by M. D. Cooper
A woman’s groan came, and Flaherty knelt down, putting his knee on what he believed to be her stomach.
“Shut off your stealth tech, or I’ll just kill you,” he whispered.
“OK,” the invisible figure wheezed.
The woman’s body shimmered into view, as did a large caliber sniper rifle.
“Smart rounds?” he asked, and the woman nodded.
“No opportunity to surrender, eh? Just blow the car when we get in.”
“Orders,” she wheezed.
“How many are there?” Flaherty asked.
The woman didn’t reply, and her face was covered by her mask. He pulled it off and leant close to her face. “Numbers.”
“Six.”
Flaherty shook his head, then grabbed her hair and slammed her head into the rock. Not hard enough to kill, but enough to make her rethink her life choices.
He grabbed the sniper rifle and set off down the hillside.
Flaherty reached the car a half-minute later to find Mary waiting at the right-side door. He gestured for her to get in as he pulled open his door and placed the sniper rifle in the back.
“That’s some serious hardware,” Mary said as they settled into their seats.
“Enough to blow the car,” Flaherty replied as he activated the vehicle and took off. No point in waiting around to see if the woman had not been lying about more enemies lying in wait.
He set the car to drive on a pre-programmed route down the hill while he ran the scan suite, checking for any further hostiles. Luckily, nothing showed up other than residents in their homes, and the regular traffic on the hill.
Then Mary grabbed his arm. “Two gunships approaching, seven kilometers out. They’re staying low, only a dozen meters above the ground.”
OK, regular stuff…and gunships.
He tapped the drone feeds she was watching and spotted the enemies. “Good work. Keep an eye out for others.”
There was no reason to believe that the gunships had seen them yet, but there was also no reason to believe that those were the only enemies approaching.
Though a pair of heavily armed gunships approaching would terrify most people, it was comforting to Flaherty. Not-Sera was using conventional means against him, which meant he was less likely to encounter a gunship around the next corner on the road.
OK…still could be a gunship around the corner, but it’s a bit less likely.
Flaherty took over manual control of the car and pushed the throttle forward. He activated the car’s EM dampening, which would make it even harder for the approaching attack craft to spot them.
“You should go for Tunnel 72,” Mary suggested.
Flaherty grunted in acknowledgement; Tunnel 72 was on his list of possible egress routes.
Consisting of one hundred and ten lanes of horizontal traffic, and thirty of vertical, the tunnel was tucked half a kilometer beneath the surface of the ring. At this time of day, it would be packed, the volume of vehicles creating a near-perfect hiding place—both physically and electromagnetically.
The problem with Tunnel 72 was that it had traffic shunting systems that could move vehicles to other routes, or just stop them altogether, creating an impassible three-dimensional gridlock.
“Seriously, Dad. Tunnel 72 is our best bet. I know what you’re thinking, but they can lock down the other routes faster, and we can’t drive around on the ring’s surface with gunships hunting us.”
“OK,” he nodded, and turned the car off the surface road at the first entrance to the subterranean tunnel system.
Several other cars were ahead of them on the descent-ramp, and he swerved into the oncoming lane to pass the vehicles.
“Dad…that’s a hauler coming our way!” Mary braced herself as a large, boxy vehicle rounded the bend, heading straight for them.
Flaherty only grunted as he pushed the accelerator all the way forward and sped past the remaining slow-moving cars, swerving back into their lane a scant few meters before hitting the hauler.
“Piece of cake,” he said, looking for the exit to drop further down into the ring.
“Next right,” Mary said, her breath coming quickly as she shot him a dark look.
At the exit, there was a long, sloping road to bring cars down to Tunnel 72. The road wrapped around a large vertical shaft through which a-grav transports flitted.
Flaherty tapped into the traffic network, looking at the patterns in the shaft for a moment before twisting the controls sharply and boosting the car’s a-grav systems.
They surged into the air and flew over the decorative rocks and shrubbery at the edge of the road, slotting into a clear pocket in the shaft traffic.
Mary sucked in a breath, but didn’t say anything as Flaherty pointed the nose of the car down and killed its vertical a-grav lift. They dropped like a rock, and he worked the lateral a-grav emitters to weave in and out of the transports while the ring’s motion force tried to send them into the anti-spinward wall of the shaft.
“I don’t know why they made these shafts straight…they should have angled them,” Mary muttered as Flaherty wove around the other shaft traffic.
He didn’t respond, concentrating on lining up to drop into the top layer of traffic in Tunnel 72—which he managed to pull off with only a light bump against a hauler.
“Just be glad they didn’t enforce maglev as strictly here,” he said while trying to keep his breathing even, pushing the car toward its max speed of three hundred meters per second.
“Yeah…well…starting to wish they did!” Mary said through clenched teeth as Flaherty squeezed the car between the top level of traffic and the roof of the tunnel.
