Black Rust (26 page)

Slinging my rifle over my back, I dragged a ragged piece of a hover bike off the top of another that looked to be in one piece.  Knowing Workman was getting farther away with each passing second, I gave the bike a quick look for damage.  Scratches and chips, nothing else.  It was a military model, built a bit more rugged than the cop bikes.  I figured I’d chance it.  I started the engine, checked the fuel, and spotted Sienna running toward me as she hollered, shaking her finger in the direction Workman had escaped.  “That was him!  That was Workman!”

“Got it.”  I looked into the destroyed lobby.  I didn’t know if Lutz’s Mercedes would be going anywhere soon.  “You have a car?”

Sienna nodded and pointed, I guess to wherever it was parked. 

“You should get out of here.  You don’t want the blame for any of this falling on you.”

“What about your partner?” she asked.

“Nobody gives a shit about Lutz.”  I pushed the throttle, and the bike floated up.  “Because Lutz doesn’t give a shit about anybody.  Get your car and go.”

I shot up to thirty, forty, then fifty feet.  I was drifting southwest and climbing.  Just because Workman started out fleeing in that direction, didn’t mean he kept going that way.  If it were me fleeing, I wouldn’t have.

I scanned the sky as my bike clawed for more altitude.

I saw no buzz bike. 

The century-old oaks stood like giant broccoli florets on thick trunks under sprawling hemispherical crowns.  Most were separated by plenty of space to fly a hover bike through.  It was a maze that stretched for nearly a half-mile in each direction, and he was staying down between the trees to keep hidden. 

He was proving wilier than I’d expected.

But every choice comes with a list of pros and cons.  On that cop bike—a bad choice of the two who were left—he could maneuver between the widely spaced oaks if he didn’t go too fast.  That meant he couldn’t get far away from the admin building very quickly.  Once he got out of the oaks, he’d either have to make his escape across open fields or over the treetops of the pine forest where the trees were too densely packed for his hover bike to fly safely through.

That meant I had an excellent way to catch him.

I flew in a lazy spiral, going higher and higher.  The white stone and glass buildings of the admin complex all came into view among the oaks.  I saw Sienna’s training compound a half-mile to the south, and I saw the rows of cottages another half-mile to the east.  No shiny blue-and-white bike with an old man on top, though.

I’d leveled off at about three hundred feet and continued in circles.  I spotted the employee parking lot.  People were running toward it.  Some were in their cars, already on an exodus down an eastbound road.  I didn’t see any of Blue Bean’s pickup trucks driving toward the admin complex, though I saw some in far away fields, parked near bands of d-gens hard at work.

Lutz’s black Mercedes wasn’t on the road below me.  I wondered if the SUV was stuck in the lobby—maybe it wouldn’t be moving again under its own power.  If Lutz wasn’t such a 24/7, two-faced prick, I might have felt guilty about it.

I hadn’t yet spotted Workman, and I started to worry.  How long had it been?  A minute, three?  Could he have parked the hover bike and disappeared into the forest in a car?  Could he be holed up somewhere close by with a gang of trustees?  Could he be hiding in one of the other buildings, or even in the woods?

The list of possibilities was long.  But would a man running for his life—as he surely had to think he was—with a bike under his ass, flying away from danger, second-guess himself into abandoning his buzzing savior for another plan?

A flash of movement across my peripheral vision answered that question.

He was indeed a wily bastard. 

The river’s surface flowed along ten feet below the high banks.  Dense pines on both sides of the river grew to a height of fifty or sixty feet, making the river a near-perfect getaway route.  Any hover bike flying along close to the water’s surface would be invisible from anyone flying over the forests until they were directly over the river.  The only flaw—rivers snake across the landscape in every direction. 

I spotted Workman because he’d just zipped down a stretch of river that ran for a quarter-mile directly away from where I’d pinned myself in the sky.  My position gave me a full view of that section of the river’s surface.

