Running Start

by J. A. Sutherland

  The very thought of it was terrifying. The tubes were in nearly complete vacuum and the express capsules traveled hypersonic. Yeah, if you timed it right there were some stations close enough to each other that you could sneak in behind a local and run, holding your breath or breathing out of some container you brought with, to get to the next, but he’d seen how remote Bright Horizons was — there was no way.

  “It’s too far,” he said. “The tubes are in vacuum and we wouldn’t be able to carry enough air unless you’ve got tanks, and then they’d be too heavy to run fast enough.”

  Fuentes gave him a scathing look.

  “I’m not stupid,” she said, though the look said maybe he was. “We’re not running the tubes —” She pointed. “We’re taking that.”

  Eight

  Mason looked and immediately saw what she had in mind.

  “It was some warden’s — I think she got killed in a riot and they never collected it,” Fuentes was saying, but Mason was already moving. He knew what she wanted from him now.

  The capsule was small — it’d hold maybe six people. Yes, six, he saw as he got close to its open doors. It sat next to the platform in the station tube, covered in dust like the rest of the lower station, but looking for all the world like it was ready to run down the tubes and take them away.

  He stepped in.

  The lights were off and didn’t come on as he entered, but there was enough light from the station to see by.

  This one had a control board at the front of the passenger compartment, unlike the public capsules where it was tucked away from any passengers.

  A private capsule, he marveled.

  He’d heard of them. The celebrities on the vidscreen all had them — just hop in and program your destination, then sit back. No changing stations or waiting for other people or the next capsule.

  The console was dark, just flat panes of black glass, and the access panels were already off the bottoms. He guessed Fuentes had already tried to get the capsule to work — he hoped she hadn’t screwed anything up. He’d observed that coders could really screw up the hardware if they tried, and Fuentes was obviously great with systems — after all, she’d gotten them down here past all the guards and cameras — so she could probably screw hardware things up extra good.

  A first glance told him all she might have done was pull some of the boards and reseat them — smart, and careful, not much damage she could do that way.

  He crawled under the panel and began scanning things. There was a lot of space, most of the boards were small and clipped on to the underside of the display panels. The wiring was a mess, though, with all the factory bands snipped so the wires hung loose. He wondered if Fuentes had done that to make pulling the boards easier instead of taking the time to do it right. He traced a line with a finger.

  Fuentes was still talking, but he ignored her. She was only telling him that the capsule didn’t work and she thought with the charges against him he might be able to do something with it and then if the capsule worked they could both get away from Bright Horizons —

  He tuned her out. He knew all that. Why did people insist on restating, sometimes over and over, what was completely obvious and he already understood?

  Then she started talking about the things she’d tried to get the capsule working, but that wasn’t helpful either. Even if she’d done something, he was still going to try it himself, because she was a coder and didn’t understand hardware — he also wasn’t sure she’d have done it right, so why skip trying something?

  Everything looked okay under the console. Of course any or all of the circuits might be fried, which he couldn’t tell by looking, but none of the boards looked or smelled like they needed replacing — if they did, then they were in trouble. Maybe Fuentes, with her implant, might be able to order replacements and have them delivered somewhere they could gain access to. Probably.

  There was a line leading out of the console panels that caught his eye. Sometimes the broken things just did that — he couldn’t explain it to anyone else, even though he’d tried. Even his mom didn’t really believe him, and, boy, try telling a school guidance counselor that he’d known the classroom vidscreen was about to throw sparks and warned the teacher because it “just didn’t look right”. They never believed it and always thought he’d done something to cause —

  He followed the suspicious line out of the control panels. Fuentes had some tools laying around — they were scattered everywhere; she didn’t take very good care of things or put them back where they belonged or in, really, any sort of logical order. He wondered if she kept her bunk area at Bright Horizons in such disarray and if so how her roommate handled it — it must be hard to live in a small space with such an unorganized person.

  He grabbed a screwdriver and started removing wall panels to follow the line toward the rear of the capsule.

  “What are you doing?” Fuentes asked.

  Mason ignored her and kept removing panels.

  “We don’t need to take the whole thing apart,” she said. “I’m pretty sure the problem’s one of the boards — if you can tell me which one, I can get a replacement sent —”

  Mason tuned her voice out completely. The farther he followed the line, the more sure he was this was of the problem.

  He got the last panel off and cocked his head.

  Well, that was easy.

  He reached inside.

  The kid was ignoring her. He was actually ignoring her. It was like he didn’t even hear her, just kept taking one panel after another off the wall and setting it aside, following the power line to the rear of the capsule.

  “So I figure this might take some time — probably a lot of replacements to be made. Like I said, show me what’s broken and I can order something. We’ll just have to get it out of the mailroom before they deliver it to stores — that’s tougher to get into.”

  The kid said nothing.

  “We just have to be back in our cells before morning — the guards on duty tonight always skip the late counts. Then we can come back in two nights when they’re on again.”

