*
It was late afternoon as I headed back along the broken tarmac highway towards the city. I'd spent the day out in the boonies, salvaging robot spares. At least, that has been my excuse. I had just needed to get away from the city for a while. And now I was planning to hide the Land Rover and make my way to the hospital using public transport again, figuring I'd be safer if I was surrounded by crowds of ordinary folk.
I slammed on the brakes and the Land Rover slid to a halt, leaving two smoking black streaks on the road behind. I couldn't see anything through the windscreen, but there were several pulsing hotspots on the monitor. Getting closer. I squinted into the gathering gloom, and finally spotted the approaching vehicles. They weren't road warriors. The cars were sleek corporate saloons. Unmarked security patrols. Five of them, plus an armoured van.
Of course, their appearance here might be a coincidence, they might just be out for a picnic. Or maybe not. Just call me paranoid, but I decided to assume they were after me, and take appropriate action. I reached for the Land Rover's extra gear lever.
Chapter Sixteen
Most of my driving was done on cracked tarmac or over heaps of rubble, so I couldn't claim to know exactly what I was doing when I steered the Land Rover off the edge of the road and down the slope into the field below. But I did know some of the major differences between a normal road vehicle and a four-wheel drive off-roader, and made my plans accordingly.
Corporate security vehicles are generally based on standard saloons: ground clearance may be slightly better, tyres and suspension are uprated, and their top-of-the-range engines are tweaked to provide maximum oomph. On city streets, they're the business, especially in flight-mode. Fortunately, this chase sequence wasn't happening on a city street. There were too many trees and the ground was too uneven for them to consider taking to the air for a low-level chase: they were restricted to the ground, which evened things up nicely. Except there were six of them and one of me.
As well as looking more macho than a dragon tattoo, a four-wheel drive vehicle has one great advantage: four-wheel drive. When the rear wheels begin to slip in mud, the front wheels can pull you out. Or vice versa. I headed for the boggiest ground I could see: if those cars intended following me, I wanted to make the most of my advantage. It was also a fairly safe assumption that the driver who tried to follow me would overestimate his vehicle's abilities, and his own. The Land Rover was bouncing across the uneven ground, so I couldn't make much out in the rear-view mirror, but I did see one set of headlights turning off the road and following me. They didn't get very close. I stopped and leaned out the window to look back. I heard the whine of wheels spinning madly, and the cloud of steam or smoke behind the car also contained a shower of churned up mud. The first rear-wheel drive Ford was up to its axles in the soft stuff.
Your premier Ford saloon car has a long wheel base, to allow lots of room inside. Security firms beef up the suspension and the power of the engines, but there's not much they can do about that long stretch of car between the front and the rear wheels. And compared to a 4x4, the saloon is quite low to the ground. This isn't a problem in the city or even on cracked asphalt, but over uneven ground there's a real risk of grounding the vehicle, as the second pursuing car discovered. The Land Rover pitched and yawed its way across the lumpy ground, rattling my teeth and causing the suspension to bump and creak, but I was still making forward progress. The car behind me eventually ground to a halt, a large hump of ground under the middle of the car, and neither the front nor the rear wheels able to reach the ground. The driver raced his engine but nothing happened: he was sitting in a very expensive see-saw. Exit chase car number two.
Of course, it's not just the car that counts, it's also the skills of the driver behind the wheel. And the speed of his reactions. I drove headlong towards the river and then turned at the last minute. If he'd been up to the task, the driver closest behind me would have done the same thing and not carried on into the water. But he was hampered by the fact that his road tyres provided poorer traction, while my chunky rubber had already ploughed up the ground in front of him, making a slide down the bank into the river all the more likely. Three to go.
The armoured van was doing much better than it ought to have been: was that down to the abilities of the driver, or the vehicle? Only one way to find out.
Off road, you can drive up a steep slope with as much speed as you can manage, you can turn your vehicle around at the top and then drive back down again at even greater speed. What you probably shouldn't do is drive halfway up a steep slope at speed, and then try and do a u-turn. The driver of the van thought he'd gain ground on me by doing just that. He started to turn just as I passed him on my way back down the hill, and I caught a glimpse of his expression as it changed from smug to panic. The van reached the halfway point of its turn, and began to tip. There's probably a way for an expert driver to compensate for this and keep his vehicle upright, but van man didn't know what it was. The van tipped onto its side and slid down the hill.
And then there were two. Closing fast.
I decided to strike deeper into the countryside, hoping that increasingly tough terrain would see off my pursuers. I managed to get far enough ahead of them that I could use the old fake tracks routine – used once to great effect by the legendary Sherlock Holmes. I drove the Land Rover down a shallow muddy embankment towards the river until my front tyres touched the water, then I backed up along the same tracks and made a sharp turn and hid up behind a hedge where the oncoming vehicles couldn't see me. The idea was that the pursuing vehicle would follow my tracks, thinking I'd found a shallow place to cross the river, which they could also use.
Were they stupid enough to fall for it? The lead driver slowed to a stop, trying to see if I really had made it across and up the bank on the other side. Unfortunately, the car behind him didn't brake in time, and nudged the first car out into the lovely cold water.
