Shadowplay

by Nigel Findley

  He depressed the clutch, which was smooth as silk, and tested the throw of the shift. The gearbox was tight, precise, much better than anything he’d ever driven. He was starting to doubt whether he could handle this thing at all.

  But then he forced the doubts out of his mind. Like he’d said, it was him or nothing. “What about the door?” he said.

  Sly reached up to a small box clipped to the sun visor, pushed the button on it. The big door directly in front of the car silently rose.

  Checking the gearbox pattern on the shift knob one last time, Falcon slipped the car into first. He gave the engine a little gas, watched the tach needle rise to about fifteen hundred revs. Then—carefully, almost gingerly— he began to let the clutch out, paying attention to exactly where it began to catch. Smoothly, the big car pulled out and cruised up the ramp to street level.

  The Callaway was a pure joy to drive. Now that he’d gotten the feel of the pedals. Falcon’s fear of the big engine had turned to unadulterated admiration. The torque was incredible. Even though he knew the car would be much happier cruising faster than safe city speed, the application of power was smooth and well-mannered enough that he never had the feeling the vehicle was trying to get away from him. For the first couple of blocks, he kept one eye on the boost gauge, nervous that he’d accidentally rev high enough for the turbos to kick in. But then the car started to feel like an extension of his own body, of his will. He didn’t think it was going to do anything that would surprise him.

  He glanced over at Sly, glad to see she’d released her white-knuckled grip on the door handle. “Where to?” he asked casually.

  “The east route,” she answered after a moment. “Highway Ninety. But go around Council Island,” she added quickly.

  He snorted. “I can figure that out for myself.”

  She reached behind the driver’s seat to pull out the computer she’d acquired from the dead man's place. Set it on her lap and opened out the keyboard. Then, as if second thoughts had hit her, she shot a doubtful look at Falcon.

  He grinned broadly. “Chill, Sly,” he told her. “You do what you got to. The wheels are totally under control.”

  As if responding to the confidence—real, this time— in his voice, she nodded with a quick smile. Then she busied herself powering up the computer and unrolling the fiber-optic lead.

  Let her play with her toy, Falcon thought, still grinning like a bandit, and I’ll play with mine.

  Highway 90, but bypassing Council Island. The quickest way was north on I-5, across the Highway 520 floating bridge, and then south on Route 405. All freeways. Which was just fine with Falcon.

  He cruised the Callaway south along Broadway, then hung a right on Madison, heading southwest toward I-5. As he pulled up the on-ramp, he saw that the freeway traffic was relatively light. His grin broadened. Why not? He pushed down the gas pedal.

  Even though he was watching the boost gauge and anticipating the extra power, the sudden added thrust as the twin turbos kicked in caught him by surprise. The big rear tires chirped, and the car surged forward, throwing Falcon and Sly back in their seats. The car wobbled alarmingly for an instant before Falcon got her back under complete control. Sly yelped in fright.

  “Null persp, chummer,” he crowed as he threw the Callaway up through the gears. “Just seeing what this baby can do.” He could feel her eyes on him, but didn’t take his gaze from the road and traffic ahead. “I could get used to this.” He took the car up to 115 mph—more than 180 klicks!—before he backed her off to a more moderate speed. The machine felt as smooth and steady, as much under precise control at speed as it did cruising at fifty klicks on back streets.

  Yeah, he could really get used to this.

  21

  1400 hours, November 14, 2053

  I feel like drek, Sly thought. I need to sleep.

  She reached down, played with the buttons controlling the power passenger seat. Tilted the back a little further down, adjusted the lumbar support slightly.

  The seat was comfortable, as comfortable as any car seat could be after six hours of solid driving. And the low, steady hum of the engine, the thrum of the tires on the road, should have been soporific, but Sly couldn’t drop off even though she was physically and emotionally exhausted.

  She’d come close a couple of times, drowsing off, but as her thoughts began to range free, beyond her conscious control, the terrible images came back. Modal blowing bloody foam with his last breaths. The horribly abused body of Agarwal. She’d jolted awake, her muscles rigid, like she’d been hit by a taser dart.