I throttled up to max speed and raced to the spot where I’d seen him for that fleeting second.

I kept my altitude.  In moments I was over the river, slowing so I could follow its course.

I looked up and down the course of ruddy water, paying particular attention to the lengthening shadows thrown off the pines on the banks.  That’s where I expected a sneaky man to fly.

Almost immediately, I was rewarded when I spotted him hugging the bank, flying low and slow at a speed that allowed him to maneuver the cumbersome cop bike along the river’s winding course.

Too bad my military bike had been stripped of its armament before being sold into private hands, I could have strafed Workman for an easy kill.  He’d never have seen me coming.

Flying down from above and shooting at him with a pistol was a plan that would work only through luck.  Hell, Goose Eckenhausen had missed a whole car when he tried to shoot me earlier—at least, I think he missed.  The problem was that the air was turbulent enough to make a steady aim impossible.  And it was impossible to match speed and course with only one hand on the controls. 

Following him until one of us ran out of gas was a wager I didn’t want to make.

I needed a better alternative.  I looked down the course of the river and an attractive possibility presented itself.

With no idea how Workman’s plan of escape would change once he saw the shelter of his tall pines go away, I figured I’d not give him any time to think about it. 

The forest ended at an expanse of soybean fields, which looked to stretch for miles to the south.  Through that flat, cultivated ground, the river flowed straight out of the forest for half a mile before cutting a long snaking path for as far as I could see.  But I didn’t need to see that far. 

Making a judgment on how long it would be before Workman’s hover bike passed out of the trees, I peeled off my course over the river and dove down a long circular turn that sent me over the forest.  By the time I reached the edge of the pines I was just above the treetops, still descending, and still turning my bike back toward the river.

At a meager altitude of five or six feet, in the danger range of ground clutter, I was flying parallel to the line of trees, perpendicular to the river and heading toward it.

I throttled back.  My timing didn’t have to be perfect, but reaching the river early would ruin my surprise.

Seconds ticked.  Ground slipped by beneath me.

And though I was watching for it, anticipating it, I still felt a little surprise when Workman flew out of the forest.  From my perspective so close to the ground, I didn’t see his bike, which was flying above the water but below the top edge of the bank.  I only saw him, looking like a man soaring magically across the landscape.

I accelerated toward him, coming from the side and a little behind.  He was less than a few hundred yards in front of me.  I was closing the gap quickly at over thirty miles an hour. 

A handful of seconds passed as I zeroed in.

He looked to his right, surprise on his face.  Maybe he’d caught sight of a blur in his peripheral vision.  Maybe he sensed something.  Maybe he was skittish, being suddenly out in the open and looking around for threats.

None of it mattered except to give me the satisfaction of him having just enough time to see a hover bike careening at him—just enough time to have the shit scared out of him, but not enough time to do one single thing to avoid it.

The shroud on one of my forward fans collided with his shoulder.  He came off the bike, cartwheeling through the air.  His bike pitched up, thrown off kilter as it zipped into the air over the soybean field.  Mine went into a flat spin with one of the fans jammed against a bent shroud.

I wrestled for control, throttling up, hoping to grab some altitude to avoid hitting anything on the ground.

The landscape blurred by going sideways with the spin.  I saw forest, then field, then forest, then field again.  Then dirt and sky.

Oh, shit.

With the fans’ lift out of balance, the bike bucked forward.  By throttling up, I’d made my problem much worse. 

I throttled all the way down and leaned back as far as I could to try and balance the bike.

The software in the bike’s control system did its best to keep the bike stable as it dropped, and miraculously—luckily—settled it into the soybeans without putting a scratch on me.

I hopped off the bike and stumbled toward the riverbank before falling from dizziness.  I shook my head, gave it a moment to clear, jumped back to my feet, and ran.  I scanned across the fields as I went, looking for workers or trustees.  None.  Good luck for me.

At the top edge of the bank, I stopped.  I was probably eight feet above the water.  The river was wide—nearly twice as wide as it had been back in the forest.  That meant shallower.  Probably.

