Kaleidocide (49 page)

“If you like the colors of this truck,” I said to Terrey, “you'll really like this feature.”

I told Jon to activate the controls between the seats and use them to release the car that was at the very back of the bottom rack. It slid out of its resting place, bounced onto the road behind the truck, and kept going that direction, causing several of the SUVs to slow down and swerve in order to avoid hitting it. Jon then released the car that was in front of it, and it gained more momentum as it slid down the tracks and flew off the back of the rack like a bullet. Again, the SUVs had to slow down and swerve, making them fall even farther behind the truck. They soon got smarter, however, and moved to the two outside lanes of the highway, where they were not directly behind the truck, and gunned their engines.

On my suggestion, Jon yanked the truck over to the left lane, and then back to the middle when the SUVs in that lane moved to avoid being behind him. They slid to the side again, one behind the other, but then on his own Jon made the surprisingly deft move of releasing the third car while jerking the wheel at the moment when it reached the back of the rack. So the rear of the truck was pointed at the SUVs when the car exited it, and it connected with the first enemy and caused him to careen off the guardrail and flip over into the middle of the road. The driver of the SUV behind him had to slam on his brakes to avoid being hit himself, taking him out of the race for at least a few minutes. In the meantime, the two SUVs on the other side of the freeway had surged forward to the side of the truck, where they were no longer in danger of car missiles being fired from the back of it. The roofs of both enemy vehicles slid open, and from the front one a blue-clad soldier sprang up and started firing his assault rifle toward the back of the cab. He would soon be firing into the windows of the cab because the SUVs were moving faster than the truck, and on the roof of the second SUV another merc was readying an RPG launcher.

“Watch out!” Terrey said.

“Watch
this,
” I said, and Jon knew what to do even before I told him. He released the last two cars on the bottom rack of the carrier, simultaneously starting their engines with the remote system that the truck drivers used to unload and park the cars they transported. The two cars slid out onto the road behind the rack one after another, and with a forefinger for the first one and a thumb for the second touching the pad next to him, Jon was able to control both cars. Acceleration and braking depended on how much pressure he applied to the pad with each finger, and turns were made by moving it left or right. It only took a few seconds for Jon to bring the cars up close to the SUVs, because one of the cars was a Ford Mustang and the other a Menger Flash. In any other situation this would be a terrible waste of a couple very fast automobiles, but in this case it was necessary—he slammed the Mustang against the side of the SUV in the front, jarring the merc with the RPG launcher enough that he couldn't aim well enough to fire.

The Flash was pressing up against the rear of the second SUV, but the smaller cars were barely budging the bigger armored vehicles, and the shooters were stabilizing themselves to fire at the truck. So I told Jon to use the even greater weight of the carrier truck and turn the wheel to the right. The Flash in the rear stopped moving and was out of the game when he took his thumb off the pad to concentrate on controlling the wheel and the Mustang, in order to take out the two SUVs. The huge road monster and the smaller car next to it pushed the two other vehicles easily to the far right side of the freeway and pressed them into the cement wall there, grinding them against it until they couldn't move forward anymore and were left in a smoking clump by the barrier.

The Mustang was ruined, too, but the massive car truck was barely scratched. Jon had to keep it moving forward, however, because now the last remaining SUV had caught up to it. In a strategic blunder, the driver didn't try the RPG approach, which might have worked now that there was more room on the freeway section that widened as it approached the bridge. Instead he pulled up directly behind the back of the truck, tailgating the empty bottom rack, and two light blue attackers climbed out of the roof of the SUV, down the windshield and hood, and onto the empty bottom rack of the truck.

“Just hit the brakes,” I said to Jon when we saw what they were doing.

“But this is more fun,” he said, and released the back car on the top rack, so it dropped down right onto the windshield and hood of the SUV, smashing it dramatically and incapacitating it.

He's enjoying this too much,
I thought,
which always happens at first with lethal violence—until we really begin to understand the “lethal” part.
But I let him go, because in this situation it was either them or us—either them or my wife, to be more precise.

