by Rhine, Scott
Mr. Fontenelle picked that moment to choke on piece of meat. He was turning purple before the guard did the Heimlich on him. Then, he transitioned to a terrible shade of red. I said, “Hey, if this is a bad time, I can come back later. You know where I’ll be.”
I got up to leave as the second guard moved to escort me out. “Nice touch with that GEDM cover. Those corporate pork-barrels have so many do-nothing vice-presidents at this shindig, they couldn’t spot one more on the roster. I guess, if someone tried to blow the whistle on you, they’d only draw attention to their own useless existence.” This time he choked on his drink. Old Fontenelle was having a rough night of it.
I was as shocked as anyone when the geek from the hospitality suite bumped into me in the hallway. He pointed to his name tag and winked. “Sorry, I already have a date,” I explained. Groupies come in all styles, I guess.
“My name is Playfair,” he hissed.
“I’ll keep that in mind if I get lonely later,” I said, trying to push past him.
“Don’t you get it? Play fair ciphers, or playing fair at the game. See?” He looked like a college math weenie, Boston College material. Come to think of it, the Feds recruited a lot from Boston College. Maybe he knew my contact.
I slurred out a curse as the truth occurred to me. “You’re my contact.” I had just made a major enemy. Well, just more of a challenge for the Scarab to overcome—first Exotech, then Siberian, and now GEDM, the military monstrosity of Michigan.
“It’s okay, not many people can penetrate this disguise. I’m at the convention as a reporter for Motor Trend. I took out the reservation here for the press. I usually excuse myself when they start smoking, so nobody suspects.” I had a seat on a nearby, plush divan.
“I just wanted to let you know that several people have tried background checks on you, and they think you’re a cover identity.” He handed me a copy of a dossier on E. Hayes.
“What do I do about it?”
“Nothing. If they assume that you’re a government agent, it might take some of the heat off me. I’m involved in a sensitive investigation and the less people notice me, the better. Just be mysterious, and don’t dispel any rumors.” He gave me his room number but warned me not to say anything on the phone to give him away.
“They’d tap phones for the game?” I asked.
“Grow up. There’s money on this. There’s only two rules at this game. One, don’t change the game program through unapproved interfaces. Two, survive.” He looked me in the eye, and I felt shaken. I was in the big leagues and there were no umpires.
When I got back to the table, Mary was ready to go. “What took you so long, babe? It’s time to leave. I saved you a mint chocolate.”
In the back seat of the limo, I didn’t even react at first when she kissed me on the cheek. Eventually, I held her chin in my hand and said “Mary, I really need you. Thanks for being here for me.” I kissed her gently and slowly on the lips. If I hadn’t paid 100 grand for tonight I would have told the driver to keep going. If she showed any more leg, forget the money.
Chapter 8 – Wabbit Season
On our way back through the convention center, we couldn’t believe the change. The background volume had reached a frenzy. I saw billboards advertising all-night movies, flyers offering seminars, and women in bikinis inviting passers-by to trade shows. All of them were vying for attention against the giant TV screens on the ceiling. It was a circus with a hundred rings.
Twenty minutes before the first virtual racer was scheduled to start, we made it to our hotel room. The elevators had been packed. “Geez, if the elevator had broken down, there’d be a lot fewer competitors,” Mary Ann said, taking off her high-heels and massaging her right foot. Her black stockings made me wish that I had time to relax her whole body.
I logged back on to my system and checked the watchdog programs. “That’s why some people race from booths in the auditorium, despite the audience. At least you know you can get to your terminal.”
Her face looked innocent, even a bit shocked. “Hey, I was just kidding.”
My “trio” of vehicles would start in tandem mode. This was considered by some as putting all my eggs in one basket. When you use baskets with armor this heavy, why not?
“We’ll start in non-spin mode to keep our abilities secret for as long as possible. It will take a minute to spin up the hull, but once we turn on the cloak, we can keep it on all the time. Until we do, it’ll steer like an overweight hippo. On the bright side, we shouldn’t need much speed inside the city.”