I had hoped the final car (slightly dented) would stop and help rescue his sinking comrades, but the moment he saw me sneaking out from my place of concealment, he threw his car into reverse and came after me.
At the first opportunity, the driver turned his car to make use of the five forward gears and one reverse gear, instead of the opposite. I racked my brains, trying to recall every movie chase I'd seen, but couldn't come up with anything appropriate for the circumstances. This last one ought to fall victim to something pretty outstanding, to provide a proper finish to the whole sequence. Like what, exactly?
"You could try shooting at their tyres," my subconscious suggested. Unfortunately it had forgotten to suggest that I bring along a gun.
Oh, well. Hold tight.
I swung the Land Rover hard left to take it around a sudden depression in the ground, where some enterprising individual had been mining plastics out of an old landfill or something. The area was littered with such holes, some of them fenced in. And some not.
I glanced in the mirror: my pursuer had only just come into view, he hadn't seen me swerve. I slowed down, keeping the old mine between me and them, wondering if they would see the big deep hole in time. Their car tipped suddenly, its nose disappearing, its tail rapidly following. The hole was deeper than I'd thought. As I drove back past the mine, I leaned out of the window and looked down: the car was wedged about ten feet down. The driver had switched on the hazard warning lights for some reason; bit late, I thought.
"That was almost too easy!" I said, as I drove away.
Famous last words.
I turned on to an old B-road and headed back towards the outskirts, but didn't even make it within sight of the city. Two guys in heavily-armoured sky suits appeared on either side of the Land Rover and pointed nasty looking guns in my direction. They were wearing the colours of Minos Technologies. As I slowed, a black company limousine gently touched down on the road in front of me and sat there like a glossy bloated spider, blocking my way.
I was invited to step out of my car and join some cor
porate type in the back seat of the limousine. How could I refuse? I mean, how many times do you get invited for a ride in a limousine? At gunpoint?
"Taxi!" I called, as I approached the Mercedes. Nobody laughed. Tough audience.
I found myself in the back of the car sitting beside a man in an expensive-looking suit. His shirt and tie both looked like they might be silk. He was thin, black-skinned, with a shaven head, and arched eyebrows that gave him a mischievous look. He smiled. His eyes were chips of black ice. Actually, they were fairly ordinary brown eyes, but I wanted to think of him as cold and hard and nasty. He was younger than I'd expected the captain of this bunch of corporate Keystones to look.
"Hello, Steven. I am Anderson Phripp, head of security for Minos Technologies," he said. There was something slightly camp in the way Phripp moved and spoke: but considering the power he obviously wielded, I wasn't about to underestimate him. There was a large buff-coloured folder on the leather seat between us, stuffed with about two-inches of papers in various colours and sizes. I think its physical presence was meant to impress me; its battered, well-thumbed appearance telling me more than any computer file ever could. He was also letting me know that my clumsy attempt to erase all trace of myself with the iDeath software hadn't had the slightest effect on his data resources.
"What's it to be?" I asked. "Back to the dungeon for the rubber truncheons and cattle-prods?"
"You have a rather medieval view of our practices, Mr. Houston. We have far more sophisticated interrogation methods these days: they don't leave a mark." He smiled. "Can I offer you some tea, or coffee?"
"Do you get to play good cop and bad cop when you make chief of security?" I asked.
"No, just bad cop: you haven't tasted the coffee."
"I think I'll pass," I said.
"Wise man. A couple of cups of Minos coffee and you'd be begging for mercy," Phripp said.
Enough banter.
"Why am I here?" I asked. "Am I under arrest?"
"I don't think so, no. It could be that you are not here at all," he said. "It might be that we have no idea where you are. Or who you are."
Phripp wasn't looking at me, he was watching a flat-bed truck and a crane moving past us in the direction of several corporation vehicles which seemed to have found themselves in difficulty a little way down the road.
"I don't understand," I said.
"We didn't track you down because we wanted to slap your wrists for all the trouble you've caused in the past," Phripp said. "I am here to ask for your help in completing a business transaction."
"You're telling me that you sent five patrol cars and an armoured van after me simply so we could have a chat?" I asked.
"My people were instructed to locate you, but it seems they have seen too many movies. However, since you have already convinced them of the error of their approach, there seems little more that I need to add."
"You could make them all walk home," I suggested.
Phripp smiled briefly. "However it was brought about, the situation is that we are now having this discussion, which is all I intended."
"What makes you think I would agree to help you?" I asked.
I knew the answer, but I wanted to hear it in his words: I wanted to know exactly how much they had on me. Phripp placed his hand flat on the file beside him.
"I won't bore you by quoting facts anyone at a computer terminal could dredge up," he said. "Instead let me remind you of one or two incidents which will give you an overall flavour of this file's contents."
Phripp knew that I used to catapult magnets at the domestic robots at home. If you fire them at just the right spot in the middle of the back, the robot can't reach them. This spot also happens to be about level with a robot's main processor unit. You have to score half-a-dozen hits with penny-sized magnets before it begins to have any kind of noticeable effect. Then the robot starts walking into things. Misjudging distances. You ever see a robot when it's drunk? Great fun! If you then start giving them conflicting or illogical instructions, they get really confused and eventually have a seizure.
