Roboteer (30 page)

Will rammed his mind into the transport’s tiny control node. He could see the street from above now, blocked at either end by the flashing squares of police vehicles. As he watched, the police began to dash towards them from both ends, personal assault cannons cradled in their arms.

‘Stay down!’ Will warned and kicked the transport into motion.

He reversed violently, straight into the police lines. The men barely had time to aim before they were forced to scatter for their lives. Then Will hurled the transport forwards as flechs pounded the vehicle from all directions with a deafening roar. Half of Will’s sensors winked out, but he could still see through the traffic-control cameras situated on the canopy overhead.

He accelerated towards the other police line and then swerved at the last moment, into one of the gardens to the right. He smashed through the hedge, showering the transport with vegetable shrapnel. It bounced madly as it ploughed over the landscaped ground, its ruined door flapping uselessly like a broken wing. Police flechs scoured them from behind.

Will drove straight through an untended pond of brackish water and over a cluttered lawn beyond it towards a high fence. He smashed through it and raced across a second garden while the wail of sirens mounted behind him.

In seconds, Will was out into open street. He threw the transport sideways into the traffic and sped away, weaving between the trucks and personal pods as fast as the engine would permit. He knew where they had to go: the safe house. The problem was how to get there. Will doubted the place would be much use to them surrounded by Protectorate Police.

He glanced between the seats at where Rachel was frantically trying to staunch the flow of Hugo’s blood. They were both drenched in it. Will was astonished that so much could come out of just one person. Hugo was gasping like a landed fish while Rachel ripped strips of her skirt to make bandages.

‘How’s he doing?’ said Will.

‘He was lucky,’ said Rachel. ‘That was a standard-issue Earther cannon, as far as I could tell – no toxins or nerve agents so it’s just tissue damage.’

‘How long has he got?’ said Will.

She looked up at him worriedly. ‘I don’t know. An hour, perhaps.’

Will could see no police behind them, but that didn’t mean a thing. Police only chased people in historical dramas. Modern law enforcement used surveillance and simply trapped you.

He jumped his mind back into the transport, and through it out to the traffic system. Sure enough, their progress was leaving a wake of alarms wide enough for the whole city to see. Flashing police units were converging on them from all directions.

Will turned to the hacking code John had left him. It was depressingly limited – much less than John had given him reason to hope for, just some worms and cracking tools along with a handful of basic SAPs. He’d have to make the best of it.

Leaving the transport to drive itself for a moment, Will jumped through the traffic-control software till he found a portal to the Protectorate Police network. He fired a generic crash virus through it. That wouldn’t buy them much time, but it’d have to be enough. All across Will’s display, the police markers went dark. He threw the transport into a tight turn up an alley behind a commercial thoroughfare, keeping his eyes peeled. Unless they changed vehicles before the police came back online, they were dead.

He spotted a bright-green troop carrier parked idly at the back door of a pleasure palace.

‘Rachel, get ready to move him,’ said Will. ‘We’re changing vehicles.’

Through the traffic software, Will dragged up a portal to the troop carrier. Just as he’d hoped, it was the property of a different subsect from the one running the police. The police were under the jurisdiction of the Sons of Mao, while the carrier belonged to the Ecowarriors. And the suspicious, factional Earther groups had put plenty of security between their respective domains.

Will slammed one of John’s password levers into the Ecowarrior network and had the carrier’s engines running before they screeched to a halt behind it.

‘In there!’ Will told her, pointing at the new vehicle.

Rachel glanced nervously at the back of the pleasure palace. The door was open and rhythmic music blasted out from inside. She scowled at him.

‘Are you crazy?’

‘It’s the best I’ve got,’ said Will.

He shut down the transport, severing its links to the traffic grid, and ran around to help Rachel carry the limp and slippery Hugo into the open back of the vehicle. Rachel, though, was doing fine on her own. She charged forward like some blood-soaked Amazon with the scientist joggling limply on her shoulders.

Will leapt into the back of the carrier and took Hugo from her.