I started checking all systems, beginning with the radio. The game permitted two types of communication, broadband broadcast to everyone in range (including the press) and point-to-point message squirts for messages you only want one other vehicle to hear. The secret transmissions were generally for your own team members, but could be sent to other players if they accepted.
We had only five minutes to post time when I looked up from my screen. Mare had already changed into a Team DeClerk jump-suit and put her hair up. I was so absorbed in the preparations, she hadn’t even shut the bathroom door while she changed. The screen showed an aerial view of northwest London in the Regents Park region. The speaker broadcast revving engines that had been digitally recorded at the Indianapolis 500 a few years back. In reality, most of our machines would be much quieter. For both fuel efficiency and attack stealth, noise is your enemy.
“What’s on the telly?” I asked, getting into the Continental swing of things.
“The usual. Since Abbey Road studios is in the area, On-line Music is doing old Beatles hits. ESPN is winding up their piece on polo, fox hunting, and other sports of the wealthy English. The local channel is covering the four day weekend they’re having at Sandia this week and how the extra tourist money from this convention will help the city.” She had several miniature TV’s and a cellular phone she was arranging on the huge, glass-topped, living room table.
“Where’d you get all that?” I asked, paying attention to her for the barest instant.
“The same place I got the phone list of all the contestants, International time and temperature, information, and the short-wave I haven’t unpacked yet—room service,” she said matter-of-factly. “The portable phone is the one I use at work.”
“You’ve done this before?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I just pretended I was setting up a comm center for a police dragnet. I figured a racing crew does about the same thing, keeping tabs on both friends and enemies. The racers just have better funding.
“So what should I expect for the first leg?” she asked.
I flipped my engines into warm standby and disconnected from the control chair. I was about to rummage through my map pile and get the London detail, but she already had it spread on the wall beside me. Wow, she was efficient. “Uh, we start here, head south toward Hyde Park, and pass by the Hard Rock Cafe. Zip down this way, through Piccadilly Circus, and eventually out of the city. We connect up with the A2 freeway through Canterbury to Dover, catch the ferry to Calais, then take this road straight to Paris. Easy.”
I picked up a bowl of peanuts and brought it with me to the chair, where I hooked in again. There was no direct cortical link to my computer like you see in movies, but we did have the look-shoot interface Honeywell did for jet weapon guidance systems. My hands and feet were also synchronized in with the control interface of my virtual cockpit. If I took my hands off the phantom wheel without engaging autopilot, my megabuck mirage would crash into the nearest guard rail. More than one pilot has learned that if you’re firing lasers, don’t sneeze.
All the stations carried the exact same sound and image at the beginning of the race, but diverged again quickly. A vehicle would be launched every ten seconds from the starting line. Even though I wouldn’t be going for another ten minutes, I was a coiled spring.
“Hey!” she shouted, almost causing me to smash into the sedan beside me. “He’s going the wrong way!” She referred to
the Harley-Ikawa Saturday Night Special that had just gone off the road to the north instead of south. I concentrated on my rapid pulse, lowering it from the false alarm.
“Mary, please be careful not to distract me. Talk as if you were on police radio, and try to avoid touching me for the time being.”
“Why?” I could hear her smile. “Afraid of girl germs?”
“No. You’d turn me on and change my pupil size, and then the eye calibration would be in the toilet.” I nosed forward as the line progressed steadily.
She muttered something about underwear.
“Pardon?”
“He’s still going the wrong way.”
“Maybe he’s taking the outer belt, or knows another short cut. Hell, he’s about the size of a three-wheeler, he could take the Tube. I told you, we don’t even have to obey traffic signs.”
MTV played Baker Street because that, too, was nearby.
Other announcers were laughing as London traffic, modeled after the wall clock not the eight hour time zone difference, began to lag. I heard a few horns honking at T plus eight minutes. At T plus nine, I heard a thump, and saw my video shake.