  They were out of Seattle, out of the UCAS. Shouldn’t that make a difference? But of course it didn’t.

  Crossing the border into the Salish-Shidhe lands had made for a few tense minutes. Sly had been pretty sure that the data she’d manufactured on Agarwal’s portable computer and then downloaded into the optical chips of two credsticks would pass all but the most intensive scrutiny. But being pretty sure and knowing were two very different things. While Falcon—now traveling under the name of David Falstaff—handed the two credsticks to the alert Border Patrol guards, she’d felt serious fear twisting her insides. If they didn’t accept the false identities and passports for David Falstaff and Cynthia Yurogowski, they’d hold Sly and Falcon until they dug up their real names. And when those real names come over the Matrix, who else might be taking an interest?

  But all had gone well. The Border Patrol officer had slotted the credsticks one by one into the reader on his belt, scanning the information they contained via the connection to his datajack. He’d asked a couple of routine questions—reason for travel (even though that was, by law, included on the travel permits), home address (ditto)—but Falcon had answered them smoothly enough. (He fragging well should have, after the way she’d drilled him.) Then, just when she thought they were through, the patrol slot had wanted to talk about the fragging car.

  Sly forced herself to relax. That was all past now. After the border guard had asked a couple of technodweeb-type questions about displacement and horsepower, to which Falcon invented answers on the spot, he’d simply waved the Callaway through and gone on to the next vehicle.

  There’d been almost no traffic on Highway 90 as they began to climb into the Cascade Mountains, driving through what used to be the Snoqualmie National Forest. The sky was heavy with grayish-black clouds, but the rain was holding off.

  Though the road was wet, the only real snow was in the dispirited-looking patches on the grass verges of the highway. That was unusual for the Cascades in mid-November, Sly knew. Seattle never got even the slightest touch of snow anymore—thanks to its “industrial microclimate” and localized greenhouse effect—but the mountains often got several meters. The roads through the high passes like Snoqualmie were often closed, particularly since many of the tribal factions making up the Salish-Shidhe council seemed to consider snow plows to be “inappropriate technology.” The unseasonable weather was a piece of luck for which Sly was grateful. A relatively light car like the Callaway would probably not handle snow very well.

  The forest-clad mountains of the Cascade Range rose around them. Because of the restricted view, it was easy to forget that Snoqualmie Pass was at an altitude of more than a thousand meters, and that the peaks surrounding them were up another thousand meters higher than that. Every now and again. Sly caught a glimpse of Mount Rainier rising like a giant, head and shoulders taller than the flanking mountains. Rainier had lost its actual peak in 2014 when the land had responded to Daniel Howling Coyote and his Great Ghost Dance, but it was still more than four thousand meters tall.

  Except for short-term business trips like the one that had taken her to Tokyo, Sly had never left Seattle, never even visited the Cascades lying only a few hours east of the sprawl. She'd always imagined them to be like the Rockies, huge, majestic, rugged peaks of bare rock and snow, which she'd seen once when biz had taken her to Banff and Lake Louise, further north in what used to be the border between Albe
rta and British Columbia. (It was the preserve of Dunkelzahn the great dragon, although that august personage had had nothing to do with her run—thank whatever gods there happened to be.) She’d loved the Rockies, found them beautiful, overawing, even terrifying in a way.

  She remembered being driven along Highway 1, heading roughly north from Banff to Lake Louise. To the left of the highway was a seemingly unbroken row of shattered-looking peaks, clawing at the underbellies of the low clouds. She recalled one in particular—Mount Rundle?—a massive upthrust of rock with a perfectly flat upper surface, angled upward at about forty-five degrees. At the time she’d thought it looked like a paving stone, one section of a roadway to the gods, smashed and driven upward by an unimaginable force. At the left and southern end, it terminated in a jagged cornice, from which the steady wind blew a long pennon of snow that had made her think of tatters of cloud-stuff hooked on the sharp rock. She was sure that, volcanically and geologically speaking, the Banff area had probably been “dead” millennia before mankind first appeared on the scene. But the area still possessed an aura of newness, of immediacy, of violent forces currently—but not permanently—held in check.

