Nightside CIty (19 page)

Bobo nodded, and pulled a needle from his
pocket and jabbed under my jaw with it.

I felt it go in, and then I felt a spreading
numbness. I didn’t know if it was a bug or a drug or what, but it
was obviously something designed to put me out for a while.

I wondered why they hadn’t dosed me back in
my office, and decided that it was pure sadism on Orchid’s part. He
wanted me awake and aware of my helplessness for as long as
possible. Maybe he even wanted me to see what they’d done to the
poor cab.

I was starting to get fuzzy, but I felt Bobo
cut the cables from my ankles and wrists, and I thought I saw him
throw them out on the street. I started to turn, but I was fading
fast, and before I could get myself running clean the door had
closed, with me still inside. I tried to fall against the door, and
maybe I did, but it didn’t open.

Then I lost it completely, and I don’t
remember a damn thing of what happened for a long time after
that.

I woke up with a horrible yellow glare in my face;
the instant my eyes opened I reconsidered and closed them
again.

Even then, the darkness was blood red instead
of cool black, and I realized I was looking at the insides of my
eyelids.

My skin felt dry and crawling, and the wind
was screaming much more audibly than usual, and at a higher pitch.
I’d never heard anything like it. It was the only sound; there was
no music, no background hum at all. I had a gnawing suspicion that
I wasn’t in the City any more.

I didn’t want to think about where I was
instead. That blast of light was a pretty clear indication, but I
didn’t want to think about that.

With my eyes still shut I felt around, and
felt inert upholstery on all sides. I stretched, and found that I
could move freely; I wasn’t tied, wasn’t confined in anything very
small. Something was in my mouth, though; I reached up and pulled
it out, figuring it must be the gag Orchid had stuffed in. I tossed
it aside.

I flexed my right arm; it was still slightly
sore from the recoil when I took out the spy-eye. My wrists and
ankles were a bit chafed, and my mouth was dry. I thought I might
still be feeling a trace of whatever put me under, as well. Other
than that, I seemed to be all there and reasonably sound.

That seemed to be about all I could do with
my eyes closed. I put my hands over them, and opened them a
slit.

That wasn’t too bad. If I squinted and
blinked a lot I thought I could manage. I moved my hands a little,
so I could peek through my fingers.

I was still in the cab. It wasn’t moving. It
was lying on the ground, cocked at an odd angle. One door was
slightly sprung, which I figured would account for the wind noise.
Other than that it looked pretty much as I remembered it; the
access panel was still open, bare circuitry showing. The seats were
inert, the screens all dark, the readouts all blank, and not even
the system-failure lights were still glowing—at least, not that I
could see in the glare.

All the colors seemed wrong because of the
light, but I didn’t doubt for a minute that I was still in the same
cab I’d passed out in.

The entire upper bubble was transparent,
though, and the scenery outside wasn’t anywhere in Nightside City.
It wasn’t on the nightside at all. The entire sky was a blindingly
bright pale blue that was almost white; I knew it wasn’t really
white only because it was streaked with thin, high, fast-moving
clouds that
were
really white. That sky was terrifyingly
alien, awash in more light than I had thought the universe could
hold.

The only other thing I could see, in any
direction, was bare ground, and that ground was sand and rock. Gray
sand, black rock, mostly, with streaks of brown here and there. It
stretched off to an impossibly distant horizon. I’d lived my whole
life at the bottom of a crater; I’d never seen a real horizon
before, except in vids, and all that openness was absolutely
terrifying. Nothing stood between me and the rest of the universe
but open plain.

And light blazed off everything, intense
white light, blinding light, brilliant light. It sparkled off the
sands, off the rocks, it prismed rainbows off the cab’s bubble.

It was beautiful, in a painful sort of way.
I’d seen light that bright, in a small area, for a moment or two,
but to see an entire vast landscape, from one horizon to the other,
ablaze in that glare— it was a new experience for me, and one that
I couldn’t help but appreciate, despite my sorry situation.

