∞ ∞ ∞
“So when will I be able to take delivery?” Rico asked Reid over a secured omniphone channel.
“If the shipping information is correct, then the day after tomorrow. Make sure you have the final payment.”
“Two days from now? Why the delay?” Rico didn’t really care—in fact the delay was probably to put him off the trail while the Velkaryans made off with the files—but Reid would expect him to protest.
“We’ll need time to transfer the boxes to another vehicle and dispose of the Steel Mesa truck.”
“What about the driver?” The truck could have been entirely autonomous, of course, but it was Steel Mesa policy to have all loads accompanied by a driver in case of problems, and to hand-deliver any individual items.
“He’ll be fine. We’ll just hold him incommunicado for a couple of days then release him. He won’t remember the details.”
Rico wondered if any of that was true. On the other hand, a missing person usually prompted a more extensive investigation than a missing truck.
∞ ∞ ∞
Reid clicked off his omni. The driver was a complication, of course, but not an insurmountable one. In theory, autonomous vehicles couldn’t be tampered with while in motion. Unless overridden by law enforcement codes, the car or truck’s driving computer would keep to the optimum course dependent on conditions, and if conditions changed beyond what the poor robot could handle, and there was no authorized driver aboard to take manual control, it would pull over, lock itself down, and send a distress call until someone came to take care of it.
Reid could come up with any number of scenarios to sufficiently confuse a truck’s artificial intelligence. A vehicle’s systems could be hacked into wirelessly from another car driving nearby, although that kept getting harder as the systems got smarter. But with a driver aboard that would be trickier; a driver would notice something wrong. Given sufficient time and the Velkaryans’ resources, they could come up with the police override codes for Steel Mesa’s vehicles, and there wouldn’t be anything the driver could do to stop them pulling the truck over and locking him in the cab. But that wasn’t an option. They would have to use more direct methods.
∞ ∞ ∞
I-70 Westbound, East of St. Louis
The Steel Mesa truck—actually more of a van—cruised westward on I-70 at a modest 180 kph. Fred Smith, the driver, yawned and paused the vid he was watching to check his progress. This new implant was like telepathy, he just had to think at the controller and it was like he was pushing buttons by hand. He was coming up on six hours; he was going to need to stop and stretch his legs soon. The nav system put him almost at Effingham, Illinois. Less than an hour to St. Louis.
Fred shifted his attention to the road outside. It was still early enough in the day that traffic was light. He’d be hitting St. Louis at the morning rush hour but the autonomous-vehicle-only lanes would route him around the city with barely a slowdown. The town of Effingham passed by as he watched, and as the buildings gave way to countryside again he turned back to the console to resume the vid. A highway sign flashed by overhead and the van moved to the left lane.
Wait a minute, Fred wondered, didn’t that sign say that left was towards Memphis? As he watched the road, the van kept left as the highway forked, splitting off on I-57 southwest instead of staying on I-70 towards St. Louis and Denver. What the heck?
Fred used his implant to bring up the nav display on the cab’s main screen, and began checking the map. Okay, if there was some problem ahead on I-70 maybe the van was routing him south to Mt. Vernon and then up I-64 to St. Louis. That was about a twenty minute detour. He would have thought the van would have announced the change of planned course, but this wasn’t his usual truck. Maybe the software was different. He shrugged and went back to his vid.
It was fifteen minutes later, when the vehicle slowed to take the exit onto the old US 50 at Salem, that Fred began to realize that there was something seriously wrong. In general, the vans were supposed to stick to the Interstate highway system. Those roads were engineered to higher speeds and their uniformity made things simpler for a truck’s AI. He looked at the map again. Yes, US 50 was a shorter route, but it would take quite a bit longer. Was the software just that stupid?
Fred considered disengaging the autopilot right then and parking the truck while he figured it out, but then decided that as long as they were headed in mostly the right direction, the problem wasn’t that urgent. He’d check it as they drove.