Workman was sitting on a sandbar in water about six inches deep, two-thirds of the way across.  One of his legs was bent in the wrong direction at the knee.  He was conscious, and his right forearm had all of his attention.  A broken twig of white bone protruded from the skin halfway down from the wrist.  Blood oozed around it.

I made the educated guess he was going nowhere soon.

I ran upriver about a hundred yards, scoping out the sandbanks and deep currents as I went, mapping out a path to get to him that didn’t force me to spend too much time in deep, fast water.

When I found my spot, I slid down the muddy bank and sank in water over my head.  I swam across a channel twenty feet wide while being washed at least forty feet back downriver before I was able to climb onto a sandbar out in the current.  I got to my feet in water just above my knees and moved toward Workman, careful with each step as the current tugged to get my legs out from beneath me.

The water became shallower as I followed the sandbar downstream, angling across the width of the river as I went.  Then it was back into a deep but narrow channel.  The water was moving particularly fast, and it was difficult climbing onto the sandy bar on the other side.  Only one more waist-deep channel had to be crossed after that, and then I was on Workman’s sandbar, just a few dozen feet away.

Splashing through the water, breathing heavily from the effort, I stopped in front of him.  “You’re a greedy bastard.”

He looked up, surprised, as if I’d just materialized out of the air when my words hit his ears.

“What’s your password?” I asked him, indulging a sudden inspiration to have Workman compensate me for ruining my life.

He was confused.  His nose was bleeding.  He may have had a concussion along with his other injuries.

“Your password,” I demanded.  “For your computer.  Tell me.”

He found some lucidity, and holding his broken arm with his good left arm, he asked, “Why?”

I grabbed a finger on the hand at the end of the broken arm.

He howled.

I hadn’t even twisted or yanked it.  All it took was that little bit of movement.  I knelt down in front of him.  He was sobbing and going on about his busted bones.  I slapped his face.  “Back to me, dumbass.  Look at me.”  I slapped him a second time.  “Tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“Your computer password.”

Shaking his head, as though he couldn’t discern the purpose of my request, or couldn’t reason out why his password was worth all the violence I’d perpetrated to get it, he blurted it out.

I smacked him again and made him repeat it twice more before I was satisfied he hadn’t made one up just to get me to stop.  I stood up and took a step back.

He looked up at me, with tears on his face and asked, “Why?”

“Because you tried to destroy my life to save yourself a few bucks.”

“I don’t even know who you are.”  He shook his head as his face turned to a sad grimace.  “My arm.”

“I’m Christian Black, the Regulator you tried to fuck over.”

I saw recognition on his face, just before he guessed what was about to happen.

I pulled out one of my pistols and shot him twice in the head. 

Having wrestled the bent shroud back to a roughly round shape, I freed the fan blade to spin normally, and my hover bike flew as if nothing had happened—pretty much.  On it, I raced back to the admin building.  Time was a factor, so I pushed the throttle all the way forward and maxed my speed. 

Once over the complex, I took two passes—one wide circle and one tight circle—looking for any threats that might have materialized in my absence.

It looked much like it had when I’d flown away, except the d-gens who’d been frightened by the gunfire were calm again, back doing much of nothing.  No trustees were rushing toward the admin complex in their pickups.  No men were milling around with guns out looking for perpetrators to punish.  The bodies of the dead lay where I’d left them.  The flow of employees’ cars out of the parking lot near the residence compound had slowed to a trickle, and the parking lot was near empty. 

It didn’t appear that any of Blue Bean’s employees wanted anything to do with the massacre at the admin building.  It didn’t seem that any of the trustees charged with work camp security were motivated to charge into a situation where they might be gunned down.  And why would they—they had nothing to gain by it and everything to lose.  Eventually, some law enforcement agency was going to show up.  No prisoner with half a brain would want to be an armed inmate standing amidst the bodies around the admin building when that happened.  That would look like guilt to any law enforcement-type racing onto the scene to answer the call that had to have gone out.

