Kaleidocide

by Dave Swavely

  “Where to now?” said Jon’s voice in my ear. I jerked my attention back to my big view and saw that he and Lynn had arrived in the part of the prisoners’ corridor that provided access to the courtrooms in the Hall of Justice. I sent them through one of the rooms, into the beautiful, long atrium that ran through the center of the building, and then to the foyer by the exit on the north side of the building, which was on the other side from the fight going on at the jail and the lot where we had parked our aeros. A glance at Ni’s view showed that she was still occupying the enemy force there, but it was way too hot for me to get Lynn to one of the aeros. I told them to stop where they were and take a break, partially because Lynn was huffing and puffing, but also because I was concerned that an enemy copter was circling high enough in the air and close enough to that far side of the building, and it might see them if they exited.

  I thought about hiding Lynn somewhere in the building, which had by now been emptied of all the county employees, for the fifteen to twenty minutes until our Firehawks arrived. But I hesitated because I was afraid that the mercs might be scanning the property and would see her heat signature, think she might be me, and hit her location with grenades or rockets. I was soon glad that I didn’t go that route, because my fear was confirmed when Terrey’s voice came over the comm.

  “They must have detected Lynn and your double,” he said, “because the squad in the court building just turned around and headed their way.”

  “How many?” I asked.

  “Looks like about six,” Terrey said, which meant Stephenson had taken out almost half of them, and now would be in the clear because they had left his location. I hoped he would follow and distract them further, but I couldn’t count on him slowing them down, and then Terrey made it very clear that Lynn and Jon had to run. “The fourth squad, which was not being engaged, is also moving in their direction.”

  That left me with no choice, so I told Lynn and Jon to run out into the parking lot behind the building, and head toward a huge auto transport truck that was parked there, presumably because the driver was visiting the DMV inside the building when it was evacuated. I wanted to put them in something more secure and powerful than a car, and an idea had come to me about how we could use the big carrier to our advantage. Incidentally, I also noticed that the truck was the most colorful object in the parking lot, since it had ten new cars of different shades secured to the top and bottom racks behind the big cab. I didn’t know if Terrey would think the colors were good or bad luck, but I didn’t have time to worry about that, because two of the enemy helicopters were now swinging around the building toward them. Lynn and Jon would be easy targets for the guns and rockets on those birds in about twenty seconds, whether they made it to the truck or not.

  43

  THE BRIDGE

  Lynn and Jon were running hand in hand—even she didn’t mind doing that with a “monstrosity” when her life was on the line.

  I was about to tell them to separate from one another in the hopes that the enemy aircraft would only fire on Jon, when two aeros suddenly appeared from the east over their heads and flew directly toward the helicopters. These were two peacers who had been nearby and came when they heard what was happening, and since our aeros were armored but not armed, they had to be creative in how they engaged the sikersky Primes. So both of them used their aeros as missiles, hurling them toward the enemy, and one of the peacers even extended half of her body out of the open driver’s side window and fired both of her handguns at the helicopter as she approached it. That pilot swerved out of her way rather easily, but had to evade her gunfire as she passed. The other aero was still being steered by the peacer inside, and so collided directly with its fast-turning target, lodging its nose in the side of the helo and sending them both into a spin that would take a while to recover from. Soon a third aero with another peacer arrived and joined the fray, and now I was more confident that Lynn and Jon could make an escape in the car carrier.

  I thought briefly again about sending the two of them in different directions, in different vehicles, but it was the Wild West on that property right now, especially with the two squads of attackers swarming out of the building into the parking lot. I made a quick judgment call that I would rather have Lynn with me, or with my other me at least, so I told them to get in the truck and walked Jon through hot-wiring the engine. He was a quick study, and soon the powerful vehicle was pulling out of the parking lot with all twelve tires screeching. If the SUVs were able to pursue them, the cab would likely take some gunfire, so I told Lynn to curl up in the sleeping compartment in the back of it. If the helicopters were able to pursue them, however, and they had any rockets left, it wouldn’t make any difference where Lynn was when the whole truck got incinerated.

  “Min and Ni,” I shouted after noticing their windows in my holo were still active. “We’re on the road, so focus on taking down the three remaining Primes, or at least keep them too busy to follow.”

  They both acknowledged my order, and I watched briefly through their views and the overhead one as they disentangled themselves from battles with the foot soldiers, some of whom had already left to clamber into the SUVs and pursue the car truck. Both cyborgs had run out of ammo long before this, so Ni dropped the rifle she had taken from one of the attackers and liberated a guided RPG launcher from another. With amazing speed she moved into a position where she could fire it at a couple of the helicopters.