  These Cascade peaks seemed older, more weathered, softened somehow by their covering of trees.

  She glanced over at Falcon. If the kid was feeling any strain from driving or from the border crossing or from anything else, it didn’t show in his face or posture. He looked relaxed, even had a smile on his face as he steered the powerful car around the tight corners of the pass road.

  “When you’re tired, tell me and we’ll stop,” she said.

  He nodded.

  Shifting around until she found the most comfortable position, Sly closed her eyes and tried to sleep.

  To her surprise, it worked.

  * * *

  The coastal mountains were long behind them, replaced by the arid semi-desert of southeastern Salish-Shidhe. They’d left the clouds behind with the mountains, and the early evening sky was a clear and infinite blue. Here, too, there was no sign of snow, and Sly knew that meant the climatic changes weren’t limited to the Seattle area. The way it used to be, when she was a kid, November would always have meant snow around Sunnyside and the Columbia River. At the very least, the ground should have been iron-hard with frost.

  But here it was, well past seventeen hundred hours, with the sun sinking toward the horizon, and the temperature was still well above freezing. Maybe even as warm as ten degrees Celsius. Sly wondered idly if the Salish-Shidhe lands might have maintained the archaic Fahrenheit system, which would have made it about fifty degrees. Unseasonably warm no matter what system you were using. The temperature would probably drop like a rock after dark, but Sly still doubted they’d have to deal with any snow.

  They’d needed to gas up soon after hitting the plains, which had made Sly somewhat nervous. Most service stations dispensed only methanol and natural gas because petrochem vehicles weren’t all that common, particularly in the tribal lands. To make it worse, Falcon was convinced that the Callaway needed high-octane unleaded, a specific type of gasoline that might not be available everywhere.

  As it turned out, they needn’t have worried. They were still on Highway 90 at this time, the major connector between the Salish-Shidhe Council and the Algonkian-Manitou Council nation. As such, it probably had more traffic—and more long-haul petrochem vehicles—than any other route within a thousand kilometers. The first service station they’d pulled into had the fuel the Twin Turbo needed. (At an outrageous price, of course, but what choice had they but to pay the going rate.)

  Not long after, they’d turned south on Route 82 and tooled through Yakima. The map that Sly had picked up at the gas station—a hard copy map, printed on real paper-helped them refine their route. The trick was to keep their average speed up by staying on the old interstates as much as possible, but to avoid getting detoured into either A-M Council or Tir Tairngire territory. (Granted, the former was nowhere near as serious as the latter, but the fewer border crossings they had to make, the better she’d like it.)

  They would follow Route 82 south over the Columbia River until it hit Route 84. (According to the map, the meeting of the two highways wasn’t more than a klick from the Tir Tairngire border. That was closer than either Sly or Falcon really wanted to get, but any other route would have added hours to the journey.) Then it was southeast on 84—but bypassing Boise if possible—and on to the Sioux border at Pocatello. From there, the only available major road would dip down into the Ute Nation, so they had to take to the “blue highways”—the secondary roads—until they could pick up Highway 80 at Rock Spurs. From there it would be a straight shot roughly east, through Laramie, until they hit Cheyenne.

  And what then? Sly wondered. Was this journey really taking her closer to a solution, or was it just an elaborate way of avoiding the issues?

  No, she scolded herself sharply. She mustn’t think like that.

  She looked over at Falcon. “Can’t we go any faster?” she asked.

  His only answer was a grin as he pushed down on the accelerator.

  22

  0010 hours, November 15, 2053

  The drek-eating motel was too close to the drek-eating highway, and Falcon’s drek-eating bed was too close to the drek-eating window!

  Every time one of those big, long-haul trucks thundered by, he thought the clamorous roar of the engine was going to shake his teeth loose. And then the shock wave as those countless tons of metal hurtled through the night would slam into the window and wall, making them shake as though a grenade had gone off outside. And we’re supposed to sleep through this? Falcon groused inwardly.

  He glared over at the other bed, where Sly lay curled up in fetal position. For a moment, he was almost angry enough to boot her bed as hard as he could. If he wasn’t getting any sleep, why the frag should she? They’d tossed a coin for who got which bed, but it had been her fragging coin, and she who’d fragging tossed it!

