by J. S. Morin
Holding a hand to the wall, Mort stepped back, and a section the size of a large doorway came free, stuck to his hand as if by suction cup. With a simple trick of logic, Mort insisted that he wasn’t the one holding up that unreasonable weight of bricks; they were all holding each other up, in a twisted loop of broken causality that continued to work because of the plain evidence that they already were.
Mort swung the section of wall aside as the occupants of the room beyond let out vulgar shouts of surprise and disbelief. Carl was inside, sitting at a shabby table wearing handcuffs. Lloyd was seated beside him, and across from them were two fellows in uniformly cheap suits. With a subtle reminder to the universe that the bricks were just held together with mud, the section of wall Mort had removed fell apart into individual bricks, which shattered to reddish crumbs as they hit the ground.
“What the hell’s going on here?” one officer shouted, he knocked his chair over leaping to his feet.
His companion was quicker and already had his gun drawn from its holster. He fired it at Mriy as the azrin in gangster’s clothing rushed him. Two shots. One shot whizzed past Mort; the other did not. A third shot flew harmlessly into the far wall as Mriy drove the detective to the ground.
Carl knocked over the table and curled into a ball behind the cover it provided. Lloyd rolled out of his chair and joined him in a low crouch.
The second detective was slower to get his gun out, but Mort was tired of primitive weapons. He’d assumed—wrongly, it seemed—that the amount of magic he’d used would have rendered their weapons inoperable. Apparently he hadn’t damaged local physics badly enough to prevent whatever science made bullets work. As the second detective turned his firearm on Mriy in an effort to help his companion, the steel turned to dripping molten ore in his hand.
“Ow! Shit,” the detective exclaimed as he dropped the melted weapon.
“Glad to see you found me,” Carl said from the floor. There were a lot of things to be said about Carl, but he was a pro. There was no use of names, no “Mort, I’m so glad to see you. Where’s the Mobius?” He’d let himself be rescued before he worried about what was going on.
“You must be Mort,” Lloyd said from the floor. “I’ve heard so much about you. Where’s the Mobius? Looks like we’re down this whole jailbreak path now, huh?”
“For what it’s worth,” Carl said. “I had faith that you’d have gotten me off. It was a bullshit charge, and these chuckleheads knew it.”
There was already a commotion in the station at large. Probably a response to shots being fired in an interrogation room. It seemed silly in a way, since Mort’s magic was by far the larger threat. It was like arresting jaywalkers during a riot. Still, Mort supposed that what they didn’t know was probably going to hurt them, and he’d already burned the hand of one poor slob just earning a paycheck.
“If you two boys would like to use that door, now’s the time,” Mort said.
The detective with the burned hand looked down at the floor, where Mriy was rising from the limp form of his partner. It was an incongruous sight, seeing a thick-necked, muscle-bound human with his fingers and mouth bloody. Mort had grown accustomed to Mriy to the point where he’d stopped cringing at her close-combat methods. Seeing a human who’d bitten and clawed another was far more disturbing. “There’s just one,” Mriy said. “Fucker shot me.”
Mort gave the remaining detective a rueful smile. “Looks like we’ve got a countdown,” Mort said. “Care to be on it?”
“We shouldn’t stay here,” Lloyd said. “If we’re escaping, let’s escape. I’ve got a place in Pasadena we can lay low.”
“Go on,” Mort said, making a shooing motion. “Get out before I change my mind.” Realizing the stumbling block, he met Mriy’s eyes and, with a jerk of his head, urged her out of the detective’s path.
The five of them went their separate ways, the detective into the belly of the station, Mort and the rest left through the hole in the wall. Carl made a stop at the bloody mess of the detective on the floor to fish through the man’s pockets.
“What are you waiting for?” Lloyd asked. “Come on!”
“Keys,” Carl said, not looking up.
“I can take care of the handcuffs,” Mort said. It wasn’t the sort of thing that was worth lingering over. Letting the detective out was the starter’s pistol of a race to freedom. If it weren’t for the officers’ inevitable confusion over a door, now magically held shut, they’d have already gotten to them. Once informed of the situation with the wall, it wouldn’t be long before they came around the building.