He did a quick net search to find out what the original problem had been with I-70, why they’d diverted. Curiously, he couldn’t find anything. From what he could tell, I-70 was still open in both directions between Effingham and St. Louis. Maybe there had been a temporary diversion that put them on I-57 and now that the problem was cleared, the computer was trying to get them back on track, hence the exit at Salem. Again, although that made sense geographically, it should still have been faster to continue to I-64 and take that road. This two-lane, undivided highway—not much more than a street, really, bordered by fields and the occasional house or stand of trees—had forced his speed to drop to a mere 90 kph, despite the road being completely empty.
Well, not quite completely. There was that car following him which had been there since exiting I-57. Possibly even before that, Fred hadn’t been paying attention. If it was being hand-driven, whoever was back there might be getting frustrated with Fred’s pace. If so, that was their problem. Overriding the autopilot to go faster would earn him a reprimand. It wasn’t worth it. Fred looked at the map again, then checked the time remaining on his vid. Screw it. If they didn’t get back on the Interstate at O’Fallon, on the outskirts of St. Louis, then he’d pull over and call in the problem. He relaxed and sat back to finish the movie.
∞ ∞ ∞
“This is turning out to be easier than I thought,” Hendricks, the muscle he’d brought along, said to Reid. “Are you sure there’s even somebody driving that truck?”
Reid and Hendricks were behind the Steel Mesa truck, following it closely. They weren’t frustrated at all with it’s pace; they were tapped into its computers and controlling the ride.
“Oh, there’s somebody in there all right, but so far we haven’t done anything that he couldn’t explain away. He’s obviously not trained to think like a security guard.”
“I guess he’ll notice soon. That sign said five miles to Carlyle Reservoir.”
“All right. Is the jammer ready?”
Hendricks pushed a TEST switch on the box in his lap, a lunchbox-sized contraption with a parabolic dish attached to the end. A light lit up in response. “Ready.”
“Okay, here we go.”
∞ ∞ ∞
When the truck slowed again and pulled off onto a small side road just past the sign that had said something about “South Shore State Park” and “Saddle Dam 2 Road,” Fred could no longer fool himself that there was nothing wrong. “What the hell?”
He tried twice with his implant to command the vehicle to stop, then, slapped the emergency manual override switch and stepped on the brakes. He managed to bring it to a stop around a curve where trees blocked his view of US 50. As he did so, the black car—which had apparently followed him off the highway—pulled around in front of him, blocking his path. Two men stepped out, one pointing a boxy device with a dish at the truck, the other pointing a gun. It finally dawned on Fred that this might be a hijacking, although he couldn’t imagine what might be in his cargo to be worth it. Old files?
Fred raised his hands so the men outside could see them. He didn’t want any trouble, and with this implant he didn’t need hands to make a call.
He was halfway though making the connection when a sudden burning pain and sharp electric tingle from the implant site made him remember why one of his friends had said they were a dumb idea. That guy outside had some kind of EMP generator, a magnetic pulse gun, and he’d just fried all the electronics in the vehicle, including his
implants. Feels like being tased from the inside, were his last thoughts before passing out.
∞ ∞ ∞
“Who uses implants anymore?” Hendricks asked, noting the deep burns behind the driver’s ear as they pulled his body from the truck.
“People who don’t know their history, I guess.” Implant burnouts had been a significant cause of injury during the Unholy War, in areas affected by EMP but not the direct blast of nuclear weapons. “And who don’t travel much in space.” Radiation and electromagnetic effects from warp were minor, but over time they’d degrade the nanoscale electronics of implantable systems. Antirad drugs helped the body repair organic damage, but they couldn’t do a thing for implants. Ship and portable electronics were more robust, and more easily repaired or replaced.
“So, is he still alive?”
Reid checked for a pulse. A fried implant wasn’t necessarily fatal, it would depend on specifics, including how strong the victim’s heart and nervous system were. Apparently this driver’s systems weren’t strong enough. “Nope. One less thing to worry about.”
