by Rhine, Scott
Bronze hieroglyphics now floated in the air beside the Djinn, among them, a bio-hazard symbol, a lightning bolt, an ear, an eye, and an open hand. Meanwhile, my repair account meter was dropping like a rock. When prompted, I selected English as the language. Now, several options appeared on the screen: target, subsystem affected, severity, rapidity of onset, contagiousness, trigger, and deactivation fail-safe. I was sitting on a state-of-the-art virus factory!
This would be great to use. First I’d stick Exotech with a nice slow one in the guidance systems. Next, I’d hit TSM up with a weapons system worm that would trigger when a player other than me passed too close. The problem was, how could I afford to use it? Once I used it, everyone would zero in on my location and exterminate me on principle. Corporations hate viruses, because even the best tailored ones seldom stay contained, and the only answer was net-wide isolation of every machine having contact during the infected period. That could sometimes cost more than the actual machines being saved.
Perhaps that’s why Pensatronics hadn’t unveiled it yet. Its use would be messy and unpopular. Until I could decide what to do with it, I set a booby trap in case someone else took this device from me, or I wanted another mine. I chose a highly contagious virus that would affect the disk system slowly and the electronic mail system immediately, triggered by opening the mini-vault. As the fail-safe password, I typed the password PANDORA.
Next, I backed up the booby-trapped program to my removable drive and used it to guard the evidence file I already had. This was great stuff, but I was dangerously short of sleep. I promised myself I would explore the other options of the program and experiment with effective ranges as soon as I knew it wouldn’t wipe out the world by mistake. As quickly and deliberately as possible, I powered off the Electronic Warfare device, and stuffed it back in the vault; however, I left the lock unlatched. Popping out my portable drive, I turned off the workstation, and made my way back to bed.
Chapter 16 – Mysterious Disappearances
I woke up at 7:00 AM, wound tighter than a ten-day clock. Reality has a nasty way of sneaking up behind somebody. Here we were at day three already and the real pressure-cooker was about to begin. Someone had slipped a copy of the latest standings underneath our door before sunrise and most of the twenty remaining vehicles were heavyweights, damaged, or sole survivors on their teams. All of them had high kill ratings, while I had the award for “most shot-at of the year.” TSM, predictably, had no entries left; however, GEDM and Exotech still had a couple entries each. The two companies might forget their previous animosities to join forces against me. Luckily for me, the Exotech Viper had brake trouble, crashing spectacularly on the final approach to Monaco. As I expected, last year’s second place, the sole Hicks-Eisner Overdrive vehicle looked like a guaranteed winner. The Australian-engineered and Indonesian-built sports vehicle dubbed the “Tasmanian Tornado” was predicted to beat all known speed records for this event once it reached the open road of the Autobahn.
After the late shift, Mark Waters had scribbled a note on the printout saying that he had to leave for a few hours but would be back soon.
Between the shower and the time I hit the planning table in the living room, I developed an acute sense of my own weaknesses. I guess I had been so concerned about surviving the preliminaries that I didn’t put much thought into what we’d do to get to the finish line. I was nearly out of information and had already used my fifth ace without anybody catching me. I was getting superstitious; my luck was bound to run out soon, and the stakes were getting high enough that I wouldn’t want to be around me when it did.
Mare came out for coffee at eight, smiling languidly. “What did you get up for last night?”
I explained the Pandora device to her. “I checked it out a little this morning. It’s more than just a virus breeder. From what I can tell, the lightning bolt symbol can be used to blind other players through satellite links, radio, or direct circuit overload at close range. This might have been what hit the pilot who came after me at the casino. It can look like an accident if you do it right.”
She caught on fast. “I get the idea. The eye is for locating or tracking, the ear for eavesdropping, recording, whatever. That’s hardly worth a mint.”
“It’s more sophisticated than that. It can perform pre-programmed acts based on detailed trigger events, notify you when something you’re interested in has been detected, even sniff the radio emissions of enemy computers for passwords. Mare, I’m starting to worry about who else has these things.” I pointed to the on-line chat group the losers were holding to back my worries.
