Neurolink (36 page)

The NP rocked back, slapped its belly and roared with laughter. Above the hologram, a very real bank guard stepped onto the window ledge and pointed a rifle. Its laser made a red smudge on Qi’s forehead, and Dominic covered her face with his arm.

A second later, the barricade of chairs broke apart, and more surfsuited guards pushed in through the doors. Half a dozen rifles bristled at them, and red lasers swarmed over their bodies like motes of dust. Dominic helped Qi sit up. He brushed glass from her hair and felt her trembling. She gripped fistfuls of glass beads in both hands. His Net node beeped again.

He glowered at the NP. “Meet my terms, and I’ll accept your degenerate merger. Otherwise, I’ll fight you till one of us dies. You have my word.”

“Nick, you can’t,” Qi whispered. He hushed her with a look.

Rifle muzzles bore down on them like staring eyes, and Qi sat still and tense, fingering her gear bag. Very slightly, the NP moved its jaw.

“Bad precedent,” the NP said at last. “Dealing with protes. It’ll come back to bite us.”

“It’s good business,” Dominic said quickly.

He sensed the NP was wavering. One well-phrased argument might cinch the deal, but he had only a few seconds to compose his line. It had to be solid, rational, irrefutable. It had to be the truth. Yes, only a real benefit would be potent enough to sway the NP’s calculating mind. He drew a breath through his nose, and as he lined up his thoughts, a tremendous blast of heat bowled everyone to the floor.

There was a clash of cymbals, a profound shredding rumble, and the NP’s holographic projection flew backward out of the room.

“The cop car crashed!” Qi was the first on her feet, pointing out the window. “Look!”

The NP had been projecting its image from the police cruiser. While the guards were busy shaking themselves off and retrieving their weapons, Dominic crawled through the slippery glass beads and leaned over the window ledge. A ragged eddy of black smoke swirled up from the dome where the cop car had gone down. And something was happening in the sky. Air cars churned through the smog, spinning up whorls of turbulence. It was hard to see what disturbed them.

“Wish I hadn’t thrown my helmet away,” Qi said at his elbow. “It was rigged for metavision.”

Out of the billowing smog, a small white car skidded in and bumped sideways into the ledge. Its side panels were dented and scraped, and the entire front section was bashed in. Two people in surfsuits knelt in the open door holding a double armload of rope. No, it wasn’t rope, it was a cargo net. They flung it over Dominic just as Qi made a flying leap toward him. The net caught them both, and the aircar jetted away, trailing them behind. In midflight, their abductors hauled them into the tiny cabin and slammed the door.

Dominic fought at the heavy net, but the best he could do was force his head through one of the holes. His eye patch had blown off. Sunlight splintered through the car’s windows, and he turned his one good eye away from the glare. The driver banked a sharp right turn, then a left, and Dominic bounced around like loose change. In the commotion, he saw Qi work free from the net and grab the back of the driver’s seat to steady herself. Dominic rammed his hands through the net and clutched the other seat back, just as the passenger turned to face him. When she removed her helmet, mousy brown hair stuck to her forehead.

She said, “Sir, I’ve been trying to reach you.”

Dominic blinked his single eye. “Elsa?”

“YES
, sir. It’s me, sir. This is my brother, Offener. We came as fast as we could.” Elsa Bremen ducked her head and swiped at her sweaty bangs. Her hair stuck out in soft damp wings where the helmet had pressed it. She gave a shy smile.

Dominic introduced Qi, and when the car settled into a glide for a few seconds, he shook hands with Offener Bremen, the driver. Then the car flipped on its side and hurtled through a forest of communication towers. Blue lights flashed through the smog as a cop cruiser zoomed up behind them.

“How did you know where I was, Elsa? And why did you do this? You’ve taken a terrible risk.” Dominic glanced through the rear window. Their car was jetting white smoke. That meant engine damage. Not far behind, the cop cruiser skidded between two antennas and kept coming.

“Sharon called. You know, sir. Sharon at the gym. When she saw your…” Elsa indicated her left eye and blushed. “Sharon was worried, sir. You hadn’t cut your hair, and you were wearing the wrong uniform.”

“Oh, the wrong uniform. I see.” Dominic slammed against the ceiling as Offener careened the car through another sharp turn. When he thumped back to the floor, he patted Elsa’s shoulder. “You saved my life.”