“I imagine you can,” Carl said. He fished a set of keys from the detective’s pocket. Their merry jingle was incongruous with the dire situation. “But these keys will start his car.” Carl’s grin warmed Mort’s heart. He was the reason for the highjinks of the Mobius and its crew. He made this shit fun.
# # #
Carl did manage to find the key to the handcuffs, and Detective Wallace’s service revolver as well. The trigger seemed stiff, but he didn’t dare pull it all the way for fear of firing it. Up close, it was a lot more complicated to reload than it looked in the old flatvids. There was a good chance he wouldn’t be able to reload it without help from one of the locals—not that he’d thought to grab spare bullets.
“How are we going to know which car is Wallace’s?” Lloyd asked. He didn’t lower his voice, since they were a little past the point of a stealthy getaway.
“It was all squad cars out front,” Carl reasoned. “Must be parked in the back.”
There was indeed a general-use parking lot behind the station, filled with shiny new cars made to ancient blueprints. Like the rest of the colony though, it was a mish-mosh of eras, with new Model T’s mixed in with early model Corvettes and Microbuses. Even Carl, whose historical education was limited to the entertainment industry, knew it was off.
“There are too many of them,” Mriy said, punctuated by a grunt. It was weird hearing her voice coming out of Tanny’s cousin Jimmy, but he’d seen stranger things result from Mort’s magic. Best thing to do was to play along. But Jimmy or not, she’d taken a bullet in that jailbreak. Plenty of the blood all down her front was Detective Drake’s, but enough of it wasn’t that he was worried.
“You need a doctor?” Carl asked. It wasn’t the side trip they needed just then. But the risk of arrest was worth it if Mriy was in bad shape.
“No.”
She probably meant ‘yes, but I’ll be damned if we’re going to one,’ but Carl wasn’t in the mood to argue. He studied the key in his hand, looking for a model badge, or a plate number, or any hint of what car it matched up with. All it had was an engraving of some sort of great cat. He wracked his brain for types of cars named after big cats. Tiger? Cheetah? Puma? Leopard?
“Can you tell what this is supposed to be?” Carl asked, holding the key chain toward Mriy.
“What am I? Your expert in all things—it’s a jaguar,” Mriy said. She was clutching a hand to her side.
“Mort, do something to stop her from bleeding,” Carl said. “Lloyd, help me find a jag in this lot. I don’t care what year or model. How many of them can there be?”
Officers poured through the back door of the station, but beat a hasty retreat as Mort raised a cage of flames to bar their path to the parking lot. Carl ducked between the rows of cars as shots rang out from the doorway.
“Found one!” Lloyd shouted over the roar of flames and gunfire. “Jaguar ’63 S-Type.”
Carl cursed his stiff knees as he struggled to run and crouch at the same time. He reached the car just as Mriy and Mort converged on it. He pressed the keys into Lloyd’s hand. “Your world. You drive.”
Lloyd shoved them back as if they were diseased. “Rhiannon drives. I haven’t learned yet.”
Carl pushed the keys toward Lloyd again. “And you think any of us know how?”
“I thought your whole family were retroverts at heart,” Lloyd replied. “You must’ve seen it don
e in a holo. I walk to work. I take a cab to the ballpark. I’m scared shitless of driving one of these—”
“Fine,” Carl snapped. “But strap in and hold on tight everyone. This could get interesting.” They all piled into the vehicle, with Mort and Mriy in the back and Lloyd flying co-pilot.
The Jaguar started like a dream. Turning the key yielded a few cranks and the growl that only a petrol-burning engine can do justice. Carl revved the engine a few times, just enjoying the sound. Then he turned his attention to the stick shift. It was labeled simply: N-R-1-2-3-4.
A bullet punched a hole in the windshield between Carl and Lloyd. “Quit fooling with it and get us out of here,” Lloyd snapped. It was the closest he’d heard to his boyfriend-in-law losing his temper. He was a real even guy, for a planetside historian.
“Sometime today would be nice,” Mort said from the backseat.
