by Alex Lamb
He spotted a bright-green troop carrier parked idly at the back door of a pleasure palace.
‘Rachel, get ready to move him,’ said Will. ‘We’re changing vehicles.’
Through the traffic software, Will dragged up a portal to the troop carrier. Just as he’d hoped, it was the property of a different subsect from the one running the police. The police were under the jurisdiction of the Sons of Mao, while the carrier belonged to the Ecowarriors. And the suspicious, factional Earther groups had put plenty of security between their respective domains.
Will slammed one of John’s password levers into the Ecowarrior network and had the carrier’s engines running before they screeched to a halt behind it.
‘In there!’ Will told her, pointing at the new vehicle.
Rachel glanced nervously at the back of the pleasure palace. The door was open and rhythmic music blasted out from inside. She scowled at him.
‘Are you crazy?’
‘It’s the best I’ve got,’ said Will.
He shut down the transport, severing its links to the traffic grid, and ran around to help Rachel carry the limp and slippery Hugo into the open back of the vehicle. Rachel, though, was doing fine on her own. She charged forward like some blood-soaked Amazon with the scientist joggling limply on her shoulders.
Will leapt into the back of the carrier and took Hugo from her.
‘Wait!’ she ordered and dashed back to the civilian transport to grab their flech-riddled bags from the trunk. She hurled them into the carrier and jumped in after them, her face full of thunder. ‘If I have to fight for my life, there’s no way I’m doing it in this fucking corset.’
Will permitted himself a grin before diving back into the carrier’s node and driving them out onto the main street towards the safe house. He checked the traffic-system status. The police units were coming back online with alarming alacrity. A pair of hornet-striped police vehicles sped past them, sirens blaring.
It was only a matter of time before the authorities found the transport, Will knew. And once they did, it wouldn’t take them long to make the connection to the troop carrier. Assuming, of course, that the soldiers who’d lost it didn’t report it missing before then.
‘We’re going to have to swap cars again,’ Will warned.
‘No shit,’ said Rachel. ‘Once they find this thing gone, they’ll come down on us like meteors.’
Will scoured the traffic system for something he could use, well aware that he had only minutes to complete their escape. By now, the Protectorate Police were bound to have their finest SAPs on the case. What he needed was a vehicle that was clean and hard to trace, preferably one on a different network. Unfortunately, portals were slamming shut all across the system like starship airlocks. One by one, the disparate subsect domains were raising their alert levels.
Will groaned in frustration as the carrier ground to a halt at an intersection to let a maintenance robot lumber across their path.
Then the solution hit him.
‘That’s it!’ he exclaimed.
The robots ran on guide strips by the roadside, barely integrated with the transport network, and the traffic system treated them as pedestrians. It took him precious minutes to find his way into the city maintenance system from the increasingly isolated traffic control, but once he was in, it was easy. He arranged for the carrier to rendezvous with a couple of larger robots behind an unused warehouse.
Will held his breath as they turned into the deserted lot, hardly daring to hope that his ruse had gone unnoticed. He grunted with relief when he saw the two robots standing there alone. They looked like a couple of animated trash bins, with small sensor heads and large hairy waldos.
Rachel stared at them with unabashed concern. ‘We’re going in those?’
Will nodded. ‘There should be enough cargo space in the back of each for a couple of people. It’ll be a tight fit, but hopefully untraceable.’
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll bring Hugo. You haul the luggage.’
She carried Hugo over to the larger of the two machines and laid him carefully in its cargo hopper. Will dumped the bags in the back of the other machine and climbed inside.
‘Wait,’ said Rachel. She ran over to him, grabbed his cheeks and kissed him hard on the mouth. Will’s face tingled. His heart pounded. He blinked dumbly at her.
‘What was that for?’ he mumbled.
‘That’s in case we die before we get there. You did great, Will. Really great. See you at the safe house.’ With that, she ran back to her robot and climbed inside.
