Fuzzy Nation (13 page)

In most ways Holloway’s skimmer was basic. He’d purchased it from another surveyor who had gone bust and was looking to make any sort of money he could before dragging his ass back to planet Earth. The skimmer was built for purpose rather than for beauty, with a large cargo area and a spartan interior covered by a standard retractable roof/window combination. Four large rotors, cowled so as not to julienne unwary flying creatures or surveyors, were stationed at the corners of the vehicle, providing lift and maneuvering capability.

Holloway had done almost nothing to improve the skimmer after he purchased it. He liked a flashy conveyance as much as the next guy—he had been a lawyer, after all—but part of the point of a flashy conveyance was showing it off, and on Zara XXIII, there was no one to show off to. People there were obsessed with the getting of money, not the exhibition of it. So there was nothing to prove in the direction of ostentation. In a way it was freeing.

Nevertheless, Holloway had splurged on one thing. The skimmer’s previous owner had equipped it with a single utilitarian speaker, for likewise utilitarian use—announcements from the skimmer and the infopanel, communication with his contractor rep, and so on. Holloway had blanched at this. If he was going to be spending most of his time in the skimmer, he was going to want to listen to music and audiobooks and other things that would keep his brain entertained while his eyes and hands and everything else were busy. Holloway wanted a sound system.

The sound system he got was ridiculously expensive, not because he wanted that particular system, but because it was the only one the ZaraCorp general store carried. Most surveyors, he was told, listened to their music on earbuds and went for the utilitarian speakers for their skimmers. The shopkeep offered Holloway what he assured him was a nice deal on a pair of formfitting earbuds. Holloway, who disliked the idea of sticking anything smaller than an elbow into his ear, bit the bullet and paid for the ridiculously expensive sound system.

The zararaptors had torn down the emergency fence and were now circling the skimmer, trying to make some sort of sense of it, and determining how to get past its hard outer shell to the soft chewy treat inside. Holloway focused on not wetting himself and on calling up his sound system’s diagnostic software.

One of the things that made the sound system so expensive, or so the general store shopkeep explained to Holloway, was that the system put out sounds above and below the human range of hearing—the range of the system was in fact 2 kilohertz to 44.1 kilohertz. The point of this range was that even if humans couldn’t hear in those ranges, there were psychoacoustic effects that propagated above and beyond human hearing range, effects that were lost in conventional sound systems whose speakers reproduced less than the human hearing range. This sound system reproduced everything, the shopkeep said, allowing for the best sound performance short of real life.

At the time, Holloway told the shopkeep that he suspected that was all just a bunch of sales bullshit. The shopkeep agreed that it probably was, but that Holloway was paying for it anyway, so he might as well know the excuse for it.

The zararaptors began pounding on the skimmer windows with their hands, first in open palm smacks and then with fists. The windows rattled but held; they were composite windows built to survive bird impacts at nearly 200 kilometers per hour. They could handle an animal fist.

One of the zararaptors broke away from the skimmer. Holloway, despite himself, watched the thing go. Its gaze was fixed on the ground, as if looking for something. Suddenly it paused and bent down and came up with an impressively large rock. It looked back at the skimmer and then swung its arm back in a frighteningly accurate simulation of a cricket bowler.

Huh, tool user,
some part of Holloway’s brain said.
I’ll have to tell Isabel about that.
Then Holloway ducked involuntarily as the very large rock sailed through the air at a viciously flat trajectory. It smacked full into the front side window, leaving a small but distinct crack. The zararaptor rushed toward the skimmer to try again.

Holloway tore his attention away, back to his infopanel, and to the sound system’s diagnostic software, which had now loaded.

When Holloway purchased his sound system, he had looked at the horribly complex sound system software for half an hour, with its various frequency tests and acoustical settings and options. Then he decided that life was too short to geek out on speakers, went back to the front screen of the software, and checked the box for
AUTOMATIC MAINTENANCE
. This meant the software would take care of itself, and Holloway could just listen to his music and books. Holloway was on that screen now, jabbing the button for
MANUAL MAINTENANCE
instead.