They retrieved the keys—mechanical, so they wouldn’t have to use the tools—and opened the back of the van. Another van had just pulled in off the highway and pulled up behind them, the driver hopping out and opening the doors of his own vehicle.
“Okay, we’ve got a lot of boxes to move, let’s hustle,” said Reid and began shifting boxes in the Steel Mesa vehicle to get to the ones he wanted. They soon had a kind of bucket brigade going, with Reid grabbing boxes and handing them to Hendricks, who in turn handed them to the new guy who stacked them in his van. In a few minutes they were done.
“All right, let’s get—” he read the name on the driver’s jacket “—Fred here into the back.”
Together they unceremoniously dragged the body around and dumped it in the back of the Steel Mesa truck, and locked the doors.
“Now let’s dump this and get going.”
The Steel Mesa truck was un-driveable with its electronics fried, but they’d planned for this. The reservoir’s shoreline near the dam was just a few meters away from the road here, and the bottom dropped off rapidly. It was an easy job to use one van to push the other out to where it drifted a few more meters before submerging. It would be found eventually, of course, possibly within the week—although they’d start looking from where the van’s transponders dropped off line, back in Effingham— but there wouldn’t be anything that could trace it back to the Velkaryans, and Reid himself would be off-planet by then.
27: Blue Book
“What do you mean, missing?” Hubble demanded over the phone.
“What I said,” replied Reid. “I’ve gone through all twenty seven boxes. There’s no Hill file, there are almost no photographs in any of the files, and what is there is just blurs in the sky or empty scenery on the ground. Okay, I haven’t gone through page by page—” that would take a lot longer “— but photos tend to stand out, they’re on a different kind of paper. The ones that are there are easy to find.”
“So there’s nothing there that isn’t already on microfilm and digitized?”
“It doesn’t look that way. Do you suppose this stuff was removed a long time ago?”
“We haven’t heard any suggestion of that. It might be possible. Is there any way Lee could have arranged to have that stuff removed?”
Reid didn’t think so, but if he gave it some thought he might come up with some possible scenarios. “But why go through with the heist? If he had what he wanted, why bother?”
“I don’t know. To keep us distracted?”
The pieces started to fall into place. Shit! He wondered if Lee had made him back at that first meeting at the maglev station. “Is Lee still in Denver? What about Brown?”
Reid heard Hubble relaying the question to someone else, then he came back with: “So far. In fact they haven’t left the hotel since yesterday. Maybe waiting for your call.”
“Or waiting for something else.” Reid was sure of it. “Keep them under surveillance, I’m heading for Denver.”
“And if they move?”
“Stop them.”
∞ ∞ ∞
Brown clicked off his omni. “The package is here,” he told Rico, “we can come and collect it.”
“Where’s ‘here’? The Federal Center?” Rico asked, referring to the aging campus of federal government buildings on the west side of the city. The trick would be showing ID to get into and out of the campus, but that shouldn’t be too hard. They tended to worry more about what got in—concern about bombs and the like—than what got out.
“No, even better. A BOR building that’s off the main campus.”
“BOR?”
“Bureau of Reclamation. These files supposedly relate to dam construction in the 1930s.” Brown smiled. “Nobody cares about that anymore. I just came up with a reason to need the originals rather than digital scans.”
Rico shook his head in disbelief. “Whatever works, I guess.”
“Then let’s be on our way. We can pick up the files on the way to the spaceport.”
“Wait a moment, Doc.” Rico hadn’t survived this long by being careless. “They know what I look like. We’ll take two vehicles, me trailing you. You get the boxes. If it looks like you’ve picked up a tag or run into trouble I’ll intercept. If I pick up a tail I’ll lead them on a chase. Stay in touch, I’ll meet you at the spaceport.” While saying this, Rico had checked his pistol and slid it into a shoulder holster.