Will set the troop carrier on automatic and sent it back to the place they’d found it. Then he sealed the lid of the hopper above him so that the only light came from a crack around the rim. The inside stank of surface dust and chemical adhesives. It was hot and cramped, but bearable. With his head still spinning from the kiss, Will let the robot trundle out along the street.
12.3: WILL
The trip to the safe house was a nerve-wracking one. Will watched police vehicles dash past via the robot’s inadequate electronic eyes. He could hear the sirens around him with appalling clarity, though. Just a thin plastic wall separated him from the street.
He began to wonder if the hoppers were watertight. If not, Hugo’s blood might dribble out onto the pavement, leaving a trail for the Earthers to follow. Rachel would be found. He’d have caused her death.
He was immensely relieved when both robots shuddered to a halt outside the front door of the safe house. He scanned the street using the robot’s simple senses and waited till there were no passers-by. Then he leapt out and threw back the lid of Rachel’s hopper. The inside wasn’t pretty. Hugo was still losing blood. Rachel looked up at him with exhausted eyes.
‘Stay here,’ he told her. ‘I’ll get help.’
She nodded. ‘Be quick.’
Will strode up to the door of a house that appeared to be made of yellow lace, surrounded by a dense garden of small blue-green pine trees. He pressed the visitor stud. A few moments later, an Angeleno woman with plastic-perfect features and a yellow dress that clung to her like paint opened the door. She surveyed Will’s blood-spattered clothing and dishevelled hair with alarm.
‘We need help,’ said Will. ‘My friends are back there, in the robots. One of them has been shot.’
She stared at him for a moment, her face blank. A terrible fear gripped Will. Could he have made a mistake about the address?
‘Isn’t this the safe house?’ he said stupidly.
What would he do now if it wasn’t? Kill her? Tie her up in her own home? Will doubted he could bring himself to do either.
The woman’s face slowly took on a frosty aspect. She looked out at the robots for a moment, and then up and down the street.
‘Bring them around the side,’ she said tersely. ‘Behind the trees.’
Will grinned at her in relief. He took a breath to thank her but the door was already closing. He hurried back to the robots.
It took a little coaxing to persuade the robots to abandon their guide strips, but Will succeeded in leading them along the gravel path to the back of the property. He found the woman waiting for them there. A huge, muscular youth with no shirt and pectorals like slabs of mocksteak stood beside her with a handgun tucked into his belt. Will helped Rachel out and together they retrieved the unconscious Hugo.
‘This way,’ said the woman.
She led them inside and down a flight of stairs to a simply furnished room behind a false wall in the basement. Will and Rachel lowered Hugo onto a narrow bed made of wipe-clean plastic. The youth with the gun watched them from the doorway, poker-faced.
‘You’ll find medical supplies in there,’ said the woman, pointing to a blue plastic crate in one corner. ‘I’ll get help.’ With that, she walked out, shutting the door behind her.
Rachel started carefully peeling away Hugo’s improvised dressing. ‘Will, help me. I’ll need tweezers, disinfectant, plasmix, spray-skin and dressings.’
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‘I’m on it,’ said Will.
He dashed over to the crate and started rifling through the contents. He spent the next hour following Rachel’s instructions and accessing Goldwin’s public medical database. Luckily, the safe house was well equipped. Beyond the room with the wipe-clean furnishings lay a bathroom and a basic kitchen. They were able to do a fairly creditable job of dressing Hugo’s injury. They picked the bits of steel from his side, then disinfected the wound and patched it up as best they could. Rachel gave him a shot of repair accelerators and followed it up with another of neurostimulant.
‘Isn’t that dangerous?’ said Will.
She nodded. ‘Yes, but it’ll be a lot harder to get him out of the city if we have to carry him. We’ve got a few hours tops before they figure out what’s going on and lock the whole planet down, so we need him walking if we’re all going to make it out of here alive.’
When they were finished, Hugo lay on the bloody bed, breathing shallowly but regularly. Rachel and Will staggered off to the bathroom, taking turns to shower and change back into their crumpled ship-suits.
