Lethal Cargo

by Felix R. Savage

  “Daddy.” Lucy touched my shoulder.

  “What is it, sweetiepie?”

  “Daddy,” she said again, doing her thing of repeating my name while she found exactly the right words for what she wanted to say, the words that would not anger me or cause me to deflect her concerns with a joke, the magic words that would get through to me. Her little face looked like a cracked cup. There was so much misery and confusion in there, waiting to spill out, I couldn’t stand it.

  “Did you see … your mother?” I said. “Did they make you talk to her?”

  “No,” Lucy said. “She had to go. She didn’t have time to come by the house.”

  Thank God for that, anyway.

  “Here’s all the trucks,” Parsec said. I turned to the dashboard, grateful for the interruption. He had a map of the entire continent open on the screen. Bright blue dots flashed here and there, as far away as Cascaville. “Now we gotta narrow it down.”

  “Let’s do it on the move,” I said.

  “My thoughts exactly.”

  As we lifted into the air, I took out my phone. “I’m gonna call a friend, OK?”

  “Who?” Parsec said.

  “Someone I can leave Lucy with,” I said, hoping I was right.

  “No, Daddy!” Lucy said. “I want to stay with you! Forever!”

  “I want to stay with you, too, sweetiepie,” I said wretchedly. “But it isn’t safe.” I dialed Christy Day.

  “Mike,” she said. The note of wary distance saddened me.

  “Hi, Christy. Listen, I’m sorry I didn’t call yesterday. It’s been crazy. Forgive me?” I put warmth into it and a touch of wheedling humor. Parsec wasn’t the only one who could keep up appearances.

  “Are you going to make it up to me?” she said, matching my humorous tone. I sighed inwardly in relief.

  “That depends if you can clear your schedule for the weekend,” I purred. Parsec grinned at me.

  “Well, I might be able to,” Christy said, taking me at my word, which I hadn’t expected. “I’m owed a day off after all this Founding Day jazz. God, how many ways can you spell ‘nightmare’? Forty kids, and every one of them is running in a different direction. They couldn’t just sit still and watch the performances. Oh, no. Whose bright idea was it to offer all these free rides, anyway?”

  Now I heard a backdrop of music and noise behind her voice. I sat up straight. “Where are you, Christy?”

  “At the festival, of course. Mike, how is Lucy?” She sounded really concerned, or abashed that she hadn’t asked straight away. “Her nanny called the school to say she had a virus. Poor little chick. Is she feeling better?”

  The mention of my dashed-off excuse struck an unpleasant chord. She’s got a virus, I had told Nanny B to say. Everyone in Mag-Ingat might have much worse than a virus if we couldn’t pull this off. But at least it sounded like Christy was in a safe place. “You’re at the uptown festival,” I clarified. “On the mall level?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Between Extritium and Hanayashiki, kind of to the left of the stage. Are you nearby?”

  I looked out the window. “Actually, I am.”

  We just call it ‘the mall level,’ but it’s famed throughout the Cluster as the Mag-Ingat Skymall. Six skyscrapers over one kilometer in height spear up from uptown, and all of them—plus the smaller ones like Bonsucesso Tower—are connected by pedestrian walkways so broad, they feel like parks. Shops dot these greenways, whether standalone flagship stores or cunning little mazes of boutiques, so that you’re constantly moving from indoors to outdoors and back again. The predictability of Mag-Ingat’s weather is what makes it possible, but a huge whack of the city’s budget goes into keeping the mall enchantingly presentable, not to mention on maintenance of these carbon nanofilament-reinforced concrete structures suspended in mid-air.

  200 meters above the streets.

  Completely inaccessible by ground transport.

  Perfect.

  I looked out at the Celtic knot of walkways now coming into view, as Parsec merged into the main uptown skyway. Right now, rather than being mostly green, the mall level was a sea of green, red, and white, decorated for Founding Day and thronged with crowds.

  “Hey, Parsec,” I said. “Put down over there. Between Extritium and Hanayashiki.”

  He looked up from the dashboard computer. “You nuts?”

  “We’re dropping Lucy off.” I turned around and explained to her, “That was Ms. Day I was talking to. From school. All the kids are at the festival. Would you like to join them?”

