Off he goes. He caps Bloom… He seemed real angry about the way the Doc was treatin’ the pigs. Leaves me for the marshals with this here card. Lookit. Y’see? It’s what them there boys call tarrow. Tarrow cards or somethin‘. One o’ the marshals tole me that these things got, whatchacall, mojo on ’em, black magic. Well, shit. I unloaded a hun-nerd rounds at that boy and never nicked him one time. If that ain’t black magic, then I dunno what is.
William “Big” Buettner, arrest suspect #6575FG, Fresno State Militia Service. Subject brought to book by Sanctioned Operative Joshua Fixx (independent), serial number 1800979.
For more information on any of the weapons systems mentioned during this transcript, Touch Here for Hyperlinx. This RealTime Interrogation is a WKIL-TV program, sponsored by Turner, Harvest and Ramirez.
2. Full Throttle
The Vector held to the road like it was in love with it. This being a weeknight and the hour somewhat late, the Northern Lantau Expressway was sparse with traffic. Ko pressed the accelerator hard to the floor and let the gunmetal sedan eat up the asphalt. Angry hoots from the drivers he slipstreamed fell away in strangled chugs of Doppler-shifted noise, the Mercedes sliding effortlessly around the other road users as if they were static islands in a shimmering river of mercury. The speed limit signs blurred past him. Each used a laser ranger to bounce off oncoming vehicles and flash up their kilometres-per-hour on the big holograph displays that floated over the highway. If you kept to the limit or below it, it beamed out a cartoon smiley face. If you overshot, you were given a grimacing scowl. Ko’s speed was so high that the signs were throwing up skulls and crossbones.
“This is unnatural,” said Feng, jamming a cigarette in his mouth. The guardsman held himself tight, arms braced about the cuirass on his chest. Ko threw him a look and Feng stabbed a finger at the road. “Don’t turn away! You’ll crash this thing into someone and kill them, and I don’t want any company!”
“Yeah, if I die, who’d you haunt then?” The driver chuckled. “You don’t need to be here,” said Ko. “Do your thing, go away and come back later.”
“I can’t always do it. Not just like that, not on demand.”
“Oh.” Ko grinned. “Pity. For you, I mean.”
The next holosign he passed had a string of text on it: “Authorities Informed. Speed Reduction Measures Initiated.”
“Uh-oh.”
“What?” demanded Feng.
“Tanglers.”
Five kilometres further up the expressway, a crack opened in the surface of the road, the polymerised blacktop peeling back like a lipless mouth. Two prongs, blinking with warning strobes, extended upward and grew spines of impact-resistant piezoplastic. At their tips were pressure-jet web guns, needle-fine nozzles that could fling a polymer spray into the air. Like spider’s thread, the polymer hardened on contact with the air, turning thick and gluey. It was water soluble, and it lasted for less than five minutes before it dissolved, but that was typically more than enough time to coat the wheels of a speeder and force them to slow. Ko had caught a grille full of the stuff once, back when a race against some Wanchai show-off had sent him down the wrong road. It was like driving through treacle.
The trick to beating the tanglers was to drive in a way the designers thought only an idiot would.
Ko shifted around the neon-lit bulk of bleating robohauler and aimed the bonnet of the Vector directly at the closest pylon. He saw the thin streams of fluid hissing into the night air, crossing away and to the right, converging on the place where the traffic control computer estimated he was supposed to be.
“The pole with the lanterns…” Feng said. “You’re going to hit it!”
“Yes.” Ko ran the sedan right into the plastic upright and heard it clatter and scrape against the underside of the Mercedes as it folded beneath it. The car listed sharply as some of the rangier fluid spat over the rear tyres, but he was ready for it and there was hardly enough to cause him trouble. In the rear-view, he spotted the hauler going headlong into a puddle of the stuff and the vehicle skidded hard. The robot truck’s simplistic road-brain lacked the finesse to manage such a sudden change in highway conditions and the hauler spun out, throwing up a fountain of sparks as it scraped the barrier on the median strip. The Vector made some complaining noises and shuddered. A clatter of noise from the back seat drew Ko’s attention. “What the hell is that? A bag?”
“The speed traps were ineffective.” The masked man spoke for the first time, never once turning his head from the driver’s seat. His voice was neutral in a way that seemed too precise to be fully human.
Frankie watched the distance markers blinking past the window as the remaining cars in the YLHI convoy followed the expressway back toward the city. He felt an odd sense of amusement at the thief’s boldness, taking one of the Vectors from right under the nose of his escorts. He let his gaze wander to Alice. Her annoyance was palpable there in the back of the sedan, coming off her chilly expression in ice-cold waves. The car felt cramped, the air inside uncomfortable.
Alice paused only to listen to the report from the man in the Monkey King mask and then returned to the conversation she was having in hissy Japanese with her vu-phone. A hand-held cellular model, the compact wedge of electronics was standard-issue equipment to every Yuk Lung executive above grade three. She gave Frankie a contrite but irritated look. “I am so very sorry you had to witness that, Francis. You are barely home for ten minutes and you are forced to watch a crime unfold in front of you. Rest assured, the thief will be caught and punished.” She turned back to the phone and barked out something angry.
“Damn kids,” said Ping, the guy who’d taken his bag at arrivals. Coiled in the front passenger seat, he sported the beginnings of a nasty bruise on his cheek. “Oughta ban the lot of them from the ’port. Only go there to race up and down the highway.” He started to say something else, but Alice gave him a sharp glare; it was Ping’s fault the car had been taken, and so he had forfeited the right to speak because of his laxity.
“Highway patrol enforcers are inbound,” reported the Monkey King. “He’ll be at the bridge before they get here.”
Frankie wondered where the agent was getting this data from. There had to be an audio-video link inside the mask, or else some cyberware implant looping a feed from the police band. He heard the masked man make a tutting sound under his breath as he guided the Mercedes around a stalled robohauler and through the thick slurry of spent tangler foam. The other car in the group was quite a way behind them.
Alice looked up and met the driver’s eyes in the rear-view. Frankie saw something unspoken pass between them.
“He’s going to go for the WarPark off-ramp. I can catch him. With your permission?”
She nodded, and with a grunt of power from the engine, the driver threw the Vector into top gear.
Alice punched in a different number. “Traffic control, this is YLHI mobile 41312, enacting clause six of the Corporate Self-Defence Act. Advise all enforcement agents that this is a duly noted and legal exercise of our company rights.” She hung up without waiting for a reply and snapped the cellphone closed.
A thought formed in Frankie s mind. “My bag… Where’s my carry-on bag from the plane?”
Ping looked at the floor. “In, uh, in the car.” He pointed in the general direction of the road.
“Don’t worry,” said Alice. “The moment the vehicle was stolen, the contents of your personal computer were nashloaded to our central server and then the machine was wiped. Your company phone was also automatically severed from our internal network.”
“That’s not what I was thinking.” He extended his hand to her. “May I?”