“How are you doing, little buddy?” I asked.
My phone relayed my question to Chit and translated it into silent Pyr pulse-codes. It also translated back, turning Chit’s message into something that mimicked her voice.
“Doin’ fine, bucko,” said Chit. “It made more sense to check out the executive assistant, not the big honcho. Somethin’ about her didn’t smell right.”
I’d had the same feeling.
“Smart move,” I said.
“You bet it’s smart, chump,” said Chit. “I think she works for EUA.”
Chapter 20
“…the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong…”
— Ecclesiastes 9:11
We were still downtown and our autocab had just turned up Marietta Street when Chit’s excited voice came through my phone’s speaker.
“Wait a second,” she said. “Bad news. The Flower is deploying mobile assets after your autocab to capture you.”
“What?” asked Poly.
“Who?” I added.
“Chit is referring to Camilla Moultrie,” said my phone.
“You bet your sweet assembler code I am,” said Chit. “She’s sending seekers, buzzlers and orcas to track you down.”
That wasn’t good. Seekers were remote-controlled four-wheeled pursuit and capture vehicles much like oversized autocabs, but with magnetic grapples, light armor, and non-lethal weapons. They looked like streamlined SUVs and had the semi-melted appearance so common in vehicles inspired by Orishen designs. Buzzlers were powerful, riderless motorcycles with high-pitched engines sounding like angry soprano didgeridoos. The autonomous two-wheeled vehicles had pairs of harpoon guns—and sophisticated artificial intelligence systems. They were fast and could maneuver through traffic more effectively than the larger seekers.
Orcas were tanks with tires, not treads. They were big, round, and the last gasp of militarized policing before police departments returned to sanity. Their name came from their shape and their typical black and white paint scheme. Orcas had thick armor, heavy weapons, and carried a squad of SWAT-style assault troops inside. The city of Atlanta had unloaded all of its orcas years ago, but rumor had it that several corporations and oligarchs had snapped them up to transport bodyguards and augment their own security details.
“Autocab. New destination. Lenox Square Mall. Execute,” said Poly.
“New destination: Lenox Square Mall. Confirmed,” intoned the autocab’s A.I.
Our vehicle turned right on Ivan Allen, Jr. Boulevard, just north of the original Georgia Aquarium building and south of the new, even larger buildings added to exhibit galactic aquatic species. Ichthyosaurs need lots of space. I was glad Poly was thinking fast. We didn’t want to lead our pursuers to the underground laboratory complex where we were staying. Lenox Square Mall was seven or eight miles away, which should give us time to think of something.
“Can’t this thing go any faster?” I asked.
Our autocab was piddling along, moving at or below the speed limit on streets that weren’t crowded and wouldn’t be until the afternoon rush hour.
“Autonomous vehicles are required to scrupulously observe all traffic regulations,” said my phone.
I spotted a seeker and a couple of buzzlers turning off Marietta Street to follow us. They weren’t dawdling.
“How can we take control of this thing?” I asked.
Substituting actions for words, my phone jumped onto the dashboard of our autocab and extruded something that looked like the connector R2-D2 used to stop the trash compactors on the Death Star. It plugged what it had extruded into a circular receptacle on the autocab’s dash and turned it left and right, like opening a safe. I heard a cheerful chirp and the words Manual override accepted from the autocab’s A.I. Soon, our vehicle’s speed doubled and we were opening up some space between us and our pursuers.
Buzzlers were created to minimize the need for police officers to engage in high-speed chases. Their intended mission was to catch and hold felons trying to escape the scene of a crime. It was unusual for them to be in private hands, but unusual didn’t mean impossible. The two buzzlers pursuing us were unmarked and definitely dangerous.
