The taxis were all different makes and colors. Dolph, of course, gravitated to the best of the bunch, a sporty white Skyliner.
Charging stands, cleaning hoses, drains to let the water run away. It all looked normal …
Dolph opened the Skyliner’s driver side door. “Come on,” he said, shrugging.
At that moment a distant toilet flushed.
A door in the back wall clunked, and Kaspar Silverback walked out, drying his hands on his jeans.
I knew it was Silverback by the way he reacted to the sight of us, although I’d never met him before. He was smaller than your average bear, with a paunch and a bald spot.
He growled at Dolph, “What the heck are you doing here?”
“That’s what I was going to ask you, asshole,” Dolph said.
Silverback turned to Sophia. “Why’d you let these guys in?”
“It’s complicated,” Sophia said. She looked thrown. She must not have been aware that the toy fairies had been shipped on the St. Clare. Then again, I hadn’t had the St. Clare when we were together, so she could have seen the ship’s name without realizing it was me. “Do you know them?”
“They’re dogs!” Silverback spat. That was all he knew. Dolph’s jackal isn’t even his primary form. He strutted towards us. He was outnumbered, but I soon saw why he acted so confident. He had a gun. It was in his waistband, but I could tell it was there by the squared-off bulge in his plaid shirt, which he wore untucked, a giveaway in itself.
What the hell was Parsec into here?
“Back off,” Dolph warned him.
Silverback did not back off. “You followed me from the spaceport, didn’t you? What gives?”
I said soothingly, “Just making sure the cargo was successfully returned to sender. Satisfaction guaranteed, that’s my motto. I know Mr. Parsec is personally concerned about this particular shipment.”
This was a pure shot in the dark. But it had a surprising effect. Silverback stopped approaching us. He glanced at the crates of fairies, and then scowled in confusion. “The boss brought you in?” Emphasis on you, like I was the last person Parsec would ever bring in on anything. Which was probably correct.
“Sure did,” I said. “You weren’t aware?”
“I gotta call him,” Silverback said, taking out his phone. His other hand hovered near the gun in his waistband.
“Mike,” Dolph said. “Let’s go.”
“In a minute,” I said.
“Let’s go,” Dolph repeated. He plopped into the Skyliner. The passenger side door sprang open, almost clipping my nose. I jumped back—and it was just as well I did, because the next second I heard a gunshot, and a bullet crunched into the open passenger door, making it bounce on its hinges.
Dolph told me later that while I was talking to Silverback, he’d been watching Sophia. That’s how he saw another bear coming through the door behind her.
It was Canuck.
On paper, at least, Canuck was the owner of Mujin Inc, and it had given him a confidence never before displayed in his furtive, violent doings around Shiftertown. He wore an open-collared shirt under a blazer, with diamond stick-pins in the lapels, like he was some big shot now. When he saw me and Dolph, he checked, edged sideways, and propped his shoulders against the wall. He folded his arms and smirked at Dolph across the garage.
Then Dolph saw Canuck’s gun hand sneaking inside his blazer. As Dolph said, “Let’s go” for the first time, Canuck’s hand was closing on the grip of his shoulder-holstered rig. As he said “Let’s go” again, Canuck drew and fired.
With the report still ringing in my ears, I leapt into the Skyliner’s passenger seat. A second bullet snatched the door out of my hand as I tried to close it.
Canuck crab-walked across the garage, shooting at the taxi. We had our heads down, but I glimpsed something in the rearview that made me feel sick. All the time this was going down, Sophia just stood there, frowning slightly, her head swivelling to follow the action, like a person watching animals fight. Or insects. Yeah, she watched us like we were insects.
My door finally managed to close. “Where to?” the taxi asked pleasantly.
“St. Andrew’s Pier, and step on it,” Dolph yelled.
“Certainly, sir.”
The Skyliner accelerated forward.
Canuck broke into a sprint, with slow-reacting Silverback a few feet behind him. Now both of them were shooting at the taxi. Rounds thudded into the bodywork.
The force field in the nearest bay popped open automatically for just as long as it took the Skyliner to squirt through.
