Guy Haley

by Reality 36

  Otto tried his best to smile, conjuring up a grim, slotmouthed expression that did double duty at funerals. “Your curiosity is understandable.”

  The waitress nodded, abashed.

  Otto attempted a fresh start. “So please, I would like to sit there.”

  “Are you sure, honey?” she said. “It’s awful cramped for a big fella like you. We’ve got some lovely views out front.”

  Otto looked at the vista of plunging forest-cloaked slopes. “You have. It is beautiful here, but I would like to sit there, for privacy’s sake. I have an important call to make,” he lied.

  “OK, honey, they say it everywhere you go, but we mean it when we say the customer is always right at Josie’s!” She smiled broadly, as wide a smile as a Euro would spare for her lover, but as emotionally involved as a car grill. Otto did not understand Americans – they wore their hearts on their sleeves, but when you peered closer to look, there wasn’t that much to see. What first seemed to the cyborg like refreshing openness had long ago revealed itself as a lack of depth. Americans used your name too often. They lived up to their reputation for doing everything big, endlessly detailing their own dreary lives and mediocre achievements in unasked-for confessionals, in person and online.

  He paid little attention to the woman’s chatter as he forced his bulk behind the table. Thick log walls to his right and back, the stove to the front, he was well protected from small-arms fire. The booth afforded a good view of the restaurant’s patrons and doors. The waitress stopped listing the specials, and reached for an animated menu card. He halted her arm midway, preventing the menu reaching the table. “Ham and eggs, a double portion of ham, eight eggs, sunny side up, as you say.” He tried another smile, but it felt all wrong. He was not a man for smiling.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to see the menu? We have some fine specialties here – what about some of our famous pancakes? This tour bus party here, why, they stopped here special, just for them.”

  That sounded agreeable. “Very well. I will have pancakes with my ham and eggs. And a pot of coffee.”

  “You got it.”

  “Please could you provide me with the code and add a charge to my bill for your energy relay? I would like to recharge my phone and my implants.”

  “Sure! Energy’s free here, it’s open, just tell it to zone in and drink up!” She bustled off, then returned with a pot of coffee and a mug with “Josie’s” emblazoned on it in a fat 1950s script, or at least the 2090s idea of a fat 1950s script. There was something well-meant about the mug, like the place. It was genuine in its artifice, for all its kitsch.

  “I am not your phone,” muttered Chloe when the woman had gone. “I am Veronique’s PA. Not yours.”

  “Fine.” Otto sipped the coffee. Coffee, he thought, Americans are good at coffee.

  “You appear emotionally stunted. I will explain. I am not engaging with you. I am exhibiting signs of displeasure.”

  “If you tell me where Veronique is you can be reunited with her, and you need worry about my emotional state no longer.”

  “I cannot. How do I know you are telling the truth?”

  “You have no face-reading applications?”

  “No,” she said in a small voice. “Anyway, you are a cyborg. You could probably hide a lie.”

  That particular kind of biological micro-management was beyond him. His upgrades didn’t include the somatic rephrasing, and the tricked-out facial capillaries needed heat-beating, but he was tired of explaining himself. “You will have to trust me,” he said.

  “I can’t,” she said, somewhat sorrowfully, then, “You smell,” her voice suddenly high and piping.

  “Keep your voice down, or I will be approached and detained and you will not see Veronique again.”

  Chloe did not respond.

  “You do want to help Veronique?”

  A small sound: “Yes.”

  “So then, shhhh.” He held his finger to his lips.

  Otto’s meal arrived, and he attacked it with sensuous relish. The gammon alone was enough to feed a family of four. The steak was vat-grown, film-engineered stuff pressed into patties that lacked the texture and flavour of genuine animal meat. But he ate methodically through it just the same.

  He was tackling the pancakes when something tweaked at his Grid cover. Within milliseconds his near-I adjutant examined the alert, weighed its relevance, judged it pertinent and passed it on to Otto as a warning icon in his iHUD. Otto’s head came up whip-fast and he moved. He hit the floor as a burst of flechettes punched perfect round holes through the plate-glass windows and embedded themselves in iron and wood alike. The hubbub of voices and click of knives on plates abruptly ceased as the restaurant patrons looked at the window.

  A large man in his sixties pitched forward into his meal, blood pumping from holes either side of his neck, the flechette that caused them buried in the table. The woman next to him screamed. A second burst of flechettes terminally compromised the glass. The windows fell inwards. The restaurant erupted in a din of shouts and screams.

  “Scheisse,” said Otto wearily, and kicked his augments into gear. His lips took on a greyish hue as combat drugs entered his bloodstream. Time slowed as his chronaxic sense accelerated, the drugs bringing his other senses into sharp focus. He could feel the individual fragments of glass under his knees, smell the fear in the restaurant. His near-I dutifully fed him combat-relevant data. “I thought this was too easy,” he said. He grabbed his pistol out of the holster under his jacket, snatched Chloe down from the table and took cover. Many of the other customers were scrabbling for the door and throwing themselves through the glassless windows. All sense of propriety lost, they became a herd that shoved at itself savagely. Otto heard a fresh series of distant cracks, louder now the glass was gone. A fraction of a second later a handful of people fell dead. The rest scattered, banging into each other as they panicked. In the car park engines started.