  Meanwhile Min, who had been flashing in and out of cover brandishing the two deadly blades that were stored in his back, stopped hacking at the other group of mercs and made two massive leaps toward the Prime that had eaten the aero and was struggling to maintain altitude near the ground. He climbed in the hole on the side of the helicopter and took a flurry of bullets from the pilots while he used his massive strength to push the damaged aero back out. The Prime immediately stabilized and gained altitude, but the pilots wouldn’t be saying thank-you to the big Chinese man, because he leapt upon them and threw them out of the same hole. He took control of the bird and turned its weapons on the others, which I knew would definitely occupy them for a while. I also knew, however, that Min’s built-in Atreides shield only had enough power to function for a limited time, and it was probably close to the end of its battery life. And Ni had only so many RPGs to fire at the Primes, so I knew that before long one or more of the helicopters would be able to catch up to the truck that Jon and Lynn were fleeing in. I just hoped that the truck could make it to our approaching Firehawks before that happened, so they would have some protection. I was sure, however, that the enemy SUVs would overtake them before the cavalry arrived, so they would have to protect themselves from that danger.

  With that in mind, I told Jon to head south on the 101 freeway and to acquaint himself with the special controls between the two seats in the front of the cab. Fortunately there wasn’t much traffic on the freeway because it was the middle of the day. There were, however, too many hills to climb for the huge vehicle to maintain a high speed, and I knew the enemy SUVs would be catching it too soon. So I told Jon to veer off to the left onto 580 East, since that was a flatter road, and mostly downhill to the bay.

  “That’s good,” Terrey said, obviously still watching all this with great interest, while speeding north from the city. “The Firehawks are coming across the bay from the west, so you should cross their path on or near the bridge. They’ll take care of anything that follows you.”

  Despite myself, I couldn’t help thinking about Stephenson’s other dream when Terrey mentioned the bridge we were now heading toward. It certainly was big enough for someone to fall to his death from it, but there were heavy railings on the sides to prevent such an eventuality, at least while inside a vehicle. Terrey didn’t say anything about the dream thing, but he did mention the other weird metaphysical theory that we had been hearing about too much.

  “I like your choice of transportation,” he said. “Very colorful.”

  “You would think of t
hat,” I said.

  “And you’re telling me you didn’t?”

  I didn’t have a chance to respond, because San interrupted us to tell me that the four armored SUVs were now approaching fast behind Lynn and Jon. They had obviously been souped up inside as well as outside, and most of the others cars on the road in front and in back of us moved to the side of the road or stopped when they saw them speeding up to the rear of the car carrier.

  “If you like the colors of this truck,” I said to Terrey, “you’ll really like this feature.”

  I told Jon to activate the controls between the seats and use them to release the car that was at the very back of the bottom rack. It slid out of its resting place, bounced onto the road behind the truck, and kept going that direction, causing several of the SUVs to slow down and swerve in order to avoid hitting it. Jon then released the car that was in front of it, and it gained more momentum as it slid down the tracks and flew off the back of the rack like a bullet. Again, the SUVs had to slow down and swerve, making them fall even farther behind the truck. They soon got smarter, however, and moved to the two outside lanes of the highway, where they were not directly behind the truck, and gunned their engines.

  On my suggestion, Jon yanked the truck over to the left lane, and then back to the middle when the SUVs in that lane moved to avoid being behind him. They slid to the side again, one behind the other, but then on his own Jon made the surprisingly deft move of releasing the third car while jerking the wheel at the moment when it reached the back of the rack. So the rear of the truck was pointed at the SUVs when the car exited it, and it connected with the first enemy and caused him to careen off the guardrail and flip over into the middle of the road. The driver of the SUV behind him had to slam on his brakes to avoid being hit himself, taking him out of the race for at least a few minutes. In the meantime, the two SUVs on the other side of the freeway had surged forward to the side of the truck, where they were no longer in danger of car missiles being fired from the back of it. The roofs of both enemy vehicles slid open, and from the front one a blue-clad soldier sprang up and started firing his assault rifle toward the back of the cab. He would soon be firing into the windows of the cab because the SUVs were moving faster than the truck, and on the roof of the second SUV another merc was readying an RPG launcher.

  “Watch out!” Terrey said.

  “Watch this,” I said, and Jon knew what to do even before I told him. He released the last two cars on the bottom rack of the carrier, simultaneously starting their engines with the remote system that the truck drivers used to unload and park the cars they transported. The two cars slid out onto the road behind the rack one after another, and with a forefinger for the first one and a thumb for the second touching the pad next to him, Jon was able to control both cars. Acceleration and braking depended on how much pressure he applied to the pad with each finger, and turns were made by moving it left or right. It only took a few seconds for Jon to bring the cars up close to the SUVs, because one of the cars was a Ford Mustang and the other a Menger Flash. In any other situation this would be a terrible waste of a couple very fast automobiles, but in this case it was necessary—he slammed the Mustang against the side of the SUV in the front, jarring the merc with the RPG launcher enough that he couldn’t aim well enough to fire.

  The Flash was pressing up against the rear of the second SUV, but the smaller cars were barely budging the bigger armored vehicles, and the shooters were stabilizing themselves to fire at the truck. So I told Jon to use the even greater weight of the carrier truck and turn the wheel to the right. The Flash in the rear stopped moving and was out of the game when he took his thumb off the pad to concentrate on controlling the wheel and the Mustang, in order to take out the two SUVs. The huge road monster and the smaller car next to it pushed the two other vehicles easily to the far right side of the freeway and pressed them into the cement wall there, grinding them against it until they couldn’t move forward anymore and were left in a smoking clump by the barrier.