‘Wait!’ she ordered and dashed back to the civilian transport to grab their flech-riddled bags from the trunk. She hurled them into the carrier and jumped in after them, her face full of thunder. ‘If I have to fight for my life, there’s no way I’m doing it in this fucking corset.’

Will permitted himself a grin before diving back into the carrier’s node and driving them out onto the main street towards the safe house. He checked the traffic-system status. The police units were coming back online with alarming alacrity. A pair of hornet-striped police vehicles sped past them, sirens blaring.

It was only a matter of time before the authorities found the transport, Will knew. And once they did, it wouldn’t take them long to make the connection to the troop carrier. Assuming, of course, that the soldiers who’d lost it didn’t report it missing before then.

‘We’re going to have to swap cars again,’ Will warned.

‘No shit,’ said Rachel. ‘Once they find this thing gone, they’ll come down on us like meteors.’

Will scoured the traffic system for something he could use, well aware that he had only minutes to complete their escape. By now, the Protectorate Police were bound to have their finest SAPs on the case. What he needed was a vehicle that was clean and hard to trace, preferably one on a different network. Unfortunately, portals were slamming shut all across the system like starship airlocks. One by one, the disparate subsect domains were raising their alert levels.

Will groaned in frustration as the carrier ground to a halt at an intersection to let a maintenance robot lumber across their path.

Then the solution hit him.

‘That’s it!’ he exclaimed.

The robots ran on guide strips by the roadside, barely integrated with the transport network, and the traffic system treated them as pedestrians. It took him precious minutes to find his way into the city maintenance system from the increasingly isolated traffic control, but once he was in, it was easy. He arranged for the carrier to rendezvous with a couple of larger robots behind an unused warehouse.

Will held his breath as they turned into the deserted lot, hardly daring to hope that his ruse had gone unnoticed. He grunted with relief when he saw the two robots standing there alone. They looked like a couple of animated trash bins, with small sensor heads and large hairy waldos.

Rachel stared at them with unabashed concern. ‘We’re going in
those
?’

Will nodded. ‘There should be enough cargo space in the back of each for a couple of people. It’ll be a tight fit, but hopefully untraceable.’

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll bring Hugo. You haul the luggage.’

She carried Hugo over to the larger of the two machines and laid him carefully in its cargo hopper. Will dumped the bags in the back of the other machine and climbed inside.

‘Wait,’ said Rachel. She ran over to him, grabbed his cheeks and kissed him hard on the mouth. Will’s face tingled. His heart pounded. He blinked dumbly at her.

‘What was that for?’ he mumbled.

‘That’s in case we die before we get there. You did great, Will. Really great. See you at the safe house.’ With that, she ran back to her robot and climbed inside.

Will set the troop carrier on automatic and sent it back to the place they’d found it. Then he sealed the lid of the hopper above him so that the only light came from a crack around the rim. The inside stank of surface dust and chemical adhesives. It was hot and cramped, but bearable. With his head still spinning from the kiss, Will let the robot trundle out along the street.

12.3: WILL

The trip to the safe house was a nerve-wracking one. Will watched police vehicles dash past via the robot’s inadequate electronic eyes. He could hear the sirens around him with appalling clarity, though. Just a thin plastic wall separated him from the street.

He began to wonder if the hoppers were watertight. If not, Hugo’s blood might dribble out onto the pavement, leaving a trail for the Earthers to follow. Rachel would be found. He’d have caused her death.

He was immensely relieved when both robots shuddered to a halt outside the front door of the safe house. He scanned the street using the robot’s simple senses and waited till there were no passers-by. Then he leapt out and threw back the lid of Rachel’s hopper. The inside wasn’t pretty. Hugo was still losing blood. Rachel looked up at him with exhausted eyes.

‘Stay here,’ he told her. ‘I’ll get help.’

She nodded. ‘Be quick.’

Will strode up to the door of a house that appeared to be made of yellow lace, surrounded by a dense garden of small blue-green pine trees. He pressed the visitor stud. A few moments later, an Angeleno woman with plastic-perfect features and a yellow dress that clung to her like paint opened the door. She surveyed Will’s blood-spattered clothing and dishevelled hair with alarm.