  “What’s going on? Get me out of your pocket, I can’t see! I want Veronique!”

  “Be quiet,” said Otto. He pulled Chloe out and pointed her camera across the valley. “There is a sniper up there.” He nodded over to the mountainside opposite. “Thirty-three hundred metres away or so, armed with a railgun. He’s probably got a lock on me.”

  “Why? Why?” wailed Chloe.

  “Because I’m trying to help Veronique.”

  Otto jogged over to the door, keeping the thick log walls between him and the shooter, pistol at the ready. Though it had nowhere near the range to hit the assassin, the weight of the weapon in his hand helped him focus. Outside bodies littered the forecourt. His car lay in pieces, holes punched through one side to the other, sunlight lancing through, tyres shredded, lubricants and water dripping onto the floor. He looked over the mountainside quickly, magnifying likely-looking locations for the sniper based on his near-I’s estimation of the flechettes’ trajectory. He saw nothing; whoever was shooting at him had decent camo, and if they were any good at their job would be moving in between bursts.

  They’d have to have been good at their job to have found him.

  He stepped back at an explosion from the car park as the split hydrogen in a fuel cell went up. Debris clanged over the forecourt surface.

  On terrain like that on the opposite mountain the shooter would be moving fifty, sixty metres each time, if there were only the one and they were human. If there were more than that, he was as good as dead. Sound was no aid in locating his attacker. The sonic reports of the railgun munitions were faint. Without his enhancements he’d have heard nothing until the darts impacted the restaurant; the booms the flechettes made as they went hypersonic arrived as distant crackles, much of their energy lost in the vastness of the landscape. Nature barely deigned to acknowledge human noise up here, no matter how violent.

  “Is, is it safe?” A young woman spoke, three wailing children crouched by her skirts, hands over their ears.

  “Stay down!” shouted Otto and waved her back.
“Get behind the table. Stay in here, where it’s safe, all of you!”

  “What’s going on?” asked someone.

  “Are you a cop?” asked another.

  There were fifteen people left in the restaurant. He had to get out of there; he was putting them all at risk. He would have to go out the back. Another burst came, and a man hiding behind the charge station fell to the ground, writhing. The shooter was firing at targets as they presented themselves – that meant he had no bead on Otto, no firm lock; that was something. He watched the slopes as darts peppered the room, the mountainside opposite lit up like a rack of votive candles, infrared decoys mimicking the brief heating and cooling of a railgun as each shot was fired, a signature produced only by barrels of high-end long-string magnetic iron ceramics; exotic, expensive, more evidence this guy wasn’t going to mess around.

  He waited for the burst to stop, then made for the kitchen door at a crouch. His foot nudged a body, old face on a starlet’s body. The waitress. He reached down a hand to feel for a pulse, found none, drew back fingertips dripping blood.

  “Where are you going?” shouted a man in a red plaid shirt. He was wearing a grease-stained cap with the restaurant logo across the front, non-motile, a genuine cloth badge; possibly the owner.

  “See this?” Otto plucked a flechette from the stove. “Hardened tip, anti-armour round. Cyborg killer. For me.” He threw it aside, and it skittered across the broken glass. “I’ll draw his fire. It is me he is trying to kill. When I am gone, you will be safe.”

  He pushed open the kitchen door, keeping below the level of the shooter’s line of sight, worried that he’d be moving to higher ground to spray darts through the flimsy shingle roof. He went through the kitchen. The cook crouched on the floor, clutching at his bloodied arm, eyes wide with shock. The android sparked as it roasted on the grill plate, filling the room with the stink of melting plastics.

  “Stay down!” Otto told him. “It will be safe when I am gone. Where is the exit?”

  The cook jerked his head back. Otto nodded in thanks. He reached the back door, let his Grid cover drop a moment, hoping to draw fire from the restaurant. The last thing he wanted was for his assailant to lose patience and fire a warhead into the building. He had enough blood on his hands.

  It was luck his assailant hadn’t got a firmer lock, or he’d be a damn sight closer and Otto would be dead. Otto had been a fool; the way from Payson was the only real road in these parts.

  Otto sprinted across a yard to the rear, a scraggly garden full of weeds and sun-bleached children’s toys, on into the narrow strip of woods behind. Seconds later he burst through the underbrush into the car park. More people there, hiding behind cars. Two rangers stood by the door of their cabin, bear stunners out, looking warily back and forth across the car park, all too aware of their armament’s inadequacy. One spotted Otto and waved frantically at him to get down. Otto ignored him.

  Two cars by the car park entrance were ablaze. Three aircars hung from tree branches like over-sized Christmas ornaments, one of them burning, fuel cells cracked and leaking hydrogen. The tree it hung in was an upright fire, reminding Otto of Brazil.

