Route 666 Anthology

by David Pringle

  Luther Vandenberg’s long dream was finally ended.

  The street was a sprawl of fazed mujos, staggering from wall to wall like blind men, bent double with cold-turkey seizures. Joe wrenched a punk out of a Renegade which had stalled mid-street and pulled Tasha inside. He nursed the flooded cylinders back to life and flicked the locus grid up on the screen.

  Tasha grabbed his sleeve. “We don’t need that. I can get us back to the security gates.”

  “Yeah, but we got a house call to make first.”

  The Renegade screamed down alleys littered with zombies floating between dreams. The lucky ones saw the rig burning down on them and got out the way. Others were too far gone. Tasha flinched at every rolling shudder under the tyres.

  Three blocks down and the low outline of the baby-blues factory started to fill up the windshield, chasing its ghost on the spookscreen. Joe primed up all the hardware the rebel rig had left on board.

  “Guess we won’t need to take any of this with us.”

  A stream of lead from the gun-mounts. The outline of the factory shivered, then blossomed out in crimson and blue flames. Joe spun the Renegade round on a brake-skid.

  “OK,” he said. “Take us home.”

  The gates were within a kilometre when Tasha saw the shimmer of chrome in the rear-view. “Sorry to spoil the party, but we got company.”

  Another rig was coming up on the Renegade’s tail, gaining fast, black crucifix decals set on glistening steel. The Apostles.

  Tracer fire started dancing up around them. Tasha had her hands clasped together, eyes closed. “I thought all the creeps were supposed to be junked out!”

  “Not these guys.”

  Joe jammed the gas-pedal into the floorboards. “Hold on to whatever you’ve got.”

  The open gates were in sight. If they stayed lucky for another thirty seconds—

  “Goddamn!”

  Two more Apostles were rushing to the gates, pulling the heavy doors shut. The rear windshield blew apart as a shell hit home, drowning Tasha’s scream. The autoguide panel was flashing NO THRU-GO as the rig bore down on the gates rising sixty. As the gap narrowed Joe threw the Renegade into a right-hand swerve then hammered the wheel hard left. The offside wheels lifted off the deck with Joe fighting to keep the steering on line. The Renegade slipped through the closing jaws leaving a skin of paint as a parting kiss. Behind them rubber squealed on ashphalt as the pursuers tried to pull up. A second later the walls flamed out in a sunburst finish.

  Joe checked the G-Mek over once the dustsheet was lifted clear, scarcely able to believe she’d lain up in the workshop untouched by some dirtboy with a crowbar and a grudge. Tasha McRae handed him a beer.

  “It’s not such a bad place, y’know. And it might get better, now. But then maybe the whole sandside circus looks like trash to a big-city boy.”

  Joe took a long swig of the beer, looked at her for a while.

  “I don’t know,” he said at last; “a prison’s still a prison, even if it’s some cosy PZ apartment tower, security cameras following you around all day.”

  He looked around at the shells of houses still echoing the memory of an old town called Greenton.

  “See, I was born here. Or somewhere like it.”

  “Then why are you going back?”

  “Because ‘back’ is where home is, now. Because ‘back’ is the only place I know I belong anymore.” He pressed the starter; the G-Mek kicked into life with a puff of blue smoke from the exhausts.

  “Besides, one battle doesn’t end a war.” Joe slung his leather jacket behind the driver’s seat, a few more scars picked up for the memoirs.

  “There’s other Ed da Souzas out there. They’re safe enough behind their corporation payrolls and crooked agency franchises. But sooner or later one of them steps out on the wrong street at the wrong time, with only their own sweet self for company.”

  He looked back up at Tasha for the last time before slugging the interceptor into gear. “And when that happens, I want to be there.”

  Four-Minute Warning

  by Myles Burnham

  With one phase of the operation left to go, Steve Yonoi, Caetano Pereira and Shimon Eitan got back into the car and headed for town. Good timing was now vital, and Eitan drove fast and steady. He had the car’s retractable chain-gun up, test-fired and ready. The last thing they needed at this stage was trouble. If anything got in their way, Eitan would shred it now and maybe say sorry later.