We plunged into the air, 400 meters above uptown.
23
The taxi’s shocks muffled the jolt as our levitation field expanded. A split second into our fall, it was no longer a fall but the characteristic rollercoaster swoop of a flying-car launch from a high point. Leaving our stomachs behind, the taxi quickly levelled out and rose towards the nearest skyway.
“I can’t believe it,” I said. “I can’t believe it. What’s she doing here?”
“Working for Parsec,” Dolph said. “Obviously.”
“It’s so stupid. She comes from Montemayor.” Montemayor is one of humanity’s other Heartworlds in the Cluster, a wealthy and sophisticated planet. Sophia had wanted for nothing as a child. “She could do anything she likes.”
Dolph gave me a brief glance of pity. “Such as working a good job in a glitzy office, a little bit gray-zone to keep it exciting?”
I rubbed my hands over my face. Then I looked up at the sky above and all around us. I’ve ridden in flying cars plenty of times, but it always freaked me out to be flying without the rattle and roar of a spaceship drive. The fan ducting airflow over the aerofoils beneath the car made only a soft whooshing noise. I leaned across to make sure the Stirling engine powering our forward motion was actually on.
“Get off,” Dolph said, blocking me with one arm.
“You can’t drive this thing. It’s self-driving.”
“Yes, I can. It’s manual mode enabled.” Dolph gunned the engine to prove it. We merged into the southbound skyway faster than was wise.
Of course, the reason even self-driving cars have controls is because some people like to, well, control their ride. But the AI is always there, waiting to step in and take over if you do anything dangerous. I glanced back at Bonsucesso Tower, reflecting that our taxi was still under Sophia’s control. She could turn us around and bring us back to face the bears if she wanted to.
But apparently the bears had other ideas.
A glittery object tumbled out of an upper window.
It rapidly levelled out and flew straight towards us.
“Don’t look now,” I said, “but we’re about to have company.”
Dolph swore filthily. Then he said, “If Silverback drives that taxi like he drives his truck, I should slow down just to give them a fair chance.”
“They’re punching it,” I said. “It’s probably Canuck. He’s not even in the goddamn skyway.”
“I hate that guy,” Dolph said. “He crashed Marie’s birthday party. Remember?” Marie was a girl Dolph dated off again, on again, when he wasn’t playing away with big-bosomed showgirls. “He pissed in her sister’s closet. He was so drunk he thought it was the toilet.”
“Classy.”
“He even got thrown out of St. Patrick’s one time.”
“I didn’t hear about that.”
“They were filming snuff videos in the graveyard.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Word to God. I heard he’s into the ripper scene.”
“I don’t even want to know what that is,” I said wearily.
Dolph rolled down the window. That wasn’t as reckless a move as it sounds like. We were half a kilometer up, but flying cars don’t actually go that fast—50 klicks an hour, tops, even if you’re really punching it like Dolph was. Air rushed into the car, but the Skyliner barely wobbled as the AI angled the aerofoils to compensate. �
�Hey,” Dolph yelled out of the window. “That the fastest you can go? Eat my exhaust!”
“Dolph …” I trailed off. I had known him long enough to know there was no reasoning with him in this mood. We had been expecting a teeth-and-claws fight. The bears had turned it into a gunfight. We might have got away, but Dolph was not going to forgive them for having made him feel stupid.
He closed the window and juiced a few more rpms out of the Stirling engine. I looked back again. Canuck and Silverback were catching up with us, because they were cutting across the curve of the skyway. That was illegal. The AI is supposed to make sure you stay in your corridor. Their taxi, too, was clearly on manual. It might even be jailbroken—the term means disabling the AI’s drive controls, so it can’t tell you no.
By now we’d left uptown behind. The streets and buildings shrank below us as the skyway passed high over downtown at the north end of the beach. From here the westbound stream of flying cars split into two: one half followed Space Highway out along Cape Agreste, and the other crossed the bay towards Mag-Ingat Harbor. A small number of vehicles peeled off onto a third route that tracked the beach a couple of hundred meters offshore.