No, the trustees wouldn’t be coming, but who would?

The police weren’t already onsite, so that meant whatever police presence had been around to investigate my crime from the night before was gone.

Realistically, the nearest assistance might come from a nearby town with a population large enough to support a sheriff and a deputy or two.  I couldn’t think of one close by, so that left Houston with its sizeable police force.  I might have thirty minutes, or even an hour to work with.  Ideally, I wouldn’t need that long to put Workman’s computer password to good use.

I parked my hover bike in the grass near a tree behind the admin building where I’d have easy access to it out the building’s back door.  I assumed when the authorities arrived, they’d be coming up the long drive in front.  If they arrived before I finished what I was doing, I’d spot them and be able to make my escape undetected. 

After hopping off, I raised my rifle and scanned the area for threats.  I ran to the doorway that opened up to the back stairs and let myself in.  I climbed cautiously, listening for the sound of people in the building.  Despite the deductions I’d made while flying in, I could easily have been wrong. 

I heard nothing.  The building seemed to be abandoned.

I took a moment to switch out the magazine in my rifle, guessing that if things got hairy upstairs, I might not have a second to do so then.  The one I was removing had three rounds left.  I loaded the only full magazine I was carrying for the rifle.  I cursed the sticky-fingered trustees again for stealing everything from the Mercedes.  Running through a quick count on my pistols, one was full, the other had just eight rounds.  I switched my pistols right to left and left to right, putting the full pistol on the right since I was more likely to use that one first. 

At the top of the stairs, I hurried down the hall, peeking in through office doors that were still open.  At the second-floor waiting room, I looked across to see Workman’s office doors ajar.  After the way I went through them earlier, they weren’t going to close again without repair.

I crept into the waiting area and snuck a look inside.

What the hell?

Sienna and Lutz were sitting in the chairs facing Workman’s desk with their backs to the door.  They were alive.

The situation had
trap
written all over it.  I retreated across the waiting room and into the hall. 

Get the hell out?  Maybe.

Go kill the knuckleheads hoping to shoot me in the back?  Bingo!

I didn’t like running from a fight.

Having given the offices off the hall only a cursory glance on the way through a moment before, I went back and did a fast but thorough check.  All were empty.

Going back to the waiting room, I very quietly crept along the wall and checked each office directly off that space.  Again, no one lurking there to put a bullet in my back.

My ambushers weren’t very good at what they did.  They had to be waiting just inside Workman’s office on each side of the door. 

Right, left, both?

Why take a chance?  I had a full magazine in the rifle I could spare to save myself from a shot in the back, and I was all but finished killing folks for the day.

I took up a position in the lobby, looking through the office doors with Sienna and Lutz directly in front of me but way on the other side of Workman’s office, still sitting and facing the other direction.  They weren’t aware I was in the building.

I pointed my rifle at the wall just to the left of the double doors.  Because of the angle to the wall beside the door from where I stood, none of my bullets would hit either Lutz or Sienna.  I fired ten rapid shots in a wide pattern across that wall and immediately fired another ten into the wall on the right.  Anyone behind either wall had to be dead or wounded, and I still had ten rounds in the rifle, just in case.

With the pop of my shots still echoing, with Sienna screaming and Lutz cursing, I ran into the office, letting my rifle hang in its sling and drawing my pistols.

Once through the door, I spun, looking for the ambushers I was certain were there.

They weren’t.

Not one body.

It made no sense.

I was sure it was an ambush.

I turned on Lutz.  “What the hell?”

Lutz was out of his chair and facing me.  “What the hell yourself!  I damn near pissed my pants.”

“Is there anyone here?” I demanded.  “Ambush?”

“No,” Lutz told me.  “You fucking killed everybody already.”

