He always did that. Whenever the world turned especially nasty, whenever he could stomach it no longer, he puked his guts out. But he had never done it before while in the air.
* * * *
The call came while he was rinsing his mouth from the thermos he always carried with him: “CODE NINER NINER. ALL OFFICERS TO REAGAN EXPRESSWAY, MILE THREE EIGHT. REPEAT: CODE NINER NINER. ALL OFFICERS TO REAGAN EXPRESSWAY, MILE THREE EIGHT, MILE THREE EIGHT.”
Pausing only long enough to spit and close the port, he turned off the autopilot, seized the control yoke, and kicked the Hawk into a power dive toward Mile 38 on the old Reagan Expressway. Code 99 was a rare one. It meant a military or paramilitary attack. In this country, this age of the world, it had to be terrorists.
His destination was not far away. As his Hawk cupped its wings to slow its dive, he saw two other Hawks arriving from nearer the city, diving like his own, converging on a scene of chaos. Traffic was backed up in both directions, six lanes of pavement covered with automobiles, Tortoises, Roachsters, Hoppers, and other Buggies. Only the zone immediately surrounding the Sparrow airliner was clear of vehicles, and the reason was obvious: The bare pavement was coated with blood and other body fluids and littered with the scraps of the Sparrow’s meal.
Bernie was not surprised to see the logo on the Sparrow’s side. The Palestinians—along with the Iranian Shi’ites, Lebanese Christians and Moslems, Irish Nationalists, Afrikaners, and a hundred other factions—had long since broadened their battles to encompass all the world.
The three arriving Hawks began their siren calls together. The ululating rising-falling screams were as unlike a natural hawk’s screech as they could be, for the gengineers had labored hard to mimic the sound of traditional police cars. They had succeeded, and now, as the three Hawks swept, screaming, into a tight circle above the carnage, the Sparrow stopped its feeding and lowered itself on its legs. Then it cocked its head, half spread its wings, and, beak agape, lunged at its threateners.
But the Hawks were still too high aloft. Bernie eyed his fellows. One—he recognized Connie Skoglund—held a microphone and was gesturing. When Bernie waved his acquiescence, the other’s voice boomed out of the police radio:
“YOU ARE UNDER ARREST! TAKE OFF IMMEDIATELY AND FOLLOW US. YOU ARE UNDER ARREST! COME QUIETLY, OR WE WILL BE FORCED TO STOOP!”
Bernie wished the rapist he had sought earlier were beneath him now. Hawks had replaced helicopters for most police purposes because their built-in weaponry, by its nature—beaks and talons as sharp as scythe blades, and larger—had more deterrent effect on evildoers than machine guns or rockets. The Hawks were also quite effective at catching those who fled the scenes of their crimes.
The Sparrow—or its crew—ignored the threat. It sidled a few steps down the road, and its beak dipped once more into the gridlocked traffic. Years ago, Bernie reflected, that Sparrow and its crew and passengers would have been safe. Terrorists routinely once had taken hostages as guarantees of their own safety. But those days were gone. The world could not afford them. Governments had accepted that the only way to handle terrorists was to destroy them promptly—hostages, if necessary, and all—in hope of convincing other terrorists, and would-be terrorists, that they had nothing to gain by their actions. Sadly, some terrorists continued to believe that publicity was enough of a reward. It had been proposed that government bar the press from covering terrorist attacks, but such proposals had never been implemented. If they had, they would not have worked. No government could ever muzzle the press for long.
The Hawks folded their wings and dived. The Sparrow sidestepped and its engines roared, their exhaust sweeping a number of Buggies across the pavement behind it, tumbling into one another and the ditch. To Bernie, one tiny detail stood out: A Roachster’s antennae crumpling in the gust of hot exhaust; he could almost smell the scorching chitin.
The Sparrow spread its wings and lurched into the air. The Hawks lunged, trying to force it toward the airport.
It refused. Even though its stubby beak was no match for the predatory hooks and talons of the Hawks, it was larger. It slashed at its tormentors and, steadily gaining altitude, tried to push past their lunges.