“I hope all that is unnecessary, but all right. Do you think you’ll need that?” He gestured at the gun.
“If I thought I was going to need it I’d bring more firepower. This is just in case. Let’s go.”
∞ ∞ ∞
“Something is definitely up, they’re both leaving the hotel but taking separate vehicles,” the Velkaryan observer relayed to Reid, who was nearing the city.
“Can you follow them both? You have enough people?”
“We may have to split the team, which will make us easier to spot, but yes.” Normal surveillance technique was to have at least three cars following the subject so they could trade off, making it less likely the subject would realize he was being followed. Of course there were transponders, but a clever subject would destroy or discard them, and a crafty one would hack into the transponder and feed it false data. These subjects were likely to be the crafty type.
“Do it.”
The two subject vehicles seemed to be headed to the same place, one trailing the other by a block, sometimes two. That suggested he might be looking for a tail. They’d have to be careful.
∞ ∞ ∞
Rico spotted another tail car, a grey two-door Taprobane, as they passed the intersection at Sheridan and Alameda. Who names a car model after a planet? wondered Rico. He told his omni to contact Brown.
“Keep driving around a bit, I need to lose some people,” Rico said. After Brown acknowledged, he placed another call.
“Hervis Rental Agency.”
“I need a local rental, one day, as soon as possible. Meet me at—” he looked around to get his bearings and made a decision, which he relayed to the rental. He authorized his omni to send the appropriate identification and payment data, and clicked off. Here’s where it got to be a bit of a challenge.
He sped up the car—he’d been driving manually since they left the hotel—and abruptly made an illegal left turn at the next major intersection. The car’s guidance system chided him about that, and Rico told it: “Emergency override, for safety reasons.” The car accepted that, although Rico thought it seemed a bit sulky about it.
He’d shaken the Taprobane with that maneuver, but his other tail, a black sedan, had made the same turn and still followed. No matter.
He kept driving, making a series of not-quite-random left and right turns, until he’d left his convoy behind. That would only be temporary, especially if they had him boxed. He tapped his omni and a half-block ahead, a parked car, a dark
blue Plazma, flashed its lights. He dimmed his rear window, then slowed and re-engaged his car’s AI. He stopped just ahead of the Plazma and opened his passenger side door.
“Resume operation,” he told his car. “Destination, Denver Maglev Station. Take a scenic route. No passengers. Go.” With that he rolled out of the door, staying low to prevent his followers from seeing him above the intervening cars, and slammed the door.
His former car pulled away as he ducked around and entered his new rental from the passenger side. Rico stayed low, watching as the black sedan and the Taprobane continued on past, trying to catch up to the now empty car taking the scenic route to the maglev station. It had worked.
Now to help Brown shake off his baby ducklings.
Interlude II
Near the Yucatan coast, circa 100 CE
“I spotted some of the intelligent natives in the jungle,” Quetz said. “I think they have some kind of encampment or village nearby.”
“What were they like?” Kukul asked. It had been only a handful of days since the crash. They had stayed close to their campsite at first, but were now venturing further afield, both in search of things they could eat, and samples to analyze. They hadn’t seen any of the natives until now.
“Bipeds, of course, but no tail. About my height but their necks are shorter and heads rounder. ”
“So, mammals?” Kukul felt there was something vaguely disgusting about mammals, despite their prevalence on the life-bearing worlds. Something about a mammal’s method of growing offspring within its body, rather than laying eggs like every other order of animal, struck him as vaguely parasitic. It was surprising how successful they were. The short necks were characteristic, as was a fine skin covering which superficially resembled very thin pinfeathers, but soft like down.
“Yes, although they confused me at first,” Quetz said. “Their skin was smooth, with no hair, and they had crest and display feathers.”
“They had what?”
“Exactly, you understand my confusion. As I looked closer, however, I realized the feathers were attached, like clothing or ornaments, not growing from them.”
The Reticuli Deception (Adventures of Hannibal Carson Book 2) Page 12