“We’ll drop down into lower traffic in a minute,” Flaherty grunted as he swerved around vehicles entering from a shaft above. “We’re close to the rendezvous. Grab the glide packs from the back.”
He watched out of the corner of his eye as Mary turned and grabbed the two packs.
“Shit, I think I saw two drones drop in back there!” Mary called out.
“I disabled the biolock on the sniper rifle. Take them out!” Flaherty ordered.
“What? Dad! I’ve never fired anything like this!”
Flaherty swerved around a large hauler that consumed two lanes, and rotated the car onto its side to squeeze between it and another truck. He heard Mary fall sideways onto the side of the car, and then back onto her seat as he leveled out again.
“It’s a smart gun. It’ll guide you. Activate it, find your target, fire.”
“Just keep us level, for light’s sake,” Mary muttered.
Flaherty did his best, though the ride was still far from smooth.
“Ok…” Flaherty heard is daughter whisper as she crouched on her seat, the gun’s bipod resting on the back dash. He quickly rolled his window down, creating an outlet for the pressure wave the weapon would create inside the vehicle, not to mention the sound.
“Watch the re—” he began to say as Mary fired.
The gun threw her back against the dashboard, and she cried out in pain as her head cracked against the windscreen.
“—coil.”
His right ear rang so loudly he could barely hear Mary as she yelled at him.
“Fuck! Thanks for the timely warning, Dad.”
“Did you get it?” Flaherty hollered back over the sounds of the traffic and their impaired hearing—though that was rapidly clearing up for him. She may be hearing bells for some time.
Mary struggled forward once more and looked out the back window. “Shit, yeah…blew it to smithereens. I hope no one got hurt.”
“Mostly automated transports up here,” Flaherty replied. “Where’s the other one?”
He could see Mary peering around, swinging the rifle side-to-side as she used its holosights to sear
ch for the other drone.
“Shit! Duck!”
Flaherty dropped his head as shots hit the car, some bouncing off, some going clear through.
He didn’t have time to check himself over as Mary swung the rifle around while calling out, “Stay down!”
Flaherty acquiesced, staying hunched forward, and felt the barrel of the gun resting on his back. It wasn’t too hot yet, but if she fired more than a few—
A trio of rounds burst from the barrel and his right ear seemed to shut down entirely. He did see an explosion outside the car, and Mary sat back in her seat, lifting the hot barrel off his back.
He saw her lips move, but couldn’t hear a word she was saying—she probably couldn’t, either.
He saw her nod silently, her face a mixture of fear and excitement.
Flaherty didn’t blame her. Firing a weapon like that rifle was a rush when you weren’t doing it inside a vehicle moving at three hundred meters per second.
She managed to get the rifle tucked down between them, and then reached into the back for the glide packs.
Flaherty nodded.
Lane by lane and level by level, he worked his way down through Tunnel 72’s traffic. The car had racked up over seventy fines, but the vehicle’s remote kill-system was disabled, and the car wasn’t connected to Flaherty in any way.
More drones had been deployed—or, he expected they had—but so far none were visible around them. That was the difficulty for law enforcement. They couldn’t put everyone at risk to catch one speeding car—even if it was firing on drones.
Flaherty, on the other hand, had no compunctions about scaring the crap out of other drivers if it meant saving his daughter.
When he reached the second to lowest level of traffic—the bottom consisting of maglevs and bulk haulers without a-grav—he slowed to match the flow of traffic and set the car back to autopilot.
Mary handed him the second glide pack, and he slid his arms through the loops, pulling it snug to his chest.
“I can finally hear again…mostly,” she said with a nervous smile.
“Good. On three, then,” he said. “One, two, three!”
They kicked their doors open and jumped out of the car, gliding alongside the vehicle for a moment before Flaherty signaled Mary to follow him.
He tucked into the left-hand side of the tunnel as the car sped off once more, pulling back up into the main flow of traffic. Flaherty turned his attention to the task at hand, searching for the maintenance shaft showed by the ring’s schematics overlaid on his HUD.
Flaherty replied as he spotted the narrow maintenance shaft and turned into it.
Flaherty glanced back at his daughter to see her lips drawn in a thin line. She didn’t speak further, and he didn’t offer any more information.
There would be plenty of time for her to lay into him when they got on the ship.
SHIP OUT
STELLAR DATE: 03.29.8948 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Ring Service Tunnel 183.AA91.CC2
REGION: Airtha, Huygens System, Transcend Interstellar Alliance
Mary set down on the platform beside her father and pulled off the glide pack while looking out over the tunnel they’d stopped in.
It angled down at just over twenty degrees, was dimly lit, and probably would eventually dump right out of the ring into space.
“Your pack,” Flaherty said, holding out his hand.
Mary handed hers over, and he grunted in acknowledgement. She watched as he linked the two glide packs together and programmed a flight path into them.
