by Terry Brooks
In Calzonia, and most particularly in L.A., the most feared tactical unit serving under ORACLE is Achilles Pod.
The stories about the Calzonia arm of Achilles Pod are legion, and all of them are pretty much the same. A situation arises, one in which lives are at stake and ordinary police are swiftly determined to be inadequate. A call goes out, an order is given, and members of Achilles Pod are dispatched. In short order the dangerous situation is diffused, hostages and innocents are rescued, and those in the wrong come to a bad end.
Those who serve in Achilles Pod are not governed by ordinary rules of propriety and fair play. They are not particularly concerned about human rights or bloodless resolutions. Their mandate has always been the same—put an end to the problem with minimal loss of life on the side of the innocent. If you are on the wrong side of that equation, it’s just too bad for you. Justice and rights run a poor second to keeping the peace. The common perception is that when you bring Achilles Pod down on your head, your life span is likely to be dramatically shortened.
This isn’t always the case, of course; it is an exaggeration of the actual facts. These are the United Territories, after all, and even if they aren’t the dominant superpower they were when still called the United States of America (that distinction belongs to China now), they still maintain their core values. A respect for law and order and justice for all is central to their culture. Still, it isn’t an exaggeration to suggest that avoiding an encounter of any sort with Achilles Pod is a good idea.
And now an entire squad of these men (and possibly women too—who knows?) has arrived at substem #23 searching for Ash.
At least, he has to assume so. Maybe it’s coincidence, but likely not. Probably someone recognized him from the reader board and called it in. What he can’t figure out is why an Achilles Pod unit has been dispatched. He’s a seventeen-year-old boy. Why not just send in the L.A. Preventatives to handle things? Why this level of firepower?
Ash walks quickly down the ramp leading to the boarding platforms, intent on catching the #41. Waiting around any longer is exceedingly dangerous. Maybe Achilles Pod is here for another reason, but he can’t afford to find out the hard way he is wrong. Better to catch a substem and get out of there. Even though he doesn’t want to go into the Red Zone no matter what his father has told him to do. No one in his right mind does. The very idea of going there is absurd. If his father is protective about Ash when it comes to public places in civilized Calzonia, he should be ten times more so when it comes to the Red Zone.
He should never have asked Ash to go there.
Yet that is exactly what he has done.
Which brings something else to mind—something that in the rush of things Ash has forgotten to consider. His father’s brother is Cyrus Collins, director of the Calzonia branch of ORACLE. No one in his right mind would mess with Uncle Cyrus. While they are not close, Brantlin and Cyrus Collins are still blood. If his father was in trouble, why didn’t he go to his brother for help? And why not send Ash to him?
But there isn’t time to consider this or anything else. Not with members of Achilles Pod breathing down his neck. There is no time to think; there is barely time to act. At the bottom of the ramp, he buys passage from a ticket dispenser before hurrying on. Hunched down in his overshirt, his backpack slung across his shoulder, Ash tries to blend in with other passengers, staying close to large groups, just one of the crowd.
Only once does he glance back. There is no sign of the black-clads. Maybe he is mistaken. Maybe they are there for someone else.
He melts into the crowd waiting for the #41 to arrive. Standing at the rear of the platform, he keeps an eye on the connecting walkway. He doesn’t see anyone from Achilles Pod. A small measure of relief rushes through him. Even if they come after him, there are more than fifty platforms. They can never search all of them in time. Without knowing which one he is on, they won’t be able to find him before his train departs.
But in the next instant he notices a woman standing off to one side, glancing at him as she whispers in a furtive way while using her vidview. When she sees Ash looking at her, she turns away. But there is no mistaking what she has done.
A good citizen, doing her civic duty, she has given him up. What are the odds of that happening in this city? Better than he thought, obviously. He despairs. This is all so unfair. He has done nothing, and everyone in L.A. is involved in trying to have him arrested and imprisoned. Or maybe worse, since now Achilles Pod is involved.
The woman is moving away. Ash doesn’t try to stop her. What would be the point? The damage is done. He waits until she is out of sight and then quickly walks the other way. Others have probably noticed him as well and made similar reports. It is a foolish to think they wouldn’t. In any case, he can’t take the underground now. They will know which train he is on and set up reception committees at every stop along the way until they find him. He will have to find a different way.
As the #41 pulls in, the first of the black-clads appear and make the turn onto the platform. People are stepping aside hurriedly, shrinking back. Ash holds his ground, waiting as passengers begin disembarking from the train through the doors on the opposite side. But the instant the doors open on his side, he shoves his way to the front of the crowd, rushes into the car, and immediately exits onto the platform on the other side. Without slowing, he races to catch up to the departing passengers and disappears into their midst. It is a desperate act, but the only chance he sees to escape.
Halfway up the stairs leading to the street, he turns down a connecting corridor, runs at full speed to the next set of stairs, and continues up. A small deviation from the shortest route, but it might help throw off his pursuers, and he doesn’t have time to think up anything more creative.
He is filled with rage and despair.
This is all so stupid! Why is this happening to me?