One of the attackers started moving up the middle of the empty bottom rack toward the cab, and the other climbed up to the top rack and began to make his way across the four cars that were still up there. Jon began to lower the entire top rack, which the carrier drivers did to get the cars up there off the truck. He lowered it as fast as it would go down, and the man on the bottom rack couldn't keep his balance well enough at the high speed to get to the side and jump off in time. He was crushed under the weight of the rack and the four cars. Then Jon released all four remaining cars from the top rack at the same time. The second mercenary tried to run toward the cabin across the top of the sliding cars, and actually made it to the fourth and final car. But he couldn't make it off that one, and he dropped to his stomach and held on for dear life as the car fell off onto the road. Then he probably lost his dear life as it slammed into the other three cars and he was thrown onto the pavement like a child's rag doll.

The double had just started to celebrate this Pyrrhic victory when the really lethal enemy showed up. Two of the light blue Sikorsky Prime helicopters had emerged from the hills to the left of the truck, and were probably in firing range already. I glanced down at the small windows on the bottom left of my holo projection, and saw that Min's and Ni's views were both blacked out. Only Stephenson's view, from his glasses, was still active—he seemed to be stationary and looking at a damaged wall sideways, like he was taking a rest after the battle, or perhaps immobilized by a wound.

“The bad news is that the Primes shook off our cyborgs,” Terrey said, reading my mind. “But the good news is that they used all their ammo to do it, and the BASS Firehawks are right on the other side of the bay. If you can make it into the suspension cables of the bridge, they can't even follow you in there and the Hawks will take them out.”

Jon looked toward the bridge that the truck was almost on, which was called the Golden Bay Bridge. The one that used to span the North Bay at this location had been called the Richmond/San Rafael Bridge (or RSR), but it was destroyed by the quake because it sat right on two major fault lines. It had been an eyesore even before that, so no one wanted to rebuild or restore it. Instead, BASS helped Marin and Richmond to accommodate their swelling population of refugees from the peninsula and Oakland by erecting a new bridge that would be a combination of the two most famous feats of Bay Area architecture: the Bay Bridges and the Golden Gate Bridge. The Golden Bay had two high towers like the Golden Gate, and two levels of traffic like the Bay, and the gold color was somewhere between the red and silver of the other two. As I looked at it through Jon's eyes, I saw what Terrey had meant: the first length of the bridge was open on the top level, and the suspension cables stretched up toward the near tower. Once we got to it, no helicopter could possibly get to us.

I looked off in the distance to the right of the bridge, and could see the black shapes of the Firehawks headed our way. But then I told Jon to look out of his driver's side window, and I could see clearly that the light blue enemy birds would reach us before the friendly ones did, and maybe before we could get to the tower. It could be a matter of seconds, and Jon knew this without me telling him, so he pressed the pedal to the floor as hard as he could and gripped the wheel with white knuckles. I tried to imagine what the Primes would do if they reached the truck while it was still vulnerable—I figured they would try to fire hand weapons into the cab or drop men onto it like the SUVs had tried to do. I was wholly unprepared for what they actually did.

The two enemy helicopters did reach the truck just before it made it to the tower, and well before the Firehawks were in firing range. The pilots positioned them above the front and back of the car carrier and extended the same wires they had used to transport the SUVs, with the smart heads on the wires fastening themselves to the top of the truck in eight places. Then the helicopters lifted the whole truck off the road just high enough to clear the barrier, and dumped it over the side of the bridge.

I was shocked, and didn't know what was happening until it did, so I only had enough time to shout Lynn's name and a brief instruction to her and the double. I didn't know whether they heard me or not, because Lynn was screaming at the top of her lungs from the back of the cab. Jon didn't scream at all but merely watched through the front window of the truck as it rushed toward the surface of one of the wide cement circles that supported the legs of the bridge and protruded from the water more than a hundred feet below. The truck fell cab-first because of the way it had been released from the wires by the helicopters, so Jon had a view that looked like being in the front car of a roller coaster on its steepest drop, but with only a horrible death waiting at the bottom.