One of the low-slung, riderless black cycles fell in behind us and fired its harpoon weapon. My phone jerked our autocab sharply to one side and the barbed head of the buzzler’s harpoon missed us and caught in the back bumper of a delivery van. Thirty feet of titanium-alloy cable unspooled behind the missile’s head. A massive steel anchor at the other end of the cable popped off the buzzler, flipped out its arms, and dug into the asphalt of the boulevard. The buzzler’s A.I. software must not have been updated recently because it crashed into the taut cable and fell on its side, only to be crushed by the delivery truck when it rebounded after making an abrupt stop.
One down.
The second buzzler was holding back—I assumed to analyze what the other buzzler had done wrong and correct for it. I could hear the rumble of its congruency-powered motor revving, making a sound like an angry eight-hundred-pound mosquito. I wanted to swat the blasted thing or zap it with the technological equivalent of DEET. Unfortunately, I didn’t have anything I could use as a weapon—or did I?
I examined the interior of the autocab to see if there was anything I could throw. Poly figured out what I was doing and started her own search. There were small flat screen panels on the backs of the seats in front of us. They tilted to optimize their viewing angle—enough so we could get our fingers around one edge and pull.
With a splintering rip of plastic, the screen on my side came loose. A few seconds later, so did Poly’s. The buzzler may have been holding back but the seeker wasn’t. It was gaining on us and would soon be in range to fire its magnetic grapples. Standard seekers were mostly used by law enforcement to capture joy-riding kids who’d hacked autonomous vehicles. They normally had strict do-no-harm protocols. I didn’t think the vehicle tailing us was standard issue, however. I glanced through our cab’s back window and saw ominous-looking gun ports opening just above its front bumper.
I pushed a button on my arm rest and the window on my side of the autocab went down. My phone had us moving at a pretty good clip and took a left turn onto Williams Street on two wheels. Air blasted into my face, but I loosened my seat belt and stuck my upper body out the window. It didn’t make sense to throw the screen at the seeker’s windshield—the seeker-drone’s driver was probably sitting in an air-conditioned pod in one of the nearby skyscrapers. My target was the sensor array, a transparent bubble the size of a softball where a hood ornament would have been a couple of generations ago.
I held my breath, took careful aim, and launched my screen in a high arc. It not only landed on the sensor array, it embedded itself in the hood. The seeker slowed and fell back.
That was two.
The remaining buzzler kept pace with us but didn’t try to close or fire its harpoon. I think it was biding its time until more assets could join the hunt. It didn’t need to track our position—Camilla Moultrie surely had our autocab’s transponder code by now.
“Nice shot,” said Poly.
We roared down the Williams Street on-ramp to the Connector, moving so fast I expected to hear a sonic boom when we neared the bottom. We shot out into light midday traffic on the stretch of road where two interstate highways came together, bisecting downtown Atlanta. My phone made me wish our autocab had an inertial dampening field as it cut across four lanes of traffic to get to the section that would soon become I-85 North and take us to Lenox Square Mall. Traffic wasn’t at rush hour migraine levels—it was barely the equivalent of a slight headache.
I’d hoped we were done with vehicles trying to stop us, but we weren’t that lucky. Three more seekers and four buzzlers were coming up fast on multiple lanes. All of them were painted a lustrous, metallic black with a sheen like scarab beetles. I hoped they wouldn’t mob us and consume us like the beetles in the Mummy movies. One of the seekers stayed in our lane, wh
ile the other two pulled alongside of our autocab to flank us, left and right. Two buzzlers pulled in front of us and two more filled in the corners behind us.
“Too bad we don’t have a Golden Snitch,” said Poly. She was trying to keep up a brave front.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “What’s Quidditch got to do with a high-speed chase?”
“If we had a Golden Snitch, the seekers would have to chase it or risk losing the game,” answered Poly.
“There’s more at stake now than the House Cup,” I replied, “and we don’t have a Golden Snitch.”
“Not necessarily true,” said my phone.
I’m glad it was good at multitasking, able to talk and drive at the same time.
“Do tell,” I said, “and make it snappy.”
“Yes, please,” added Poly. “It won’t be long before we’re forced off the road.”
“You understand how the seekers know where we are, right?” asked my phone.
“They’re following the autocab’s transponder code,” I said.
