by Matt Forbeck
"On what charges?"
"I'm not a police officer, sir. I don't need a warrant."
I nodded. There had been a time when the US military wouldn't have been permitted to take action against a US citizen inside the country's own borders. That had been so long ago that I barely remembered it, but I still missed it.
"It doesn't have to be like that," I said.
"My orders are 'bring him back, willing or not,' sir. I'm sorry."
I stared down and saw Isle Royale scudding beneath me. A little bit farther, and I'd have made it into Canada – for all the good that would have done me. At the most, it would have delayed Patrón getting his hands on me for a few days while he wrestled with the extradition requests.
Still, I wasn't about to go quietly. Eight needed more time to make a clean getaway, and I wasn't about to let him down.
"No, Captain," I said. "You don't need a warrant – but you still have to catch me first."
With that, I slammed the hovercar into reverse. The transmission screamed in protest and tried to leap straight up through the dashboard to tell me what it thought about being treated like that, but the hovercar managed to switch direction anyhow.
My seat's autobelts deployed and grabbed me from several angles around my middle to keep me in my seat. I smiled, as that was just what I had wanted. I planned on needing those straps even more soon.
As the transport zipped straight past me, its powerful wake buffeted my hovercar about like a ship on a stormy sea. The transport's rear gunner pointed his lasers at me and fired off a wide-spectrum burst designed to burn out my retinas. On most people it would have blinded them and forced them to land. In my case, my lenses darkened in plenty of time to protect me. Turns out they didn't need my nanoserver for at least that basic function. Here's to superphototropic materials.
I knew the gunner would wait a moment before firing again, just to see how well his first attack had fared. I used that hesitation to buy me some space, and I threw the hovercar into a barrel roll that spun me off to the left, spiraling away from the transport in a long, sharp arc that drew me closer to the Canadian shoreline.
I glanced back to spy a thin cable tipped with a magnetic coupler sailing through the space where I had just been. If I let the transport get that close again, the gunners would catch me and haul me in for sure.
A new voice came in over the hovercar's communications system now, one with a distinctly Canadian accent and politeness. "Attention, please, unidentified hovercar. You are about to trespass into Canadian airspace. Please break off and return to the United States on the bearing now being transmitted to your hovercar's autopilot."
I ignored that, along with the plaintive beeping that now sprang from the autopilot. If I'd been scared – or stupid – enough to give in and turn the damned thing back on, Captain Moloke would have taken over my autopilot and put me down on the nearest open patch of land still in the USA. I'd have been stranded there for all of the thirty seconds it would take for his troopers to surround me, rip my hovercar open like a garbage bag, and haul me aboard their transport.
That was probably how it was still going to end, but I didn't need to win this game. I just had to run out the clock. That gave me the advantage I needed. I shut the hovercar's communications system off again. It would only serve to annoy me, I knew.
I flirted with dashing into Canada and seeing if I could cause an international incident. I pointed my hovercar straight for the border and gunned it. About then, I spotted the trio of Canadian fighter jets break off from where they'd been cutting a broad circle to the north and come right at me. I might have been able to make it across the border, but I had no illusion that I'd get much farther than that.
One of the Canadian jets let loose with a barrage of tracer bullets that sailed through the air between us like shooting stars. They angled far to my left, clearly only meant as a warning. Still, I was flying a rental hovercar. It wouldn't take much to bring me screaming down.
I was pretty sure their orders were to bring me in alive. There's not much use in killing an amortal. Patrón wanted to know what I was doing, and it would be a lot simpler for him to just ask me rather than have me die in an "accident."
Of course, that didn't mean I couldn't die in an honest accident.
I yanked up hard on the hovercar's controls, starting into a full vertical loop. When I reached the apex of the loop and was upside down, though, I flipped the craft over and dove forward, executing a perfect Immelman turn.
This put me pointed nose-to-nose with the transport, which had come about and chased after me once I'd pulled out of my barrel roll. From here, I could see straight into the transport's cockpit blister, in which I spotted a dark-skinned man I knew had to be Captain Moloke. His white eyes grew wide in his dark face. His teeth gleamed as he shouted for me to break off from this suicidal game of chicken I'd turned his chase into, but I couldn't hear a word coming from him. I turned the communications console back on.
"– off, damn it!" Moloke shouted, audible over the blaring proximity alarms going off in his cockpit. "Now!"
"I'm amortal, captain," I said, the gap between us growing smaller with every passing instant. My hovercar's alarm finally kicked in too, and I had to bellow over it to be heard. "How about you?"
I saw Moloke flinch at that and pull the controls in his hands back and to the right. That was all I needed, just a hint of the direction in which he planned to go. I nudged my controls down and to the left. My hovercar zoomed past the oncoming transport, clearing its hull by a matter of scant feet.