He closed his eyes toward the end, so I could only hear the screams of my wife and the violent, horrific crash that silenced them, as the cab slammed into the concrete and was smashed like a beer can under a foot, by the immovable surface below it and the force of the heavy car rack coming down on top of it. The video link went black, and I couldn't picture the remains of the cab, because I knew there would be nothing remaining.

Almost as soon as the two enemy helicopters had dropped the truck over the side of the bridge, the BASS Firehawks came into firing range and took them out with their rockets in two fiery explosions. But that was little consolation for me. I told Terrey and San, who had now arrived at the scene in their aero, to fly to the wreckage and look for Lynn and the double. Then I just sat and stared in silence into the deep darkness of the holo, a million thoughts pressing into my head and immobilizing me. I questioned every decision I had made that day, of course, and imagined every torture I wanted to perpetrate on my enemies for inflicting this on my wife and baby. But strangely, I couldn't help but think about the supposed supernatural elements of this fiasco, probably because they were so uncanny. I thought about how the cars on the truck had been all different colors, and wondered again if there was something to the bizarre beliefs of the Chinese cult.

But even more than that, I thought about how Stephenson had dreamed that he would miraculously survive a battle with an enemy assault team, and that my double would fall from a bridge. At this moment of reflection, in the swirl of my high emotions, I actually thought that this might be the culmination of the spiritual journey I'd been sent on by the all the talk I'd heard about a wide range of metaphysical beliefs. I even pictured myself buying a Dreamscape rig and investing in the company, so that it could further unlock these mysteries. Maybe my dreams could be the key to finding some meaning in this tragedy, and some help in coping with the deep pain I was already feeling.

 

44

THE BIG PICTURE

Fortunately, my trauma-induced delusion of converting to a religion of dreams was short-lived, because Terrey and San soon reached the wreckage of the truck. The rack had fallen over the edge of the cement base into the bay, but the parts of the disintegrated cab were strewn in piles on top of it. And amid those piles lay Lynn and the double, unconscious but perfectly preserved by the second-generation Atreides shields that shimmered around their bodies. They had put the projectors on their waists at the beginning of the trip, as standard procedure for when they went out, and they had activated them either by their own initiative during the road attack, or maybe later during the fall when I shouted that they should turn them on. To my shame, I had actually forgotten the shields until the truck was thrown over the bridge, so they were saved despite me rather than because of me, and I couldn't claim any credit for it. But the small size of the antigravity engine on their belts meant that its energy was very limited, so I was surprised that there was enough life in it to withstand such a powerful impact. And it was amazing that the truck was thrown over the bridge at a spot where there was cement below, because I honestly didn't know whether the shields would have saved them or suffocated them if they had fallen into the water.

Mixed with my initial relief was the realization that we now had to see if they were really okay, or had been injured—especially Lynn and the baby, of course. San deactivated the shields and scanned Lynn first with her built-in medical ware. While she was doing this, Lynn stirred and woke up, well before my double did. Despite Jon's bravura and skill during the road attack, which had definitely impressed me, he had fainted dead away from fear during the fall. Lynn, however, who had been through childbirth and some other trauma in her life, had merely been knocked out temporarily by the impact of the crash. As my wife showed her toughness by quickly springing back to life, while Jon lay unconscious, I had occasion to admire her again through someone else's eyes. In this case I was looking through San's, as she finished her examination and said that both Lynn and the baby looked fine, except for an understandable increase in their heart rates.

Jon also seemed to be okay, but was still dazed enough when they revived him that they had to help him to his feet so they could put him in the aero. Lynn, on the other hand, walked over on her own power and sat down in it. As Terrey and San were helping Jon through the piles of wreckage to the aero, I told them to hold on before putting him in, because I was regretting Lynn being in danger by being close to him and thinking that they should be separated from now on.