“Correct,” said my phone.
“Aren’t the remote pilots getting a direct camera feed?” asked Poly.
“They used to before evaders began using congruency-powered solar corona bombs,” said my phone. “The light blasts from the bombs ruined the pilots’ vision, so they switched over to just tracking transponders.”
“How does that help us?” I asked.
“The cab’s transponder will be easy to disable,” said my phone, “and the vehicle’s operation can be handled manually.”
“You want one of us to drive, without an A.I. assist?” asked Poly.
“In a word, yes,” said my phone.
“I’ll be glad to do it,” I said, “though getting into the front seat will be a challenge.”
“Don’t sell yourself short, Sweetheart,” said Poly. “I know you’re good at complex athletic positions.”
“Please leave our love life out of it,” I replied with a grin as I started to climb over the center armrest. “What will you be doing?” I asked my phone.
“Simulating this ’cab’s transponder and leading the seekers away.”
It was a better plan than anything I’d come up with.
I awkwardly fell or slid or somehow contorted myself into the driver’s seat and took the wheel, keeping the throttle pushed to the floor and weaving a bit so the seeker operators wouldn’t think I was completely at their mercy.
The seeker behind us had opened the panel masking its magnetic grapple and would soon be trying to capture us, so my phone moved quickly. Once it knew I was ready, my phone disengaged from the autocab and hopped nimbly into the front passenger seat to begin its reconfiguration. Its mutacase lengthened and became more rounded at the ends until it looked like a thick business card between two soft-drink cup lids, turning itself into a dual-fan drone.
I pushed a button in my armrest and the autocab’s right front window rolled down. My phone rose from its seat, hovered momentarily, and zipped out. The blades of its rotating fans made a high-pitched noise that seemed like a whining piccolo compared to the buzzlers’ thrumming outback roar.
Go go go! I silently encouraged, then closed the window.
I watched with delight as my phone zoomed off sharply to the right, heading up I-75 at the point where the interstates split while our now-anonymous autocab stayed on I-85. The three seekers followed my phone and were soon out of sight as the highways diverged. It may have been just a trick of the light or my phone playing games with its refractory index, but I thought I saw a glint of gold just before it vanished.
Now we only had four buzzlers to worry about—two ahead, two behind. The buzzlers’ A.I. units were not fooled by my phone’s maneuver, but they hadn’t deployed themselves well. The two in front were not positioned to use their harpoons. Unfortunately, the same could not be said for the pair on our tail.
I was too busy weaving from side to side, trying to avoid other traffic, to do anything about the buzzler cycles on our rear bumper. Poly, however, was Ms. Resourceful. Still holding the flat screen from her side of the autocab, she turned around facing backwards and climbed on top of the armrest between the two front seats. She used her free hand to trigger our vehicle’s sunroof and pecked me on the cheek while waiting for it to retract. Then she stood on the arm rest and stuck the upper half of her body through the opening.
More air came rushing in and Poly’s body acted like a small sail, requiring me to focus even more attention on driving, not what she was doing. I did see the results of her actions in my rearview mirror, however. The flat screen caught the inside front wheel of one of the buzzlers, flipping it over and sending it careening into its companion, which had just been about to fire its harpoon. The force of the impact caused the second buzzler’s harpoon to launch and the barbed missile embedded itself into the road behind us. The two interlocked buzzlers were left spinning around a ten-foot arc on the harpoon’s cable like a pair of flies tied up with a long human hair by a sadistic schoolboy.
I didn’t wait for the two lead buzzlers to fall back and redeploy. Instead, I accelerated, crossed the short distance separating us, and smacked into them. Their front wheels rose off the ground, like rearing stallions, but they didn’t spin out or tip over. Poly pulled herself back into the autocab.
“Excuse me,” she said.
She reached behind my head and removed the detachable headrest. It was heavy and well-padded with two long, thin steel rods to secure it in place. I could see her do the same thing to the headrest on the other front seat. Then half her body disappeared again. I laughed out loud when the rods on one of the headrests caught in the spokes of the rear wheel of the right-hand buzzler and it tumbled to the right, out of control.