“A lot of disks have been turning up bad lately, more than you can explain by the usual rate of infant mortality. I mean, they have these weapons classed by number, and this bundle of Armageddon only rates a seven. What if someone out there is packing a ten?”
While she was telling me not to be so paranoid, I put in a panic-button call to Foxworthy. His wife, Celeste, couldn’t tell me where he was or when he’d be back. Fifteen minutes after that, she told me the same thing. Celeste sounded like a classy lady. When I apologized for annoying her, she explained, “This is nothing. You’re a client in trouble. I come from a family with three generations of lawyers. I promise Nigel will get the message as soon as possible.” Then she took down my number.
When our bodyguard didn’t show up after a while, I rang his office. His answering service said that Mr. Waters had been “unavoidably detained” but would meet me at noon to explain. We would be on our own until the mid-day break. To top it all off, my starting position was smack in the center of the line-up, a target for both groups. Everything that had happened so far today was conspiring to make me as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.
“Just because you’re paranoid ...” I muttered.
I tinkered with all of Ghedra’s systems compulsively and still had the headset and data-glove on as I pored over all the photos and clippings on the table. I was so desperate, I was even reading the latest stories in the press on my competition. The most informative one had the unlikely title of “The Car as a Weapon, a Retrospective.” It was by a psychologist who had done his thesis on vehicular personality analysis. The phrase “psychopath” came up a dozen times, as well as the average number of laws a pilot in the SimCon competition violated per hour.
From a more practical standpoint, it told me that with the tighter playing field, some of the players I had trusted as allies yesterday might be gunning for my back today. If I wanted to survive, I had to follow the advice of Tsun Tsu, “Seek weakness, avoid strength.”
According to the game guidebook, the route for day three was shorter in horizontal distance than the other days, but not in vertical distance or strain on the machines. It was designed to try the endurance of both the vehicles and the teams. We would start slow, leaving Monaco and heading into Italy through San Remo. We’d get to Milano by way of Genoa, and then the hard part would begin. We’d head north into Switzerland on the Autobahn. What had started out as a foot-race would digress into an ironman competition. I predicted that at least three vehicles would crap out while trying to cross the Alps. The stumps of Roman columns still visible beside the road were the same ones seen by Hannibal on his trip through those mountains.
Beyond that, I had no idea where I was going, as almost all of my maps for East Germany were out of date. The only books about the Alps still available at the local library were about a 1918 trip through the Andorran Alps on the wrong side of France. I pitched the book across the room, and into the balcony sliding door. “Oh, that’s good if I want a fold-out copy of the Andorran national anthem. Cripes, we need facts!”
Mare said “Relax, Ethan. I’ve seen Sound of Music.”
“Those were the Austrian Alps. We need Italian Alps.” After almost an hour of furtive stewing and honing my engine performance ratios to a razor’s edge, tuning them for the steep slopes and rarefied air, I snapped. I vaguely recall shaking the Swiss road m
ap, and screaming, “Why can’t they write them in English?”
To her credit, Mary resisted the impulse to slap me like they do hysterical people in movies. Instead, she put two hands on my back in pre-massage position and calmly said, “I’m sure the Chinese team is having a much harder time, dear.”
That got a chuckle. I butted my forehead against the interface screen. “I have no idea how to make up the time we lost the last few days. I definitely have no idea what the best route through downtown Zurich might be.” I didn’t tell her that I was still unable to contact the only other people we trusted in the world.
She took off my head-visors and said, “Why don’t you let me help?” I struggled for a moment with no good answer. Without a word, I handed her the mangled Swiss road map.
“Where do we start?” she asked.