  Escape was not going to be easy. His near-I checked off the vehicles, highlighting a nearby aircar as a likely ride. Otto ran for it, expecting a dart in the back at any moment, but none came. He reached the car.

  “What are you doing?” said Chloe.

  “Stealing this car,” said Otto matter-of-factly, “so I can get away before anyone else gets killed.”

  “But that’s against the law!”

  “Fine, you may turn me in when we’re done.”

  “Wait! The police will come, we can explain.”

  Otto shook his head. “By that time the sniper’s point man will have got me. Working alone on someone like me is not how it is done.”

  His near-I adjutant broke the car’s security in short order, the doors popped open and the engine started up, turbofans whickering then whining as they picked up speed. He got into the car. A quirk of topography, a crease in this mountain shoulder the rest stop sat on, meant that the car park was as hidden from the opposite hillside as it was from the road. As soon as he got airborne that would change quickly, but better to fly than roll along the road. As poor as his odds in the air were, there was no chance of escape on the ground.

  He checked his armaments. He had the 9mm caseless pistol and his carbon bootknife, plus two electromagnetic pulse grenades. Reusuable, but he had no means of recharging them. Everything else he’d had – his own flechetter railgun, EMP gun, grenade launcher and external computer equipment – was still in the back of the car out front, no doubt full of razor-sharp darts.

  “Listen, Chloe, you have to trust me now. Whoever is trying to kill me is trying to stop me getting to Veronique. If they are close to me, they will soon be close to her, because they will find you and use you to get to her.” He pulled back the action on the gun. His near-I talked to it and counted off the rounds: twenty-six. Not nearly enough.

  “Maybe they were the police, and they were trying to protect Veronique from you,” said Chloe. She was scared, close to crying.

  “You saw what they did to the restaurant,” said Otto calmly. “Would the police kill nine people to protect your mistress?”

  “My friend! She is my friend, she always has been. We were incepted together, she and I, born and made. Friend! I love her,” she wailed. Then, chillingly calm by comparison: “The law enforcement authorities would not behave in this manner.” He’d never get used to these switches in mode.

  “Do you trust me?” he said. Chloe said nothing. “Tell me where Veronique is”

  She did not reply. Otto had almost given up hope and had begun examining his other options, none good, when Chloe answered, quietly but firmly: “Yes.”

  The car roared to life as Chloe muscled in on his near-I’s link. She keyed the autopilot to a location forty kilometres away. The car rose into the air, blasting stonedust away from the car park’s hard standing.

  “Stop!” said Otto. “This will be difficult.” Chloe demurred without protest, retreating from the vehicle. The steering column went slack, and Otto grabbed it. “Hold on,” he said. He had his near-I begin work undoing the car’s central programming, smothering its Gridsig with non-informational noise.

  As soon as he had risen six metres over the car park, flechette rounds started hissing through the air around him. Some found their mark, piercing the car’s bodywork with dull clonks. He had seconds at best. He dropped down to within centimetres of the other cars’ roofs, gunned the engines. The car rose vertically into the sky. His near-I had chosen well: this was a sporty model, a Toyata Zephyr. All four lateral fans were multidirectional, attached to the body by gimbals, giving excellent manoeuvrability, climbing rates and enough power to deal with the mountain weather. Its ventral fan was sized for rapid acceleration, with a top speed of around 600kph. He wished for countermeasures and some degree of armour, because a vehicle like this was a rich man’s toy, and against railgun fire was as precisely as durable as a paper bag. He dodged violently from side to side and headed for the trees beyond the car park, which marched precipitously upwards to crags and a mountain shoulder. There was a notch in the ridge one hundred metres up; pass that and they’d be clear.

  Branches whipped past the windscreen as Otto wrestled the aircar through the trees’ canopy. He’d have liked to take it lower, but here, sheltered and sunlit, the trees grew close together, and he was forced into the upper branches, dodging the tops of the pines. Wood exploded into splinters all around them, slender crowns toppled and fell. Few of the darts found the car, and none found anything essential. Otto was pushing the vehicle well beyond tolerance, climbing hard and swerving. The driver’s-side window shattered. Otto felt a stab of pain in his left arm. A stray branch was sucked into one of the fan housings with a bang and sprayed out as woodchip behind. The car swerved, right and down. If a thicker limb went into the machinery, they would cra
sh.

  Chloe screamed. “Almost there!” shouted Otto, his near-I working manically, violating the car’s tiny brain, breaking the manufacturer and government safety protocols and speed limiters, pushing it well past its design specifications. The Zephyr flew like a hawk, smoke pouring from its engines.

  A flechette pierced the rear window. Another slammed into the boot. Gauges flashed red; one of the aircar’s five fan motors was burning out, undone by the triple insult of branch, speed and projectile.

  The trees began to peter out. Bare rock took their place. Puffs of dust and sparks rose up from the mountainside as they approached the cleft, impacts that closed with the car.

  Then they were up and over the ridge, through the notch in the mountain, and on the other side of the ridge. The firing ceased. Otto eased back.