Mind Over Ship (29 page)

The addy for the relationship counselor led him to the lower lobby of the Nestlé Tower off Daley Plaza, but when Fred arrived, Mary was nowhere to be seen.

Hi, hey
, she said when he paged her.
I’ll be right there. I’m out visiting the baboon.

Fred went to the window wall overlooking the plaza. Daley Plaza, at Munilevel 000, was a concrete park sixteen square blocks in area that served as the floor to Daley Well, the deepest traffic well in the Midwest. It boasted unobstructed airspace 507 munilevels to the top of Nestlé Tower and the blue skies beyond. It contained four pairs of spiral interchanges
that served all major traffic arteries on all major munilevels. Thousands of vehicles climbed up and down the magic bean stalks every minute, like tornadoes of taillights, like twirling ropes of shiny beads, like a living sculpture three kilometers high.

By comparison, the twencen Picasso baboon sat like a rusted doorstop in the center of the plaza, like some kid’s discarded metal shop project, like the afterbirth of the Industrial Age. Fred couldn’t conjure up a baboon in its simple shapes. If anything, he saw the head of a dairy cow. Other people saw other things; that was probably why it was called art.

Fred picked out a figure on the main pedway connecting the Picasso to the Nestlé. An evangeline—was it Mary? Fred confirmed her transponders in his visor, and while he was watching, the pedway came to an unexpected halt. Pedestrians were thrown off balance and were falling over each other. Another hairball?

Then everyone on the plaza stopped what they were doing and looked up into the chimney of the well. Fred pressed his cheek against the glass but couldn’t get the angle. He found Mary again, some meters away from the stalled pedway, limping to a park bench. “I see you. Hang on. I’m coming.”

Fred, wait! It’s not safe.

But he was already through the pressure curtain and sprinting toward the baboon. The moment Fred left the building, he tasted panic in the air. It was intensified by an illegal subaural alarm that jarred his bones—a two-note dirge, like a silent foghorn that was felt as much as heard. A bee flew at his face, almost tripping him up, and screeched, “Flee! Flee! The Wreckers are here! Flee! Flee!” before racing away.

There was a terrific thud overhead, like a giant boxing glove hitting a brick wall, and Fred glanced up to see a cargo van careening out of a downward spiral. Fortunately, it was scooped up in a safety lane and chuted to a soft touchdown on the nearest munilevel. But its short fall was enough to spook the thousands of plaza pedestrians who began a stampede to the emergency portals. They filled the paths and forced Fred to cut across a stone fountain.

As he ran, he tagged the spirals overhead in his visor, which blossomed with travel advisories ten layers deep. “Mary, are you hurt?”

Yes, my knee. I can’t walk.

There were sounds of more collisions overhead, and cars were falling into safety lanes by the dozen.

“I saw you on a bench. Is it made from conplast?”

I think so
.

There were so many collisions, the safety lanes were overwhelmed, and cars, vans, and buses started to spill out and fall into the well.

“Crawl under it right now, Mary! Don’t hesitate! Do it now!”

By the time he reached her bench, vehicles were hitting the plaza with impact-absorbing thuds, like rotten fruit. Fred paused to catch his breath and did a snap assessment. The bench was, indeed, molded conplast, and nearly indestructible; Mary fit snugly under it. Options: carry her through the impact area or shelter here.

The question was answered a moment later by a big black limousine right on top of him. Fred dove behind the bench and the limo struck meters away and cartwheeled over them, slamming the bench with debris.

“Are you hit?” he asked. She wasn’t. Fred didn’t quite fit in the space under the park bench, so he crouched next to it and watched for falling cars. The city traffic midem had apparently regained control of the grid, and the sounds of collisions were tapering off.

Mary said, “It’s over.”

“Only the bombardment part. Next comes the pillaging. Look!” An army of freakish mechs began to invade the plaza. They surged out of storm drains and service vents, from side streets and arcades.

“They won’t bother us,” Fred said without knowing if that was true. “We need to shelter here.” He took off his Campaigner hat and pulled its floppy brim, stretching it to its limit. He covered both Mary under the bench and himself with the hat like a rain poncho.

“How’s the knee?”

“Bad.”

“I don’t have anything on me for the pain, sorry.”

“I’ll survive. By the way, love the hat.”

“It sorta grows on you.”

