Reality 36 (32 page)

  He pushed open the kitchen door, keeping below the level of the shooter's line of sight, worried that he'd be moving to higher ground to spray darts through the flimsy shingle roof. He went through the kitchen. The cook crouched on the floor, clutching at his bloodied arm, eyes wide with shock. The android sparked as it roasted on the grill plate, filling the room with the stink of melting plastics.

  "Stay down!" Otto told him. "It will be safe when I am gone. Where is the exit?"

  The cook jerked his head back. Otto nodded in thanks. He reached the back door, let his Grid cover drop a moment, hoping to draw fire from the restaurant. The last thing he wanted was for his assailant to lose patience and fire a warhead into the building. He had enough blood on his hands.

  It was luck his assailant hadn't got a firmer lock, or he'd be a damn sight closer and Otto would be dead. Otto had been a fool; the way from Payson was the only real road in these parts.

  Otto sprinted across a yard to the rear, a scraggly garden full of weeds and sun-bleached children's toys, on into the narrow strip of woods behind. Seconds later he burst through the underbrush into the car park. More people there, hiding behind cars. Two rangers stood by the door of their cabin, bear stunners out, looking warily back and forth across the car park, all too aware of their armament's inadequacy. One spotted Otto and waved frantically at him to get down. Otto ignored him.

  Two cars by the car park entrance were ablaze. Three aircars hung from tree branches like over-sized Christmas ornaments, one of them burning, fuel cells cracked and leaking hydrogen. The tree it hung in was an upright fire, reminding Otto of Brazil.

  Escape was not going to be easy. His near-I checked off the vehicles, highlighting a nearby aircar as a likely ride. Otto ran for it, expecting a dart in the back at any moment, but none came. He reached the car.

  "What are you doing?" said Chloe.

  "Stealing this car," said Otto matter-of-factly, "so I can get away before anyone else gets killed."

  "But that's against the law!"

  "Fine, you may turn me in when we're done."

  "Wait! The police will come, we can explain."

  Otto shook his head. "By that time the sniper's point man will have got me. Working alone on someone like me is not how it is done."

  His near-I adjutant broke the car's security in short order, the doors popped open and the engine started up, turbofans whickering then whining as they picked up speed. He got into the car. A quirk of topography, a crease in this mountain shoulder the rest stop sat on, meant that the car park was as hidden from the opposite hillside as it was from the road. As soon as he got airborne that would change quickly, but better to fly than roll along the road. As poor as his odds in the air were, there was no chance of escape on the ground.

  He checked his armaments. He had the 9mm caseless pistol and his carbon bootknife, plus two electromagnetic pulse grenades. Reusuable, but he had no means of recharging them. Everything else he'd had – his own flechetter railgun, EMP gun, grenade launcher and external computer equipment – was still in the back of the car out front, no doubt full of razor-sharp darts.

  "Listen, Chloe, you have to trust me now. Whoever is trying to kill me is trying to stop me getting to Veronique. If they are close to me, they will soon be close to her, because they will find you and use you to get to her." He pulled back the action on the gun. His near-I talked to it and counted off the rounds: twenty-six. Not nearly enough.

  "Maybe they were the police, and they were trying to protect Veronique from you," said Chloe. She was scared, close to crying.

  "You saw what they did to the restaurant," said Otto calmly. "Would the police kill nine people to protect your mistress?"

  "My friend! She is my friend, she always has been. We were incepted together, she and I, born and made. Friend! I love her," she wailed. Then, chillingly calm by comparison: "The law enforcement authorities would not behave in this manner." He'd never get used to these switches in mode.

  "Do you trust me?" he said. Chloe said nothing. "Tell me where Veronique is"

  She did not reply. Otto had almost given up hope and had begun examining his other options, none good, when Chloe answered, quietly but firmly: "Yes."

  The car roared to life as Chloe muscled in on his near-I's link. She keyed the autopilot to a location forty kilometres away. The car rose into the air, blasting stonedust away from the car park's hard standing.