‘We need help,’ said Will. ‘My friends are back there, in the robots. One of them has been shot.’

She stared at him for a moment, her face blank. A terrible fear gripped Will. Could he have made a mistake about the address?

‘Isn’t this the safe house?’ he said stupidly.

What would he do now if it wasn’t? Kill her? Tie her up in her own home? Will doubted he could bring himself to do either.

The woman’s face slowly took on a frosty aspect. She looked out at the robots for a moment, and then up and down the street.

‘Bring them around the side,’ she said tersely. ‘Behind the trees.’

Will grinned at her in relief. He took a breath to thank her but the door was already closing. He hurried back to the robots.

It took a little coaxing to persuade the robots to abandon their guide strips, but Will succeeded in leading them along the gravel path to the back of the property. He found the woman waiting for them there. A huge, muscular youth with no shirt and pectorals like slabs of mocksteak stood beside her with a handgun tucked into his belt. Will helped Rachel out and together they retrieved the unconscious Hugo.

‘This way,’ said the woman.

She led them inside and down a flight of stairs to a simply furnished room behind a false wall in the basement. Will and Rachel lowered Hugo onto a narrow bed made of wipe-clean plastic. The youth with the gun watched them from the doorway, poker-faced.

‘You’ll find medical supplies in there,’ said the woman, pointing to a blue plastic crate in one corner. ‘I’ll get help.’ With that, she walked out, shutting the door behind her.

Rachel started carefully peeling away Hugo’s improvised dressing. ‘Will, help me. I’ll need tweezers, disinfectant, plasmix, spray-skin and dressings.’

‘I’m on it,’ said Will.

He dashed over to the crate and started rifling through the contents. He spent the next hour following Rachel’s instructions and accessing Goldwin’s public medical database. Luckily, the safe house was well equipped. Beyond the room with the wipe-clean furnishings lay a bathroom and a basic kitchen. They were able to do a fairly creditable job of dressing Hugo’s injury. They picked the bits of steel from his side, then disinfected the wound and patched it up as best they could. Rachel gave him a shot of repair accelerators and followed it up with another of neurostimulant.

‘Isn’t that dangerous?’ said Will.

She nodded. ‘Yes, but it’ll be a lot harder to get him out of the city if we have to carry him. We’ve got a few hours tops before they figure out what’s going on and lock the whole planet down, so we need him walking if we’re all going to make it out of here alive.’

When they were finished, Hugo lay on the bloody bed, breathing shallowly but regularly. Rachel and Will staggered off to the bathroom, taking turns to shower and change back into their crumpled ship-suits.

Will felt the adrenalin drain out of him as he washed. By the time he was putting his boots on, his hands were shaking so hard that he could barely fasten the adhesive straps.

While Rachel dried her hair, Will wandered around the small suite, examining the facilities in a state of addled shock. Everything they might need for basic living was provided, along with enough dried food in the kitchen to last them for months. However, there were no windows or obvious escape routes.

Will wondered how long they’d be stuck there, and how hot a trail they’d left. He patched into the house computer system and requested a portal to the Protectorate Police. To his surprise, there was no reply. The house’s metaphor space remained as windowless as the basement itself. That was down to resistance security, no doubt – it was understandable that they wouldn’t want any live links to the authorities. Will, however, didn’t like to be thwarted.

He returned to the medical database he’d used to fix up Hugo. From there, perhaps he could find a way to a local hospital and through that out into the rest of the network. But those routes were blocked, too. Eventually he realised that the database he was looking at was a disconnected backup, not the real thing at all.

On a sudden instinct, he strode into the main room and tried the door they’d come in through. It was locked.

‘Fuck!’ he yelled.

He raised his hand to slam the thing and thought better of it. There was always the possibility that Earther soldiers were searching the basement on the other side.

‘What now?’ said Rachel.

‘We’re locked in,’ he explained, ‘and there are no lines to the outside.’

Rachel frowned. ‘It’s probably just resistance paranoia.’