  Still nothing, and he was still following the stupid power line, which she’d told him — she leaned out of the capsule’s door and checked. The station’s power cable was still plugged in to the capsule’s outlet and the little lights next to it, the only things on the damn capsule that still worked, glowed the green of a full charge.

  “I checked that,” Rosa said. “The battery’s fully charged — it’s even plugged in outside.”

  The kid reached inside the last panel he’d taken off.

  “I told you,” she said, “the battery’s fully charged, I —”

  There was a click and the capsule’s lights came on. She spun to look at the front where the control panels were live, spinning through their startup sequence.

  Rosa looked around at the lights, then back at the kid, who crawled out of the access space and grinned at her. The little fucker actually grinned.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  Nine

  “A year and a half,” Rosa muttered.

  “See, the battery was charged, but —”

  “I get it.”

  “— if something’s going to sit for a long time they —”

  “I know.”

  “— unplug the systems so it doesn’t —”

  “I get it —”

  Rosa broke off and just let the kid talk. He clearly felt a need to explain, despite the fact that explaining was, essentially, telling Rosa how stupid she was. A year and a half since she’d found the capsule, and in all that time she hadn’t checked to see if the console’s powerline was still connected to the batteries. Maybe she was stupid.

  She sat down at the console and studied the readouts, almost hoping she’d find another problem so that she could say, “See? It wasn’t just the battery, so fix this, smart guy.”

  But there wasn’t. Everything was green.

  Hey, Seymour?

  Yes,
Miss Fuentes?

  Does this thing have a plant interface?

  It does, Miss Fuentes.

  Good — double-check the diagnostics, will you?

  Right away.

  Rosa sat back and waited. They’d get one shot at this — one only. If there was anything else wrong with the capsule, a thousand kilometers an hour in vacuum would be a really horrible time to find out.

  “So what’s next?” the kid asked.

  “I’m making sure the capsule’s working.”

  “The board’s green.”

  “My implant’s checking.”

  “Oh.”

  The capsule’s diagnostics appear to be functioning, Miss Fuentes. All reported values are correct. All agents are active and connected and awaiting your order to execute their instructions.

  Rosa took a deep breath.

  This was it. No more excuses — she glanced at the kid.

  “You sure you want out?” she asked. “I can get you back to your cell and no one’ll ever know you were involved.”

  Mason thought about it for a minute.

  Escaping had a risk. Yeah, he might be able to clear things up, but probably not — his best bet for that would be to stay, maybe. Wait for his mom to find out where he was and come visit, then let her take care of it. On the other hand — he thought hard about what Fuentes had told him. The thing about him being sold and the judge and everybody else getting paid — that made sense. It made a lot more sense than what he’d thought happened — that it might be just a mistake.

  He thought about other things he’d heard around the neighborhood — how once you were in the system, you were in for good. He’d always thought the guys who got picked up by the flashies a second or third time were just bad, that they deserved it for whatever they were into, but if Fuentes was right, then weren’t they the likeliest, easiest targets for the flashies to pick up again and get paid? Once someone had a record, they couldn’t get decent housing or any kind of real job, so …

  That was a sobering thought. No matter if he could get this cleared up at all, it would probably stay on his record. He’d heard of that too — guys who had the charges dropped, but still couldn’t go back to school or find a job because just the arrest was enough to keep them out.

  His throat closed up as he realized just how much of his life had changed, and just how little he knew about what was in store for him. Fuentes must have a plan, though.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  Rosa cocked her head at the kid’s question.

  “I’ve got my plans,” she said. “But you’re not coming with me.”

  She had enough to take care of with herself and figuring out what to do with the plant. The last thing she needed was this kid tagging along.

  “No,” he said, “but you have a plan, right? You know what you’re going to do? How you’re going to live?” He took a deep breath. “Look, after what you told me — and it just makes sense — there’s no way I can get back to a normal life, is there? I mean, I can’t get a new explant and use my own name — once they figure out I’m not here anymore every flashy in my neighborhood will be looking for me and there’ll be alerts on the nets. I don’t know what to do about that, but I figure your plan might work for me.”

  Maybe the kid wasn’t as stupid as she thought. At least he recognized there was no life left to him once he had a record.

  She wondered how much she could safely tell him about her plans, then shrugged. By the time he got picked up and could tell anyone, she’d be where they couldn’t reach her anymore.

  “I’m going up,” she said. “Up and out. First Luna, then Mars or maybe the Belt. Probably stay on Mars, though.”

  She’d made the plan years ago, before she was arrested, even. It was kind of funny, because it was the arrest and her stay at Bright Hors that really gave her the means to do it — getting out of Earth’s atmosphere was still pretty expensive, but the agents she had in place now would take care of that.

  She could almost remember exactly when she’d made the decision to go there, though. Some school presentation on the benefits and glory of Earth — and how we all have to sacrifice because the rest of the system hates us for how good we have it and screws with our economy.