  The Mustang was ruined, too, but the massive car truck was barely scratched. Jon had to keep it moving forward, however, because now the last remaining SUV had caught up to it. In a strategic blunder, the driver didn’t try the RPG approach, which might have worked now that there was more room on the freeway section that widened as it approached the bridge. Instead he pulled up directly behind the back of the truck, tailgating the empty bottom rack, and two light blue attackers climbed out of the roof of the SUV, down the windshield and hood, and onto the empty bottom rack of the truck.

  “Just hit the brakes,” I said to Jon when we saw what they were doing.

  “But this is more fun,” he said, and released the back car on the top rack, so it dropped down right onto the windshield and hood of the SUV, smashing it dramatically and incapacitating it.

  He’s enjoying this too much, I thought, which always happens at first with lethal violence—until we really begin to understand the “lethal” part. But I let him go, because in this situation it was either them or us—either them or my wife, to be more precise.

  One of the attackers started moving up the middle of the empty bottom rack toward the cab, and the other climbed up to the top rack and began to make his way across the four cars that were still up there. Jon began to lower the entire top rack, which the carrier drivers did to get the cars up there off the truck. He lowered it as fast as it would go down, and the man on the bottom rack couldn’t keep his balance well enough at the high speed to get to the side and jump off in time. He was crushed under the weight of the rack and the four cars. Then Jon released all four remaining cars from the top rack at the same time. The second mercenary tried to run toward the cabin across the top of the sliding cars, and actually made it to the fourth and final car. But he couldn’t make it off that one, and he dropped to his stomach and held on for dear life as the car fell off onto the road. Then he probably lost his dear life as it slammed into the other three cars and he was thrown onto the pavement like a child’s rag doll.

  The double had just started to celebrate this Pyrrhic victory when the really lethal enemy showed up. Two of the light blue Sikorsky Prime helicopters had emerged from the hills to the left of the truck, and were probably in firing range already. I glanced down at the small windows on the bottom left of my holo projection, and saw that Min’s and Ni’s views were both blacked out. Only Stephenson’s view, from his glasses, was still active—he seemed to be stationary and looking at a damaged wall sideways, like he was taking a rest after the battle, or perhaps immobilized by a wound.

  “The bad news is that the Primes shook off our cyborgs,” Terrey said, reading my mind. “But the good news is that they used all their ammo to do it, and the BASS Firehawks are right on the other side of the bay. If you can make it into the suspension cables of the bridge, they can’t even follow you in there and the Hawks will take them out.”

  Jon looked toward the bridge that the truck was almost on, which was called the Golden Bay Bridge. The one that used to span the North Bay at this location had been called the Richmond/San Rafael Bridge (or RSR), but it was destroyed by the quake because it sat right on two major fault lines. It had been an eyesore even before that, so no one wanted to rebuild or restore it. Instead, BASS helped Marin and Richmond to accommodate their swelling population of refugees from the peninsula and Oakland by erecting a new bridge that would be a combination of the two most famous feats of Bay Area architecture: the Bay Bridges and the Golden Gate Bridge. The Golden Bay had two high towers like the Golden Gate, and two levels of traffic like the Bay, and the gold color was somewhere between the red and silver of the other two. As I looked at it through Jon’s eyes, I saw what Terrey had meant: the first length of the bridge was open on the top level, and the suspension cables stretched up toward the near tower. Once we got to it, no helicopter could possibly get to us.

  I looked off in the distance to the right of the bridge, and could see the black shapes of the Firehawks headed our way. But th
en I told Jon to look out of his driver’s side window, and I could see clearly that the light blue enemy birds would reach us before the friendly ones did, and maybe before we could get to the tower. It could be a matter of seconds, and Jon knew this without me telling him, so he pressed the pedal to the floor as hard as he could and gripped the wheel with white knuckles. I tried to imagine what the Primes would do if they reached the truck while it was still vulnerable—I figured they would try to fire hand weapons into the cab or drop men onto it like the SUVs had tried to do. I was wholly unprepared for what they actually did.

  The two enemy helicopters did reach the truck just before it made it to the tower, and well before the Firehawks were in firing range. The pilots positioned them above the front and back of the car carrier and extended the same wires they had used to transport the SUVs, with the smart heads on the wires fastening themselves to the top of the truck in eight places. Then the helicopters lifted the whole truck off the road just high enough to clear the barrier, and dumped it over the side of the bridge.

  I was shocked, and didn’t know what was happening until it did, so I only had enough time to shout Lynn’s name and a brief instruction to her and the double. I didn’t know whether they heard me or not, because Lynn was screaming at the top of her lungs from the back of the cab. Jon didn’t scream at all but merely watched through the front window of the truck as it rushed toward the surface of one of the wide cement circles that supported the legs of the bridge and protruded from the water more than a hundred feet below. The truck fell cab-first because of the way it had been released from the wires by the helicopters, so Jon had a view that looked like being in the front car of a roller coaster on its steepest drop, but with only a horrible death waiting at the bottom.