Will felt the adrenalin drain out of him as he washed. By the time he was putting his boots on, his hands were shaking so hard that he could barely fasten the adhesive straps.
While Rachel dried her hair, Will wandered around the small suite, examining the facilities in a state of addled shock. Everything they might need for basic living was provided, along with enough dried food in the kitchen to last them for months. However, there were no windows or obvious escape routes.
Will wondered how long they’d be stuck there, and how hot a trail they’d left. He patched into the house computer system and requested a portal to the Protectorate Police. To his surprise, there was no reply. The house’s metaphor space remained as windowless as the basement itself. That was down to resistance security, no doubt – it was understandable that they wouldn’t want any live links to the authorities. Will, however, didn’t like to be thwarted.
He returned to the medical database he’d used to fix up Hugo. From there, perhaps he could find a way to a local hospital and through that out into the rest of the network. But those routes were blocked, too. Eventually he realised that the database he was looking at was a disconnected backup, not the real thing at all.
On a sudden instinct, he strode into the main room and tried the door they’d come in through. It was locked.
‘Fuck!’ he yelled.
He raised his hand to slam the thing and thought better of it. There was always the possibility that Earther soldiers were searching the basement on the other side.
‘What now?’ said Rachel.
‘We’re locked in,’ he explained, ‘and there are no lines to the outside.’
Rachel frowned. ‘It’s probably just resistance paranoia.’
‘Probably,’ said Will, unconvinced.
He thought back to the woman’s face when he’d appeared at the door. On reflection, her expression had looked more like guarded panic than surprise.
‘Don’t you think it’s a bit odd that she didn’t ask us what happened?’ said Will.
‘From the look of Hugo she could probably guess,’ said Rachel. ‘Plus it’ll be all across the pervasivenet by now.’
But then something horrible occurred to Will. What if the resistance had something to do with their predicament?
‘And why did the police fire at us in the first place?’ he asked. ‘They shot John before he even saw them.’
Rachel looked at him nervously. ‘He was armed,’ she said.
‘But Hugo wasn’t. He even told them as much. It’s as if they wanted us dead then and there, regardless of what we did.’
‘Are you surprised?’ said Rachel. ‘These are Earthers, remember?’
Her face, however, betrayed a mounting sense of alarm that echoed his. There’d been no time for either of them to think about the police raid till now. On reflection, there was something very wrong about the way it had played out.
‘I don’t buy it,’ Will replied. ‘They’d want to interrogate us, surely. Find our ship. Find out what we know. If they just wanted us dead, why did they bother to announce themselves as police? It doesn’t add up … Unless,’ he added slowly, ‘they weren’t police.’ He started to get a sour, unpleasant feeling deep in his belly. ‘What if they were resistance? Or police in the pay of the resistance, like the ones John mentioned? John probably worked out something was going down – that’s why he was armed. The negotiations must have failed at the last hurdle. Either that or they set us up from the start, because of the heat we were bringing down on them.’
The more Will thought about it, the more convincing that interpretation became.
‘Shit!’ he exclaimed. ‘I’ve gone and killed us by coming here. I’ve killed the whole mission!’ He clapped his forehead with his hands. They were trapped in a locked room, most likely with assassins on the way.
Rachel grabbed him by the shoulders and stared hard into his eyes. ‘No, you haven’t, Will! Neither of us saw this possibility. And where else were we supposed to go? If we’d headed back to the depot, we’d never have made it out of the city alive. We had no choice but to trust them, and they might still come through for us. We have no idea what’s really going on out there, and if we jump to the wrong conclusion it could lose us our last chance.’
Will looked down at the floor, appalled with himself regardless.
Rachel grabbed his head in both hands. ‘Look at me, Will.’
He glanced up at her.
She kissed him then, for the second time that day, and Will’s world suspended for a while. Nothing existed except Rachel’s lips.
She pulled back and examined him. ‘That’s for getting us here in one piece,’ she said.