That was supposed to be our route, but the bears had timed it perfectly to cut us off.
“Let’s see how big their balls are,” Dolph said. He yanked the wheel over hard, turning us onto a collision course with the bears’ taxi.
“Jesus, Dolph!” I leaned over and wrestled him for the wheel.
“Fasten your seatbelt,” he howled. “I got this—”
I had just time to check my seatbelt before the jolt hit.
There’s a reason midair collisions never happen.
The technology makes it impossible.
Not AI control, but something more fundamental: the actual levitation fields that keep flying cars in the air.
These fields are the same force fields you use to keep bugs and burglars out of your yard—if you’re rich—or to deflect space gravel from the nose of your spaceship. Expand a force field into a bubble 30 meters in diameter. Hey presto, you’ve got 14,000 m3 of vacuum lifting your car straight up. Shrink or expand the bubble to go lower or higher. And that bubble is also an invisible buffer keeping your car 30 meters away from everyone else’s.
So when we were 30 meters from the other taxi, our force field hit theirs with a spongy kind of jolt. It threw us back in our seats. My teeth clicked together.
The two taxis started to slide past one another, 30 meters apart, the force fields repelling one another while the engines drove them forward.
Our levitation field had T-boned theirs. If they wanted to escape the collision, they could’ve just accelerated to let us slip past their tail.
Instead they turned into the collision, bringing us head to head.
“Oh, you wanna play chicken?” Dolph grunted. He fought the wheel as the auto-steering sought to bend us out of the collision. Our engine fans whined, revving but going nowhere.
I could see Canuck glaring at us through the windshield of their taxi. Silverback was rolling down his window, the one nearest us, on my side.
Suddenly, our levitation field pushed past theirs. Our taxi shot forward.
Silverback leaned out of his window, gun in his hands.
I automatically ducked to put my head below the level of my window.
I was now looking at the underside of my own seat. There was a gun velcroed to it.
Without thinking, I snatched it up. It was a small conventional automatic, the kind of piece we used to prize on Tech Duinn for concealed carry. I racked the slide one-handed, while hitting the window-open button with my other hand. I straightened up and twisted in my seatbelt. The window began to open. We were drawing level with the other taxi. I poked the snub nose of my own weapon out of the window as soon as there was room for it, and sighted down the barrel on Silverback’s face. I fired. The muzzle of Silverback’s gun flashed. I hardly registered it. My breathing was steady. So was my weapon. I fired twice more. Silverback’s weapon flew up and he slumped forwards, half in and half out of his taxi. It all seemed to take ages but it could only have been a matter of seconds before we shot past the other taxi, and I no longer had a target.
I fell back in my seat. Wind buffetted my face from the open window. Dolph yelled, “Got him, got him,” and thumped the wheel in exultation. “Where’d that come from?” He grabbed the gun off my lap and looked at it. It was a Blackbird, no markings.
“It was under the seat,” I said. “Oh God, I think I killed him.” I took the gun back from Dolph. My window was still open. We were in the beach skyway, cruising a kilometer up. I dropped the Blackbird out of the window. It fell invisibly into the sparkling sea.
“That was a good gun,” Dolph said, but he made no further comment. He knew as well as I did that you don’t hang onto a gun you just shot someone with.
I looked back. The bears’ taxi was swooping towards downtown in what looked like an emergency descent. “They’re going down.” I wondered if I had hit Canuck, as well. I didn’t think so.
“What was their goddamn game?” Dolph said. “They coulda killed us.” He touched my knee. “Mike, they were going to kill us.”
“Yeah,” I said. “And what’s gonna happen when Parsec finds out I killed him?”
A few seconds later, that was the least of my worries.
“I am effecting an immediate landing,” our taxi suddenly said. Its voice was still mellifluous, but the words coming from its speakers were no longer customer-cosseting verbiage. We started to lose altitude. Dolph cursed, and pulled the wheel back, to no effect. “I have been placed under the control of the Ponce de Leon Police Department. Remain in your seats with your hands visible until I come to a complete stop.”
