Floyd passed me a band-aid. “I fetched it from the truck when you started on the lock.” He turned and walked back to the open door of the cab. I wanted to throw something at him, but he’d just turn and catch it. Not that I know that from experience.
The shutters on the loading bays had standard electronic locks. I chose the end bay and attached a little magnetised transmitter to the lockbox. It sent a code that made the lock think it had received a legitimate ‘open sesame’ from the warehouse control room.
While the metal shutter was rolling upwards, I used the transmitter to hijack a communication line to the control room and told it to turn off the pressure pads and other sensors inside the warehouse. This was all kid stuff. Being on a backwards planet had its advantages. But it also meant my advanced skills were getting rusty. I’d have to burgle somewhere more up-market soon, just to keep my hand in.
Floyd reversed the trailer silently until it rested against the platform. We’d disabled the annoying beeping sound that was supposed to warn people they were about to be rolled over by something the size of a house.
Floyd hopped up onto the loading platform. “You’ve opened the shutter and turned off the interior sensors,” he said. “And I don’t see fresh blood. Well done.” He held out a cookie.
“Are you patronising me?”
“It’s called positive reinforcement,” he said.
“Have you been reading that human psychology book again?”
“No. It’s from a dog-training guide.”
“I hate you. What kind of cookie is it?”
“Chocolate chip.”
“I like the raisin ones best.”
“Don’t you want it?”
I snatched it out of his hand before he could toss it away. “We need to locate our cargo,” I said.
“I’ll find it,” he said, looking down at the papers Mister Flint had given us. “We’re going to need a forklift truck. In this puny body, I can’t lift things like I used to.”
I licked melted chocolate off my fingers and managed to suck the band-aid off. I don’t think Floyd noticed.
“You find our pallets, I’ll get the forklift,” I said. The band-aid tasted vile so I swallowed it quickly.
We stepped into the dimly-lit warehouse. Floyd held up a cautionary hand.
“I’m picking up one security drone,” he said. “It’s patrolling a pre-programmed route and using basic motion and heat sensors. What do you want me to do?”
“Make it look like an accident,” I said.
Floyd nodded and slipped away into the shadows.
The pallets for our load were easy to spot. They were standing close to the loading bay door. We must be the first pick-up of the day. Looking at the double row of pallets, it was difficult to believe all twenty of them would fit into our trailer. Each pallet had sixty wooden boxes stacked on it and I could smell the sawn wood even through the transparent wrapping that was securing them.
I wasn’t sure how much a loaded pallet weighed, but maybe Floyd in his old body could have shifted them into the trailer. An expertly driven forklift truck would do the job almost as quickly.
There was a small office off to the left and four battered yellow forklift trucks were parked in a line beside it. I could have started one of the trucks without the keys, but that might have caused visible damage – and it was just as easy to pick the lock on the office door and take the keys from the little box on the wall.
It’s surprising the skills you pick up when you live a life of crime. When you are someone who takes things, often quite large things, you have to learn how to operate the tools needed to do the taking. I know how to drive a forklift truck and I can manage basic loading and unloading in an exoskeleton. Both are trickier than they look, but you can do less damage with a forklift. Today I wouldn’t be trying anything clever. If I’d had to manoeuvre it in narrow aisles or around tight corners, we might have been in trouble.
Two things make driving a forklift truck tricky. Firstly, when you turn the steering wheel, it’s the back wheels that turn. It’s like trying to drive a car backwards. You turn into a corner much later than you think you need to and the opposite when you’re reversing. Or is it the other way around? They’re also heavy at the back because that’s where the weight sits to counterbalance whatever you’re picking up with the front forks. And secondly, you have to be able to visualise things in three dimensions. Not everyone has that knack.
Moving and stacking loaded pallets is just like playing with huge building blocks. But aiming the forklift so you’re centred on the pallet, judging how close to get, and knowing when to lift and when to tilt – these things all take hours of practice. Luckily, once you have learned these things, it’s just like riding a bike. When you get back in the saddle it all comes back to you and the muscle memory kicks in.
“I thought we wanted to avoid damaging anything,” Floyd said, appearing next to the forklift. I’d just reversed it into a wall.
“Look at all those scuffs,” I said. “People do it all the time. Why can I smell burning?”
“There was a power surge and a cable came down. The security drone didn’t make it. He’s dead.”
“Were you affected by it?” I asked, checking him for electrical damage.
“No. It’s not like I knew him.”
“I’m sure there’s something wrong with you,” I said. “When this trip is over, I’m getting you checked out.”
“How many pallets do you still have to load?” Floyd asked.
“Twenty.”
“There were only twenty to start with,” he said.
“I was just reacquainting myself with the controls,” I said.
Floyd glanced at the scuffed wall. “The brake is the other pedal.”
“Why don’t you do something useful?” I suggested.
“I’ll keep watch outside,” he said. “The workers will be arriving soon and they can load the truck for us.”
Floyd went out onto the loading platform and jumped off it. He landed on the ground without a sound. He was much lighter on his feet than he used to be. Literally.