  “It’s today?”

  “Sure is.”

  “Is Mia there?”

  “Course she is,” I said, before remembering that Mia and Kit were at St. Patrick’s. Right down at sea level. Oh God. I had to call Irene.

  “Yes please,” Lucy said, nodding and doing her exaggerated forced smile. She bounced in the back seat, a caricature of an excited child. She was trying to please me. “Yes, please, Daddy!”

  “Forget it,” Parsec said, glancing down. “Nowhere to park.”

  Fortune, or my patron saint, smiled on me then. A car lifted off from the parking area halfway between Extritium and Hanayashiki. “There!” I said. “Grab it!”

  Parsec grumbled, but he stabbed his fat finger on the button to reserve the space before anyone else could. As the sub-limo’s AI set us down, he said, “You’re not back in ten, you can take the bus.”

  I called Christy back, set up a meet with her and navigated towards her phone signal, dragging Lucy by the hand. As expected, it was absolute bedlam. Family-friendly was the theme of this part of the festival, and as everyone knows, kids’ parties are the noisiest of all. Small fairground rides had been set up in between the shops. Their dinging and rattling and jingling almost drowned out the noise from the nearest stage, where local acts were performing songs, dances, and skits related to events from Ponce de Leon’s history. Scents of cotton candy and baked potatoes and Shifter barbecue filled the air, enclosed by the same force fields that rose up from the edges of the greenway, which kept the wind from carrying off all the bunting and the flags and the silly hats.

  I caught sight of Christy through the crowd. She had one child by the hand and was stooping to console another. Then she straightened up and saw me. My heart did a flip-flop at the moment of charged eye contact.

  I dragged Lucy over to her. “Hi! Glad we caught up with you. Here’s Lucy. I’m gonna take off for a few.” I didn’t give Christy a chance to say no. “I’ll be back to pick her up—” I pulled a timeframe out of my ass— “by five o’clock.”

  “Oh! Lucy, you’re all better!” Christy said, looking from me to my daughter, perplexed. “Have you got your nametag?”

  The kids’ nametags had geolocation chips embedded in them. Some parents get the chips implanted in their children’s bodies. Not at our school.

  Lucy shook her head. She was clinging to my hand. I peeled her off, hating that I had to let her go.

  “Just stay with Ms. Day,” I told her. “Stay with her.” I lightly touched Christy’s sleeve. She jumped as if I’d stung her. “If I don’t—don’t get back on time …” I pointed up at Extritium Tower. “Get a room in the hotel, on me. Or just take her up to the observatory. Get up high, and stay high.”

  “Mike? Is something wrong? You can’t just … Mike!”

  I turned my back on them, on Christy’s questions and Lucy’s silence, and sprinted back to the parking lot.

  It had been a lot more than ten minutes, but Parsec was still there. He had killed time by getting himself a fruit slushie approximately the size of an oxygen tank. Slurping through the straw, he said, “We got the fucker.”

  I leant to the dashboard.

  51

  “What I’m wondering,” Parsec said, scowling at the dash computer, “is why he didn’t just turn off the tracking.”

  “Self-driving trucks,” I said. “You’d have to go into manual mode to turn off geolocation. Right?”

&nbs
p; “Right.”

  “Well, he isn’t driving. The AI is.”

  I paused, mirroring Parsec’s scowl. My own words reminded me of the mystery around Rafael Ijiuto. I assumed Sophia had hacked the AIs of the Trident Overland trucks so they’d pick Ijiuto up and chauffeur him around. But why? What was he to her?

  The answer came to me as neatly as a firing pin dropping. She worked for him. She had never really left the Travellers at all. She had been operating undercover as a member of Zane Cole’s gang.

  Whom we had decimated on Gvm Uye Sachttra.

  God, how she must hate me now.

  I made myself focus on Ijiuto. “Which truck is it?”

  “I had to reconstruct all the trip logs over the last couple days to see which one picked him up,” Parsec said. “If it was the same one that almost hit your jackal buddy on 94th, it was this one.” He pointed to a blue dot on the Lamonstrance road, 200 klicks from Mag-Ingat.

  “Huh?” I said. “Lamonstrance ain’t even worth visiting, let alone attacking.”

