The Scarab (6 page)

I didn’t mean anything by it, just
pointing out what was obvious to any veteran mechanic. Unfortunately, this
codger decided to take the comment personally. The little guy in the corner was
even taking notes on what I said.

The natives appeared to be
restless, so I grabbed a fist full of sandwiches and moved into the hallway.

“Who was
that
?” asked
somebody.

“I dunno,” I heard behind me. “Some
advisor flown in by the DoD? Could be from Langley.”

“Why the gloves?” asked the first
voice.

“Fingerprints, obviously.”

“And the scar? He didn’t get that
shaving.”

So the legend of the Scarab at
SimCon Five began.

Mary’s first reaction was to notice my clean shaven face. “Smooth.”

I was overjoyed that she didn’t
start back at the argument. I had to watch every word, careful not to stick my
foot in my mouth again. “New invention, the electric razor.” She hadn’t said
anything about the scar yet. She knew about the accident and my problem with
healing. Mare also knew that, before today, I’d never shown it to anyone but my
mother and the doctor.

She stroked the side of my face. “I
like,” she said.

Our suite was bigger than Sam’s
garage. It had a huge, central living area with an entry hall, two bedrooms, a
bathroom, balcony, dining room, and kitchen going around it in a circle. The
balcony had floor-to-ceiling glass windows and a sliding, glass door, giving a
beautiful view of the city and the desert beyond. I ran my toes through the
plush, white carpeting and gave Mary a back rub while she told me about her
trip.

We had an hour to relax together
till the recon began. She felt a little guilty about moonlighting, and I joked
that she could wear a red wig as a disguise. I convinced her that after meeting
the snakes downstairs, I needed her as a bodyguard more than ever. She would
also make a great co-pilot on the longer simulations. With me wired into the
simulation, someone had to watch what was happening in the real world.

I called room service to bring us
burgers and fries while I listened to everything she had done since I left. Tonight,
I promised to take her out some place with cloth napkins to make up for all the
fast food places I’d taken her in the past. We both smiled awkwardly, and
chattered about everything except for the fact that we were now technically
sharing a hotel room together.

At about ten till noon, I
powered-up my interface and logged in. The simulation was about to begin. I
showed Mary the various maps of Europe I had photocopied and other reference
materials I wanted handy.

“The first leg of the virtual race
is a little one, mainly for the media. At around 400 kilometers, it’s more like
a parade than a race. We will start at London at 6:00 tonight, and have four
hours to get to Paris any way we can. The only hitch there is the ferry
schedule. There’s a ferry leaving from Dover to Calais an hour from post time,
but I’ll really have to hump to get there on time. If I miss it, I eat the
half-hour till the next one arrives.”

“What about the Channel Tunnel?”
she asked.

“True, normally that would save
time, but it’s closed this week because of a bomb-threat. Since the simulation
tries to mimic conditions in the real-world exactly, we can’t cross there in
the game either. Some people might try to drive across the water, but there’s a
small craft warning out tonight.”

“Think anyone else knows about that
tidbit?”

“The rich ones and the smart ones
do. Some of the others will figure it out when they follow the crowd. This
object of this recon is to find the differences with reality, and what the game
obstacles are that they’ve place in the way to gauge our abilities. All the
good pilots have done their homework already.

“I want to do a quick scan of the
course, and look at all the major turns, the starts and the finish lines. They
don’t put many metrics on the straight-aways unless it’s through a mountain
pass or something. We’ll plot a rough course on the autopilot, avoiding cities
where we can.” Like locomotives, hover vehicles had trouble with three things—starting,
stopping, and hills.

The narrow streets of the old
country may have been quaint, but they were a royal pain to navigate. I pulled
out an elevation map of Western Europe, and penciled in the milestones we had
to pass during our trip. Mary pulled a pop out of the refrigerator, rolled up
her academic sleeves and started to read through the papers with me.

Although I had four hours of time
allocated for scouting, I only needed two. One difference between this game and
the local ones I’d played in was the greatly improved resolution of the
computer graphics. The trees beside the road and even the clouds were photo
quality. Even after letting Mary pilot for a while to get accustomed to the
handling, I was still the first middleweight pilot to sign off. Mary told me
that got DeClerk Enterprises a mention on ESPN.