“Some cover fire would be nice,” Carl replied over his shoulder. “What’re you waiting for?”
“You want to walk back to the ship?” Mort asked. “What’re the odds this thing can handle me throwing lightning and fire around? I don’t have a mule in my pocket to pull this thing if I kill it.”
With a quick prayer generically addressed to the patron saint of car theft, Carl picked ‘R’ and hit the gas. Tires squealed, and a second later they shot backward in a cloud of rubber smoke. The wheel took some getting used to; it was close to a flight yoke, but not quite close enough, with multiple turns required to max out the car’s turning radius. Stomping on the brakes threw the passengers sideways in their seats, then Carl shifted into ‘1’ and switched to gas once more.
The Jaguar peeled out, and they jumped a curb onto the main road. It wasn’t long before sirens wailed and blue lights shone in the rear-view mirror. It was hard to get a count of how many squad cars were following them, but Carl’s best guess was “all of them.”
“Great, now where are we headed?” Carl asked. “Tanny got the ship waiting somewhere nearby?”
“Nope,” Mort replied. “It’s back at the landing pen, with all the other spaceships.”
Keeping one eye to their pursuers, Carl kept getting distracted by the image of Jimmy Rucker in his rearview. “Can you put Mriy back to normal without disabling the car? Fucking weird back there.”
Mort gave a grunt in reply, and the illusion of Tanny’s cousin faded. In its place was Mriy in a nun outfit. “What the hell, Mort? Just put her back to normal.”
“This is how she snuck into Old Timey California,” Mort replied. “Don’t blame me.”
“Sister Mriy, how you holding up back there? You’re awfully quiet,” Carl said. It wasn’t that Mriy couldn’t go long periods without hearing the sound of her own voice, but in these sorts of stressful, tactical situations, she usually had something to offer.
“You wouldn’t… like the noises… I’d make right now,” Mriy said between gasps. “I’ll live. Leave me be.”
“Roger that,” Carl said. “Cat’s down to seven lives, and no further updates until orbit.”
“You have any bright ideas on how to get us to your ship?” Lloyd asked. “If I’d known there was no plan, I’d have stayed at the station and disavowed you.”
“You’re doing a nice job piloting this contraption,” Mort said. “I really expected us to have to fight it out at the police depot.”
Carl slipped the shifter from ‘1’ to ‘2’ to ‘4’ and back to ‘1’ again, with no change in the Jaguar’s behavior. “Thanks, but this is an automatic. Someone didn’t want to learn the hard way to drive, so they just dummied it up to look authentic. The pedal throttle is taking some getting used to, but the rest isn’t that hard.” There was another vehicle he’d recently learned to pilot. It wasn’t sized for four, but it was a helluva lot closer than the Mobius. “Lloyd, can you get us to the highway that runs back toward the landing zone for off-world visitors?”
“Sure,” Lloyd replied. “That’d be Route 66.”
“Of course it would…”
# # #
Pilots are trained to go through a detailed and thorough pre-flight check prior to takeoff. Even if Carl had gone up in his Typhoon a thousand times, he would still check the most mundane and innocuous details before doing it again. Most of the time it was a precaution, double-checking the work of mechanics and maintenance staff aboard a carrier ship. Once in a while, it would catch something that wasn’t wrong, but wasn’t quite right either—things that fell under the category of personal pilot preference. But on rare occasion, it caught real problems, the sort of thing that grounded a fighter until someone took care of it. Maybe a sensor panel wasn’t displaying. Maybe it was a fuel-cell bleeding energy. Maybe one of the life-support seals wasn’t completely closing.
The Jaguar S-Type had a limited indicator console, and it hadn’t occurred to Carl that any sort of pre-drive check would have been in order. Despite the half-dozen unfamiliar gauges, he might have noticed one needle that was pointing more toward ‘E’ than ‘F’ and puzzled out that it was low on fuel.
The Jaguar sputtered out in the middle of Route 66.