“We’re going back into the dome, sir. We’re too easy to spot outside.”

“Sweet costume, Nick.” Qi helped him disentangle his head and arms from the cargo net.

“Halt!” blared the cruiser’s loudspeaker.

“You can’t escape me,” blared the NP’s voice.

Dominic reached for a hold as the car flipped on edge again. He said, “Elsa, I’m afraid you’ve sided with the losing team.”

“Don’t worry about the car, sir. It’s a rental. We didn’t mean to crash that police cruiser. We just wanted to bump it out of the way.” Elsa had cinched her seat belt so tight, when her brother inverted the car in a barrel roll, she barely moved.

Dominic, however, spun sideways, smacked his teeth against the ceiling panel, then ricocheted into Qi. He grabbed the loose cargo net, but it didn’t do him any good at all.

“Nicky, control yourself,” Qi said.

Elsa tucked her chin down and gave him her shy little smile again. “I don’t mind about losing my job, sir.”

Dominic felt certain that wasn’t the worst she would lose. Poor innocent Elsa. What had her loyalty cost her? As the car took a nosedive, he grabbed her seat back and held on tight.

“We’re going into the main airport, sir. Lots of traffic to hide in.” Elsa faced front again.

Offener hunched over the steering yoke and maneuvered through an obstacle course of surface equipment. Clearly, he was a man of action and few words. Qi clutched Offener’s seat back and leaned into the turns as if her body language could help steer. She glanced at Dominic and grinned. She was enjoying the ride.

“Do you want to hear about the mess I’ve dragged you into,” he asked Elsa.

“The Neural Profile, sir. I understand. You’re trying to get the miners a loan.”

The car plummeted, and his stomach levitated. “How does news travel so fast?”

“Viral chat. You know, office gossip. Word is, you want to hack the Ark, sir.”

Dominic wedged his shoulder against the ceiling and braced for another acute turn. “How many people did Karel tell?”

“Everybody knows, sir. And a lot of people are rooting for you. We don’t like an unprogrammed AI running our bank.”

They zigzagged through a loose fringe of aircars waiting for permission to land at the Trondheim Intercommercial Airport. Running lights diffused through the afternoon smog and cocooned each car in a soft rusty glow. As Offener steered closer to the main port, the traffic grew denser, like stars spiraling around the cloudy brown heart of a galaxy.

“Offener will set us down in the employee terminal,” Elsa explained. “We’ll travel as workers so we’ll be less conspicuous. I hope that doesn’t annoy you, sir.”

He laughed. “I can do that.”

“And, um, we have a disguise for you, sir.” She snapped open her purse and lifted out a sealed plastic envelope. Dominic read the label. “Inflatable body cast.”

He puffed his cheeks and blew.

They landed with a soft thud, and Offener shouldered open the one car door that would still move on its hinges. Already, a security siren was blaring as they raced away from the battered white car into the shelter of a luggage wagon. Hiding between stacks of suit bags, Dominic pondered the mysterious complexities of his fate as he tugged on the filmy, yellow “body cast.” While Elsa and Offener kept lookout for the security guards, Qi made him lie flat on his back while she sealed the tabs around his wrists, ankles and neck, then yanked the inflation ring. With a piercing squeal, compressed gas filled the suit, mashed the breath from his lungs and squeezed his entire body in a big yellow bubble. Qi chose that moment to kiss him on the lips. Then, with brisk efficiency, she wrapped layers of white gauze around his head and face.

“I’ll pay you back for that trick,” he mumbled through the gauze. “With interest. Compounded hourly!”

“Yeah, yeah. Cut the chatter.”

He could feel her slathering something cold and viscous all over his hands. It had a sharp chemical stench. “What is that vile gunk?”

“Fake scar tissue. Elsa found it at Jack’s Joke Shop. She says it’ll disguise your palm print when we go through security.” He could feel Qi blowing on his hands to dry the fake scars. Then she paused. “Your little friend Elsa, I like her.”

As soon as the gunk hardened, Qi tossed him over her back in a fireman’s carry. He couldn’t see what happened next because Qi hadn’t left him an eyehole. But he could smell tar and jet fuel and feel her sharp bony shoulder gouging his groin as she sprinted across an open surface, up a short stair, and through an echoing hall. He heard a pitter-pattering step that was probably Elsa, and a loping run that had to be Offener. And something rolling on wheels. Qi flopped him down onto a hard cottony pad that jounced on springs. A rolling hospital stretcher.