She had been flipping channels on
the bathroom TV while getting ready for our “date.” I was more nervous about
the evening out than when I was eighteen. When we went out a few years ago, we
had made out like bandits. But now, I felt shy holding her arm on the way to
the limousine, which arrived at the front door compliments of the SimCon
consortium. She wore high-heels for me, which is a huge sign to anyone who
knows Mary Ann.

We had an excellent wine with
fillet mignon at a candle-lit restaurant whose name I cannot pronounce, also
courtesy of SimCon. “No cheese-burgers here. I bet this place doesn’t even have
doggie bags,” I said, unfolding my linen napkin.

Mary Ann used a French accent to
say, “But it does, Monsieur, you must merely show us it’s pedigree first.” She
smiled, and the whole trip was worth it. A few minutes later, under cover of
chit-chat about possibility of the latest International Auto Workers Union, she
ambushed me with “Speaking of extra income, what are you going to do with the
prize money?”

This stunned me for two reasons.
First, she put a lot of faith in my rookie design and pilot skills. Second, I
had never even considered the money. I must have been thinking too long,
because she asked, “There is a prize, isn’t there?”

First prize was a cool million,
with 500 grand for second, 250 for third, and 125 each for fourth and fifth.
There were also assorted design, honorable mention, and team awards. This
sounded like a lot of money, but with entry fees, TV contracts, sponsors, and
product endorsements, the event still cleared ten or twenty million a year
after expenses. “Yes, the total purse is a few million. I honestly haven’t
thought about what I’d do with the money. After I paid the company back the entry
fee, I would probably start with a house near where I’ll be working. Hawaii is nice to vacation but the long distance bills will kill me.” Her smile came back,
stronger than ever.

“What else?”

I hedged for a little while and
played with my glass before settling on, “I’ll need to take some business
classes from one of the local colleges so that I’m not totally ignorant about
what’s going on in my own company. What about you? What would you do with the
profits?”

“I’m not after the money. I want to
be a Special Investigator some day,” she said, referring to the Patrol’s
version of Detective grade officer.

We exchanged dreams, laughed, and
gossiped for over an hour.

The more she enjoyed herself, the
more leg Mary Ann showed, and the more I drank. I was feeling no pain and
enjoying the company when the waiter brought a portable phone to my table. It
was Foxworthy. He wished us luck, let us know that the investors were watching,
and that he had some friends do a bug sweep on the hotel room for our safety.

“One last thing, Hayes—our client
wants to confer with you in private. Their agent is incognito, you understand,
so I can’t tell you his name. I can only say that he’s chosen a humorous
pseudonym, and he’s reserved a private dining room in his name at the same restaurant
you’re at tonight. Just make contact, and he’ll take care of the rest.”

I would have preferred to spend my
free time rubbing ankles under the table, but if Foxworthy said the secret
branch of the FCC wanted to talk to me before the curtain went up tonight, so
be it. Technically, I was playing with government money this week, but I was
just buzzed enough to irritate this FCC employee like I had the suits in
Bayside.

I slipped the maitre-de a twenty to
look for a friend of mine in the reservation book. I found it on the first page—Ira
Fontenelle, registered under the company Ground-Effect Defense Motors—a known
gravy-sucking defense contractor, the thinnest cover imaginable. I told Mary Ann
where I’d be and found my way to the private dining hall upstairs. Surrounded
by mahogany panels and smoked mirrors, an executive type ate turtle soup while
two guards and a toady looked on. His china was better than ours had been,
rimmed in gold, with faint pink figures laced around the border. The set looked
like a museum piece.

“Ira!” I announced as I came in.
The monkey on the left searched me for weapons, and I held up my hands to show
him I wasn’t hiding anything. Ira looked at his toady for confirmation, and the
man said, “It’s a representative from DeClerk, sir.”

“Ah, yes. What can I do for you?
Sit” he said, pausing with his spoon in the soup. The guard pulled out the
chair next to his employer for me to use.

“No. It’s what I can do for you.
Ask your walking appointment book here, he’ll remind you. I saw the registry
tonight and had to come visit you. You’ve got to have a twisted sense of humor
to come up with a joke name like that! Fontenelle? Why not just call yourself ‘soft
in the head’?” Then I laughed, clapping him on the back.

Mr. Fontenelle picked that moment
to choke on piece of meat. He was turning purple before the guard did the
Heimlich on him. Then, he transitioned to a terrible shade of red. I said, “Hey,
if this is a bad time, I can come back later. You know where I’ll be.”