I kept my head down, as weight came off my shoulders. “We’ll ride the A9/E9 from Milano into Lugano at the edge of your map. It’s easy to spot; look for the only city around there with an airport. The way everyone else seems to be taking is to follow the autobahn straight north through der Mittenland to Zurich, to Staad, across the lake to Ravensburg, and into the German map over on the chair. It’s over 325 kilometers, and has grades of nine and ten percent on the uphill roads.”
She laughed at my pronunciations, and said “First, it’s Mittel, not mitten, and second they use the Sh sound at the beginning of Staad.”
“How do you know so much?” I asked, looking askance at her.
“Remember the ski instructor who was hitting on me?”
“Did he have any useful information?” I snapped.
“No, but looking at this map, why don’t we take the right fork, and save half the time?”
I was stunned. There had to be a reason why everybody in the world wasn’t taking that way. It went right past Torrente Alto, through the Saint Bernardino Tunnel, Bad Ragaz, and followed the Rhein through Liechtenstein into Germany. Measuring it out, it was only 200 kilometers, had no lakes, no major cities, and no major drawbacks.
“The grades go up to eighteen percent, but that’s also on the downhill. It’ll cost us some time on the way up, but we should set one hellacious speed record on the way through the Rhein valley,” Mary reasoned.
Then I found the problem. “We’d miss Zurich altogether. We can’t do that!”
“Why not, they just penalize you twenty minutes. We’ll make that up and more to spare.”
I was hopping up and down like a kid on a sugar binge. “Yes!” As Mary went into the bedroom to get dressed, I started hacking the course into the autopilot.
I got as far as the mother of all down-hill runs when she came back in. “I meant to ask you, what’s the little mailbox for in the corner?”
“Just net mail that came in since our last session, while we were at the party and last night.” I hit the glyph to show her and almost ran the autopilot off the mountain-side. There were three messages. All said simply, “I cheat at solitaire.” But the last one was login five from an anonymous user. There was no login five. Someone wanted that Exotech log badly, and I’d bet my last dollar they arranged the Viper’s crash because the crew had seen it. I rushed over to the phone, pulling several connections loose and nearly lost an ear. I rabbit-punched Playfair’s number into the poor touch pad and waited for a pick-up.
“Hello, I’m not here right now, but my phone is lonely and will talk to you (beep).”
“Playfair. We’ve got to meet. Come to my room. I’ve got a disc I need to give to you. It’s too hot for me,” I waited a few extra seconds in case he decided to answer himself, then threw down the receiver in disgust.
Two minutes before race time, the phone rang, sending me through the ceiling. As Mare picked it up, I asked, “Foxworthy, Playfair, LAS, Waters?”
She plugged the ear facing me and shook her head. “No interviews, the Maestro is meditating before the race.”
She was answering someone’s questions rapidly. “Bull fighter videos.
“Yes.
“He is the chief scientist.
“No, Maria is busy with the Sports Illustrated camera crew right now.
“I’m sorry, we represent certain government issues and that information is classified.
“I’m sorry, we have another call on line seven. Good-bye.” She hung the phone up and unplugged the jack to avoid further interruptions. “Wall Street Journal reporter,” she explained.
“You handled that very well.”
“As a police officer, you learn to say no comment, none of your business, and go away in the politest possible way. Who drives first?”
I thought about getting the ring for her. “I will. You can take over at the Swiss border, and I make a chow run and scope the competition down in the convention center. If you get in a bind, I have the autopilot set to pick the nearest racer and tag along after them, in stealth mode if possible. That way, we look like a computer ghost if we show up at all.”
“I thought that only worked with submarines,” she said.
“Planes and GEVs, too. Jane’s On-line talked about it briefly in the electronic warfare section,” I said as she turned on the ESPN coverage of the Monaco starting line.
“Thank you, Tom Clancy.”
“I’m not Tom,” I said, grinning. “He’d have a Soviet defector to help him crack this case by now. Yikes, that crowd is a zoo. How many people are watching this game?”