Poly’s next shot wasn’t as effective. The padded part of the other headrest smacked into the rear wheel of the remaining buzzler, knocking it off balance, but not fully destabilized. I rammed it on an angle with the autocab, finishing the job and sending it crashing against a Jersey barrier two lanes to the left. Luckily, all the other self-driving vehicles on the road had given us a wide berth.
“Nice shooting,” I said, resting my palm on the back of one of Poly’s legs.
“Thanks,” said Poly, lowering her body all the way back inside and slipping into the front passenger seat. “Nice assist.”
Our exit was coming up on my right so I took it and headed east toward Lenox Square Mall. Its huge, multistory parking lot would be a good place to lose potential tails. I couldn’t see any vehicles chasing us in the rearview mirror, which I imagined would be the next item to be turned into an improvised thrown weapon if it came to that. Breaking the mirror would mean seven years of bad luck, but I hoped the ill-fortune would fall on our enemies, not on us.
“The mall’s ahead on the right,” said Poly, confirming what we both already knew. She scanned in every direction, making sure we were in the clear.
I accelerated up Lenox Road and was speeding toward the retail complex, making good time, when our luck ran out. A black and white orca half the size of a city bus ponderously pulled into the intersection directly ahead. It blocked most of Peachtree Road and I was going too fast to avoid it. I stood on the autocab’s brakes and only tapped the side of the orca instead of slamming into it full speed. The huge cannon on the orca’s turret swung our way. It tilted down to point directly at our vehicle. Poly and I flung our doors wide and dove out. The first shell split the autocab in half like an eggshell and knocked me over. The blast didn’t do much for my hearing, either.
When I got to my feet, I looked across the burning remains of our autocab to check on Poly. She was standing, if a bit unsteady on her feet, and seemed okay. Her face was dirty and her suit was beyond repair, but she smiled at me and waved. I ran to join her, avoiding chunks of flaming wreckage, and saw the orca’s main ramp-door was swinging down. Well-equipped hostile forces would soon emerge to capture us, since Poly and I were in no condition to escape.
> I’d nearly lost hope when I heard screeching tires. A white van—my white van—hopped the median on Peachtree Road in front of the mall and pulled up next to us. The driver’s window rolled down and the sliding door near us opened. I was expecting to find Mike at the wheel, but it wasn’t him. It was someone I didn’t know, though he seemed vaguely familiar—maybe from Las Vegas. I couldn’t tell what he looked like because he was wearing a programmable disguise like a welder’s mask, but made from flat screen film. The mask was currently displaying thirty-six-year-old Arnold Schwarzenegger’s face. He was saying something I couldn’t understand.
“What?” I said, cupping my hand around my ear.
“Arnold” looked impatient. He fiddled with the mask’s controls to up the volume.
“Come with me if you want to live,” he said in an electronically distorted Austrian accent.
Poly and I got in and buckled our seat belts. Arnold peeled out.
Chapter 21
“Who was that masked man…?”
— The Lone Ranger TV Show (1949-1957)
“THANK YOU!” I said to our rescuer.
“You don’t need to shout,” he replied.
“I’M SHOUTING?” I asked.
“I THINK SO,” said Poly.
“Cut your decibels in half and you’ll both be fine,” said the man in the Schwarzenegger mask.
Even with my damaged eardrums I still heard gunshots coming from behind us. A squad of armored attackers on heavy-duty Segway-like personal transports were rolling our way, firing in our direction. So far, it seemed like they’d been trained at the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy. Then a bullet pinged off my van’s left side door column and I revised my assessment of our pursuers’ abilities. I was also grateful I’d let the van dealer talk me into the bulletproof glass package. Poly squeezed my hand and leaned so her mouth was close to my ear.
Xenotech General Mayhem: A Novel of the Galactic Free Trade Association (Xenotech Support Book 4) Page 16