I got up to leave as the second
guard moved to escort me out. “Nice touch with that GEDM cover. Those corporate
pork-barrels have so many do-nothing vice-presidents at this shindig, they
couldn’t spot one more on the roster. I guess, if someone tried to blow the
whistle on you, they’d only draw attention to their own useless existence.”
This time he choked on his drink. Old Fontenelle was having a rough night of
it.

I was as shocked as anyone when the
geek from the hospitality suite bumped into me in the hallway. He pointed to his
name tag and winked. “Sorry, I already have a date,” I explained. Groupies come
in all styles, I guess.

“My name is Playfair,” he hissed.

“I’ll keep that in mind if I get
lonely later,” I said, trying to push past him.

“Don’t you get it? Play fair ciphers,
or playing fair at the game. See?” He looked like a college math weenie, Boston College material. Come to think of it, the Feds recruited a lot from Boston College. Maybe he knew my contact.

I slurred out a curse as the truth
occurred to me. “You’re my contact.” I had just made a major enemy. Well, just
more of a challenge for the Scarab to overcome—first Exotech, then Siberian,
and now GEDM, the military monstrosity of Michigan.

“It’s okay, not many people can
penetrate this disguise. I’m at the convention as a reporter for Motor Trend. I
took out the reservation here for the press. I usually excuse myself when they
start smoking, so nobody suspects.” I had a seat on a nearby, plush divan.

“I just wanted to let you know that
several people have tried background checks on you, and they think you’re a
cover identity.” He handed me a copy of a dossier on E. Hayes.

“What do I do about it?”

“Nothing. If they assume that you’re
a government agent, it might take some of the heat off me. I’m involved in a
sensitive investigation and the less people notice me, the better. Just be
mysterious, and don’t dispel any rumors.” He gave me his room number but warned
me not to say anything on the phone to give him away.

“They’d tap phones for the game?” I
asked.

“Grow up. There’s money on this.
There’s only two rules at this game. One, don’t change the game program through
unapproved interfaces. Two, survive.” He looked me in the eye, and I felt
shaken. I was in the big leagues and there were no umpires.

When I got back to the table, Mary
was ready to go. “What took you so long, babe? It’s time to leave. I saved you
a mint chocolate.”

In the back seat of the limo, I
didn’t even react at first when she kissed me on the cheek. Eventually, I held
her chin in my hand and said “Mary, I really need you. Thanks for being here
for me.” I kissed her gently and slowly on the lips. If I hadn’t paid 100 grand
for tonight I would have told the driver to keep going. If she showed any more
leg, forget the money.

On our way back through the convention center, we couldn’t
believe the change. The background volume had reached a frenzy. I saw
billboards advertising all-night movies, flyers offering seminars, and women in
bikinis inviting passers-by to trade shows. All of them were vying for
attention against the giant TV screens on the ceiling. It was a circus with a
hundred rings.

Twenty minutes before the first
virtual racer was scheduled to start, we made it to our hotel room. The
elevators had been packed. “Geez, if the elevator had broken down, there’d be a
lot fewer competitors,” Mary Ann said, taking off her high-heels and massaging
her right foot. Her black stockings made me wish that I had time to relax her
whole body.

I logged back on to my system and
checked the watchdog programs. “That’s why some people race from booths in the
auditorium, despite the audience. At least you know you can get to your
terminal.”

Her face looked innocent, even a
bit shocked. “Hey, I was just kidding.”

My “trio” of vehicles would start
in tandem mode. This was considered by some as putting all my eggs in one
basket. When you use baskets with armor this heavy, why not?

“We’ll start in non-spin mode to
keep our abilities secret for as long as possible. It will take a minute to
spin up the hull, but once we turn on the cloak, we can keep it on all the
time. Until we do, it’ll steer like an overweight hippo. On the bright side, we
shouldn’t need much speed inside the city.”

I started checking all systems,
beginning with the radio. The game permitted two types of communication,
broadband broadcast to everyone in range (including the press) and
point-to-point message squirts for messages you only want one other vehicle to
hear. The secret transmissions were generally for your own team members, but
could be sent to other players if they accepted.