He emerges from the tunnel exit onto the sidewalk, frantic and disoriented, sweating hard. He races to the curb and is almost squashed by a robo-taxi dropping into the landing zone right in front of him to disgorge its passenger. Without a thought for his earlier vow, he jumps into the rear seat as soon as its former occupant departs.
Please fasten your—
“Red Zone!” he shouts, overriding the mechanical admonition. “Take me to Street Freaks!”
—restraining straps. The voice ignores him. A maddening pause. Destination, please.
“Red Zone! Red Zone! I already said!”
Red Zone is a prohibited destination for this vehicle. Choose another destination, please.
Prohibited. Ash glances out the window, scans the streets, the substem exits, the faces passing by. “The perimeter of the Red Zone, then!”
Red Zone perimeter recorded and entered. Thank you for your cooperation.
“No, wait!” he screams. “Get me close to Street Freaks! Can you take me close to . . .?”
But the robo-taxi is already lifting away into public transportation airspace, revving up its engines. Then they rocket away into the overhead traffic, just another robo-taxi joining the swarm, all of them looking the same.
Ash leans back and closes his eyes. At least he has escaped Achilles Pod—for the moment, although they’ll discover quickly enough where he has gone. But the Red Zone is a big district, and he will be a needle in a haystack with any luck. All he has to do is find Street Freaks. He still doesn’t know what it is, but he assumes it is some sort of business, though he can’t imagine what sort. He doesn’t know if his father will be waiting for him or what to do if he isn’t, but he can’t worry about that now. Maybe he will be able to find out what’s happening from someone who works there if his father fails to show. Maybe someone will let him use a non-embedded vidview so he can call his father without being traced.
Maybe, maybe, maybe. It makes him want to scream.
The robo-taxi ride is traumatic, stomach lurching, and seemingly endless. But finally the driver descends to street level, demands payment, rel
eases the restraining straps, and boots Ash out. He watches as the taxi lifts away, grateful to be back on solid ground.
Then he turns around and is not quite so happy.
He is standing at the edge of what looks like Armageddon. Blocks of buildings that are either already collapsed or seemingly on the verge stretch away into the distance. Some are burned out, some merely missing pieces of walls and roofs, some lacking doors and windows. All of them look derelict. The dull, paint-faded surfaces stand in sharp contrast to clusters of brightly colored wildflowers that grow in tiny patches along sidewalks that are cracked and buckled.
No one is in sight. All of the buildings appear to be abandoned. The streets are empty. A dog wanders into view, gives Ash a cursory look, and passes on. He waits a bit to see if any people will appear. None do. He wonders where he is supposed to go from here. But he already knows the answer. Ordinarily, he would use the map function on his vidview. But his vidview might be compromised, so that’s out. Vidviews are supposed to provide help if you are in trouble, but somehow he doesn’t think it will work that way here.
He wishes momentarily that he had a mask to protect himself against the L.A. air. He takes a deep breath, testing for taste and smell, and there is a little of each, but neither is intense enough to cause him to cough or gag. Maybe it will be all right.
So he begins walking into the Zone, searching for a street sign. If he can find one, maybe he can use that fabulous memory of his to figure out where he is. He remembers a little of how the Zone is laid out, a geometrical grid-work of streets forming even-sided blocks. But when he looks at the devastation around him, he despairs. These derelict buildings can’t be all there is. There are businesses in the Red Zone. There are people living here. Somewhere.
But he also knows what sorts of businesses and people occupy the Red Zone, and he knows that if you don’t have a firm idea of where to go and how to get there, this isn’t a good place to be wandering about. Even the L.A. Preventatives stay out of the Zone as much as possible. Even members of Achilles Pod probably think twice.
Or maybe this is where they come from.
Once again he wonders what on earth his father was thinking when he decided to send him here. Of all the places he shouldn’t have sent him, the Red Zone should be at the top of the list.
And what the heck is Street Freaks?
He walks for a long time. He pushes on through acres of devastation with rats scurrying in and out of weed patches before things start to change. The collapsed buildings and abandoned warehouses give way to clusters of residences evidencing better upkeep with fences and yards. Aged and worn, they are nevertheless inhabited. He passes a playground that has been stripped of everything that isn’t made of iron and set in concrete. He hears the voices of children playing. Two little girls frolic on the sidewalk. They move out of his way quickly and watch him carefully until he is well past them before resuming whatever game they were playing.
The quality of the air remains unchanged, and he continues to breathe it without difficulty. It makes him wonder about all the warnings, although not every danger to your health is visible.
Ash sees no robo-taxis, so he guesses the prohibition against their entry into the Zone is real. He sees men and women sitting on porches and in lawn chairs, staring out at the world while drinking beer and smoking. A few of them acknowledge his presence with a nod. Most ignore him. No one speaks. No one wears a breathing mask. Faces appear at the windows of some of the houses before disappearing again. The midday sun beats down, and the heat rises off concrete streets badly eroded and weed-cracked.