The Hawks attacked. Their beaks slashed. Their talons seized and tore, and impacts jolted Bernie in his harness. The straps that held the Sparrow’s engines and passenger pod in place gave way, and the Sparrow, too large to fly unaided, even without its burden of passengers, fell to the highway. Its engines fell too, smashing into the packed traffic. The passenger pod, when it too hit the pavement, broke open, spilling bodies among the wreckage already there.
* * * *
The road was blocked as badly as ever, but now the end and a resumption of journeys was in sight. Long-legged, police-model Roachsters and wrecker Crabs, waving massive claws above their cabs, were picking their ways down the embankments of the highway. Ambulances—gengineered from pigeons not only for the value of the symbolism, but also for their vertical takeoff-and-landing abilities and for their broad, compact bodies that could support multigurney cargo pods—were descending on the road.
The Hawks perched on the Sparrow’s carcass. The Hawks’ red-brown tails jerked as they eyed their kill, and their hooked beaks opened and closed. Their talons dug possessively into the cooling flesh. Gouts of blood were visible as new spots on their plumage, especially against the dark-splashed cream of their undersides, the white of their throats and cheeks. They cocked their heads, each one marked, as if it wore an ancient warrior’s helm, with dark guard-pieces jutting downward past the eyes and ears. A reddish crest, resembling a tonsure, suggested that those warriors might have been monks as well.
Bernie had never before seen a Hawk on the prey for which its ancestors had been named. Now he reflected that a Sparrowhawk, or Kestrel, had to be the perfect bird for police work. There were larger natural hawks, but that mattered little to gengineers who could resize a sparrow into a Sparrow. There was one Hawk, the Duck-Hawk, that had a single-barred helm and no tonsure, but it had been claimed by the Air Force. Other, less aptly marked raptors had gone to the other armed services—the Osprey to the Navy, the Broad-Winged Hawk, with its chevroned tail, to the Army, Harlan’s Hawk to the Marines.
He knew that, if he left his Hawk to its own devices, it would feed. The instincts were there, after all; they were, in fact, a large part of what made a Hawk so effective for police work. But they had to be suppressed at times, especially when the public had already seen more than enough raw meat. He lifted a small, bright green hatch in the control panel to reveal a recessed toggle. The switch was wired to the Hawk’s sleep center. When he flicked it, the bird would tuck its head beneath one wing and go dormant. It would wake only when he touched the switch again.
A puff of breeze ruffed the feathers at the crest of his Hawk’s head. He flicked the switch. So did his fellow Hawkers, for even as his Hawk lifted one wing and bent its neck, so did theirs. In a moment, he joined his fellows on the ground. Connie was a thin brunette, as wiry and tough as the Hawk she flew; Bernie had dated her more than once, and he knew both the appeal of her soul and the strength of her body. The third Hawker was less familiar, though Bernie knew him—Larry Randecker, softer in appearance, almost chubby. Yet he was tough enough; Bernie thought his had been the Hawk that had sliced the Sparrow’s engine straps. There had been no hesitation; to all appearances, Randecker had embraced the possibility that he would not be able to dodge the blades of incandescent gas erupting from the tumbling, still blasting jets.
The cleanup crews were already removing the wreckage from the roadway, loading the remains of vehicles into trailers and those of their drivers into body bags and gurneys. The wreckers avoided the Sparrow and its pod, for they would have to be moved to the airport for examination. Proper emergency procedure allowed them only to open the liner’s stomach to retrieve its victims. The genimal’s body wou
ld have to wait for a Crane.
The medics working over the wreckage of the Sparrow’s passenger pod kept the few survivors of the jet’s fall separate, for they would have to be interrogated. The dead were trucked away to morgues, though first a single officer recorded their features with a computer-compatible electronic camera. Later, he would record the living as well. Then the electronic images would be routed through the police department’s computers for comparison with their extensive files of known terrorists, and then through the worldwide computer net for a broader search. If any of the Sparrow’s passengers and crew members—alive or dead—had any past association at all with terrorism, the local authorities would soon know the details.