The convoy of police vehicles behind them had followed at a respectable distance, as if unsure how to handle a high-speed pursuit. Maybe they didn’t know whether Carl had hostages. Or it could have been that they weren’t eager to catch up with a wizard. Either way, that buffer zone of open highway between the Jaguar and the police were closing fast.
“Everyone out!” Carl ordered.
Car doors sprang open, and the four of them scrambled for the side of the road. Mort and Lloyd moved awkwardly in business suits, while Mriy struggled along with a bloody hand pressed to her side.
“What now, Carl?” Lloyd asked. “We’re sitting ducks out here.”
Carl looked down the road ahead of them. It was dark, moonlit, and a stretch he’d only seen once before from the other direction. Still, optimism seemed like the best course. “Probably only a couple klicks short of where I stashed the Squall. I’ll go on ahead. You three hold them off.”
“Hold them off?” Lloyd replied, a note of mania creeping into his voice. “We’ve got a half-empty revolver, and they’ve got the whole Anaheim police force. What’ve we got that—”
“Mort,” Carl said, looking the old wizard square in the eye. “Keep the carnage to a minimum. Just keep them back while I get to the Mobius. There’s going to be hell to pay for this. These cops see a starship, they’ll put in a call to the ARGO garrison. That’s when the real fun starts.”
“Egads,” Mort muttered. “We’re depending on you to cover a mile of ground on foot. Maybe we should just surrender.”
Mriy snickered, though she winced in pain with each movement. “Go. We trust you.”
Carl gave a quick, informal salute and a wink. “Wish me luck!” He started out at a brisk jog in the direction he had last seen the Squall. Hopefully, it was closer than he was guessing.
# # #
As Carl disappeared into the gloom of night, Lloyd turned to Mort. The wail of sirens spread out as squad cars left the road to begin encircling them. The noise made conversation below a shout difficult, but Mriy’s ears caught the muttered conversation that took place between them.
“Couldn’t you just… you know… kill them all?” Lloyd asked, leaning close. “I’ve heard Rhiannon’s stories. These pissant retrovert lawmen shouldn’t be a threat to you.”
Mort grunted and shrugged. “Carl asked nicely. These lads signed up to play cops and robbers, not to actually be cops. I can’t imagine they get more than a few real crimes a year. This is a luxury resort more than a real ancient-Earth replica. It wouldn’t be…” Mort scratched his chin a moment. “…sporting?”
At that moment, the encircling squad cars broke contact with the ground. They lifted awkwardly, wobbling as if pulled by the rood with invisible strings. Someone gave the order to open fire, and shots slapped harmlessly against an invisible barrier. More cars rose from the ground, each coming to a stop twenty meters or
so in the air. But that didn’t stop the panicked officers from firing.
“Cut that out!” Mort shouted at them. The replies that came back were unhelpful. Confused and frightened officers shouted instructions and orders, and the shots kept on coming. “Fine, then,” he added in an undertone.
The cars began to spin, slowly at first, but increasingly fast until the squad cars had turned into the sort of carnival amusement ride that left weak-stomached passengers vomiting upon egress. There were a few screams at first, but those died away. Not as quickly as the shots stopped firing, however. The sirens fell silent as well, warped past functioning as magic broke down the local science.
Mort gave a satisfied nod. “That ought to hold them.”
“How long can you keep it up?” Mriy asked.
Mort pursed his lips and frowned up at the squad cars. “I suppose I can leave them there until Carl gets back. It won’t kill the poor saps. But I’ll give them maybe half an hour; if Car’s not back by then, I’ll let them down to puke out everything from toenails to tongue. Doubt they’ll be much trouble after that.”
“They might radio for help,” Lloyd said.
“The hell is a radio?” Mort asked.
Mriy strained to listen. “They are talking to someone at their headquarters, but there is no response. I think… you disabled those as well.”
“Now we just wait. Anyone bring snacks?” Mort asked.
# # #
The Squall was right where Carl had left it. But he hadn’t been the only one to discover it. Someone had adorned the hull with a peace symbol in dripping white spray-paint. In a panic, Carl checked for more substantive vandalism. All he found was a scrawled message on the far side, also in spray-paint, reading “Take me to your leader.”