  There’d been this one clip of some guy from the Belt. A real wild looking man with long hair bound back in a ponytail and a beard just as long — so long she couldn’t see how he could get it inside the vacsuit helmet he had tucked under one arm. The helmet, along with the rest of the suit, was stained and scraped, with a couple dents in the helmet.

  “It’s funny,” he said, “how you have to go to vacuum before you can breathe free.”

  Then the presentation went on and on about how stupid the Loonies and Marsbars were, but especially the Belters. “Look at this man, thinking he breathes free in vacuum,” the narrator said, “yet of all of the places in the solar system, only Earth has free air. Everywhere else, even Mars, despite its best efforts at terraforming, still charges people just to breathe.”

  Rosa’d looked around at the rest of the class and realized they didn’t get it. They really didn’t understand what the man had been saying, they just looked on, astounded at the thought of having to pay for air.

  She saw the kid’s face fall and figured he was probably like the others, bought into the idea that everywhere else was so much more horrible than Earth — yet, if it was, why did the spaceports have guards to keep people out? Why was it so hard to get a visa to visit even the orbitals, much less Luna?

  “I know it sounds crazy,” she told the kid, “but that’s where I’m going.”

  She paused, calculating. It wouldn’t be too much to leave the kid with something — he had helped her after all.

  “Look, maybe I can leave you something? A new explant, maybe, and I know a guy who can hack the ID systems —”

  She couldn’t do that herself, she had no doors into those. Maybe if she hadn’t gotten picked up she’d have gone into that business herself, but the ones already established guarded their methods close — both to keep the doors from being closed and to keep the competition out.

  There’d be enough to pay to get the kid a new ID, though. She was pretty sure of that, even though she wasn’t sure just how much her agents would be able to collect for her.

  “Really?” he asked.

  Rosa nodded. The puppy dog look of hope he gave her was irritating and that kicked her into action. The sooner they were out of here, the sooner she could dump him, get off this planet, and get her damn plant fixed.

  Seymour?

  Yes, Miss Fuentes?

  Execute.

  Ten

  The capsule’s doors slid shut and it started moving down the tube.

  Before they were even in the main tubes, Rosa’s agents were already reporting back, and the news was all good.

  Most of the agents had one simple instruction — just one job:

  Move the money.

  The Bright Horizons operating accounts emptied in a fraction of a second, all their balances going to new accounts set up by other agents. It took longer, almost a full second, for the agents in the accounting system to locate the payoffs — at least the cash ones, the electronic ones were easier.

  They followed the trail to bank accounts all over the world.

  Judges, prosecutors, public defenders, right down to the lowliest flashy — anyone with a link to those Bright Horizons accounts — suddenly found their money gone. And not just the amounts from Bright Hors.

  Rosa watched the numbers flash by her eyes and the growing total. She grinned.

  You’re going to pay. Every fucking millicred, you bastards.

  Those foolish enough to use the same credentials for other accounts as they did for the banking ones connected to Bright Hors would find that they’d been hit harder — stocks, bonds, retirement accounts, anything that could be put on the open market was, and her agents siphoned the credits away. If she could have figured out how t
o do it, Rosa would have sold their apartments out from under them all and pocketed that, as well. As it was, she had to settle for looting any lines of credit they had set up.

  She only wished she could have gotten at Perigree’s main accounts — that would have meant tens of billions, maybe trillions — but their systems guys were better than Bright Hors’ and her agents couldn’t break in there. The main Perigree admins apparently didn’t trust their Bright Hors counterparts.

  The numbers rose and Rosa double checked the code that totaled it, sure she’d made a mistake, but she hadn’t — the total was real.

  The numbers slowed as they topped eight hundred million credits. Made it to a billion, then slowed more.

  Rosa watched in awe as the number rolled over and the flow trickled to a stop.

  Holy shit, Rosa thought to herself, eyes wide in disbelief.

  Mason sat back and watched Fuentes.

  She was also relaxed in her seat, but her eyes were closed and he assumed she was conferring with her implant or making last minute arrangements. The lights outside the capsule flashed by faster and faster until they reached their cruising speed, whatever that was for this stretch of tunnel.

  After a few minutes, Fuentes opened her eyes and Mason braved a question, “Um, so, what’s next?”

  He expected to be told to shut up, but Fuentes actually smiled at him — he wasn’t sure what that meant. Usually a smile was good, but this was Fuentes, so …

  “Next we get out of these,” she said, fingering her orange top.

  She went to the back of the capsule and opened a storage bin, then took out a bag like his stuff had gone in when he was arrested. A half-dozen more bags like it filled the compartment and she dug through those before tossing him one.

  “Here — those should fit. Sorry we didn’t have a chance to get yours, but I was expecting things to take more than one night. Lucky I planned for having someone along and packed a selection just in case.”