Legacy of a Mad Scientist (50 page)

She found the most expensive hoverboard in the shop
and a top-shelf whip-sail. She picked out a new set of clothes,
changed in the dressing room and carried the items and tags to the
automated check out.

When asked for payment, she entered the family code
into the terminal. Alarms didn't go off, the terminal didn't hiss,
smoke, or burst into flames. It processed her purchase and asked
her to have a lovely day.

Outside, Ashley ripped open the kite. It was tricky,
but she assembled the sail and attached it to the board's central
grommet. Standing the board up was more difficult still.

The sail restricted her to just a couple directions,
forcing her to acknowledge the breeze and respond to it. She
practiced in a small abandoned parking lot near the shopping
center. She had two walls to bank off of, and if she wanted to get
creative, there was a parking garage across the central
walkway.

It was the railing she was preparing for. From this
level, there were eight railings she'd need to clear before it
would be just her, the board and the horizon. Ash wasn't sure she
was up to it just yet. The way she'd done so far, she was more
likely to fall off the kite than ride it.

It had taken Dr. Te the better part of an hour to
properly modify his server to mirror Ashley’s ocular streams to
Captain Snow’s amplifier. And as helpful as this was, it didn’t
actually help Ana pinpoint her daughter’s location as fast as she’d
have liked. They’d cut in after Ashley purchased the kite and
watched her during her practice. To say the child struggled was an
understatement.

Ashley had been at it for almost twenty minutes when
the federal agents showed up, putting an end to her practice. They
waited until she had a particularly ugly spill.

She saw them coming, four men in two teams, from both
directions. She picked herself up and dusted the dirt from her new
jeans and sweatshirt.

They stood all around her now. Two of them, the
junior two, had their hands on their weapons.

"Is there some kind of problem?" Ash asked. The idea
of picking up the kite and running for the rail had occurred to
her.

It seemed to have occurred to them too, they had
positioned themselves to block her in every direction. They would
catch her, and they knew it.

"We need you to come with us." The closest one spoke.
Ash suspected the role was interchangeable.

"I need your gun," she said.

The agents looked at each other, confused.

Ash stepped forward, her hand snaking into the man's
jacket. She spun, coming away with his weapon and ending up behind
him.

The other suits drew but hesitated, as the guy in
front blocked Ashley. From behind him, she opened fire, killing two
and wounding the third.

The disarmed leader elbowed her in the head, knocking
her to the ground. Ashley fired twice, once as she went down and
again with her rough landing, killing the lead man.

The wounded agent fired at her. Three rounds zipped
by her head and arm as Ashley ducked behind a park bench and
trashcan. He'd missed.

She slipped behind a utility box.

Consumed with his injury, the agent didn't see
her.

She slipped further away, flanking him. She then
approached from behind. The man struggled into a crouch.

Ash stayed in his blind spot, taking the last two
steps, she was directly behind him now.

He stood, took a difficult breath and coughed.

She reached forward and closed her freehand over the
pistol. Her other hand smashed her heavy gun into the side of his
head.

He collapsed unconscious.

Ash tucked the hostage weapon into her belt and
dragged the kite away from the bodies.

She took a deep breath and exhaled. Holding the mast
as a soldier with his rifle, she ran straight for the ledge.

Ashley stair-stepped a bench and then the rail.
Keeping the kite horizontal, as though it were a giant wing, she
leapt into the sky.

The next floor was coming up fast, Ashley dropped the
board, the mast and sail pivoted, the board swinging under her
feet.

She came down, accelerating toward the next rail and
over.

With the next level, she fell less, the sail took up
more of the weight, and suddenly she was airborne.

Level by level, she gained altitude, until it was
clear she was no longer over the shopping center at all. And like
some cartoon character who has realized he’s going to fall, gravity
stretched its hand out to her and the board began to lose
altitude.