Unfortunately, I hadn't figured the transport's belly gun blister into my movement. By the time I spotted it, there was no time to react. The roof of my hovercar smashed into the gun blister's glassteel hemisphere. Both had been reinforced against collisions, but even a glancing impact at opposing top speeds was enough to cause problems. The hovercar's roof caved in, stopping just shy of crushing my head. The impact knocked me off course and threw the craft toward the ground below, spinning out of control. The weapons blister cracked open like an egg. The gunner inside came cartwheeling out, still harnessed into her gun mount, which had broken completely free.
I wrestled with the hovercar's controls, straining at them with all my might. If not for the hovercar's autostabilization system, I never would have recovered before I slammed into the ground rushing up toward me. As it was, I managed to haul the hovercar out of its steep, chaotic dive and sweep back into the transport's wake, swinging into line far below it.
I spied the gunner hurtling down toward me. She'd managed to free herself from her gun mount, but her parachute had automatically deployed before that and gotten tangled in her harness. She yanked at it, desperate to pry it free before she ran out of time, but I could see that she had zero chance of managing that.
I put my hovercar into a steep dive set to intersect the gunner's path, then matched velocities with her. She spotted me coming and looped her thumbs through her harness's quick-release rings, then pulled. She sprang free from the fouled chute.
I forced the hovercar to open its passenger door. The collision with the transport had already damaged it, and the roaring winds finished the job and tore it free from its hinges.
The surface of the lake below raced toward us as the gunner kicked off from her gun mount, aiming for the open door. I gave the controls a nudge to help her out, and she grabbed onto the door's mangled frame and hauled herself in.
"Hold on!" I shouted as wrenched the hovercraft's controls back and over as hard as I could.
The gunner yelped as her legs tumbled about the hovercar's cabin, but she managed to keep a death grip on the passenger's chair with her arms.
Looking down at the waves, I could see I was too late. I had saved the woman from the fall but not the landing. No matter how hard I hauled on those controls, we were going to crash.
Something hard thumped into the back of the hovercraft, but I ignored it. The oncoming waters had all of my attention.
I knew I was probably going to die then and there, but that didn't bother me as much as the thought that I'd killed this gunner too. Even if she was trying to help bring me in so that Patrón could do to me whatever he had planned, she'd only been doing her job. She didn't deserve to die. Not permanently.
She screamed as the waters reached up to devour us.
I felt something pull at us, slowing us down. The autobelts bit into my arms and shoulders, and the gunner growled as she struggled to hold on. I knew then that the thump I'd heard had been a magnet-headed cable slapping into the back of the hovercar, tethering us to the transport.
Although hope leaped in my heart for an instant, this lastditch effort to save us wasn't enough. We hit Lake Superior hard, and its chilly black waters rushed in through the open door and enveloped us.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
I woke up in the Secret Service sick bay back in DC. At first, I thought that I'd died in the crash and been revived again. Then I realized that I wouldn't have remembered the crash if that had been the case.
Of course, if they'd been able to keep me from brain death long enough to back me up, then I might be in a whole new body. That had happened to me the first time I'd been revivified, way back in 2032.
New bodies didn't hurt as much as mine did though.
A young nurse stood at my bedside. He put a finger to his lips. "Don't try to speak right away," he said. "You swallowed a lot of lake water. You're lucky to be alive."
"What–?" I croaked. I'd tried to ignore his advice, but my throat hurt too much to cooperate with me.
He gave me a restrained, professional smile and handed me a sleeve of purified water that had been sitting on my bedside table. I took it gratefully and raised it to my lips. A slight squeeze sprayed water into the back of my mouth, and its cold stream trickled down the back of my throat, loosening things up as it went. A few sprays later, and I was ready to speak.
"What happened to the gunner?" I asked.
The nurse raised an eyebrow in ignorance.
"The woman in the hovercar with me?"
"She's fine," Patrón said as he walked into the room. "Glad to see you awake." His sullen demeanor said he was anything but.
I felt a sudden desire to throw off my blankets and beat Patrón to death, for all the good it would do. As an amortal, he'd just be back again soon enough and not remember a damn bit of it – except what the nurse and the security cameras would tell him.
I pushed that wish away and offered Patrón a weak smile instead. It didn't take much effort to feign the weakness. As much reason as I had to hate Patrón at the moment, he didn't know that, and I wanted to keep it that way.
"What happened?" I asked.
Patrón gave me a gruff glare. "How much of it do you remember?"
I rubbed my neck. I considered feigning amnesia, but since I'd already asked about the gunner's fate, I doubted I could get away with it. "Most of it, I think. Last thing that's clear is hitting the water."
"The rental company wasn't very happy about that," Patrón said. "I hope you're insured."