Mary and Fred watched the full-throttle wrecker attack from their court-side bench. Scavenging mechs came in a stunning variety. They were bizarre assemblages of cannibalized parts from other machines. There was the lawn scupper chassis with acetylene torch arms; the utility cart with grappling hooks and improvised armor; a gaggle of rat-sized, leaping metal snips.

The scavenger mechs swarmed over the fallen limo. Doors and side panels vanished. Three hapless limo passengers hung in their crash pods like bugs in blue amber as the car around them was cut, gouged, and ripped to pieces, and then carted away by tiny tractors.

“By the way,” Fred said, “in my own defense, I would like to point out that even though the sky is raining cars and buses, and I see slipper puppies
going by with frickin’ flamethrowers attached to their heads, I’m not blaming this on the nits.”

“That’s encouraging to hear, Fred.”

A subtle change came over the chaos outside their shelter. A sturdy mech with flailing teflon spikes impaled a tractor and hauled it off, along with its spoils. Fred had already checked his pockets, and now he checked them again. He sorely missed the pocket billy. What a foolish gesture it had been to leave it behind.

Buzzing, crushing, dive-bombing mechs entered the fray, and vicious fights broke out everywhere as thieves stole from each other. The only possible weapon Fred had on him was the omnitool, and its best tool for the job was probably the little plasma spot welder. Given the anatomy of his adversaries, he might be able to cripple them with a few strategically placed spot welds. It was better than nothing.

But in the end, hand-to-hand defense was unnecessary. Like pulling a switch, all the fights ceased at once, and all the surviving mechs scattered to their boltholes, dragging whatever treasures they could manage. After a minute, all was quiet on Daley Plaza.

Fred said, “The hommers must have arrived.”

Mary said, “Good. If we hurry, we can still make part of our appointment.”

That was the last thing Fred had expected to hear. He’d lost all thought of the relationship meeting. Was it so important to her that even a full-scale wrecker assault was merely an inconvenience? “What about your knee?”

“We can stop at a NanoJiffy on the way.”

Fred had his doubts, but he got up and checked their surroundings. HomCom and police GOVs had indeed arrived in force. Fred lifted the Campaigner off Mary. Its outer surface was pitted and scorched. He helped Mary to her feet. “Can you stand?”

She tried, but her knee was swollen like a melon, so he picked her up and held her in his arms. “You know, your injury is probably more than what a NanoJiffy autodoc can handle. And the police undoubtedly have a cordon.”

“Just drive, Fred.”

“Yes, boss.” Fred took a few steps toward the Nestlé. “I mean, can’t we just reschedule?”

“Oh, Fred, you are so innocent.”

The matter was taken out of their hands moments later when a hommer bee arrived and dropped a frame of a bored-looking russ proxy in a Watch Commander uniform. He said with a lazy drawl, “Myren Skarland and
Londenstane, this area has been declared a SIZ. Do not leave it without authorization. Remain where you are; medical treatment is on its way.”

“Busted,” Fred said.

“It’s like you wanted to be stopped.”

A crash cart raced over to them and lowered two seats. In a caring but authoritative voice it said, “Please sit for treatment.”

Fred placed Mary in one seat and took the other. No sooner had he sat down than the cart informed him, “You are not injured, Myr Londenstane. Swipe for medical release.” Fred hopped off and swiped.

Meanwhile, the cart covered Mary’s swollen knee in a blister wrap and cleaned and sealed her minor cuts and scrapes. All the pain lines melted from her face. Behind her, at the carcass of the limo, another cart was midwifing the three passengers from their crash pods. First, the blue gel liquefied, and then the tough bags burst, birthing the grateful survivors on the bare pavement.

“I’ll tell you what,” Fred said. “We can cut out the middleman and do the session ourselves.”

“What? Here?”

“Right here, right now.”

“Yeah, right,” Mary said. “You won’t even talk to me in our own bedroom, and you’re going to talk out here in public?”

Fred motioned at all the official activity in the plaza. “We’re in a comm fog; we’ll have pretty good privacy for a while. Just tell me what you were going to tell the counselor.”

Mary wasn’t so sure. “It’s not as simple as that,” she said. “Part of the reason for going to a counselor in the first place is for the perspective they bring to what might otherwise sound like a litany of harsh and hurtful things.”