“This is for you,” Elsa said.

“Thanks,” said Qi. “I like to play doctor.”

Dominic heard the rustle of fabric. Qi was changing clothes. Then the rolling wheels creaked louder, and he sensed rapid movement.

Bars of fluorescent light glared through his gauze as they traveled down endless noisy concourses. Strangers bumped into his stretcher and did not apologize. Several times, they passed through, security checkpoints where guards stopped them for questioning, and he heard timid Elsa spout outrageous lies. In the mildest tones, she gave false names, phony credentials, bogus itineraries, and she must have flashed fake ID chips, too. Only her soft bashful voice made her wild fabrications sound credible. She also paid liberal bribes.

Somewhere along the way, his stretcher crashed into a group of people who shoved and yelled curses. Qi shouted back that this was an emergency, her patient was experiencing acute respiratory failure due to toxic exposure. Dominic thought that might not be far from the truth. Then everything went quiet, and he heard the cool, self-important voice of an executive.

“You people are holding up traffic.”

Dominic sensed a shifting of feet, then a pregnant stillness. “You’re out of uniform, nurse. What Com are you with?”

“ZahlenBank,” Elsa’s small shy voice spoke up. “We’re all with ZahlenBank, sir. Our clothes were contaminated with toxins, sir, so we burned them.”

“That’s right,” Qi said. “This patient’s contaminated, too. You wanna inspect him?” The stretcher lurched forward.

“What the hell! Get that away from me!”

“We have to go, sir. Most sorry. It’s an emergency.”

Dominic pictured himself bouncing like a yellow squeeze-toy as the wheels of his stretcher bounced down the concourse, rounded a sharp corner, jogged down some steps and jolted over a curb. Then hands seized his wrists and ankles and swung him up into the air. He flew into darkness and landed with a rubbery squilching noise. People pressed in beside him, and he heard breathing and felt hands nudging his yellow bubble. From the quality of the sound, he sensed an enclosure. Someone slammed a metal door.

Then Qi sliced the gauze away with her knife and wiped the sweat off his face. “How they hangin’, Nick-O?”

“They ain’t,” he said. “They’re squashed. Get me out of this rubber ducky.”

“Hoo-hoo! Nick makes a joke!” Qi punctured the body cast with her knifepoint, and the gas whistled out like a high-pitched fart. Everybody laughed.

As Dominic sat up and peeled the gummy scars off his fingers, Offener slipped behind the wheel of the van—another rental, Elsa explained. He darted out at breakneck speed and dodged through traffic as if he were playing a video game. Dominic peered over his shoulder at the speedometer. Offener liked to drive fast. Their van raced through the congestion circling the airport, then swerved down into a tunnel. They went deep, deep into the suburban levels under Trondheim, deeper than Dominic had ever been before. Already, he missed the sun.

“Here, sir. Put this in your pocket. You never know when you might need it.” Elsa handed him a fistful of coins, and he laughed aloud.

They wound through tunnels just wide enough for two cars to pass. He never knew tunnels this narrow existed in Trondheim. Long stretches of light tube had failed, and only the van’s running lights illuminated the gray concrete. Pedestrians pressed against the tunnel walls, sometimes two or three deep. He wondered why pedestrians were walking here. Wasn’t it dangerous? He tried to see their faces in the dim light, and then he noticed other things. These people weren’t wearing uniforms. They were carrying sacks and baskets and jugs of water. And they were all headed in the same direction. They were runaways.

“Sir, we have two choices now. We can take you straight to a med clinic for cell hygiene. You need it, sir. Both of you. I’ve-lined up a doctor who wants to help.”

“Or?” said Qi.

“Or we can go to a safehouse where you can uplink to the Net.”

Dominic checked his watch. Very soon, the colony would run out of air. Then they’d have to float those windmills and give up their freedom forever. But maybe he could still do something. He met Qi’s eyes. “Safehouse?”

“Yep.”

Offener emerged into a populous worker neighborhood and braked to a skidding halt in front of the Rest Nest Hotel. The Rest Nest was an inexpensive tube lodge patronized by vacationing employees, Elsa told them. She’d booked a suite of interconnecting sleep tubes with Net access, and she charged the van, the lodging, and other miscellaneous expenses to an obscure office maintenance account at ZahlenBank. She said the auditors wouldn’t find her trail for years.