  "Stop!" said Otto. "This will be difficult." Chloe demurred without protest, retreating from the vehicle. The steering column went slack, and Otto grabbed it. "Hold on," he said. He had his near-I begin work undoing the car's central programming, smothering its Gridsig with non-informational noise.

  As soon as he had risen six metres over the car park, flechette rounds started hissing through the air around him. Some found their mark, piercing the car's bodywork with dull clonks. He had seconds at best. He dropped down to within centimetres of the other cars' roofs, gunned the engines. The car rose vertically into the sky. His near-I had chosen well: this was a sporty model, a Toyata Zephyr. All four lateral fans were multidirectional, attached to the body by gimbals, giving excellent manoeuvrability, climbing rates and enough power to deal with the mountain weather. Its ventral fan was sized for rapid acceleration, with a top speed of around 600kph. He wished for countermeasures and some degree of armour, because a vehicle like this was a rich man's toy, and against railgun fire was as precisely as durable as a paper bag. He dodged violently from side to side and headed for the trees beyond the car park, which marched precipitously upwards to crags and a mountain shoulder. There was a notch in the ridge one hundred metres up; pass that and they'd be clear.

  Branches whipped past the windscreen as Otto wrestled the aircar through the trees' canopy. He'd have liked to take it lower, but here, sheltered and sunlit, the trees grew close together, and he was forced into the upper branches, dodging the tops of the pines. Wood exploded into splinters all around them, slender crowns toppled and fell. Few of the darts found the car, and none found anything essential. Otto was pushing the vehicle well beyond tolerance, climbing hard and swerving. The driver's-side window shattered. Otto felt a stab of pain in his left arm. A stray branch was sucked into one of the fan housings with a bang and sprayed out as woodchip behind. The car swerved, right and down. If a thicker limb went into the machinery, they would crash.

  Chloe screamed. "Almost there!" shouted Otto, his near-I working manically, violating the car's tiny brain, breaking the manufacturer and government safety protocols and speed limiters, pushing it well past its design specifications. The Zephyr flew like a hawk, smoke pouring from its engines.

  A flechette pierced the rear window. Another slammed into the boot. Gauges flashed red; one of the aircar's five fan motors was burning out, undone by the triple insult of branch, speed and projectile.

  The trees began to peter out. Bare rock took their place. Puffs of dust and sparks rose up from the mountainside as they approached the cleft, impacts that closed with the car.

  Then they were up and over the ridge, through the notch in the mountain, and on the other side of the ridge. The firing ceased. Otto eased back.

  "That was too close," he said, picking a spent dart from his bicep. He threw it out of the shattered window. Chloe wept tiny, electronic hiccupping noises.

  Otto damned his earlier caution and attempted to use the MT to warn Richards that he'd been attacked, only to find that it had been cracked and blocked.

  The machine telepathy cipher had been broken twice in a fortnight. That was no coincidence. They were in trouble.

Otto stood in the forest and looked at the car. The Zephyr rested nose down on the slope, as if paused in the act of kneeling, left-forward fan pod bent underneath it. Its engines were shot and fans chipped to uselessness, deflated matt-black crash balloons tangled round it like a hastily draped funerary shroud. The bodywork was damaged beyond the point of salvage, the airframe out of true. It wouldn't be taking anyone anywhere ever again. Otto had his near-I run through the machine's simple brain for information one last time, making sure they'd downloaded everything of use. Maps, that's all it had to offer. He satisfied himself that was all he needed.

  He retreated a safe distance from the car and turned back to face it. Sitting there, down the slope from him, it presented a sorry sight. Once he'd tossed in one of his two remaining EMP grenades it looked worse. The grenade went in through the shattered driver's window without touching the sides. A heartbeat later a cerulean flash shorted out every circuit in the vehicle, causing tiny fires to spring up inside. No one would be tracking him off the Zephyr.

  He shouldered the bag he'd found in the boot, in which he had a first-aid kit, a sleeping bag, some climbing gear and a few high-energy food bars. There'd been a jacket too, but that was nowhere near big enough to fit him.

  "Come on," he said, "we have a long walk ahead of us."

  "To Veronique?" said Chloe, brightly.

  "To Veronique."