I couldn't help laughing at that. Every amortal was insured to the gills. No one who could afford amortality wanted to spend eternity paying off debts that insurance could have helped with. I wasn't wealthy, but as far as that went I was no exception.
The laugh hurt my ribs, and I winced in pain.
"You did nearly as good a number on yourself," Patrón said. "Fortunately, Uncle Sam has you covered there."
"But I was on sabbatical."
He waved that concern off. "You're still an employee of the Secret Service – and an amortal. It's far more expensive to boot up a new body for you than to handle your medical bills."
"Glad to hear it's all in the name of fiscal responsibility," I said.
Patrón let himself laugh at that. Then he turned deadly serious.
"Ronan," he said, putting a hand on my bedrail, "what's going on?"
"I'm not sure," I said. "I decide to head up to the old family cabin, and suddenly I have a special forces squad sent out to bring me in."
"We were concerned about you. Your signal went dead."
"I tried to quit. You wouldn't let me. I wanted to be alone."
He shook his head. "No amortal should ever be that alone."
"You had to send in a fully armed transport to remind me of that?"
"Your nanoserver went dead."
"I turned it off."
"Dead dead."
That explained it for sure then. When Eight zapped me in the head, that set off an alarm back at the head office. Patrón scrambled the transport into the air right after that.
"You're not supposed to be able to track a nanoserver once it's off."
He sucked at his teeth. "That's true for most people. Not for amortals. We need to know if you're alive and where you are at all times."
"So much for privacy. Or civil rights."
Patrón grabbed me by the shoulder. "Don't give me that shit," he said. "You know how things work around here. You've been a part of the US government for almost two hundred years."
"I did have a life before the Service."
"Not as far as I'm concerned. So, tell me: what happened out there? What made you jackrabbit as soon as the transport popped over the horizon? And who else was there?"
"Nobody but me," I said. It was, in a way, the absolute truth.
"Don't mess with me, Ronan. I'm not in the mood for it today. The damned One Resurrectionists are rioting in the streets right now, with your old friend Father G leading the charge. I don't have the time to deal with your personal dramas too. I can have a team of interrogators out here in under fifteen minutes. They'll be able to force the answers out of you."
I fought a need to spit in his face. "You don't have the authority to do that to me."
"The hell I don't. As the head of the Secret Service, I have a standing Presidential order that permits me to abridge any and all civil rights when dealing with matters of the security of the President and the First Family."
"I'm no threat to the President. I've been part of the Secret Service during twenty-five administrations. I'm untouchable."
Patrón dropped any facade of pleasantness, much less friendship. His eyes turned as cold as I'd ever seen them.
"No one is untouchable," he said. "The Amortals Project was first established to protect the life of the President, and for that reason it's always been a part of the Secret Service. Anything that threatens the Amortals Project is a matter of national security, and I will not permit any personal attachments, no matter how strong or old, to get in the way of that."
He glared at me now and leaned over my bedrail to get into my face. "Now come clean with me, Agent Dooley. This all smells worse than the Potomac. Tell me what's going on."
My fist clenched on its own, and I considered punching him in the face with it.
"How long have you been amortal?" I asked him instead.
"Quit trying to change the subject."
I put a hand on his chest and pushed him back out of my face, sitting up in the bed as I did.
"You remember back in the old days? When people in power actually died? You knew that as long as you were patient, things would change. Things would get better."
"Are you threatening me?" Patrón snarled.
"Civil rights got better. Global warming got better. Technology got better. Right up until 2032, when the Amortals Project finally got its start. Then it all stalled out. The big breakthrough – the final victory over mortality – killed everything else. Progress ground to a halt. The world fell into stasis. There was no pressure to get anything done, to improve upon anything. All that mattered to the people who could do anything about it was maintaining the status quo."
"That's our job!" Patrón said. "We keep the people in charge in charge. That's how we keep order."
"Maybe order's not always such a good thing," I said. "America was founded on revolution, not preservation."
&nb
sp; Patrón nodded at me like he finally understood. With every word he leaned closer to me, farther into my face. "You're advocating chaos. Destruction. Death!"
"I'm nearly two hundred years old," I said. I could smell the meat from his lunch on his breath. His closeness set my teeth on edge. "I've died more than anyone else in the world, and I keep coming back. It's not right."
"You sanctimonious jackass." Patrón sneered at me. "You've had the world handed to you on a platter, and like a spoiled brat you just want to knock it aside."
"I got killed saving the President!"
Patrón leered down at me, his voice dripping with disgust. "Shot right to the top, eh?"
Before I even knew it, I'd punched him. Beat as I was, my fist flew up from my bed and smashed Patrón right in his nose. I felt the little bones in it crunch beneath my knuckles, and he staggered backward, clutching his face. Blood ran out between his fingers, coating his chin and neck and staining his shirt and tie.