Then she kissed him again, more softly this time. Will found his arms around her. She pressed against him.
‘And that’s for helping me with Hugo,’ she said breathlessly. ‘And this is just because I want to.’
They kissed a third time. Will felt his loins stirring. His mind filled with sparks.
She pulled away at last and held his hands in hers. ‘While I was stuck in that hopper, I realised I wanted to kiss you again,’ she told him. ‘I wanted you to know what I felt before it was too late for both of us.’
‘You like me,’ Will said stupidly, barely able to grasp his good fortune. Somehow, it made the prospect of their impending deaths less frightening.
She smiled lopsidedly at him. ‘Yes, I like you. I like you because of the way you treat me. And the way you look at me. The way you sneak a glance at me every time I step out of my bunk. And the fact that you bothered to make an avatar of me.’
Will flushed. How long had she known?
‘You make me feel beautiful, Will,’ she said. ‘I’ve never felt like much except a starship officer before. Around you, I feel like a woman.’
‘You don’t mind?’ he said. ‘That I made an avatar of you, I mean.’
She laughed. ‘No. It’s very flattering, actually.’
‘When … I mean, how did you find out?’ he asked, but then guessed before she answered and regretted asking.
‘John,’ she said, her smile falling away. The mood between them cooled by a few degrees. ‘It’s a small ship,’ she added, ‘and he can be quite a gossip.’
Wrong tense, Will thought, but chose not to correct her.
Rachel looked away, hurt showing on her face. She stared into the middle distance. ‘That’s one of the reasons why our relationship never worked out,’ she said absently.
Will’s mouth fell open. ‘You and he were … together?’
‘Ages ago. Back in Doug’s time.’ The lines of pain around her eyes took on extra depth. ‘We don’t talk about it much. Old wounds aren’t exactly good for ship morale.’
‘I can imagine,’ said Will.
‘I could never get close to him,’ she said, hugging herself. ‘Whenever it looked like he was really going to become intimat
e, he’d laugh it off. He couldn’t bear to let himself be vulnerable to anyone, I guess. Eventually, I got bored of trying. And now he’s dead.’
Tears welled up in her eyes and she buried her face in her hands and wept. Will had no idea what to do. He didn’t try to speak, just awkwardly wrapped his arms around her again.
‘He’s dead, Will,’ she wailed into her hands. ‘The stupid, smug bastard’s dead.’
Will held her close.
Their moment of intimacy was broken seconds later when the door flew open. Resistance heavies strode into the room pointing personal cannons very much like those the police had used. Behind came Metta, immaculate in a form-fitting teal business suit.
Her gaze scanned across Will and Rachel, who were still holding each other in the middle of the room. She tsked to herself.
‘Well, well, our allies,’ she said with an ironic sneer. ‘I wonder if you realise how difficult you’ve made life for us. I think it’s fairly clear that we can’t trust you any more.’
Rachel blinked at her. ‘You can’t trust us?’ she said incredulously.
But Metta wasn’t listening. ‘Boys, take them outside,’ she said, jerking a thumb towards the door.
The heavies pushed Will and Rachel out of the room with the barrels of their guns.
‘What about Hugo?’ said Will.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Metta. ‘He’s coming with you.’
Another couple of resistance men stepped in behind them and picked up Hugo’s limp body. They were taken up the stairs and out through the back door the way they’d come in. A delivery truck was waiting there. The plastic plating that comprised the floor had been removed to reveal a space where the spare fuel cells should have been.
‘Get in and lie down,’ ordered one of the heavies.
‘Where are you taking us?’ said Rachel.
‘Away,’ said the heavy. ‘Now shut up and get in.’
He prodded her hard with the muzzle of his gun. Rachel spared him a withering look and stepped inside. Hugo was placed in the truck next to them and the flooring laid back over their faces. It was a tight fit. There was barely any room to move and the darkness was total. Will noticed with concern that the hiding place had been lined against net traffic. His electronic senses were dead.