  Pereira and Yonoi sat in the back passenger seats. Pereira, reeking as usual of Fulgencio Narcissus aftershave, foostered with his portable computer. Steve Yonoi was nervous. He opened the boozebin and helped himself to a heavy shot of ten-year-old Bushido.

  “No more, huh? We got a job to do,” Pereira warned him without looking up from his computer.

  “Sure, sure,” said Steve. “It’s only a mild attack of stage fright. It’s like my first Producer always used to say, a good performer’s the guy who gets a little nervous before going on. And drink, he used to say, is a good servant, but a bad master.”

  “Whatever you say, Steve,” replied Pereira in a tone of mild sarcasm. Pereira knew perfectly well that Steve Yonoi’s TV career had finished because he was besotted with the juice.

  Steve turned on the TV in front of him. A muso was grinding out a flat Russian blat-rap, backed by a tinny, repetitive rhythm. He was naked from the waist up and mimed playing a combination assault rifle and RAG launcher got up to look like a guitar. Steve Yonoi had been in showbiz long enough to recognize implanted muscle a mile off. The guy’s arms and torso rippled and bulged like the real thing, but his neck was too smooth. Not even the best Swiss clinics could cover something like that.

  Don’t mess with me cuz I’m wired I said

  An’ I might just have to shoot you dead

  In fact I think I’ll do it anyway

  Cuz I’m wired and I’ve not had a very nice day.

  Pulled out my machine an wasted the guy

  Man, his blood was everywhere, my-oh-my

  Another kid lying there don’t change much

  But I’m wired, I’m armed and I’m in touch.

  So remember my message loud an’ clear

  The Angel of Death is the man to fear

  Don’t mess with me, keep clear of my piece

  Cuz where I live there ain’t no police.

  Cut to linkman. “Awwwwww-right! You’re watchin’ Channel Three and that was the newest, bestest in murder rap from The Angel. It’s called ‘Wired’ and I think it sucks cuz I’ve got a pet doberman can write better lyrix’n that, but then I’ve got a Master’s Degree and you haven’t. Okay clods, we got some very important messages comin’ right up, so hands off the zapper, watch the nice adverts, or th’Angel’ll come an’ getcha…”

  Dumb amateur, thought Steve. A link can’t get away with insulting an audience for ever. Sure, the first few weeks you do it you get a following, people think you’re different, you’re smart. But their tolerance breaks very soon if you call them assholes once too much. They end up thinking you’re an asshole too, and they don’t want to watch you anymore. The guy’s Producer would know this full well, but was probably just using him for a few weeks of good ratings before firing him. If I was you, loser, thought Steve, I’d start looking for a new job right now. Maybe the Department of Sanitation’s hiring. The saddest thing about it is that most TV audiences are assholes, but you mustn’t ever say that. Not even to yourself, if you can help it.

  “D’you think you can turn off the TV a mo’ Steve? I need to do some test-runs and it’s distracting me,” said Pereira.

  They drove on, with only the occasional clicking of Pereira’s keys breaking the silence. With nothing showing on the ’scope, Eitan relaxed a little, drove with one hand on the wheel, and deftly started filling clips for his Uzi with the other.

  Steve Yonoi took another drink and watched Pereira as he played his keyboard. Caetano Pereira both impressed him and amused him. Pereira
was a man of three deep passions. First, he was Brazilian, though to hear him speak American you wouldn’t think so, and he was therefore mad about soccer. It was no difficult thing to start him talking about the game for hours at a time. Second, he loved computers. He could go for days without food or sleep keyboarding or psi’d into some system. He was clearly older than the under 25-ish you’re supposed to be burned out by, and Steve shuddered to think of the garbage he’d probably had implanted or cultured in his brain to keep himself on top. Pereira’s third obsession was women. He considered himself a great Romeo. Which Steve found odd considering he was such an ugly little swine—a huge hooked nose jutted out of a flat face topped by a receding hairline he refused, for some damfool reason, to get fixed cosmetically. He compensated a little by always dressing immaculately in expensive business suits and by wearing that wretched aftershave.