Then her father gave a single nod of satisfaction and tossed the glide packs back into the shaft, where they sped off.
“Should buy us a bit more time,” he said before turning to the door leading off the platform.
“Any word from Leeroy?” Mary knew not to Link to the networks, but she hoped that her father had managed some way to spoof his connection, so he could keep tabs on things.
“No,” Flaherty replied as he placed his lockhak over the access panel and took a step back. “I don’t want to risk contact. If there was a problem, Leeroy would let me know.”
“What if the problem is that he’s dead?” Mary asked, working to keep back the panic that had been at the edge of her mind since her father whisked her away. A panic that was somehow exacerbated by the adrenaline rush from firing the sniper rifle.
“Mary,” her father turned and placed his hands on her shoulders. “Not-Sera wants Drew as leverage over me. If she had him, she’d use him for that. They won’t kill him.”
“There are still a lot—” Mary stopped talking. She didn’t want to think of the things that could happen to her son.
“Drew’s a smart kid, Mary. Hell, he’s not even a kid anymore. He’s twenty-five years old.”
Mary bit her lip as she stared into her father’s serious, entirely unperturbable eyes. That was the best, and worst, thing about him—no matter what happened, he never lost his cool.
For a second, she wanted to slap him, get him to react to the danger they were in—that he’d placed them in. But instead, she took a step forward and wrapped her arms around his broad chest.
“You don’t let anything happen to him,” she whispered. “He’s the most important thing in the universe to me.”
Her father’s thick arms settled around her. “I won’t. Not to either of you. I feel the same way about you that you feel about him. You’re both precious to me.”
Mary saw the light on the lockhak change color. “Door’s open.”
Flaherty nodded but didn’t step away for another moment.
How is it that he can be such a fantastic dad while being a terrible father? Or is it the other way around?
He kissed her head and then turned to the door, sliding it open with one hand while detaching the lockhak with the other.
“C’mon. It’s not too much further.”
Mary picked up her pack and stepped into the passageway while her father pulled the door shut behind them.
“Turn right, then left, then left, then pass seven intersections, right, left, two intersections, right,” he said softly as he took the lead, moving in his strident, yet cautious way. “Repeat it back.”
Mary sighed. Of course she could repeat it. With her mental mods, her short-term memory was perfect. “Right, left, left, seven intersections, right, left, two intersections, right.”
“Wrong,” Flaherty said. “You would have turned right at the seventh intersection. Pass seven, then right. I shouldn’t need to remind you about our nomenclature.”
She couldn’t resist an eyeroll. “You don’t. I knew what you meant.”
“Good.”
Though her father’s directions made it seem as though the journey would be quick, the intersections in the narrow tunnels were widely separated. Twenty minutes had gone by, and they’d just passed the seventh intersection before the second-to-last right turn, when her father stopped and held up his hand.
Mary pulled up behind him and waited for his go-ahead. He had already halted several times, but he seemed more tensed this time.
She daren’t speak, and without a narrow-band Link connection, it was too risky to attempt a direct connect to h
er father to ask what he’d heard—her ears were still ringing, but she knew that with his mods, he’d be fine by now.
Then his hand touched her shoulder, and she almost cried out, but somehow managed to hold back the sound as he gestured for her to crouch behind a support column fixed to the passage’s wall.
With a short nod, she did as he instructed, carefully setting her bag down and drawing her pulse pistol. She knew his desire was to keep her out of combat—but he also expected her to fight if necessary.
She peeked around the column and watched her father creep down the passage, completely silent—at least to her ears.
Mary suspected that her father would have some nano probes deployed, but not many. He always said that relying too heavily on artificial eyes made you doubt the ones in your head.
She sat back, keeping an eye out toward the direction they’d come, wondering what her father heard.
Stars, the only thing I can hear—aside from this ringing—is my thundering heart, Mary chided herself.
Her head back, she breathed out slowly, then held her breath a moment before drawing air in through her nose. She repeated the process, slowing her heart rate, the actions triggering her lungs to open up and draw in additional oxygen.
There, getting to A-State.
That was the name her father had given to the condition of being one with your body, awareness expanded to take in one’s surroundings without having to focus on anything.
“You just have to open yourself up to absorb your surroundings,” he had always said.
Mary recalled those lessons, where he had tried to teach her how to reach perfect calm, to feel the world around herself as though it were an organism, and she a cell in its body.
Sometimes she’d come close, but Mary was certain she was never as connected to her surroundings as her father was.
Even so, the breathing helped slow her heart, and she began to pick up more sounds—mostly the creaks and groans of the ring around her.
She wondered how far down they were in Airtha. The ring’s thickness varied from place to place. The main structure of the ring was nothing more than a great circle of highly compressed carbon. While the upper half was built up, the outside kilometer or so was pure diamond.