, to go with the wallscreen of which he dreamed. The days of comfort, he promised himself, drew closer.
He felt tired but not sleepy. With his eyes glazed open he scanned the Web markets, just surfing the goods for sale, the prizes for winning, the jobs available. It seemed a good moment to look for additional opportunities. In due course, an intriguing Request For Proposals drew his eye.
He'd found the RFP posted in the Anguilla Seaside Web Market. The solicitor, Supercon Intercepts, had requested a custom-designed skytruck to cart a large, awkward device to the top of Mount Everest. Doing a global search on the Supercon Intercepts brand, the Dealer could see that they did a lot of contracting for Earth Defense. That made sense: who but Earth Defense would want to drag something that unwieldy to the remotest pinnacle of the planet? Particularly during the Month of Shiva, when just about everybody else on the planet put aside their on long-term projects and concentrated on the next couple of weeks.
The Dealer spent but a moment puzzling over the purpose of the ungainly payload: the description of the object only gave aerodynamic information, and its purpose didn't really interest him that much. What fascinated him was the set of constraints on the skytruck. The requirements were fierce.
The truck would have to be a brute. A big brute, with huge lungs—the truck would gasp for breath, hovering in the thin air above Everest.
For a moment he thought about just shipping the thing with a roton . . . but the ungainly shape really ruled a roton out. No, the RFP writer had been correct specifying a skytruck.
The engines would constitute the biggest problem. Conventional skytrucks used electrically powered turbofans, fuel-efficient but not as powerful as you'd like for this application. Worse, you'd need a custom-designed supercharger to supply oxygen to the fuel cells, adding yet more weight and considerably cutting down on the efficiency of the full engine assembly. You might be able to lift the cargo that way, but the Dealer sure wouldn't take a 'cast on it. At best it would cost a fortune.
Most people would have had to give up trying to solve the problem at that point. But the Dealer knew something most people didn't know: Saab had built a next-generation combustion engine, using the same principles as the original Moller engines that powered the first skycars, but updated to use ceramic materials and burn pure hydrogen. He'd run into the Saab spec sheets while perusing the websites for antique car buffs, antiques being about the only things around these days that still used combustion. Saab had been trying to build a business in engine retrofits.
Anyway, the Saab engines were just the monsters for this job.
The Dealer suddenly realized that his expertise on combustion engines gave him the inside track on this deal—could he really win the contract? Why not? He could surely undercut anyone foolish enough to bid using conventional technology!
He searched the Web for a suitable airframe; he needed something sturdy but open-framed, so the odd corners of the package could stick out. The frame was pretty easy to find, though it took a bit more surfing to find the bottom-end price he wanted. He needed to buy the frame cheap, because he couldn't go cheap on the flight control system: Because of the complicated effects of the payload's center of gravity, with all the appendages exposed to the fierce turbulence at twenty-nine thousand feet, he'd need top-of-the-line flight control. Only the shortest response times, the most precise corrections, would satisfy the demand. He hated going with expensive parts. It hurt deep inside. But it was necessary.
He wasn't sure how to carry the hydrogen for the engines, whether to use an adsorptive powder, a simple pressure cylinder, or whether to liquefy it; he didn't trust the pressure cylinders, but the adsorptive power was heavy, and refrigeration would surely be both heavy and technically tricky. After staring at the alternatives for a while, he realized that he wasn't the right guy to make this call. He posted a request for consulting services on the Web, to see if he could get a real expert to give him a quick answer.
Meanwhile, he turned on his CAD package and started i
ntegrating the pieces he'd already identified. His CAD system wasn't really up to this, it was almost a toy—you don't need fancy stuff for working on Mustangs—but despite its flaws it could still give him some sense of whether the pieces of his plan could sing in harmony.
Four in the morning came and went. He knew he ought to hit the sack, but his mind was flowing with the elements of the operation. He fiddled with the design till it looked as good as he could get it in his CAD system. Satisfied with that phase of the analysis, he rented a little time on a high-end system from the server complex in Novosibirsk. With that he could run a professional simulation of his new invention.
Meanwhile, a hydrogen power specialist in Germany answered his consulting request. The pressure cylinder was the way to go, though the German gave him a pointer to a particular Australian manufacturer who had a million-dollar bond backing the reliability of his products. If the cylinder failed, the Dealer could make a bigger profit than if it worked.
He still had twenty-four hours before he had to submit the proposal to Silicon Intercepts, and the CAD servers still needed a couple of hours before reporting on their simulations. It was time to get some sleep.
* * *
Morgan tapped the control, and the hatch of his cocoon opened in smooth silence. He rolled out into the brighter light of the office. The clock read 1600.
The office door swung wide. Morgan looked up to see CJ, her hair still glistening wet from the shower, sweep into the room. He considered making a tart remark about knocking first. Futile, he knew.
His momentary pause gave CJ the chance to initiate combat. "I told you we'd finish early."
Morgan pursed his lips. "So you did. Congratulations."
CJ rubbed his shoulder, the shoulder that wasn't supporting Sol. "No, congratulations to you, oh Mighty Angel Controller. You're the one who supplied the inspiration." She watched for the puzzled expression on his face before explaining, "I was excited enough about our date that I couldn't help winning."
"So it's a date now, is it?" Morgan said with an edge of steel in his voice.
"Sure." CJ placed a finger in front of Sol, and commanded, "Up."
Sol obediently climbed up on her finger, and contorted her head to rub it against CJ's thumb. "Solomon, there's someone I want you to meet," CJ said. "Since you can't come with us, I thought I'd introduce you to a new friend."
Morgan watched CJ dash down the hall with his parrot, and for a just a moment, he felt a shock of isolation. He was alone with no one, not even his arrogant bird, as company.