The zararaptor was now directly outside the window. It was reaching down to pick up the rock.

The infopanel screen changed, and a page of menu items displayed, in no apparent particular order.
Goddamn lousy user interface,
Holloway thought, and found the
FREQUENCY TESTING
option just as the zararaptor rammed the rock into the window with force, expanding the crack about a millimeter.

Holloway pressed the
FREQUENCY TESTING
option on the screen and was then treated to a soothing splash page graphic while a man’s voice explained, in warm, rich tones, how calibrating the Newton-Barndom XGK sound system across all frequency ranges would assure the listeners of total sonic enjoyment.

Holloway screamed in frustration and fear and searched desperately for the
SKIP INTRO
option. He found it at the same time the second zararaptor had picked up its own rock and started beating it against the same window as the first raptor. They were taking turns breaking the window. The window shattered as Holloway loaded up what he was looking for.

Holloway launched himself away from the window and reached over to the one manual control on the dash associated with the sound system: the volume knob. He gripped the knob as the first zararaptor punched the glass in the window, popping it out in a single sheet, and then drew its head into the skimmer cabin, hissing. It was clearly planning to jam its way into the skimmer. The other zararaptor stayed outside, waiting for Holloway to be flushed out.

Holloway managed not to crap himself while he waited for the zararaptor to get about halfway into the skimmer. When it had, he jabbed a button in the infoscreen. The sound system kicked on as it ran the frequency test for the 22.5- to 28.0-kilohertz range. Holloway cranked the volume knob, turning it over hard and fast.

The zararaptor in the window screamed and thrashed and beat its toothy head against the side of the skimmer in a frantic attempt to pull its head out of the vehicle. After several terrifying seconds, the creature managed to reverse out of the skimmer, scrambling away from the broken window. The other raptor was retreating with it. Holloway was so relieved he almost cried.

But the zararaptors, while clearly annoyed, did not flee. After a moment they began to circle the skimmer. Holloway was briefly confused about this. Then he started the frequency test again, cranked up the volume even higher, and opened the skimmer roof and windows.

The zararaptors, confronted with an omnidirectional blast of painful high-frequency sound, screeched angrily and ran into the trees.

Holloway watched them go, disbelieving. Then he fired up the infopanel’s sound recorder, made sure it could record inaudibly high frequencies, and recorded the frequency test. He set it to play on a repeating loop.

Five minutes later the jungle was silent, save for the wind through the trees. Apparently it wasn’t only the zararaptors who hated high-frequency blasts of noise.

Holloway felt himself developing a headache from it, like Aubrey said he would, a few days ago. But there was nothing for it at the moment: The alternative to a headache was having one’s brain gnawed upon. Holloway would stick with the headache for now.

He reached for the infopanel again and did another diagnostic test, this time for his front rotors. The diagnostic found nothing physically wrong with the rotors. They were operating within normal parameters.

Holloway looked around him to make sure his sound barrier was still working and then did a software diagnostic, targeting the subsystems relating to the rotors. They seemed fine, too. A diagnostic for general drive systems also turned up no errors or file corruption.

If there was nothing wrong with the hardware and nothing wrong with the software, could it really have been just a fluke—just a momentary glitch in the system? Holloway had to admit that it could have been, but he didn’t like it. It would mean that his missing ammunition was just a fluke, too, as well as his drained fence power plant.

Holloway was willing to accept the combination of any two of those things as just bad luck or bad karma or whatever. But all three things together and at once smacked of intention to him. It sounded bad paranoid, and he wasn’t generally the bad paranoid type, but what else could it be? Someone had just tried to kill him.

Who had access to the skimmer? Holloway did, obviously, but unless he was sleepwalking in an overtly suicidal sort of way, he was not a suspect.

Isabel had been at his treetop compound for a week now, so she would’ve had plenty of opportunity. But while Holloway had certainly given Isabel good reason to be angry with him over the time he had known her, the idea that she would try to kill him was inconceivable. That wasn’t how she was built. And even if it
were,
Holloway thought wryly, Isabel wouldn’t be sneaky about it. She’d come at him head-on.