“It’s number three this year behind the Super Bowl and the Stanley Cup,” she said, a fountain of statistical information, one of the hundreds of reasons I kept her around. “Maybe this game would be number two if you put it on an ice rink and showed more blood on the safety glass. I couldn’t condone beer commercials during a sport involving vehicles, so you could never be number one.”
“I’ll settle for not peeing my pants in front of several million couch jockeys, thank you. I don’t need any more pressure. Ready?” I asked as the first vehicle launched. “Team DeClerk!” I said, as we exchanged good luck kisses.
I went stealth as soon as we curved past the final virtual camera in Monaco. The heavyweight behind me maintained visual, though, till I flew through a quaint European archway that he wedged into tighter than T-shirts in a tourist’s suitcase. He couldn’t turn his turret backward, so the next GEV along scored a freebie. And then there were nineteen.
After a few minutes on cruise control, someone got bored. No one was likely to meet another player for several hours, and the viewers were starting to switch. Bored gamers get dangerous, but bored viewers create sponsors that make sharks look discreet. One of the younger pilots suggested something often done in sand-lot games, time compression. If everyone agreed, we’d speed up the game clock by a factor of up to two. That would put my top speed at nearly 500 kilometers per real-world hour. I voted yes mainly because everyone’s tactical display would flicker so much that I would become invisible.
Our accelerators now made us time machines, and one person braking would bring everybody down. For the first ten minutes, it was a rush. For the next ten, it was a contest of machismo, and then it became a white-knuckle rodeo. Andiron Enterprises slowed down for a curve and got flamed by everybody on the net. The next person to say “chicken” would get artillery-shelled. A bridge out in Milano claimed two victims, and we hit normal speed in a spate of curses. I nearly over-corrected into an embankment.
The bridge had been the scheduled sudden-deceleration test, and somebody had known about it in advance. But which of the seventeen had set us up?
I didn’t have many conscious thoughts after that. I reacted for two straight hours. When we hit the Alps, I drove straight through a hailstorm without noticing because it sounded like bad radio static. Mary Ann informed me that we stayed at fifteen Celsius during the cabin temperature test. I noticed the fingers of frost creeping toward the center of my windshield and cranked up the heater. It’s a good thing that we hadn’t needed air-conditioning this trip because I had forgotten that option on the
prototype, too.
She told me a few minutes later that somebody had fired a cannon and wounded another vehicle. The ensuing avalanche had buried both of them. A third GEV stalled out trying to go around the site and would be stuck there till Spring.
The rest of us were slaloming at jet simulator speeds. My muscles were vice grips on the controls when Mare pried me loose. “You can coast for a while, babe. The judges are flashing the yellow flag. They’re switching to regular speed rules, or we’ll finish the race today. Let’s take advantage of the flag and switch. Nobody is on our screens for miles and you’re bending the controls.”
“Huh? Oh, sorry.” Several things vied for my attention right then, hotel wallpaper, my bladder, and the buzz of the air-conditioner humming a merry tune. I was fried. Only six kills had taken place so far this leg, but there had been several close calls. I got a head rush just standing and plopped back down into the control couch again. Time, what time was it? I looked Mary over and smiled. Phasing back to the real world, I made a list of everything I needed to do.
I had to buy a ring, see a spy, call my lawyer, and be back before lunch. I logged off as pilot, and let Mary log herself on. After splashing some water on my face, I grabbed a clean shirt. The one I had been wearing was drenched in sweat. We didn’t have any logo shirts left, so I wore a plain white T with a pocket that I normally wore to work.
I grabbed the phone out her purse and put the room phone beside her. “Call me if you need anything, anything at all. I’ll lock the door behind me.” I gave her a firm and surprisingly deep kiss, and sprinted for the door. “Pizza okay?” I asked on my way out.
“That depends,” she said Mae West style. “Do you deliver?”
I skipped down the hall, chuckling evilly. In a worst case scenario, I told myself, the Scarab got killed early, and Mare and I would have to find some other way to spend our time here. Maybe Mary Ann was right, and I had been worrying too much again. One pepperoni and diamond pizza coming up!