The Long Run

by The Long Run (new ed) (mobi)

  He raised his head slowly--just his head, no other part of his body, not letting go of his grip on the girder--and looked through the maze of structural plastisteel, into the center of the spacescraper. At its base the spacescraper covered two square blocks, but it tapered as it got higher. The car had crashed twenty meters in; the center of the spacescraper could not be more than about thirty meters away.

  Ignoring the pain in his knee, Trent began crawling.

  Behind him he could hear something, he was not sure what; he kept crawling, did not look back. Through the infrastructure of the beams, a large open space began to appear. Before he reached it, the beam he was on intersected another beam that was nearly a full meter wide, with a line of dead glowpaint running down the girder's center; Trent crawled onto what was obviously intended as a walkway, and with incredible slowness brought himself to his feet. He walked down the center of the beam, ignoring by sheer force of will the rasping pain in his knee, freezing motionless with every gust of wind, toward the place where the maglev platform had to be.

  At the center of the spacescraper was a gaping shaft, a square thirty meters on a side. The walkway Trent was on ran around the edge of the shaft; looking down, Trent could see the maglev platform itself, nine floors beneath him. It was only nine floors, not three kilometers, and still it was high enough that something inside him locked up for a moment at the sight.

  He looked up again and Emile Garon was standing on the other side of the maglev shaft. The shock was so great Trent swayed and nearly fell, grabbed at the nearest girder and held tightly to it.

  Garon was actually grinning at Trent, face creased in a position that was unnatural for a Peaceforcer Elite. His voice carried across the distance. "You are the most amazing person I have ever met."

  The controls to the maglev were not ten meters away from Trent, on Trent's side of the shaft; Garon would have to come all the way around the shaft to reach them. Trent moved as quickly as he was able toward the controls, not looking down. He reached the controls and touched the pressure point marked UP.

  The maglev platform, nine stories beneath them, began moving up. When it reached Trent's level, Emile Garon would simply walk across the platform and take him.

  Trent touched the pressure point marked STOP. The maglev ceased moving instantly.

  Garon stood, watching Trent.

  There was no way the maglev was going to work … but Garon had been alone in his vehicle.

  Garon called, "Will you see us both killed? M. Trent, this is pointless. Will you not surrender now?"

  Surely the maglev had not been the only way to get from one floor to another? Trent looked around slowly, at the abandoned jungle of girders and walkways. For the first time he looked at the vertical that he was holding onto; there were ridges cut in the surface of the plastisteel. Trent dug his fingertips into one; shallow, not really intended to be climbed by hand, but serviceable.

  Trent yelled back at Garon, "Yes!" and muttered under his breath, "Yes, I won't, frog." He reached up as high as he could, dug his fingertips in, and pulled himself up. Left foot into one ridge, right foot hanging free, and with two hands and one leg began climbing.

  Garon simply stared at Trent as Trent climbed, and then the red laser flicked out from Garon's clenched fist, touched plastisteel only centimeters from Trent's hand. The pain struck Trent after a moment had passed, flowered slowly at the edges of his awareness. Trent moved around as quickly as he was able to the other side of the girder, so that the bulk of the vertical was between himself and Garon, and kept climbing. The laser flicked past both sides of the girder without touching Trent, and then stopped. Trent spent no time worrying about why the cyborg had quit shooting at him; two meters left, and then one, and he pulled himself back up onto the level he had originally crashed on. He took a moment, looked down and saw Garon attempting the same climb on a different girder; he was barely a quarter of the way up, moving with a degree of caution that brought his words back to Trent forcibly: "We do not fall well and we do not like heights."

  To the west Trent could see the twisted tunnel of snapped girders and beams where the MetalSmith had crashed. Garon's AeroSmith had been brought down to a truly precarious landing just inside that corridor, not five meters from the edge, front and rear of the vehicle balanced on a pair of girders that the MetalSmith had damaged, stretched, on its way in. The AeroSmith wobbled slightly in the wind. Trent stood for a moment motionless, simply looking at the AeroSmith in complete disbelief. Garon had gotten out of his vehicle, with the vehicle swaying in the wind like that, to make an arrest?