  But then the anger faded away. Did he really think it would make a difference being only a few steps further away from the highway? Get real, he told himself.

  Maybe they shouldn’t have stopped at all. When Sly had pointed out the motel sign ahead, he’d been tired enough to think it was a good idea. In retrospect, though, the whole thing was turning out to be a royal pain in the butt.

  The Crystal Springs Resort. He snorted. Resort? Last resort was more like it. And the only springs he’d encountered were the ones that creaked whenever he shifted his weight on the bed. The old slag at the front desk hadn’t even glanced at the personal data scrolling across his computer screen when Sly slotted their credsticks to pay for the room. (They’d kept their new identities— David Falstaff and Cynthia Yurogowski—but Sly had changed things so they both hailed from Bellingham now.) Falcon thanked the spirits they both looked Amerindian—or sort of. People were less likely to question them.

  People like the desk man, for one, but his leer told Falcon what he thought about why a woman would be getting a motel room with a guy half her age. That had stirred up an interesting mess of emotions, of course.

  Part of him wanted to punch the slot’s lights out; another part had kinda wished he were right.

  He wasn’t, of course. They’d tossed for the beds, then settled down for a couple of hours sleep.

  That was when the first of the trucks had passed by.

  Thinking about it logically, Falcon was glad they’d decided to stop. His first encounter with one of the huge multi-trailer “road trains” had fragging near scared the wits out of him. He'd been blasting along at the Callaway’s comfortable cruising speed of about two hundred klicks per hour, the road ahead looking totally empty. Of course, that had been judging by the lack of headlights from oncoming vehicles. (At two hundred klicks per hour, he was overdriving the car’s own headlights; if there’d been anything on the road that didn’t have its own lights, he’d probably have hit it before his brain even registered seeing it.) For an instant,
Falcon thought he’d seen a constellation of tiny lights up ahead, but dismissed it as no more than a mild hallucination. Then a great, roaring mass of metal loomed up in the oncoming lane. It blasted by before he could even react, leaving the Callaway bucking wildly in the thing’s slipstream. With a chuckle he remembered how that had awakened Sly from her slumber mighty pronto. (The thing was gone, just a couple of small red lights in the rearview mirror before she’d even finished her first yell.)

  Maybe ten minutes later he was ready for the next one. Letting up on the gas, he slowed the car down to less than a hundred-fifty klicks per hour so he’d have more chance to see it. This time he spotted it a couple hundred meters away. It was moving without headlights, blacked out except for an array of tiny running lights indicating its dimensions. He’d been able to make out more of the details as it hurtled by.

  Falcon thought he recognized the tractor as a Nordkapp-Conestoga Bergen. With five huge, selfpowered trailers in tow, it formed a massive, concatenated convoy almost a hundred meters from bumper to bumper. It was probably going at about a hundred-twenty klicks per hour, which would make the closing speed something like two hundred-seventy klicks. No wonder the Callaway had bucked like a plane trying to fly through a tornado.

  Why the frag are they running without headlights? Falcon raged inwardly. Fragging idiots!

  It was only then that the details of what he’d seen actually registered. Instead of windows, the big Bergen had the standard slit-like windshield, way the frag up there above the road. No driver could have seen where the hell he was going, what was on the road ahead while seated in that monstrous solid wall of metal. Then he remembered the strange, lumpy devices mounted all over the front of the tractor. And finally he’d understood.

  Truckers in Seattle and the rest of UCAS were bitching like hell about these things. The trid reports hadn’t made much impression at the time, but now it all came back to him. It seemed that some of the Native American Nations were experimenting with something the Australians had adopted for long-haul freight shipments through the Outback. Totally automated trucks using autopilots with expert systems and limited artificial intelligence that operated entirely via massive sensor suites mounted on the truck bodies. Blasting through the night without a single living person on board. Running without headlights because the sensors saw better in the dark than a meat driver would under noonday sunlight. Much more dependable, because autopilots didn’t drink or do drugs or chips while on the job; didn’t fall asleep; and—most important—didn’t go on strike for higher wages or better working conditions.