He also knew about the day that I'd sneaked up on Boris while he was in the robot garage recharging: I'd used a quick-dry glue gun to weld his feet to the garage floor. At the appointed moment, his batteries topped up, Boris tried to step forward: there was a terrible whining as servo-motors strained to keep him upright. The left leg burned out first and he pitched forwards onto his shiny face, his knee joints giving out and bending in a direction in which knee joints are not supposed to bend. He carries the dent in his forehead to this day, as far as I know.
And Phripp even knew that it was me that had put together the fake Mayor of Nottingham, complete with fake jewellery of office, who had performed a stand-up comedy routine in the old Market Square one evening, mocking his own council's policies and making rather unkind remarks about the then Prime Minister. It wasn't a particularly sophisticated replica, but he wasn't a particularly sophisticated man. By midnight the news services were buzzing with a new story: the Mayor was drunk, or he'd gone insane. The truth was even more bizarre: he'd blown a fuse.
I hadn't realised this incident had ever been traced back to me. It comes as something of a shock to discover that the security forces can be this competent: you always believe you're getting away with stuff because you're too clever for them. But you're really just getting away with it because you're too insignificant for them to bother with. Expensive prison cells are reserved for more serious criminals; it is far cheaper for them to simply keep a watchful eye on folks like me, and only bother with us when they have a use for us.
What we were talking about here was blackmail: if I agreed to help them out, the implication was, then this file of my many misdeeds would find its way into an incinerator somewhere, the slate wiped clean. This wouldn't happen, of course, no matter what assurances he gave me. All he was really offering me now was the fact that they wouldn't use this data against me at this moment in time, if I agreed to work with them. It wasn't much of an offer. But it wasn't like I actually had a choice in the matter anyway. Phripp watched me, knowing all this was going through my head.
"What is it that you actually want from me?" I asked, not unreasonably: they'd gone to a lot of trouble to attract my attention – but what did I have that they could possibly want?
"We want Raoul Zacharias' muscle fibre design," Phripp said.
"I thought you took it the other night when you trashed the repair shop and assaulted the old man," I said.
"That wasn't us," Phripp said.
"Tell me why I should believe you," I said.
"I'm sure that you wouldn't believe me if I told you that both I, and my company, find the use of violence morally repugnant," Phripp said. "Instead, let me ask you a simple question: if my company broke into your premises two nights ago and stole the muscle fibre design, why would I be sitting here now asking you to help us to complete a contract to obtain the design legitimately?"
Good question from the man in the suit.
"Maybe your armoured thug was disturbed before he found the data."
"But if he hadn't found it, would he have risked trying to kill the old man?"
Another good question.
"If you don't have the muscle fibre design," I said. "Who does?"
"That's what we're hoping to find out," Phripp said. "And in the meantime, we think you might know where Raoul Zacharias hid the back-up copies of his data."
"Let's assume – for a moment – that I agree to help you," I said. "What are you offering in return?"
"We can ensure that both you and Mr. Zacharias become part of our research and development staff, in charge of the muscle fibre project, if that's what you want. Or we can simply give you both obscene amounts of money and let you go off to spend it on the lifestyle of your choice. We want the muscle fibre design, and we are prepared to pay a fair price for it."
I had no idea what a fair price would be for something that would make Minos Technologies the
premier robotics manufacturer in the world. But I did have some idea of what Raoul actually wanted done with the muscle fibre. He had designed it for use in prosthetics for use by human beings, not to create muscle systems for expensive robots. It seems that Phripp was aware of that fact too.
"The cost of licensing the muscle fibre design would be negligible compared to the projected profits from robots manufactured using it," Phripp said. "I've seen the figures, they make remarkable reading. Zacharias' design really will revolutionise the robotics industry. And we would be quite happy to establish a charitable foundation in his name, to oversee the development of prosthetic limbs using his muscle fibre – the cost of funding that could be written off against tax, and could probably also be used profitably by our PR people to demonstrate the caring, humanitarian side of our company."
"Did somebody write all this down for you?" I asked.
"Believe me when I say that this is the best offer you're going to get," Phripp said, "from anyone."
He let me think about that. It wasn't a threat, but it made me shiver all the same. I didn't for one minute believe that MinoTech had come over all altruistic and socially responsible. That isn't how multinational companies work. Minos knew that one of their competitors had stolen Raoul's design. Within months, this competitor would be manufacturing robots so advanced that MinoTech's finest products would become obsolete overnight. Maybe MinoTech had already tried to steal Raoul's data back-ups and failed to find them. Maybe they had just decided it was easier to try and buy the design: being the legitimate licensee would mean they could prevent Talos and the other companies using the muscle fibre, ensuring their own superiority in the field of robotics manufacture, at least for the foreseeable future.
Or maybe MinoTech had already stolen the design, and this was all some sort of elaborate double-bluff, an attempt to have their cake and eat it: they knew Raoul didn't want to sell the design, but now that it had been stolen perhaps he'd be more receptive to an offer of money.
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