  Garon, thought Trent clearly, slightly amazed that it had taken him so long to realize something that was, after all, quite obvious, is crazy. Swaying slightly with simple exhaustion, Trent glanced down again; Garon was only halfway done with the climb. Two hundred kilos moving upward on his fingers and toes; it was something the Elite's designers had clearly never anticipated. "Goddamn fanatics," said Trent to the wind, moving again toward the AeroSmith, "I hate fanatics."

  He advanced along the beam slowly, distantly aware of how close he was to the limits of his endurance, not looking back. The area around the MetalSmith was a treacherous mess; Trent skirted it carefully, moving parallel to the corridor where the MetalSmith had torn its way into the spacescraper. He passed the MetalSmith without looking at it; even if it was still functional, he needed something that could reach the ground at least as fast as the vehicles of the Peaceforcers who were swarming outside around the perimeter of the spacescraper. He could see them now, twenty or thirty AeroSmiths in the black and silver of the United Nation's Peace Keeping Force, making slow circuits of the spacescraper.

  He was on the correct side of the corridor, the north side, where Garon had left his vehicle. Looking back, Trent could see Garon himself; he had come up on the wrong side of the wrecked passageway and was following Trent, gaining on him, behind Trent and fifteen meters to his left, without seeming to realize that there was no way for him to cross that empty space.

  The AeroSmith was only fifteen meters past Trent's car; it took Trent nearly half a minute to traverse the distance. His right leg had turned into a single shriek of pain; the muscles in his thigh were cramping, seizing up and relaxing again without any particular pattern. In his mind he had planned how things would go: get into the AeroSmith, pull the machine back out into the empty air, and let it fall. Garon would be left on the spacescraper; with luck none of the Peaceforcers in their AeroSmiths would be foolish enough to follow him as his stolen vehicle plummeted toward the ground.

  He had reached Garon's AeroSmith. The car rested on a diagonal slant, in touch with the girders supporting it at only two points. Garon had turned the fans off; stupid. They would have helped stabilize the thing. Garon came even with him at that moment, standing on the other side of the divide, arm extended and rigid, the glowing cherry laser in his fist pointed directly at Trent. He spoke in a dead voice. "If you move, monsieur, I will kill you."

  From somewhere Trent found the strength to reply. "We're three klicks up, Emile. Did you lock the car behind you?" Trent did not wait for a reply; without moving anything but his hand he laid his palm flat against the pressure pad that opened the canopy, and the canopy swung up.

  Garon fired. The canopy swung smoothly up, directly into the beam, and darkened instantly as it went about distributing the heat from the laser away from the point of contact. Trent stood for a moment, looking at the motionless form of the cyborg through the smoky gray canopy, and with what was nearly his last strength called, "Emile? I'm leaving now. Good-bye."

  The laser ceased.

  Through the clearing canopy, Trent saw Garon's fist drop to his side, and then Emile Garon screamed. The sound was pure and wordless, an expression of elemental rage.

  And the cyborg leaped.

  Ten meters across a gaping chasm. The moment was imprinted in Trent's memory for the rest of his life, with an unreal perfection of clarity and detail. He had time to watch t
he dark gray streaks fading from the canopy, time to watch Garon as he seemed to float across the chasm, above the drop of three kilometers, to come down solidly upon the surface of the AeroSmith. He had time to watch the flat rictus of rage on Garon's features flicker slightly, as the AeroSmith tipped, slid, and fell a single story with Garon's fingers tearing into the vehicle's surface, ripping metal in a desperate attempt to gain a hold. The AeroSmith dropped, nose-down, and came to a shuddering, screaming stop against one of the large verticals, the vehicle's engine smashing down into the passenger compartment.

  Garon's fall never even slowed. He struck the same vertical as the AeroSmith and bounced off, a vaguely surprised look seemingly frozen on his features, bounced off still reaching for some hold, out into the empty air and the long drop to the distant Earth.

  There was not much Trent remembered after that. Later he could not recall how he had gotten back to the maglev, nor the trip down to the top of the finished construction. He remembered somewhat more clearly the moment when the maglev slowed, descended into complete darkness, and then stopped.