Getting the pallets into the trailer was actually pretty straightforward – after I’d figured out that the pallets weren’t square and you had to have one row stacked long-side first and the other row short-side. That’s why the crates were stacked on four-way pallets. It’s obvious once you know. A skilled forklift driver could have loaded all of them in twenty minutes. It took me a bit over twice that, but I was being careful because I didn’t want to risk damaging our cargo. We’d been hired to deliver all of the medicine without breakages.
Floyd shut and locked the trailer doors while I returned the forklift truck to its parking spot. Would anyone notice that it was now facing the opposite way? I put the keys back in the key cabinet and relocked the office door. On my way out, I pushed the button that brought down the shutter on the loading bay. As it came down, I glanced back. You couldn’t tell we’d been there. Except for the twenty missing pallets. And the smouldering security drone.
The sun was now colouring the clouds a bright orange, making the outside world look like something from a movie. A low budget movie. Floyd drove the truck out through the gates and I locked them behind us. When I climbed back up into the cab, I expected Floyd to drive us away. But he didn’t.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
Floyd nodded forwards, indicating something ahead of us. There was a large pick-up truck parked in the middle of the road, blocking our way. Both doors were open and behind each stood a man with a semi-automatic rifle. A third man with an even bigger gun stood in the bed of the pick-up. They weren’t members of the Dragon Riders – these men looked dangerous.
“I don’t think they’re the early shift,” I said.
Chapter Nine
“Maybe they’re from the union,” I said. “You’re not supposed to load your own truck.”
“Perhaps they’re vigilantes?” Floyd suggested.
“We
’re really not thieves,” I said. “Should we go and try reasoning with them?”
“I prefer doing that when I’m in a bigger body. And armed with a cannon.”
“If you were still in that outfit, you’d be sitting in the trailer on top of the pallets,” I said. His old body wouldn’t have fit in the truck’s cab.
Floyd didn’t say anything. He was considering options. Trying out various scenarios in his head. Or chest, since that’s where his ‘brain’ was currently. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say all of the alternatives involved ramming the pick-up truck.
“Activate deflector shields,” I said. I was more worried about the effects of rifle bullets than Floyd was.
“Aye, aye, captain.” He reached up and yanked a big rusty lever above his head. Thick steel shutters dropped down over the windshield, leaving us letterbox-sized slits to look out through. It was like being in a tank. The shields had come with the truck, but this was the first time we’d used them in battle.
“Buckle up,” Floyd said. He punched the button that triggered the truck’s fake engine sound and turned the dial up loud. He sounded the air-horn twice and then the truck rumbled forward. It felt different now that the trailer behind us was fully loaded.
“I’m going to hit them on the driver’s side,” Floyd said.
I nodded. This would put him closest to the pick-up when we hit. And me furthest from any bullets they managed to fire before the crash.
If I saw a truck barreling down the road towards me and gathering speed, I would (a) squit my pants and (b) get out of the way as quickly as I could. The three guys from the pick-up truck were either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid. They stood their ground and opened fire. Bullets pinged and rattled against the truck’s steel shutters. Some of the hits threw up sparks, just like in the movies.
The man in the bed of the pick-up was the first to move. He leaped off the back and dashed for cover. The other two squeezed off a few more shots then they too jumped away from their vehicle.
The crash was loud. So loud I couldn’t hear my teeth clack together. The cab of the truck bounced up and down and side to side. I didn’t want to think about what was happening to the cargo in the trailer. There wasn’t time to think about anything. The pallets were tied down, but we were subjecting them to more than just a bumpy ride. I could only hope they were okay. And that we would be too.
Floyd hadn’t wanted to hit the pick-up truck head-on because that would have meant pushing three tons of metal and rubber in front of us all the way down the street. I’m sure our truck was up to it, but it would certainly slow us down. By offsetting the impact, he was able to half-turn the pick-up and push it sideways away from us. It worked – the wreckage was shunted aside and the road in front was clear.
“Are you all right?” Floyd asked.
“I think I chipped a tooth,” I said.
Floyd raised the shutters. I flipped on the rear-view camera and we both looked at the screen on the dashboard. The crumpled wreckage of the pick-up truck was burning and I could see the silhouettes of three men standing looking at it, their weapons pointing downwards.
“Didn’t we say no criminal damage?” Floyd said.
“That was Plan A,” I said.
“Are we back to the original plan now?” he asked.
“Yep. Let’s go and get the Trekker.”
“Ten-Four,” Floyd said. He says things like that when he’s driving the truck.
I leaned forward and turned off the rear-view feed and tapped an icon on the screen to call up a music show instead. It was too early in the day for them to be playing rock music – hopefully, they’d get to that later when we were doing our driving along the highway montage.
“This next one’s a jolly little pop tune that was popular years ago – Don’t ask me why, I just play these things to fill air time.”
Bobby-Ray faded it out after less than a minute.
“I’d never heard that before – but I guess my luck couldn’t last forever. Oh dear, my finger accidentally hit the ‘delete’ button. You’re welcome. Let’s have something bluesy and a little bit country.”
We drove back to the motel and Floyd pulled up behind the Trekker. There was a loud hiss from the brakes and then we sat in silence. The sun was just coming up over the main building. It had been a heck of a day so far.