  Steve Yonoi, failed actor and TV presenter and slightly more successful con artist, always associated Fulgencio Narcissus aftershave with rich, vulgar men. The kind of guys who’d have diamond studs and gold ingots set into their forearms. The kind of men who had understandably un-macho nightmares about small renegades wielding big knives.

  Shimon Eitan he couldn’t figure at all. Eitan, 230 pounds of ex-Israeli Paratroop combat instructor, was the operation’s muscle. He was a solid, professional killer who was in an altogether different league from some of the psychos on both sides of the law it had once been Steve’s job to interview. Eitan was a cold, efficient professional who probably didn’t love or hate killing. He was a nice enough guy (assuming he was on your side), but he rarely had an opinion about anything. Steve had wondered if Eitan had any personality at all until he’d overheard him having the mother and father of all nightmares a week or so back.

  “How’s it going back there?” Eitan eventually asked Pereira, who was looking very pleased with himself.

  “Fine. All the test patterns are looking good.” He closed the briefcase on his lap and patted it affectionately.

  “How’s it work, anyway?” asked Eitan, now with both hands on the wheel again.

  “Well, you’ve got the most powerful portable computer money can buy, right? Plus a few special features I’ve customized on myself. With a modem it can talk to every other computer in the world that wants to talk to it. The way the blag works is simple. We go in, you two do your business and I set up and plug this baby in, and I’ve got myself an instant dealing-room. I then get it to say ‘Hello World. We’ve got something you might want to buy.’ The rest of the world says ‘yeah! Gimme, gimme!’ We hope. And for this they pay in big fat bundles of dollars and yen and rubles and ECUs and stuff. Only it ain’t big fat bundles, it’s little electronic signals going down wires and across chips and through the air, and through outer space and bouncing off satellites.”

  “Hey come on, we know all that stuff. What I want to know is what’s going to stop us getting caught?” Steve interrupted.

  “Well, for the last five weeks, I’ve been teaching the system to scatter the looies the very nanosecond they come in. See, the customers pay by telling their computers to tell their banks’ computers to make a credit transfer to my computer. The instant that the transaction is complete, we give the customers what they want. Meanwhile, the credit going into my computer is immediately transferred to other computers all over the world. Thousands of transactions take place at once. We buy government stock in Leningrad, we buy pork belly futures in Managua, play the oil spots in Rivadavia, put a few into a tax-evasion account in Nauru… All over the place. And the instructions we give the other computers will keep that cash moving, buying and selling across the globe, across time-zones and currency areas. The money will not stop moving for two months. By then I can start bringing it back together into fewer, larger holdings because the pattern will be so confusing that even if anyone does want to find out where we are or what happened to the money, they’ll come out of it with nothing except a headache.”

  “So there’s no danger at all?” asked Steve Yonoi.

  “Of course there’s danger! Someone might break into the system while it’s making the offer. But you have to ask yourself who would want to do this? Who are we hurting? And the answer is nobody, apart from our intended victim, and nobody gives a byte for him. The whole point of this operation, Steve, is that it makes money by destroying someone that ninety-eight percent of the world’s population hates and that one hundred percent will hate by the time we’re finished. If we’d tried this ten years ago then maybe the UN Computer User and Fraud Registry might have had something to say about it, but nowadays they’re totally under-resourced and ignored. The danger comes from one of the big corps deciding that what we’re doing is bad for business confidence and that they want to stop us.”

  “So how could someone stop us?” asked Steve.

  “They’d put in a sleeper, right?” suggested Eitan from the front seat.

  “That’s one option,” said Pereira. “Tell Steve about sleepers, Shimon.”

  Eitan’s eyes alternated between the road and the ’scope. “A sleeper, Steve, is a kind of time-lapse virus. You can get all types, and because people wise up to them real fast, new ones are developed all the time. I came across them when I was seconded to Mossad. Did you ever hear of PICADGE?”

  “Nope,” said Steve.