Deputy Director Von Kalt stood on the patio, several
hundred yards behind her, and watched the girl sail out into the
empty sky. He held the Metachron in his hand. Three of his agents
were dead. Emergency medical technicians were tending to the
wounded man. Several agents stood on the balcony, watching her
escape and coordinating with pursuit squads.

Her brother was caught. He was in the system. Von
Kalt didn’t have him yet, but that was just a formality. If she
hadn’t run for an international border yet, she wasn’t going to
now. All Von Kalt had to do was find the boy, and she would come to
him.

He had felt her presence. Or rather, the Metachron
had sensed the Micronix. It was getting more and more difficult for
him to tell the difference between the pocket computer’s
suggestions and his own desires.

The director dropped the device into his pocket and
rubbed his eyes. Even without holding it, the mental projections of
the device were still present. Von Kalt was wired into the camera
systems of three satellites, his approaching tactical vehicles, and
several other reconnaissance teams.

Dr. Fox’s magical little device had given him a
hundred hands and a thousand eyes. He was damned if he wouldn’t use
every one of them. Yet he found it ironic that none of those
informed him, as clearly as his own intuition, as to where the
scared child might be going.

Once Ashley had gotten airborne it didn’t take
Captain Snow long to spot her. Von Kalt’s pursuing agents found
themselves coming under fire from an unidentified source and pulled
back.

The wind whipped at her clothes, hair, and skin. The
board bucked and snapped under her feet, strained by the opposing
forces of gravity and her weight attached to the kite.

The city seemed to hang in place around her, the bulk
of Angel City's floating towers behind her and to the left. Below,
the hard structures of grounded Los Angeles.

The ocean floated on the horizon. Only the clouds
appeared to move, or rather she through them.

It was beautiful.

Ash felt as if she were a bird combined with a jet.
She easily adapted to the ride. Leaning into the bowline and the
mast, she piloted the kite across the sky at what felt like eighty
miles an hour.

The clouds rushed around her, one moment she would be
enveloped in white and then suddenly, the world would reappear.

Finally, she was through the lowest ones and there
was nothing between her and the sharp-pointed structures of steel
and glass, rising from the Hollywood below.

Ashley banked as the buildings reached up for her,
their giant metal teeth, disguised as antennae and radio receivers,
gnashing at her. The kite snapped in the wind, and Ashley held
on.

The kite, board and rider spun toward the ground. She
was going at least a hundred now and accelerating. She held on.

The first rip appeared. She saw it, it was small, and
then it was huge.

The wind caught the kite and threw her toward a
structure to her left. She lifted the board and slid along the side
of the building. For a few brief moments, she was in control, then
she cleared the building and all was noise and wind.

Ashley felt lifted, she’d caught an updraft, and it
threw her toward another skyscraper. This time her approach was
smoother and the broad building provided much more stability. She
carved a path up the side of the scraper, upsetting business
meetings and launching herself from the structure at a forty-five
degree incline.

She found herself able to control the free-fall a
little better, angling toward one building after another. She even
landed on a few flat rooftops and skidded down another's sloped
side. She wasn't doing it just for fun, buzzing the metropolitan
offices slowed her to fifty and sixty miles per, instead of free
fall at over a hundred.

There were four rips in the sail now. Ash started to
panic. She’d heard them, now she saw them as well.

She made her way toward the curving arch of the Santa
Monica Mountains. She came in from the north, sliding down over the
structures of old Hollywood, keeping the Mulholland freeway cable
to her right and gradually drifting down over the familiar
residential neighborhoods and streets of a life gone by.

Ashley curved down toward the mountains, banking off
the slower magnetic-cable traffic. She slid down the side of a
moving truck, drafted a cruising flatbed and then kicked out toward
a mountain wall.

She caught the cliff side as easily as any of the
twenty buildings she'd whipped past, but pushed away quickly as the
weeds whipped at the sail, her fingers and her face.