  He stood in the blackness for perhaps five seconds, and then the glowpaint flickered and came on automatically. He was on a single floor with no dividing walls, nothing but huge columns that enclosed the large vertical beams. Arrayed against the far walls there were upward of two hundred bounce tubes, about fifty per wall; near the east wall was a series of small maglev platforms. To all sides of Trent were maglev platforms every bit as large as the one he stood upon; the maglev platform he had descended upon was merely the center platform in a square of nine such.

  He went down in the high-speed bounce tubes. There were two chairs in the bounce tube. Trent sat down, strapped himself in, said calmly, "Command, first floor."

  The bounce tube dropped.

  Three kilometers; four minutes, dropping at forty-five kph.

  Twenty seconds into the drop, Johnny Johnny said quietly, "Boss?"

  "Yes?"

  "Is it safe to talk?"

  "Yes."

  "We're in the Hoffman Spacescraper. I've got Net access through radio packets in the bounce tube. Is there anything I should do?"

  "Are the packets being polled for users?"

  "Checking ... no, Boss. I'd have to crack the Boards running the security inside the spacescraper to be sure, but I don't think so; latency is very low."

  Trent said softly, "Call Jodi Jodi at the Red Line. Have her send me a cab."

  Johnny Johnny stopped the bounce tube down on B3, three floors below the lobby. The door to the bounce tube opened on a long hallway lined with trash bins. Two janitors were playing chess not far from where Trent moved, like an old man, from the bounce tube. They stared at him but said nothing and made no attempt to stop Trent as he walked by them. The doors at the end of the hallway would not open to his palmprint, but there was an optical interface for his handheld beneath the pressure pad; Trent jacked in and let Johnny Johnny talk to the door.

  Five seconds, six; the doors parted for him. The doors opened out onto a street Trent did not recognize. He joined the flow of pedestrians and walked without hurry, without limping, across the street. The sign on the corner told him he was at the corner of Bedford and Broadway; he looked around aimlessly at the endless stream of cars through the streets.

  Two blocks down there was a knot in the traffic, five Peaceforcer patrol vehicles surrounding some disturbance.

  Emile, thought Trent.

  The Peugeot hovercab pulled up immediately in front of him as a Peaceforcer AeroSmith rounded the corner and began its sweep down Bedford; the rear door of the cab opened outward and Denice snapped, "Get in!"

  He did his best to comply; he collapsed forward.

  The same doctor who'd done Jimmy Ramirez cared for Trent. Trent remembered her vaguely when he awoke later that afternoon, remembered with equal vagueness Jimmy and Bird and Jodi Jodi and Denice wandering in and out of his room.

  He awoke clear-headed, near nightfall, to find himself alone. He turned on the terminal next to the bed and ordered coffee from room service, then got up and went into the bathroom; his knee was numb, not shaky but completely without feeling. He used the same shower he had that morning, but at greater length, standing under the hot water until his muscles were relaxed. He got out finally, brushed his teeth, and went back into the bedroom. There was coffee and toast next to his bed, with a note from Jodi Jodi that he was to stay in bed until Denice came for him. Trent checked next door; Jimmy was gone.

  Trent went back to bed, and only then noticed that his handheld was jacked into the terminal. "Johnny?"

  Johnny Johnny's voice was curiously subdued. "Yes, Boss?"

  "How you doing?"

  "Pretty good. Thanks for coming to get me, Boss. The web angels were after me, and I think at least one Player, and I was scared, so I hid and didn't answer the phone. I'm sorry you got hurt."

  "I feel pretty good, Johnny. I wasn't hurt real bad."

  "What do we do now, Boss?"

  Trent was silent for a moment, lying in bed and staring up at the ceiling. "I think we run away, Johnny. I think we run as far away as we can get."

  In that same subdued tone of voice Johnny Johnny said simply, "Okay, Boss."

  "Johnny?"

  "Yeah?"

  "You did good, Johnny. I'm not mad at you."

  "You're not? Not even because I hid?"

  "You did just fine."

  "Oh." Johnny Johnny was silent for a moment. "Thanks, Boss."