“We should check on the cargo,” I said. If any of the crates of medicine had been damaged when we hit the pick-up truck it was better to know now rather than later.
I forced the prongs of the crowbar in under the lid of the crate and levered it upwards. The shiny nails squawked as they were prized out of the wood. I flipped the lid and reached inside.
“That’s not medicine,” Floyd said. He was no more surprised by this than I was.
“It’s good for what ails you,” I said, looking down at the bottle in my hand.
“Whiskey?” Floyd said. “Did you load the wrong pallets?”
That thought had crossed my mind. Luckily for me, there were labels stuck to the clear wrapping around each of the pallets that matched the numbers on the paperwork we had been given.
“We got the right ones,” I said, slapping one of the labels. I shrugged. “Maybe our Mister Flint always refers to his liquor as ‘medicine’.”
I looked at the label on the bottle. It wasn’t the twenty-year-old aged in oak barrels stuff but it wasn’t rotgut either. I’d have been tempted to sample it except we’d agreed to deliver all of the cases with their contents intact.
“Are you picking up any indications of breakage?” I asked. Floyd’s olfactory sensors could sniff out things I couldn’t smell. He’d know if there was even one bottle leaking in any of the twenty cases.
“No,” he said, looking into the open crate. “The bottles are well-packaged, they should survive the journey. If I drive the truck.”
I let him have that, he was probably right. “How much do you reckon is in here?”
“Twelve hundred cases with twelve one-litre bottles per case is fourteen thousand four hundred litres,” he said.
“That’s a lot of whiskey,” I said. I reluctantly slid the bottle back into the case and replaced the lid, knocking the nails down with the curve of the crowbar. “At three dollars a bottle, we have something like forty-thousand Alliance dollars’ worth here.”
“$43,200 before sales tax,” Floyd said.
“Are there any tracking devices in the cases?” I asked.
Floyd scanned the contents of the trailer with a brief sweep of his head. “I’m not registering anything except bottles,” he said.
This was a good thing as it meant there weren’t crates of illegal weapons or drugs hidden among our cargo. It also meant there was no way of tracing the cargo if it went missing.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Floyd said. “We are not going to steal the whiskey.”
“I wasn’t thinking that.”
If Floyd could have raised an eyebrow, he would have done. “If we don’t deliver this as promised, we’ll never get another load to haul.”
“Yes, that would be terrible,” I said flatly. The life of a trucker hadn’t turned out to be as much fun as I’d expected.
“If you want to quit, just say so,” Floyd said.
“I don’t quit,” I said. “We should get moving.”
We jumped down out of the trailer and Floyd swung the doors shut. He padlocked them and he didn’t give me the key. I think he has trust issues. It probably comes from living alone for so long before he met me.
I would have quite happily stolen Mister Flint’s whiskey. But it would have been more trouble than it was worth. Unless I had a buyer lined up for the whole load I’d end up lugging it from town to town shifting a few cases a day for a dollar a bottle. That sounds too much like a day job for my liking.
Floyd climbed up into the cab of the truck and I got into the Trekker. I’d paid our motel bill and dropped off the key earlier. I would be driving the Trekker most of the wa
y to New Grimsby, acting as an escort car for the truck. That meant driving a few miles ahead of it to check the road was clear of obstacles. And cops. And sometimes dropping back a couple of miles behind it to make sure no one was following. We’d trashed that pick-up but those guys might decide to come after us in something else.
The speakers on my dashboard crackled.
“This is the Stainless Steel Duck for Robin Hood, have you got your ears on?”
Floyd had started this nonsense when we first got the truck. I refused to acknowledge it. And I hated the name Robin Hood. When I first met Floyd he said that if I thought I was Robin Hood, I was kidding myself. You don’t forget something like that. I turned on Bobby-Ray instead. Why couldn’t Floyd be more like him? I drove the Trekker out of the motel car park and the big truck rumbled after me.
“I was invited to open the new Robots and Machine Intelligence exhibit at Saphira’s Science Museum yesterday,” Bobby-Ray said. “I asked the curator, ‘Which is the oldest robot here?’ and he said ‘You’re it.’ How rude. We’ve got news on the hour and taking us up to that is this from Tres Hombres.”
“Hey, Floyd,” I said. “Why do you think Mister Flint wants all that whiskey so badly?”
“Maybe he’s thirsty.” I think Floyd was sulking because I didn’t use his radio alias.
“He could fly those pallets to New Grimsby for half what he’s paying us. Something doesn’t add up.”
“Perhaps he doesn’t want the authorities to know he’s transporting it,” Floyd said. “It takes a lot of paperwork to get cargo through an airport.”
“We’ve got paperwork,” I said. “A whole sheaf of it.”
“We don’t have the papers you need to ship alcohol legally across county boundaries,” Floyd said.
“We don’t? You mean every time we cross a county line...”
“We’re liable to be arrested. Well, you are. I’m just a robot. Technically, I’m classed as a tool.”
“I’ve called you that many times myself,” I said. “I thought this was supposed to be a legitimate job.”
Road Rage Page 5