Bernie, Connie, and Larry now were traffic cops. They waded through the chaos of the scene, guiding vehicles that had, in their efforts to escape, gotten tangled in the ditches or on the embankments, or even in the roadway, back into position on the road. Using pocket recorders, they took names, addresses, and phone numbers of witnesses for later interviewing. And in due time, the road began to resemble nothing so much as a vast parking lot, covered with serried ranks of vehicles awaiting some signal to move. Behind the congested zone, traffic had been diverted and no longer accumulated. To the rear of the jam, other cops were getting some of the stopped vehicles turned around and headed toward the nearest exit ramps.
One of the last vehicles that Bernie checked was a Tortoise in full withdrawal. In front, only its nose poked out of the crack between its shell and plastron. Its eyes were safely hidden away from pecking beaks; the headlights mounted on the lip of the shell served as giant surrogates. To the sides, only the stub-clawed toes showed. Inside the passenger compartment, a man, a woman, and a child, holding a bob-tailed Cardinal feather, watched his approach. All were sweating heavily, although the vehicle’s windows were open. He guessed they had waited to unseal the Tortoise until the Sparrow was dead.
He held their gaze with his own—the woman was attractive, but she was clearly unavailable, married—while he gestured for their attention. But then he let his eyes drop to the running board and the severed arm that lay upon it. It was a small arm, with a yellow plastic watchband around the wrist.
He vomited again.
When he looked up once more, the Tortoise’s head and legs had emerged from the shell. The door was open, and the driver was holding out a can of soda. “It’s cold,” he said. “We have a small fridge on board.”
“Thanks.” Bernie rinsed the foulness from his mouth, spat, and drank the remaining ginger ale. He handed back the can. Then he bent, picked up the arm, and waved it overhead. His stomach remained still, though he was grateful that the limb, its shoulder end all torn and ragged, did not drip. From the corner of one eye, he noticed that the kid in the Tortoise’s back seat stared, wide-eyed. His parents paled, and his father covered his mouth with one hand as if he too had a rebellious stomach.
In a moment, one of the medics, pale herself and shaking her head over the carnage, retrieved the arm. Only then did he turn on his recorder. “I’m collecting information on the witnesses,” he said. “Your names?”
“Nick Gilman,” said the driver. He pointed at the woman unnecessarily. “My wife, Emily.”
“I’m Andy,” said the kid. He waved his feather. “Boys you really hit that Sparrow! Pow! It was eating everybody up!”
Bernie hoped Andy would never meet worse, as Jasmine had. The kid was too young to truly appreciate horror such as he had just witnessed, though it would surely sink in eventually. He might even have nightmares tonight, as Bernie expected for himself.
“Reason for being here?”
“I was picking Emily up at the airport.”
“I was flying in from Washington. I work for Neoform.”
He collected their home and work addresses and numbers before saying to the woman, “You’re a gengineer, then?” When she nodded, he added, “Did you have anything to do with the Hawks?” Neoform, he knew, held the design patents.
“That was before my time,” she said.
He snorted. “Whoever it was, tell ’em they’re great. I love ’em.” He turned then to survey the road ahead of the Tortoise. A Starling short-hauler was unloading a crew of litterbugs to clean up the final, small scraps and the piles of dung left by both the Sparrow and its victims. Irrelevantly, the thought crossed his mind that some people called the cleanup genimals “shit-pickers.” Most people preferred the less offensive label, but there was a strong tendency for people to call a spade a spade, almost despite themselves. “Litter” was now just another synonym for manure.
From the corner of his eye, he glimpsed an angular skeleton, like a tipsy rocket gantry against the sky, lurching toward them. It was the Crane from the airport’s repair yard, all stiltlike legs and reaching neck, its beak fitted out with metal hooks and pulleys. It was already coming for the Sparrow’s carcass.
There seemed to be a clear lane past the beak of the Sparrow. Connie and Larry were already guiding traffic in that direction. He pointed, “Through there. We’ll be in touch for your statements.”