I glanced in the rearview. Behind and above us, two sleek black-and-white cop cars dived out of the sun.
“Well, who knew?” I said with heavy sarcasm. “You can’t shoot someone, in heavy traffic, in broad freaking daylight, and get away with it.”
“Goddamn!” Dolph said. “Goddamn Parsec! I’m going to chew his fucking nuts off … I’m gonna …”
“Hush,” I said leadenly, as the cop cars swooped close enough for us to see the glaring officers at their gun turrets.
24
The cop cars tailed us closely as our taxi sought somewhere to land. Both the beach and the Strip were equally crowded, no place to put down, so we ended up landing at our original destination: St. Andrew’s Pier. There was a pick-up and drop-off point for flying cars between the funfair and the cluster of restaurants at the end of the pier.
Our taxi set itself down with AI-guided precision in one of the marked-out squares, near the Ferris wheel.
The cop cars landed in the nearest two available places.
Dolph and I sat unmoving.
Neither of us spoke a word. Dolph’s jaw was knotted, his eyes cloudy with anger and frustration.
Self-disgust boiled in my gut. I’d shot at Kaspar Silverback without a second thought, hell, without a first one—just pure reflex. That was the Tech Duinn veteran in me. He was me, but I couldn’t accept that he was the real me, the businessman and father who just wanted to make a decent living. And sometimes, like now, it felt like he was out to destroy me.
The cops sauntered over and told us to get out. We assumed the position. They searched us. People stared. They didn’t find anything apart from our phones, which they took.
Then they handcuffed us.
I swallowed back the indignity and forced myself to speak. I knew I had only one card to play. “Call Captain d’Alencon,” I said. “Give him my name. I ain’t talking to anyone else.” Slouched, defiant posture: check. Witless yet cunning expresion, with a glimpse of teeth: check. I was showing them what they already expected to see—a Shifter.
The cops went back to their cars and talked amongst themselves. The biggest and youngest officer stayed to guard us. His eyes glared pure poison.
“You try and Shift,” h
e said, patting his gun, “ain’t gonna be enough left of y’all to make a fur rug.”
What did he think we were, idiots?
Don’t answer that.
Time passed, and I needed to take a leak, but I didn’t say anything. Every car that blotted out the sun raised my hopes, only for them to plummet again. But then it was a cop car, and it was Jose-Maria d’Alencon getting out of it and coming across to us.
I corralled my surge of relief. Just because he’d come didn’t mean anything. “Captain,” I said sycophantically, “good to see you.” I didn’t dare call him “Bones,” not with that hard glint in his eyes.
“Mike,” he said, and blew out his breath tiredly. “Dolph. What the heck y’all been doing now?”
I held out my cuffed hands. “J-M, can you tell your boys to at least let me take a leak?”
Laughter. They took off the handcuffs. I unzipped and took a piss right there, on the wheel of the taxi.
“Buzz Parsec ain’t going to be too pleased about that,” one of the other officers said. So they had already looked into the taxi’s ownership record and traced it back to Canuck.
“Buzz Parsec can suck my dick.” I gestured to Dolph, wordlessly asking them to uncuff him, as well. Getting D’Alencon’s OK, they did. Dolph watched me warily past their shoulders—he wasn’t sure where I was going with this.
Neither was I. I first had to find out how bad it was. I waited, and Bones told us.
“That guy you shot? He’s on his way to hospital right now. He’s gonna make it, looks like.”
A grin of genuine relief spread across my face. Wounded wasn’t as bad as dead.
“You need to work on your aim,” d’Alencon added, with a wink.
Ho, ho, ho. The other officers appreciated the captain’s quip, and I played up: “From a moving car, with a piece-of-crap handgun like we used to toss in the scrap box on Tech D? I did pretty good winging him.” I pointed to the bullet holes in our taxi’s bodywork. “But they started it. That’s God’s truth.”
“That taxi belongs to Buzz Parsec,” d’Alencon said, pronouncing my rival’s name with about as much affection as Dolph would.
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