"Jake?" It was Carl.
"Yeah."
"Lori can't go back there, to her foster parents."
"Why not?"
"I'd rather not say just now. She just can't."
"I want to know, Carl."
A pause. "Lori says to tell you." I heard him take a breath. "Her foster father raped her."
After a moment, I said, "Right. Um… Lori? I'm very sorry."
"It's okay."
"Yeah. Uh… over and out."
Rape seemed to be the national pastime of the Outworlds. Charming.
I replaced the headset in its rack on the dash. "Sam, take over for me, will you?"
"Sure, son. Don't feel too bad. You couldn't have known."
"I should have known that when a child cries, it usually means something hurts. I'm going into the aft-cabin. Raise the seat up for me. Hard for a two-inch-tall driver to see out the Port."
I went back and dumped myself, pile of rags that I was, into the bunk.
As it happened, we wound up stopping on Schlagwasser so Sean and Liam could fuel up. Sam was showing three-quarters of a tank, but we topped off anyway. This could be the last service station till the Big Bang, for all we knew.
"Don't need any gas," Carl averred. "I'm okay."
"Gas?" I said.
"I mean, whaddycallit. Deuterium."
"What's this thing run on, air?"
Sitting at the wheel of his 1957 Chevrolet Impala, Carl knitted his brow and shook his head. "Y'know, to tell the honest-to-God truth, I really don't know what the hell it runs on."
"Then what are all those fusion-monitoring readouts-the ones under the dash board?"
"Oh, those? They're dummies."
All I could do was grunt and scratch my face. Carl and Lori got out and walked over with me to the edge of the lot, where everyone was stretching their legs. Schlagwasser―this part of it―was a planet of marshlands and swamp, over which the starslab was borne by a causeway. The sky was a dome of slate. The world smelled of brackish water and wet, fetid things. In a pond of goo a few meters away, something sucked and gurgled. The undergrowth was a jumble of orange and purple, overhung by great brooding, purple-leaved trees.
"These planets are getting less and less Earthlike," I said. "And what happens when we get out of human-occupied territory?"
"According to Winnie," Darla said, "there'll always be earthnormal planets along the way. There may be stretches where they'll be few and far between, but we'll be able to get out every now and then to move around a bit. Maybe even camp."
"But we should be prepared for hostile enviornments. Sean, did you guys pack full-pressure suits?"
"Yes, they're in the trailer."
"Fine. Now, I have two… Carl?"
"Yeah, I got one in the trunk."
"The what?" John asked.
"Storage compartment, in the rear, there."
"Oh, the boot."
"Boot?"
"Boot."
"Boot," Carl repeated. "You people sure talk funny."
Everyone looked at Carl for a moment.
"Okay," I said. "Maybe we can make do with five. And if you guys have to exit your vehicles in an airless environment, we can use the trailer as an air lock."
"Maybe we should blow all our cash and outfit everybody," Carl suggested, "just to be safe."
"A good idea," Roland seconded.
"How're you fixed for money, Carl?"
"Me? I got plenty of consols left. Might as well shoot the whole wad, since they won't be worth anything outside the Outworlds."
"'Well," I said, "you could convert them back to gold."
"Oh, I've got loads of that, too. Really, I'm bankrolled pretty well. Let's get everyone outfitted and squared away, so there won't be any problems downroad."
"Well, maybe we should look for a general store, just to make sure we haven't forgotten―"
Sam's key was beeping in my pocket.
"Yeah, Sam?"
"Jake, I' m painting three fast-moving objects coming from uproad."
"Aren't you getting too much ground clutter? Oh, I see."
I hadn't noticed, but Sam had launched an earlybird. It was hovering about a hundred meters above.
"I don't like the looks of 'em. Maybe it's best we skedaddled."
The service people were finishing up with the vehicles. The station sat on a slender finger of dry land in the middle of a vast marsh. There was no possibility of going off road and hiding.
"Right, Sam. Let's move." I turned around and faced my fellow voyagers. "You heard 'im, people. We scramble."
We scrambled. We had the attendants disconnect immediately, and to save time, I paid Sean's minuscule bill along with my own.
"Thanks, Jake."
"You owe me a couple beers. Whoa, there!"
I caught Lori by the sleeve of her pretty, but rumpled, redstriped sailor suit.
"Jake, please let me go with Carl."
"Into the cab, hon," I said firmly.
Her attitude seemed to have changed. She gave me no lip, and started clambering up the ladder to the cab. But suddenly I remembered the Chevy's astonishing capacity to absorb punishment and its stunning ability to inflict it. I grabbed Lori and yanked her down.
"Sorry, hon. You were right. Go with Carl." I swatted her skinny rump (though as rumps go, it was coming along rather nicely) and sent her on her way.
"What made you send up the bird, Sam?" I asked when I was inside the cab.
"Oh, a hunch. Thought I saw something sneaking around back there for the last hour or so. Seemed to be deliberately staying out of ground-scanner range. I'm painting a tiny airborne blip that could be their drone."
"Good work. Certainly sounds suspicious." I put on the headset as I vectored the rig out onto the Skyway.
"Carl, I'll take the bow and you take the stern."
"Check."
"Sean? You get in the lifeboat."
"Affirmative, and it's a damn good thing I know a bit of starrigger's lingo. 'Lifeboat,' indeed."
I kept one eye on the rearview screens as Sean and Carl configured themselves correctly.
"Okay, here's more starrigger's lingo for you. We're gonna squeeze hydrogen and let the neutrinos fly."
"We're going to 'grab slab,' is that it?"
"Right you are. Translation: let's get the hell moving."
"Well, the spirit is willing, Jake, but Ariadne's not herself today."
"Well, do the best you can."
"Affirmative."
Ariadne, I thought. Oh, my.
I eased the pedal down and watched the groundspeed readout until it showed 240 km/hr. A good clip, but still on the sane side. Sean began to drift back, so I feathered back to 210. I could see that Ariadne would hobble us until she was overhauled or until I could talk Sean and Liam into stashing her in the trailer. And now that we were about to leave human-occupied territory, opportunities for accomplishing the former would soon reduced to zero. I doubted that I could persuade two proud loggers to demote themselves to the status of starhikers. Our only hope was that the approaching blips weren't hostile.
But they were.
"They've recovered the first drone and put up another," Sam announced. "Which reminds me, I have to do the same thing."
Recovering a drone on the fly was a difficult proposition, and we had lost our share of them trying it. Damn little things were expensive.
"Sounds like they're very interested in what's going on downroad," I said.
"Oh, they're tracking us, all right. We're getting scanned with everything in the spectrum."
"Pendergast's cops, you think?"
"Probably, though it could be anybody back there. We stepped on a lot of toes."
"Right."
The Skyway continued straight for a few kilometers, gliding over marsh and meadow, occasionally cutting across patches of dry land. The water in the swampy areas was a dark bluegreen, mottled with rainbowed oil slicks. The tall trees weren't really trees. The trunks were masses of intertwined separate filaments, looking like a tangle of battling snakes. From the waters rose pink and purple grasses. Oval pads bearing evil yellow flowers floated on the surface.