But that didn’t leave anyone else. Holloway’s life really was without a great deal of physical human contact. The only people he’d seen in the last week were Isabel and Aubrey and his lackey, Landon. But neither of them had been near the skimmer. Well, Landon had, but—

Holloway’s brain froze for a moment as he finally remembered the other person he’d seen in the last week.

Holloway flicked on his infopanel and did a search diagnostic on his skimmer’s operational programs, looking for any programs that had been loaded or modified in the last week. He found two. One was the rotor power management program, which had been modified. The second was a program that had been added four days previous. It had no descriptor, but Holloway could guess what it did, and to which other program, and who had put it there to make sure that Holloway’s defenses were compromised.

“Son of a bitch,” Holloway said. He directed the infopanel to begin a system wipe and total reinstallation from factory settings. It would take time Holloway didn’t want to spend on the jungle floor, but he had no intention of trying to fly anywhere in his skimmer until he’d reverted its operating system to system defaults and vaporized whatever the hell that new program was.

The reinstall took two hours, during which time Holloway’s headache became a blinding migraine and his nose developed an incessant bleed. Holloway spent the last half hour on the ground chewing on aspirin, first aid kit gauze shoved into his nostrils.

By the time Holloway was back in the air, the sun was setting. He pinged Isabel. She didn’t answer. This didn’t entirely surprise Holloway; she was probably busy watching the Fuzzys do calculus or teaching them metaphysics. Holloway waited for the voice mail signal.

“Isabel, it’s Jack,” he said. “Listen, I need to go to Aubreytown to handle a thing. It shouldn’t take too long, but I need you to do me a favor. If I don’t call you back by about midnight, I want you to call your new friend and have him come looking for me. Because if you don’t hear from me by midnight, I think that one way or another, there’s a real good chance I’m going to need a lawyer.”

Chapter Twelve        

Holloway walked into Warren’s Warren and found Joe DeLise right where he expected him to be: at the bar, third stool from the right. It was the Joe DeLise Memorial Drinking Stool; DeLise sat there enough that the stool padding conformed to the contours of his ass. If someone else was sitting on it when DeLise came in, they weren’t sitting there for long. DeLise would just stand next to them, glaring, until they got the hint. One time a contract surveyor didn’t get the hint. DeLise sat elsewhere and waited for the surveyor to head out of the bar. The surveyor was found the next morning in the alley, not dead, but with an impressive crease in his forehead. DeLise didn’t have to do too much glaring after that.

Holloway walked up to DeLise, waited to see the man’s stunned look, and then slugged him right in his big fat face. DeLise tumbled off the stool, beer bottle clattering to the floor. The bar, moderately crowded, went silent.

“Hi, Joe,” Holloway said. “I know you’re surprised to see me.”

From the floor, DeLise gawked at Holloway, disbelieving. “You just hit a cop, you dipshit,” he said.

“Yes I did,” Holloway said. “I hit a cop, in front of witnesses, in a bar that’s got a security camera whose feed is piped directly into the Security offices. So that way, if you have a mind to make me disappear
this
time, everyone’s going to know it was you, you fat gelatinous turd. You’re not going to get a chance to try to kill me twice.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” DeLise said.

“Of course not,” Holloway said. “But I am curious about why you tried to kill me, Joe. We’ve never liked each other, but I didn’t think you had that much of a problem with me. So how about it? Was this just because I pissed you off out there at the camp? You couldn’t take a few mean words? Or was this something you’ve been planning for a while? You can tell me.”

DeLise pulled himself off the floor. “You’re under arrest, Holloway. For assaulting a security officer.”

“Excellent,” Holloway said, and held out his hands, close together. “Arrest me, you glutinous tub of lard. Then when you and I go to the Security offices, I’m going to call a lawyer, and then I’m going to tell him a story about you and my skimmer, and all the things that happened to it when it was left alone with you a few days ago. It’s a really good story, and it’s going to end with your flabby ass doing time. So go ahead and arrest me. I really want you to, Joe. Let’s do this.” Holloway pushed out his hands in the direction of DeLise.