“What the...?”
Incoming from Trans-Siberian Motors flashed on my screen with text only. “TAG, I’m it.”
Just what I needed. He wouldn’t be directly after me, but he’d cross the starting line within twenty seconds. I didn’t have time for traffic. “Mare, I need you to find me a way around this congestion before I launch. Be inventive.” I could already see the numbers slipping away. They had just launched vehicle number seventy. I slipped my engine into active, but couldn’t spin up to speed till I was out of sight.
Seconds clicked by on the display. “Hyde park. You can save time by going through it, not around it. I launched, accelerating as fast as my simulated engine could take me. I only got up to 35 km/h before I was jockeying for position with quaint black ground taxis that were driven by total lunatics. I was barely around the first corner when TSM’s heavyweight went active.
Not one microsecond after the tank crossed the line, everyone on the course heard a tell-tale whine. “The two-minute warning,” I shouted to my partner moments before the news station explained, “means TSM’s powering up his offensive capabilities. In this case, it seems to be pulse lasers and missile launchers.” Much Star-Trek techno-babble followed. Given the flash of the speeches, Mary told me the media had probably been informed ahead of time. I had been chosen to be the ceremonial first blood of this convention.
Not all weapons needed two minutes to be usable. Mine only took a few seconds, but I didn’t activate my weapons because I couldn’t hurt him, and I needed the style points. My only prayer was to outrun him.
The comment-requested icon came up for the local station. I put in a quick “Shh. Be vewy quiet, he’s hunting wabbits.” About that time, I jumped the fence onto the grass of the park. I headed for the trees bordering the sidewalk just to confuse his tracking systems. I managed to miss the simulated “little old ladies” that frantically pushed perambulators out of my way.
I cranked it up to sixty km/h before realizing I couldn’t spin yet. Besides the cameras still watching from the overhead blimp, in this soft ground, I’d slow to almost nothing. The engines didn’t have any power to spare yet.
“Navigator to pilot, the hunter has just entered the woods. Some of the other heavies are following in his tread marks just to be lazy. Omigod, the lake. You’re going to hit the lake.”
Normally hitting water doesn’t hurt a Ground-Effect vehicle. They’re a little like a pure hovercraft that way. Unfortunately, man-made lakes tend to descend at a steep angle, and Ghedra would sink nose-down into the sludge before leveling out. It would take no effort for Elmer to blow me away from the back-side with the whole world watching. One side of the lake had a waterfall, but I couldn’t remember which one.
“Where’s the bridge?” I shouted.
“Right!”
I turned hard, just missing a glass restaurant and more sparrows than you could shake a stick at. If I turned too sharply in non-spin mode, I could easily flip myself over. I could hear my lift compensators complaining loudly under stresses they were never designed take. It’s not the speed they minded, just the sudden changes. Just after I crossed the tiny bridge, Elmer was a little low on his aim and blew it out of existence. I was so elated that he’d bought me some extra time that I almost impaled myself on the high, wrought-iron fencing on the opposite side. A blur of green flashed by on my screen as I banked through a wooden information stand. Three networks listened to the crunch in stereophonic enhancement. I bounced in the sand horseshoe pits, sliding across the wide sidewalk into the street. “Warning, you have sustained damage,” said the collision subsystem. Annoyed, I hit the MORE button. “Main grid has been damaged, maximum speed reduced by 10 percent until repairs can be effected.” The second message came from the referee expert system. No one else could tell precisely how hurt I was because my qualifying times were so much lower than my true cruising speed. I watched my heat gauge climb as the main grid did far more work than ever intended.
A third message lit up the screen. “Twenty second penalty to realign the grids and change facing.” What was worse, I spilled my peanuts all over the control chair, and couldn’t take the time to clean them off at this moment.
“Give me some good news, navigator. Please.”