  Trent was silent after that, and Johnny Johnny as well. He was still lying awake in bed when the door to the bedroom opened, and Denice came to join him. She took off her blouse as she came into the bedroom, and stood at the foot of the bed as she undressed. "I really hate saying good-bye to people, Trent. I'm not good at it."

  "I'm sorry."

  She shrugged, pulling off the danskin underneath the blouse. "It's not your fault." Her skirt dropped to the floor, followed by her shoes and panties. "Doctor Jane said you were okay except to not put any weight on your knee; it's being held together with glue and rubber bands."

  "You went to practice today?"

  She stood completely nude at the foot of the bed. "It seemed less suspicious. Four hours, from two to six. We had you back by then, and Johnny Johnny said there were no Peaceforcer dispatches in the InfoNet about me that he could find."

  "So you're safe."

  Denice got into bed with him, pulled the covers back and snuggled up against him. "It looks like." She whispered to him. I talked to Johnny Johnny earlier today, while you were being operated on.

  Yes?

  He's a real person. He hurts about things.

  I know.

  You were right to go get him.

  I know. Trent said quietly, "Johnny?"

  "Yes?"

  "Shut yourself off for a while."

  "Okay, Boss."

  Through the windows of their thirty-second floor room at the Red Line Hotel, Denice watched the Peaceforcers hunt for Trent. Thousands of PKF AeroSmiths flew through the sky above the city; tens of thousands of spyeyes. In the distance the AeroSmiths and spyeyes merged into a dancing swarm of scarlet fireflies, highlighted by the bright white pinpricks of their searchlights.

  As the night wore on, it grew colder outside, and moisture condensed at the window, smearing the bright sharp lights into a sort of beauty.

  They were both genies, the products of the late Suzanne Montignet's brilliance in genetic engineering; but even between them the differences outweighed the similarities. For Denice the scene outside was suffused with the deep glow of infrared light from the Peaceforcer night scopes; but not for Trent. As the night grew colder moisture condensed at the window, smearing the bright sharp lights together with the dim glow of the infrared.

  She stirred, felt Trent's arms tighten around her. "When will you go?"

  Trent answered very quietly; a human would probably not have heard him. "Soon. Not yet."

  "And where?"
/>   "I don't know yet."

  Her thoughts were slow, sluggish, in the moments before sleep. "Okay."

  "They need to follow me," Trent said distantly. "They need to be drawn away from you, and if they're looking for me they're not looking for you. If I die it's just me. If you die--then they've won. David's probably dead, Denice. If you die, there's nothing left of what they were, and Amnier, Eddore, Vance, all of them, they've won at last." He stirred restlessly, sat up against the bed's headboard. Denice curled up against him, left her head resting in his lap, staring up in the darkness toward the ceiling, seeing only an emptiness so deep there was no end to it.

  "Where, Trent?"

  "Free Luna, I think," he said finally, "or else Mars, or the Belt CityStates. Somewhere outside Peaceforcer control. They won't stop looking for me on Earth. I don't think they'll ever stop looking for me now."

  She felt a distant twinge of pain, suppressed it almost without noticing. This is going to hurt; let it hurt later. When he's gone. "I think you're right," she said at last. "I'm so sorry, but I think you are. I wish we hadn't rescued you."

  "It's okay. Make me a promise, Denice?"

  "Done."

  "Don't you want to know what it is?"

  Jimmy. "I do know."

  "Oh." After a moment he nodded. "All right. But don't let him know you're watching out for him. He wouldn't like that."

  "I know. You're sure Bird will be okay with Jodi Jodi?"

  "They did fine together, in the middle of the Fringe, before I met them. They'll do fine in the Patrol Sectors when I'm gone."

  Denice inhaled slowly, brought the oxygen deep inside. It was one of the few things her father had had time to teach her before he died; the breathing exercises that brought relaxation, peace. "Be careful," she whispered into the darkness. "You're all I have left now."

  In the moments before sleep took her, she found herself with him, among his thoughts, in with the never-ending flicker of imagery that was the internal universe of the man the world would come to know as Trent the Uncatchable.

  He was a wounded person, damaged early and badly by the world around him.