  “Stands for Pan-Islamic Congress Air Defence Ground Environment. Okay, here’s your history lesson… Air superiority has always been vital to Israel’s survival. About five years ago, the Pan-Islamic Congress put their heads and money together and asked themselves how they could shoot all our planes out of the air. One answer, of course, is to have more planes than us. But we’ve always had better planes and better pilots. So they thought they’d let us hang ourselves in the next Mid-East war by developing an integrated system of air defences because Israel almost always attacks first. Their system would comprise state-of-the-art missiles, radars and every other sensor they could think of as well as a centralized air-force command. We couldn’t stand for this. We thought of commando raids or air strikes to take them out, but there were far too many different sites involved and the probability of successfully eliminating every single target was less than five percent. In the end we decided a little mall-game would be cheapest and most effective.”

  “So that’s how come all those missiles self-destructed or shot off into the desert!” said Pereira. The massive malfunction of missile and sensor bases all over the Middle East had hit the headlines two years previously.

  “That’s right. We used sleepers. And routine hacking to implant them. We managed to infect the whole thing. We mainly broke into the less well-guarded files, like the pay records or the toilet paper inventory or the staff canteen menus. Most of the bugs were disguised as payments. Then, at a pre-programmed time, they all went into action. The Arabs found that what they thought was a lot of ordinary double-entry book-keeping was in fact orders to wipe some files, scramble others, or launch missiles into the desert, or just auto-destruct.”

  “So that could happen to us. Someone could put a sleeper in, disguised as a payment,” said Steve.

  “It’s possible,” admitted Pereira. “The thing to watch out for is a sleeper that will trace the money back to us. Though one that just fried the system would be bad enough. But like I said we’re not really hurting anyone, and if they do want to stop us, a top-of-the-range sleeper isn’t cheap. If it’s been used once, you can’t really get away with using it again. And I do have some safeguards here that ought to be able to spot one coming in. The other danger is in a straight break-in. Some smartass jock coming along for the ride either on his keyboard or on psi. That’s why when I’m making the offer I don’t want to keep it open for more than four minutes. Even then, the access code to the master-drive is not something that can be crunched in an instant. The only one to really worry about is the GenTech facility at Tokyo, where they have the latest Alex machine. The chances are that GenTech isn’t going to be interested in what w
e’re doing. If they are, the duty operators are going to have to get authorization from upstairs to devote precious terminal time to us. That’s why the timing is so important. I’m aiming to be raking in the looies as their shift changes in Tokyo.”

  The car was approaching the south-east Stop/Go of the city. Eitan retracted the chain-gun and pushed the Uzi under his seat. Everyone tensed a little, but the barriers lifted and they were waved through as expected.

  “If nobody objects,” said Steve Yonoi, “I’ll have the TV on again.” He tuned into the local station, WZLD, Channel Four. It was time for the Honest-to-God Bible Show presented by the Reverend Bob Jackson and his wife Dolly on behalf of their Divine Purpose Mission Inc. Bob and Dolly were part of the fundamentalist Christian new-wave. As far as they (and their flock) were concerned, world events of the last few years proved that the last trump would soon be calling and the world would soon end. Bob was informing his audience that the Good Lord Himself (‘Amen!’) had told him this:

  “… But though The Lord has delivered this message personally to me, my friends, it’s also there for all of you, and I mean all of you, to read for yourselves. It’s in the Good Book, right in there in black and white at the end. It’s called the Book of Revelation. My friends, we KNOW that The Lord will reveal His purpose unto us before very long. So NOW is the time to come to The, Lord if you haven’t already done so.”

  Steve Yonoi let out an involuntary snigger. Pereira was loading an elegant black SIG machine-pistol. Eitan drove on.

  The Reverend Bob continued. “So please, friends, phone in, or make that credit transfer. The numbers are at the bottom of your screen. Please come to the Lord; please, brothers and sisters, get in touch now. We need your money to help us carry out our mission. We’ve never needed it as urgently as we’ve needed it now. The Lord has told me that the time of reckoning is almost upon us and that mankind is to be called to account. Now is the time to come to Him, now is the time to prepare for everlasting life. That’s why we need you to call or make that CT right now. Please have your credit cards ready. Ready to do the Lord’s work, ready for you to be saved…”