I knew, though, that my situation was bad.
The bubble might provide a little protection— though probably not,
since there was no need for any such protection on the
nightside—but I knew the sun’s ultraviolet had probably already
done a good bit of skin damage, and maybe eye damage as well. I
might be dying; I might already be in desperate need of medical
treatment.

And of course, I wasn’t about to get that
treatment. I had no idea where the hell I was, except that it was
on the dayside—since I was in the same cab, I had to assume I was
still on Epimetheus. I knew I couldn’t count on planetary rotation
bringing me the safety of night any time soon.

If I wanted the night, I’d have to go to it,
it wouldn’t come to me.

It was pretty clear that nobody was going to
come and get me, either; I’d have to get back to the nightside on
my own. Nobody kept track of me. Nobody would notice I was missing
until it was too late. My only family on the planet was my brother
‘Chan, and he called maybe once every four or five weeks, and he’d
called a week ago. I still had a few friends, but if they noticed
at all, they wouldn’t worry if I didn’t answer calls or show up at
Lui’s for a few days; I’d done that before, when I was working or
busy or just depressed.

I wondered whether anybody might miss the cab
and come looking for it, but then I dismissed the idea. I’d already
noticed, before I passed out, that it looked like an independent,
and a glance at the hardcopy license and ownership statement next
to the passenger readout screen confirmed that. This cab had been
as much a loner as I was, bought free from Q.Q.T. over a year
ago.

I looked up from the statement to that open
access panel, and at all the obviously dead inboard systems, and I
shuddered at the thought that I might have to get out and
walk
in the sunlight.

That wasn’t certain yet, though. I leaned
forward and poked around a little.

The motherboard was snapped in two, and the
central processor, the brain, was crushed; the cab itself was dead,
beyond any possible doubt. I prodded a few other systems. None of
them were working, but most of them looked intact, and after all,
the poor lobotomized thing had probably flown here under its own
power. If Orchid and Rigmus—I figured Bobo had to be Bobo Rigmus,
of course—could make the corpse fly, I thought maybe I could, too.
There had to be a patched-in slave program somewhere that had
worked the drives.

I couldn’t get any current anywhere, though.
Something had cut the power feed. At first I didn’t think that was
necessarily irreparable.

Then I got past the firewall and got a look
at the main power plant.

They’d put some sort of timed charge on it, I
guess. However they’d arranged it, one whole side was blown
out.

Fortunately for me, it was a side that faced
away from the passenger compartment; otherwise I’d have been dead,
which was probably what they had intended. They probably expected
the whole thing to blow, which would leave me as just a little more
radioactive debris. Instead, I was alive, but I’d probably caught a
good dose of radiation all the same, and that side of the cab had
probably left a streak of hot dust for a dozen kilometers before
the poor thing hit ground.

The power plant was just scrap now, which
meant that the cab obviously wasn’t going anywhere, but I’d
survived. I’d bought myself a slow death instead of a quick
one.

Or had I?

I was having trouble taking it all in—
everything was so alien that I couldn’t just accept it as it
appeared and go on from there. I had to think it through.

Just what had happened?

Obviously, Paulie Orchid and Bobo Rigmus had
taken me and stuck me in a sabotaged cab and sent me out onto the
dayside to die. But why?

I could make a pretty good guess. If I had
turned up dead in the City, inquiries would have been made. My
ITEOD records would have been pulled, and although they weren’t as
complete and up to date as I might have liked, they’d show that
Sayuri Nakada and the Ipsy were up to something, that I had been
investigating that.

Somebody would be able to put the clues
together, and the whole scheme would have been crashed.

But if I just
disappeared
, none of
that would happen. At least, not for some time, not until somebody
realized how long I had been gone. It could take weeks, maybe
longer. And when it did show up, nobody would be sure I was dead;
my ITEOD records would remain sealed until somebody got a court
order. And nobody was likely to bother with that.

Nobody was going to find me, there on the
dayside. My body would just dry up and weather away.

And if they
did
find me, me and the
cab, there would be no hard evidence that it was murder, that it
hadn’t been a bizarre and inexplicable accident or a particularly
weird suicide.