  “Which is why I don’t think he’s in that truck anymore.” Parsec dragged the map back to Mag-Ingat Bay and enlarged it. “I think he switched rides. Now he’s in this one.”

  “What are you basing that on?”

  Parsec showed his yellow teeth. “On the fact it’s currently headed for the spaceport, chucklehead.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  I’d expected we would find Rafael Ijiuto skulking somewhere downtown, preparing to unleash bio-terror on the unsuspecting masses of Shoreside. The onshore winds would give him the biggest bang for his buck, and perhaps I also made the mistake of assuming that Shiftertown had value as a target because it mattered to me personally. But the Strip genuinely was a premier target, if you wanted to terrorize every race in the Cluster at once, which I assumed was the point of choosing Ponce de Leon, an entrepot, in the first place …

  I realized I’d been doing a whole lot of assuming. But I didn’t have time to think it through. Parsec said, “My hunch is he left the bio-weapons in town. Programmed them to unload at such and such a time, and he’s planning to get off-planet before it kicks off. That’s what I’d do.”

  “Or it also could be,” I said, catching the tail of my prior train of thought, “that he never was planning to unload on the PdL in the first place. After all, he originally had the bio-weapons shipped to Gvm Uye Sachttra. Maybe he’s got them in the truck right now, and he’s trying to get off-planet before we catch up with him.”

  I liked this idea. It gave me hope that Mag-Ingat might be spared, after all.

  But I was not a criminal mastermind, and nor, for all his seedy posturing, was Buzz Parsec.

  And it nearly cost us everything.

  *

  As uptown shrank beneath us, I called Martin at the spaceport. He was only too eager to get a piece of the action. I outlined what I needed him to do. Then I called Irene. To my surprise, she picked up.

  “Yeah, what?” She spoke in a hurried, low voice, as if trying not to be overheard. She had disabled video.

  As concisely as possible, I gave her a rundown of the situation, adding that I had left Rex at Ville Verde (I didn’t know he was presently sitting in the gated community’s lock-up). I told her to get her kids and take them somewhere up high. I recommended the Skymall, where I’d left Lucy with Christy Day.

  “Oh Jesus,” she groaned. “I’m in the middle of something.”

  “Irene, where are you?”

  “I’m … waiting … for this guy.” The way she said it, I suddenly guessed that she was waiting on a rooftop behind the scope of a gun.

  “This is serious—”

  “So is this! Where are you?”

  I saw no point in not telling the truth. “In Buzz Parsec’s car.”

  “Aha,” she said. “Then I’ll say no more at the moment. Look, I hear what you’re saying. I’ll call Sister Anne. Gotta go.”

  Click.

  “Would that have been Ms. Seagrave?” Parsec said. Remember, he had worked with her in her shrouded past.

  “Yup.”

  “Shame she ain’t here. She could probably take this clown out from the air at fifty klicks an hour.” Parsec mimed squinting through sights and pulling a trigger.

  “This way’s better,” I said.

  “We’ll see. Is your buddy in position?”

  We were flying back the way we’d come, along the skyway that tracks Space Highway. Beneath us, the ground traffic was unusually light, thanks to the holiday. Cars and trucks flowed along like a parade of bright ants. The intense sunshine brought out the emerald and tourmaline tones of the jungle foliage swaddling the Cape. The bay reflected the cloudless sky. It was a day such as must have convinced the Founders that they had hit the space colonization jackpot.

  “You’ll recognize the truck.” I was on the phone with Martin again. “Yeah … yeah. We’re almost there.”

  On the dashboard screen, we were gliding up behind the blue dot of Ijiuto’s truck. This one was a tractor-trailer rig. Plenty of room in the back. Ijiuto was making a princely speed of 40 klicks an hour. It reminded me of Kaspar Silverback’s snail’s progress from the spaceport to the city, and I felt a chill, wondering if Ijiuto was going slow for the same reason: he had bio-weapons in the back of his truck. The difference being that whereas Silverback had just been instructed to drive carefully, Ijiuto knew exactly what was in those crates.

  I chewed my nails, watching our objective come into view.