“Not everybody.”  I crossed over to the restroom I’d kicked the door in on earlier.  It was empty.  I glanced over at Sienna.  She hadn’t moved.  “You okay?” I resisted the urge to bring my weapon to bear on Lutz.

She nodded.

I hurried around Workman’s desk, and I gave Lutz a once-over glance for a weapon.  He wasn’t holding one, didn’t have a pistol stuffed in his belt, but he did have an extra big bulge in one of his baggy pockets.  I laid my pistol on the desk, told Lutz and Sienna to sit, dragged Workman’s phone over in front of me, and dialed Ricardo’s number.

He picked up immediately.  “Who is this?”

I put the phone on speaker.  “Christian Black here.  I’ve got the dipshit with me, and someone else.  A bystander.”

“Lutz the dipshit.”  Ricardo laughed.  “I like that.  Why are you calling?  What do you need?”

“I’m in front of a computer full of information about accounts I think are loaded with money.  I suspect there’ll be information on offshore accounts, illegal tax-evasion shit.  Maybe more stuff.”

“And?” Ricardo asked.

I logged into Workman’s computer as I spoke, pleased that he’d given me the correct password.  “I’ve got a quick, do-it-now-or-forget-it deal.”

Intrigued, Ricardo asked, “What’s that?”

“I’ve got access to the computer.  I can give you the password.  I can give you the IP address, any network details you need in order to find it from the outside.  Can your hacker—what’s her name, Blix—get in and download all the account access information we need to drain the accounts?  The clock is ticking.  It’ll all have to be wrapped up in the next six to twelve hours.”             

“How much money are we talking about?” asked Ricardo.

“Millions is my guess.”  I looked at Sienna.  “That sound right to you?”

“Tens of millions,” she answered robotically. 

Something was wrong here, very wrong.  I casually laid a hand next to one of my pistols.  I told Ricardo, “Tens of millions.”

“What’s the split?” he asked.

“Half for me,” I answered.  “Half for you to split with Blix.”

“Three ways,” answered Ricardo.  “A third for you.  A third for me.  One-third for Blix.”

What did I care about the split?  A third of whatever Workman had in his accounts was way more than I’d need, and probably enough to set me up for a good many years.  “Deal.” 

“Will you be at this number?” Ricardo asked.

“Maybe ten more minutes,” I told him.  “Then I need to be gone.”

“Okay,” he said.  “I’ll have Blix call you in a minute.”

“Ten minutes,” I reminded him.  I looked at a clock on Workman’s desk.  “That’s it.”

“The phone will ring,” Ricardo assured me. 

I hung up, looked at Sienna, and asked.  “Why didn’t you leave?”

“We thought it best,” Lutz answered for her, “that we all leave together, get back to Ricardo’s, plan our next move.”  He looked out the window as if expecting to see something, didn’t, and looked back at me.  “Maybe talk about a more equitable split of Workman’s money.”

Sometimes the things Lutz says are so far outside my reality I can’t help but stare, dumbfounded. 

“It’s true,” Sienna said, though it didn’t sound at all true the way she said it. 

Workman’s desk phone rang.  I picked it up.  “Yes?”

“You were expecting my call?” asked Blix, like there was no time pressure at all.

I put the phone on speaker.  “I assume Ricardo explained the situation?”

“Yes.”

“You know the time constraint.”

“I do.”

I smiled.  “Tell me what you need.”

We spent only a few minutes of my ten-minute allotment while I answered questions and she got connected. 

She asked, “Can you see the mouse moving on your screen?”

“Yes,” I answered.  “You’re doing it?”

“I have control of the computer,” she confirmed.

“Anything else you need from me?” I asked.

“No,” she told me.  “You can hang up and—”

“Oh,” I interrupted.  “One more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“I’ve seen a few surveillance cameras around.  Can you access Blue Bean’s security system and erase any record of me, Lutz, or Sienna Galloway?”

“If I can get access,” Blix told me, “I’ll erase everything.”

“Perfect.  I’ll talk to you later today.”  I hung up.