Then CJ reappeared, moving with the speed of a tornado, and suddenly Morgan wished for his isolation to continue. He knew it was to no avail, however. "Okay, Angel Leader, where did you ditch my bird?"
"With someone who can use Sol's skills better than you can," CJ answered smugly. "Don't worry, she's in fine hands." CJ climbed onto one of the reinforcing steel bars across the back of his wheelchair, and stretched over Morgan's shoulder to reach the joystick under his right hand. She grabbed the control and pushed forward, causing the three of them—the captive Morgan, the maniacal CJ, and the submissive wheelchair—to charge down the hall at a speed Morgan hadn't attempted in years.
Morgan considered closing his eyes. No, if he was going to die, he wanted to see it coming. He stared straight ahead and said casually, "You're going to get us killed, you know. Wouldn't it be better to save your kamikaze instincts for the mission?" He raised an eyebrow and tried to smile into her eyes, but her breast was in the way, and her head was held rigidly up as she concentrated on the driving. Morgan noticed that his hands were clamped tight around the arms of the chair. He forced himself to relax.
The chair bounded toward the door, which opened automatically just fast enough for CJ to squeeze them through the center without a scratch. "How was that?" she asked her kidnapping victim.
"Typical," he snorted.
In moments they'd reached a drab green skycar, too ugly to be anything but military issue, even without the small label, Property of Earth Defense Agency on the side. It was specially designed to accommodate wheelchairs, and Morgan had to wonder who CJ had wheedled to get control of this vehicle for the afternoon. He wouldn't put it past Samuels to support this effort . . . though on reflection he didn't buy it. Samuels understood the dangerous consequences of this fraternization as well as he did.
Once again, Morgan wished he had the strength of personality to stop CJ's playfulness. But he could dimly remember what it was like to play. The part of him that had died with his wife Elisabeth stirred briefly to life once more, urging him on.
Their car leaped in the air, and CJ piled on the speed. She started to whistle; the notes melted on one another in a fashion that did not quite add up to a melody. Eventually it dawned on Morgan that CJ was whistling a parrot tune. Very scary.
Morgan cleared his throat. "Dare I ask where we're going?"
"Sure, ask all you like."
Silence fell. No further answer ensued.
Morgan watched the barren landscape of Nevada flow underneath them, then saw the line of hills that surrounded the Colorado River on the Arizona border. The skycar began to descend. As they closed in on an inlet to the river, he could see a row of boats, and eventually he made out the sign on the establishment: Golden Shores Marina. "We're going boating?" he asked.
"Almost," CJ said. She dug in the backseat of the car. "Here, put this on." She handed him a bulky but lightweight vest.
Morgan looked at the thing doubtfully. "A life preserver?"
"Safety first," CJ chirped. "Now put it on." The car landed itself, and CJ started stripping out of her clothes.
Morgan blushed and started to look away before he realized that she was wearing a bathing suit underneath.
CJ caught his eye and smiled. "Like the suit? Sorry it'll get covered in a minute." She grabbed another vest from the back and pulled it on. "Let's go," she said. She popped the doors. Morgan reached for his controls, but CJ was already reaching for him. "You really ought to wear your legs, old man," she complained. "Then you wouldn't have to put up with me so much." She lifted him out of the wheelchair and swung him onto her back. She set off at a fast march down the ramp to the slips.
"This is undignified," Morgan barked in her ear.
"Like I said, wear your legs next time."
Morgan tried to guess which boat they were going toward: was it the long, lean, jet boat, or the clever little catamaran? Suddenly CJ stopped, and he knew the dreadful certainty: they were not getting on any of the real boats. Rather, they were getting on the itty bitty, green-and-white waverunner bouncing in the gentle waves of the dock.
CJ did not hesitate for even a moment before grabbing the left handlebar and stepping across with her right leg. Balancing carefully, she lowered the two of them onto the runner. "Wrap your arms around my waist," she ordered him, and Morgan obeyed automatically; he now understood in the most primal sense why CJ was the Angel Lead.
CJ pressed the throttle with her thumb, and they pulled away from the dock. The departure was leisurely.
"What's this, speed demon, why are we traveling slower than my wheelchair?" he needled her.
She looked back at him with a sweet smile. "This is a no-wake zone," she said. She was still looking at him as they crossed the slightly narrowed mouth of the inlet, into the river. Her smile twitched just a bit wider, and that was all the warning Morgan had as her thumb squeezed down and the waverunner exploded forward. "This is not a no-wake zone," she yelled at the top of her powerful lungs, barely loud enough to be audible against noise of the rising wind and the bubbling water spray. Moments later they were going fifty miles an hour, leaping out of the water in time to the waves that crashed against them. "Now we're traveling," she screamed in satisfaction.
Morgan held on for dear life.
* * *
Jessica looked intently at her new acquaintance. "Okay, Solomon, I hear you like chicken. Right?"
Solomon whistled a phrase from "Joy to the W
orld." "Chicken good. Yummy!"
"The next question is, do you like white meat or dark?"
Solomon's head rocked back and forth eagerly. "White. White."
"Your wish is my command." Jessica reached across the table to the box of Kentucky Fried, pulling it close. She walked around the coat rack serving as a makeshift bird stand, and pulled a substantial knife from a drawer in the kitchenette. With swift strokes, she cut the chicken into Solly-bird bite-size pieces.
Solomon gave her a wolf whistle and dug in.
Jessica chewed on a chicken wing herself and watched Solly pick her piece apart. The thought struck her that the bird was more or less engaged in an act of cannibalism. But then, how closely related was a chicken to a parrot, after all? Would Solomon consider it cannibalism for her to eat beef, just because humans and cattle were both mammals?
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