His attention is drawn to the vehicles parked in the driveways and against the curbs of the houses he is passing. They are replicas of machines from a much earlier time, cars that were actually driven on streets, cars with rubber tires and no crash-protective devices. Some are behemoths—what they once called muscle cars—with rear tires larger than the front ones, the chassis raked steeply forward and the canopy cut down low and tight to limit the amount of exposed glass and wind resistance. Some are small and compact, scrunched down and closed in. Their bodies are wide and low slung, and they have a tight turning radius and spoilers arched across nonexistent trunks. Many are dented and scratched, their paint jobs worn and their heavy use evident. Some are pristine and alarmed in ways that suggest you should keep your distance. All are tricked out with wicked paint jobs and speed enhancements. Almost every house has one.
It is an odd sight. In the Red Zone, most people ride the streets the way they used to before the U.T. was formed. Not along elevated sky lanes but on pavement. Ash smiles, thinking of what it must feel like to travel on streets that could tear the underpinnings from a vehicle if you hit a rut or struck an obstacle. It explains why most of these vehicles have been installed with various forms of lifts to keep them sitting up higher than usual. Not all are like that, though; some hunker so close to the ground it is as if they do so in deliberate defiance of the damage risk.
And these vehicles use drivers—real people, not bots or operating systems. When you climb into one of these cars, your fate is in your own hands and not in the hands of a robotics engineer you will never meet. You are master of the vehicle, and the choices made are yours.
He is reminded of his time in Africa, when he had access to old vehicles like these and could race them across the plains at ridiculous speeds, ignoring the danger, heady and exhilarated by the speed and the power. His parents never knew about any of this. If they had, they would have shut him down in a minute.
Losing patience with his apparent lack of progress, Ash approaches an old man sitting on the steps of his porch. The oldster is grizzled and sour-faced and drinks an unknown liquid from a large plastic container.
“Can you tell me where to find Street Freaks?” Ash asks.
The old man turns his head to one side and spits. He is chewing something rigorously. “You’re not one of them ’tweeners, are you?”
Ash hesitates, having no idea what he is talking about. “No. I just have to meet someone.”
“At Street Freaks? Bad choice for a meeting place, boy. Your funeral, though, not mine.” He nods his head left. “Six, seven blocks to the intersection with the building that says ‘Heads & Tails’ on it. You can’t miss it. Then you go left about a mile. You’ll see it, though you’d be better off if you didn’t.”
Ash is unsettled by the old man’s words. He thinks momentarily about asking what exactly he is being warned against but decides it doesn’t matter. He is going there regardless.
He continues walking toward a range of mountains that he knows lies some fifty miles farther east. Eventually he passes beyond residential territory and enters a district of strip malls and specialty shops. When he reaches Heads & Tails, an establishment that offers up garish neon silhouettes of women in seductive poses, he turns left down a street that seems light-years away from the ones he has just traveled.
Like all the other streets, it carries no identifying sign. But he is pretty sure that those who live in the Zone know this one. It is broad and flat without a single crack, indentation, or other irregularity to mar its smooth surface. The composite is matte black and heavily layered and ends in a smooth curve along its edges. Ash follows the walkway paralleling its length, intrigued. He can think of only one purpose for a street like this.
Street racing.
Not in vehicles like the ones he’s been seeing parked in driveways and along curbs since entering the Red Zone, but high-tech machines designed and built specifically for preformed tracks, machines costing hundreds of thousands of credits and driven by drivers whose skills are extraordinary and sanity questionable. Some are even said to be bots.
He has watched dozens of officially sanctioned races on the entertainment vids, and the street he is walking down is an exact duplicate of the racetracks these vids. But those racetracks are dedicated to the sport and set far out in the countryside. Why would this street—if it were a racetrack—be situated here, in
the heart of a Red Zone business district?
He walks on. Vehicles roll down the sculpted surface of the street and occasional walkers pass him by, but overall traffic is light. He passes strip malls, specialty shops, distribution centers, and personal service offices, all of them enclosed by chain-link fencing topped with concertina wire, gated against uninvited entry. At each gate, there is a call box where customers can announce their business and either be admitted or turned away. While there are no cameras anywhere on the street—a condition you would never find in the rest of L.A.—hundreds top the buildings and entries that line it, all of them focused on the businesses they protect. Some of those businesses provide additional incentives for staying out if you are not expected. Some are memorably persuasive.
PREMISES ARE MINED.
UNWARRANTED ENTRY WILL DETONATE.
VALUE YOUR LEGS?
BETTER USE THEM TO WALK AWAY.
BEWARE OF ROBO-DOGS.
LOTS OF TEETH.
WEREN’T INVITED? THEN KEEP OUT!
Ash is slightly unnerved by the fact that while the buildings and grounds inside the fences are protected, anything outside apparently is not. It doesn’t seem like a very friendly neighborhood.
He has traveled a little more than half the distance to his destination when he hears the roar of a vehicle coming up from behind him, engine howling like a crazed banshee, sound system blaring out the latest metalhead music. He keeps walking without looking around, hoping that whatever is back there will just keep going. But his luck hasn’t been very good so far, and it doesn’t get any better now.
The front end of a brutish vehicle draws even, engine racing, the music a wall of sound that threatens to flatten him.
“Hey, pissant!” a voice growls over the competing sounds. “Hey, you little piece of dog shit! Look at me!”
Ash stops and turns. When he sees who is doing the talking, he wishes he had just kept going.