Chapter Three
When the clock radio came on, Emily wanted to ignore it. Andy had awakened screaming at three in the morning. When he had refused to go back to bed alone, Emily and Nick had taken him into their bed between them. He had then dropped off immediately. They had taken longer to return to sleep, and now she felt distinctly shortchanged.
Nick pushed at her with the arm on which Andy’s head was pillowed—where her head ought to be—as if to remind her that she had to go to work. She pushed back, throwing one bare calf over his own; she could get no closer, with their son between them. She was asleep, cozy, safe, and she wanted to stay that way, all three. But then the news began, and it was all a repeat of the nightmare of the day before. She growled softly and rolled out of bed. By the time she had turned the electronic voice off, she was awake.
She had not forgotten the carnage on the expressway, but every time she tried to think of it, or every time someone, or something—the radio—brought the subject up, her mind veered away to other thoughts. Right now, it reminded her that she and Nick had long ago decided that the best place for the radio was on a bureau several steps away from the bed. Mundane thoughts were a refuge to which she clung as if against her will.
She dressed. She watered the hanky bush on the bathroom windowsill. She ate. By then Nick and Andy were up and bickering amicably over the profound question of whether doughnuts or toast would make a more satisfying breakfast. That settled, Andy went to the window to look at the bird feeder. “Mommy,” he said. “See the Chickadee?” She did. “It was there yesterday.” They watched it devouring the other smaller birds. After a moment, he added wistfully, “Can you make it go away?”
“We’ll call the airport later, kid,” said Nick. “We’ll tell them to come and get it.”
“That’s the only thing to do,” said Emily. “We don’t need that sort of reminder.” Then she kissed both her men goodbye, broke a chunk from one of the doughnuts on the table, and left the house, first touching the garage-door control by the front door. By the time she reached the garage, the Tortoise was already emerging. When it saw her, it cocked its head and lowered its shell for her just as it had for Nick and Andy the day before. When it saw the food in her hand, it also opened its cavernous mouth and uttered a soft “Whonk.” She tossed the bite of cake between its jaws and patted its nose before she boarded.
She always took the Tortoise to work. She felt guilty, for the genimal was Nick’s, yes, but hers, like her father’s before her, was the need for daily transportation. She was fully and painfully aware that the Tortoise was the family’s only car, and that Nick often had shopping to do and errands to run. She was even more painfully aware that her father had been much less sensitive to her mother’s needs.
She told herself that there wa
s a mini-mall just a few blocks away, and that both he and Andy needed the exercise. Next year, when the boy entered school, might be another story. From time to time, Nick said something about looking for a job then. If she reminded him that he hadn’t had the skills for a decent job before Andy had come along, he said that, just maybe, he would go back to school.
So they would need a second vehicle. She wondered what it would be. A Beetle? A Roachster? Some other Buggy? Those had been awfully vulnerable on the expressway the day before. Another Tortoise? They had been safe, after all. How about something that could fly away from that sort of trouble? A Chickadee like the one on the lawn? But they needed airports.
Perhaps she could alter the design of the jellyfish-based Bioblimp she was working on. It didn’t have to be the size of a moving van. If she could just halt its growth at some earlier stage, the result might be just right for a commuter. She would have to think about it.
* * * *
Like the airport, Neoform Laboratories was surrounded by green. Once a visitor had passed the security guard’s gate, there was a parking lot shaded by trees, with the lines of vehicles separated by concrete troughs through which ran fresh water. There were paddocks marked off by white board fences, as at a Kentucky horse farm. There was a track for testing the vehicular genimals. There were flower beds near every building, and the smell of flowers, and of hay, and of many kinds of litter.
Most of the outbuildings were red-painted, white-trimmed barns that housed the experimental stock and prototypes. One was an inflated fabric dome, its triangular panels alternating blue and gold. Jutting high above everything else and stabilized by guy wires, it had been erected for Emily’s prototype Bioblimps. Later, she hoped, it would be the nursery for the first commercial models.
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 17