It was a pretty damn good way of disposing of
me, really. It got around the ITEOD files nicely. I had to admit
that. I wondered who had thought of it. I’d have picked Doc Lee if
I had to guess.

But
why
? Clever or not, why did they
bother? Why was I so great a threat that they were ready to go to
all this trouble to secretly kill me, rather than just telling me
what was going on?

I didn’t know, and there in the cab I didn’t
see any way of finding out. All I knew was that they had sent me
out here to die.

But I had no intention of dying. Aside from
all the usual reasons—and I’d say my survival instinct is as strong
as anybody’s—I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction. I sure as
hell wasn’t going to give up without a fight. I tapped my wrist and
said, “I need a cab, or an ambulance or patrol car; this is an
emergency.”

My voice was a croak. The gag had soaked up
all the moisture in my mouth, and the dry air in the cab was making
it hard to recover.

My transceiver did nothing. No beep. If it
had heard my command and tried to obey, it hadn’t been able to get
an acknowledgement from anyone.

I swallowed, got my mouth working a little
better, and tried again.

“I said, cab, please!” This time it came out
clear and angry.

The transceiver buzzed, an ugly, negative
sound. It had tried. It hadn’t gotten through. Nobody was in
range.

I was hot, I realized, hot and tired—my
little doze on the way east hadn’t really left me well-rested. I
was scared bad, too. My wrist was shaking as I looked at the skin
covering the transceiver, and sweat shone in a thin film.

And I hadn’t done anything yet, hadn’t gone
anywhere. I’d only been awake for a few minutes.

I looked up, then wished I hadn’t; that
blue-white sky was one huge glare.

I looked down again, and around at what I
could see.

There was nothing else in the cab I could
use. The transmitters might not be smashed, like the motherboard
and the power plant, but I had no juice for them; I didn’t have any
way to rig an adapter for my body current, and that probably
wouldn’t have been enough anyway. It apparently wasn’t enough for
my wrist transceiver.

Hell, I was probably below the broadcast
horizon for the city anyway. I’d have a better chance of contacting
ships in space. Except that most ships don’t come over the dayside
anywhere below high orbit, and they wouldn’t be listening on
ground-use frequencies.

I was stranded. Barring miracles, my only way
out was to walk back to the nightside.

I wasn’t too picky about just
where
on
the nightside. Anywhere would do; most of the nightside is at least
borderline habitable, and the bad spots are mostly pretty far back
from the terminator. I didn’t think I’d be lucky enough to hit
Nightside City right off, but if I reached the twilight zone and
then turned and kept walking along the terminator I thought I ought
to hit either the city or a working mine camp, and miners could get
me to the city.

First, though, I had to get to the
terminator, and I had no idea how far that might be. The sun didn’t
seem very high in the sky, and the shadows were long—but Epimetheus
is a good-sized planet, as I’ve said before. Great-circle
circumference is 28,500 kilometers, more or less. With Nightside
City on the terminator, that put it roughly seven thousand
kilometers from the noon pole. I wasn’t
that
far, obviously,
but looking in the general direction of the sun—I couldn’t look
right
at
it, of course—I could easily have been one or two
thousand kilometers east of the terminator.

That’s one hell of a long walk.

But what choice did I have?

Waiting wasn’t going to do me any good,
either. A journey of a thousand kilometers begins with a single
step, right? It was time to stop dawdling and take that first
step.

With no power available I had to kick open
the sprung door to get out, and the instant my foot knocked it
loose the wind, which I had already thought was screaming, became
an ear-wracking shriek. It filled the little cab with a whirlwind,
whipping dust into rising coils; the core access panel flapped
clumsily, in a broken rhythm like an old blues riff.

I’d forgotten about that. I’d forgotten the
wind.

In Nightside City, the wind isn’t that bad.
It’s always there, and it can eat at your nerves and snatch at your
clothes and carry things away if you don’t hold them down, but it’s
not that bad. Generally speaking, top speed is maybe sixty, seventy
kilometers an hour.