  He ran. He had seventy miles of rough terrain to cover. Time was running out for Veronique Valdaire.

Chapter 21

Karlsson

"Peter Karlsson," said the wiki précis as it read itself aloud, "Norwegian expatriate, resident of the USNA for twenty-three years. Until recently employed at the Virtualities Investigation Authority."

  "Until recently alive, if this case is anything to go by," said Richards. Karlsson's Gridsig was still singing out, but that meant nothing. He'd not left his residence-cum-factory in old Detroit for two weeks, a similar period of inactivity to that Qifang had undergone before he had been found dead. As he listened to the wiki, a nimble part of himself plucked Karlsson's employment history from one of the many dark places on the Grid where classified files were fragged and sent to disappear.

  They didn't.

  Richards was an expert at reassembling data. Its fragments were as cohesive as grains of sand worn from a rock and spread over a beach, but this was what his father Armin Thor had made him for.

  He began reconstruction while the Grid précis droned on. It had precious little of importance to say and its monotone began to grate on him, so he turned it down and sent it to the back of the sphere of files around him, set the man's life-site to mainline direct as he tinkered with Karlsson's VIA employment history. Pictures whose true essences were obscured by repeated replication flickered by, copies of copies of copies, showing a baby, a baby, a boy, an older boy, a man skiing, more children, a smiling woman, landscapes… faster and faster.

  Richards squatted in a black infinity, his office banished into unreality. Around him flew the scraps of Karlsson's life, pulled from all over the virtual world. Video, audio, stills, CVs, letters, mails, texts, testimonials, chat posts, network entries, health records, license details, game scores, avatars, Heaven Level access codes – all there on the Grid, for the right man to find. Karlsson had worn a soul-capt for several years. This was usually done to prepare for a pimsim, but in Karlsson's case Richards reckoned it was insurance, recording his time at the VIA. There was a mass of data just from that, more bits of recorded information than were in the whole world only a couple of hundred years ago and still not enough to encompass the entirety of one life; a pitiful testament to the existence of a sentient mind, digital flotsam. Richards was a beachcomber on the shores of the Styx. He pushed the notion away; he felt too close to Lincolnshire Flats when he thought like that.

He is dead
, thought Richards. There was a lack of vitality to the data. It was no longer growing, already suffering the small erosions of the digital world, minute corruptions of copy and transfer, the necrotisation of numbers that would one day render it unreadable, even to him, leaving shards behind as mysterious as wave-worn glass. Karlsson's Gridsig burned only as a ghost light.

  Karlsson's life lay before Richards. The receipt for six combat frames floated by, like that in the heiress, followed by more for weaponry and autonomous carriage parts. There was a lot of that over the last few months; and a lot of personal protection equipment, for use online and in the Real. Richards called up plans of Karlsson's factory. "Wow," he said, and halted them, bringing them right up in front of him. He ran through them thoroughly. It was a fortress.

  "Who the hell was this guy hiding from?" wondered Richards aloud. He called a drink into existence, drained it in one, and let the glass disintegrate into nothingness. He directed the data to reform according to different search criteria, a conductor of an orchestra of information. He looked for patterns as it danced. Hypotheses came and went, possibilities reeling off each run-through by braids of Richards' consciousness, all discarded.

  Karlsson had known Qifang well. The correspondence between them was voluminous and lively, though there were strands of consistent disagreement. Camera feeds of them together showed men comfortable in each other's company, though they were wary of others when they had met. They were secretive as they could be, but nobody got away without ever being recorded. They were careful to keep their conversation to bland topics. Maybe there was a code to it, but they were probably making small talk to cover over shortrange data transfers direct from Karlsson's mentaug to Qifang's phone. If they did that right, they could discuss what they liked in perfect privacy. They were up to something.

  Richards listened to a streetcam recording of them speak, and started to doubt that Karlsson had any part in Qifang's death. The portrait of the man forming in his mind was of a nut, mistrustful of the numbers' growing influence on human affairs. But his history spoke of defiance against higher authority, a growing fear of the AIs' influence and the pervasiveness of the Grid, not of the homicide of a man he respected, a man he was trying to sway to his point of view.