The steep slope leveled out, and Ashley caught her
breath. She sailed down the ridgeline, cresting mountaintops as if
they were swells on a stormy sea.

Cruising along the peaks, on relatively solid ground,
Ash felt her heart, arms and shoulders relax. She realized she'd
been clutching the kite with everything she had. Her hands had
cramped into claws. It took repeated flexing to get them feeling
normal again.

Ash sailed down the paths, coming closer to the
neighborhood where she'd lived. She came in from the back, down the
side of a steep mountain and then around the base on the low side,
sailing into her neighborhood along the retaining walls and
unprotected backyards of the families living against the
mountain.

The knowledge flooded back, intoxicating her.

Sailing down the familiar trails, Ashley hit turns at
full speed, banking off trees into huge vertical jumps and landing
in sweeping curves to dissipate the shock.

As Captain Snow watched her daughter fearlessly ride
the kite board, several thousand feet above the ground, she was
overcome with awe and admiration. There is no way she’d have had
that kind of courage at her age.

Ross’s voice interrupted her train of thought and
distracted her as Ashley dipped below the tree line.

“We’ve got a twenty on Geoff. He’s at the dog
pound.”

“Can you get him out?” Snow asked.

“Not without breaking cover and a bit of gunplay.
We’ll post up here until they move him. For the moment though, he’s
safe.”

“Says you,” Captain Snow said.

“No need for thanks, really. My pleasure,” Ross
chuckled.

“Thank you, Kelly. A thousand million Thank You’s for
ever‘n ever.”

“You’re welcome, but we’re not out of the woods
yet.”

“Not by a long shot,” Snow replied.

Ashley came toward the house from the mountainside
and slid her board to a stop in the backyard. Skimming over the
streets and rooftops, she hadn't spotted a single parked car with
agents sitting in it. She hoped that, if they were out there, they
hadn't spotted her either.

Ash pressed her hand against the panel and the
backdoor opened. She hauled her kite into the house and closed the
door.

Inside, she looked around for any kind of security
system. She looked for pinhole cameras or alarm boxes. Ashley
checked the main doors, finding just the basic locks, no hint of
any kind of security system at all.

In her father's study, everything appeared to be
exactly as he'd left it. There was nothing about the house that
looked as if it had been searched, ransacked or pilfered. Whatever
the agents had wanted, it hadn't been among the family's material
possessions.

Ashley's father owned a pair of Japanese samurai
swords, standing on a rack in a glass case. Ashley stared at them
from across the room, thinking about the reported incident with the
blue goo, from his childhood.

Ash walked over to the computer displays behind the
desk. She reached out and waved her hand over the console, waking
the display.

It requested a password. “Zelena,” Ash said, giving
her mother’s maiden name. Ashley had heard her father give the
command many times.

“User recognized,” the computer said. “Ashley Erin
Fox, Welcome.”

“I need security footage for this location, for
Friday, July 26th, around three pm please?”

“Sorry, that footage is inaccessible from this
location. This location has been compromised and all data stores
have been scrubbed clean. This station must be reinitialized with a
new user before any tasks or applications can be run.”

Ashley sighed. She otherwise left the study as she
found it, not disturbing any more of its secrets or forcing its
locks.

Not feeling especially hungry and already bored, Ash
headed toward her own room. She moved slowly, just taking
everything in. She peered though the windows at the front of the
house. She saw no vehicles closing in, surrounding her. She saw no
one at all.

Upstairs, she opened the door to her bedroom. It was
just as she'd left it. No Goldilocks had been sleeping in her bed,
filling the right half of the room. To the left, set at an angle,
her desk was exactly as it had been.

Ashley looked at the center drawer of her desk. Of
course, the prototype was in her pocket, but somehow the desk would
always be it's home.

Between the bed and the desk, the dollhouse her
father had built her, years ago. Behind it, the picture window
displayed a magnificent view of the canyon and the homes spotting
the other side.