My reflexes were off tonight. In the local games, I could have taken that turn easily. It must have been the booze with dinner, but I wasn’t even legally drunk yet. Hell, I’d played night games totally hammered before and not missed a beat. Something didn’t feel right.
“Without the bridge, the big tanks, including Trans-Siberian will have to go around the long way. You’ve bought yourself another half a minute or so. Get moving.”
Because so many people were on the wrong side, I gunned it down the center of the road as a compromise. I took out a pedestrian crossing box as I streaked past the Hard Rock Cafe. On the broadcast band, I said “Hey Doc, you missed!” and made a big kissing noise, ala Bugs Bunny. Within minutes, the nickname “Fudd Motorcars” was stuck on TSM.
I was cruising back at normal city speeds and had MTV cranked when I almost got my socks seared. A pulse cannon, already charged, wheeled around a corner two blocks away. This was another TSM model, middleweight. Evidently, he took off the safety at the same time his big brother did. This gun wouldn’t kill me, but he sure could keep me pinned till the rest of his team arrived. I took an extra loop around the traffic circle, breaking away a block early, down an alley. He tried to follow me, but the stress was too much for the flimsy frame. His bottom made the turn, but his top kept going straight—separating just like I had predicted.
Out of the corner of my eye, I watched the engine heat indicator on my control panel climb toward the red zone. As I reach the alley, I decided it was now or never, and spun into stealth mode. The increased air flow and aid from the other two grids lowered the temperature and took me out of the danger zone almost instantly. I used the break to wipe off sweat and guzzle down a drink. Once I reached the proper hull speed and safe engine load, I used the passive cloaking to make my way toward Piccadilly the back way.
“It’s working!” she said. “They think you’re dead or cheating. The broadcast-band radio is going nuts.”
I was almost there when Mary warned me. “TSM heavy, incoming. The broadcaster in the blimp spotted you on the visuals and named the street. Sorry, hon’.”
I was still okay. They had to use manual targeting on me because my IR pattern was too weak, and my transponder would confuse most long-range devices.
“Radar lock established,” said my onboard computer.
I floored it, and hit Piccadilly Circus going full speed. “Blanket ECM engage,” I ordered. I caught just a brief glimpse of the giant Mecca of neon advertising in Piccadilly traffic circle. About the time I reached Lily White’s, I saw the gridlock. Over a hundred cars, and nothing wa
s moving; I was going to crash.
Not thinking, I hammered the brake. That didn’t stop me, just popped me several meters into the air. My momentum kept me moving. As I came down, I could hear the rapid thumping of my vehicle against the roofs of the ground cars. “Enemy unit is firing.” I accelerated again, almost broad-siding a double-decker bus.
I found out later that the bastard fired five missiles after me. On slow motion replay, one hit the car directly in front of TSM on ground level. The next hit the fountain, another a silver tanker, and the last two went into the eight-story building with the Sony ad on it. I hit the pavement on the other side of the jam going eighty. A few seconds later, I thought I was clear, on the road out of town when my controls froze up. Cursing a blue streak, I ripped off my virtual reality head gear. The console was still locked with no autopsy on the screen. “What killed me?”
Mary Ann shushed me. “It’s not just you, dear. They have a situation. The simulator can’t handle the computation in real-time any more, so it went off-line.”
“Can’t handle it? It’s on a network of supercomputers.”
She was watching all the channels at once and talking on her headset to somebody. “Whenever a player dies, the Consortium is obligated to perform what’s left of the 200 odd tests they pay to undergo during the race. These tests take immense computational resources. Normally, you wouldn’t notice this, but pretty soon more vehicles died than they had machines. Imagine it. Each death adds to the load and then increases the size of the explosion. It’s seems some of the victims were really packing. Then there was the matter of the building falling. The chain reactions got pretty complicated after the first few seconds, and eventually the numbers exceeded game parameters. They had to call in a programmer after the game shut itself down. It could be a while. Elmer’s own team leader called him a stupid Fu... before all broadcasts ceased.”