  For the first eighteen klicks, and the last ten klicks, of its length, Space Highway runs along the shore of Cape Agreste with the jungle on one side and the sea on the other. But at the nineteen-klick mark, the cape bulges into the bay, forming a small peninsula cut off by the highway from the hills behind. This is Gillietown. It’s a settlement, not really worthy of being called a town, of unpaved streets and rubbishy houses, which seem to well up from some ineffable source of life and two-by-fours in the center of the peninsula, so that the dwellings at the edge are constantly pushed further out over the water, staggering on stilts. The place is as much water-borne as it is land-based, and that’s how the Gillies like it.

  The Shifters are far from the only flavor of alt-human to survive into the present day. The Gillies are another. We don’t have that many of them on the PdL, but some of them came, and remain, to practise their usual trade: fish-farming.

  Most all the seafood eaten in Mag-Ingat comes from Gillietown, as evidenced by the buoys and rafts dotting the water around the peninsula, and the boats nuzzling at them.

  But the reason Gillietown mattered to us right now was because for those three kilometers, there are no walls or fences or barriers of any kind along the highway. The Gillies wouldn’t have it. They said it would prevent them from crossing the road. Guess they had a point.

  So now Rafael Ijiuto was driving past a shambles of roadside stalls and gable-ends and native scrub, while we drifted up behind him. Parsec, hunched over the wheel, slowed down and indicated to drop out of the skyway.

  “Marty?” I said. I could see him below. He was in position, pulled over on the packed-dirt verge of the highway at the western end of Gillietown.

  “I see you,” he said.

  “’Bout thirty seconds to contact,” I said. “Ready?”

  “Yup. This douchebag is in for a surprise.” Martin turned his bike to face the outbound traffic. The sunlight flashed on his visor.

  Parsec dropped the sub-limo lower. We were now directly above Ijiuto’s truck, keeping pace with it as if by accident. Our shadow scudded along beside it.

  If Ijiuto saw the sub-limo’s shadow, he had no time to consider what it might mean, still less to react.

  Martin abruptly gunned his bike the wrong way, into the outbound traffic. AIs auto-swerved to miss him, blaring their horns. Ignoring the vehicles veering left and right to avoid colliding with him, Martin rode straight as a bullet at Ijiuto’s truck.

  It was in the outside, slowest lan
e.

  Just where we wanted it.

  I dug my fingernails into my palms. I’d told Martin to be careful, as this truck or one like it had nearly run Dolph down.

  Martin was more than careful. He was smart.

  A split second from what must have been a head-on collision, he swerved sharply—

  —and the truck swerved at him. Not away from him. At him—

  —as he pulled the handlebars over so hard that the rear wheel of his bike fishtailed. His knee scraped the asphalt. Somehow, he stayed on the bike. He shot across the front of the truck, so close that its grille almost clipped his muffler, and accelerated off the asphalt, into a Gillietown slum.

  The truck’s momentum carried its front wheels off the asphalt. The verge here was steep, not as steep as we’d have liked, but it had a definite downward slope. Clayey lumps of dirt sprayed into the air as the AI fought to steer back onto the highway—

  —and Parsec dropped the sub-limo right down alongside the truck, occupying the lane that the truck wanted. The road flowed past just a few centimeters beneath our wheels. This low, our levitation bubble was only about the size of a house. It bumped against the top right edge of the truck’s trailer like a slap from an invisible giant’s hand. The trailer drifted off the edge of the road, and started to drag the tractor off with it.

  I could see through the bubble into the driver’s cab of the truck. I saw Rafael Ijiuto seated upright, looking scared.

  Teeth bared, spitting swears, Parsec pushed the sub-limo’s engine into the red. The fans roared, our bubble delivered a hard shove to the right side of the tractor…

  … and the laws of physics did the rest.

  Still doing forty, the truck jack-knifed. The tractor swung around until it nearly faced in the opposite direction, and the whole rig rolled. It skidded down the slope at an angle, leaving a swathe of flattened scrub.

  God is merciful: there were no houses just there. The trailer clipped a boulder, toppled onto its side, and came loose from the tractor. Both pieces kept sliding downhill. They came to a halt at the bottom of the slope, half in and half out of one of those rainwater ponds we call gesso. The tractor fell over on its side with a secondary splash. Dead devil palm fronds fluttered down upon it.