We had only five minutes to post
time when I looked up from my screen. Mare had already changed into a Team
DeClerk jump-suit and put her hair up. I was so absorbed in the preparations,
she hadn’t even shut the bathroom door while she changed. The screen showed an
aerial view of northwest London in the Regents Park region. The speaker
broadcast revving engines that had been digitally recorded at the Indianapolis 500 a few years back. In reality, most of our machines would be much quieter.
For both fuel efficiency and attack stealth, noise is your enemy.

“What’s on the telly?” I asked,
getting into the Continental swing of things.

“The usual. Since Abbey Road studios is in the area, On-line Music is doing old Beatles hits. ESPN is winding
up their piece on polo, fox hunting, and other sports of the wealthy English.
The local channel is covering the four day weekend they’re having at Sandia
this week and how the extra tourist money from this convention will help the
city.” She had several miniature TV’s and a cellular phone she was arranging on
the huge, glass-topped, living room table.

“Where’d you get all that?” I
asked, paying attention to her for the barest instant.

“The same place I got the phone list
of all the contestants, International time and temperature, information, and
the short-wave I haven’t unpacked yet—room service,” she said matter-of-factly.
“The portable phone is the one I use at work.”

“You’ve done this before?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I just pretended I
was setting up a comm center for a police dragnet. I figured a racing crew does
about the same thing, keeping tabs on both friends and enemies. The racers just
have better funding.

“So what should I expect for the
first leg?” she asked.

I flipped my engines into warm
standby and disconnected from the control chair. I was about to rummage through
my map pile and get the London detail, but she already had it spread on the
wall beside me. Wow, she was efficient. “Uh, we start here, head south toward Hyde Park, and pass by the Hard Rock Cafe. Zip down this way, through Piccadilly Circus,
and eventually out of the city. We connect up with the A2 freeway through Canterbury to Dover, catch the ferry to Calais, then take this road straight to Paris. Easy.”

I picked up a bowl of peanuts and
brought it with me to the chair, where I hooked in again. There was no direct
cortical link to my computer like you see in movies, but we did have the
look-shoot interface Honeywell did for jet weapon guidance systems. My hands
and feet were also synchronized in with the control interface of my virtual
cockpit. If I took my hands off the phantom wheel without engaging autopilot,
my megabuck mirage would crash into the nearest guard rail. More than one pilot
has learned that if you’re firing lasers, don’t sneeze.

All the stations carried the exact
same sound and image at the beginning of the race, but diverged again quickly.
A vehicle would be launched every ten seconds from the starting line. Even
though I wouldn’t be going for another ten minutes, I was a coiled spring.

“Hey!” she shouted, almost causing
me to smash into the sedan beside me. “He’s going the wrong way!” She referred
to the Harley-Ikawa Saturday Night Special that had just gone off the road to
the north instead of south. I concentrated on my rapid pulse, lowering it from
the false alarm.

“Mary, please be careful not to
distract me. Talk as if you were on police radio, and try to avoid touching me
for the time being.”

“Why?” I could hear her smile. “Afraid
of girl germs?”

“No. You’d turn me on and change my
pupil size, and then the eye calibration would be in the toilet.” I nosed
forward as the line progressed steadily.

She muttered something about
underwear.

“Pardon?”

“He’s still going the wrong way.”

“Maybe he’s taking the outer belt,
or knows another short cut. Hell, he’s about the size of a three-wheeler, he could
take the Tube. I told you, we don’t even have to obey traffic signs.”

MTV played Baker Street because
that, too, was nearby.

Other announcers were laughing as London traffic, modeled after the wall clock not the eight hour time zone difference, began
to lag. I heard a few horns honking at T plus eight minutes. At T plus nine, I
heard a thump, and saw my video shake.

“What the...?”

Incoming from Trans-Siberian Motors
flashed on my screen with text only. “TAG, I’m it.”

Just what I needed. He wouldn’t be
directly after me, but he’d cross the starting line within twenty seconds. I
didn’t have time for traffic. “Mare, I need you to find me a way around this
congestion before I launch. Be inventive.” I could already see the numbers
slipping away. They had just launched vehicle number seventy. I slipped my
engine into active, but couldn’t spin up to speed till I was out of sight.

Seconds clicked by on the display. “Hyde park. You can save time by going through it, not around it. I launched, accelerating
as fast as my simulated engine could take me. I only got up to 35 km/h before I
was jockeying for position with quaint black ground taxis that were driven by
total lunatics. I was barely around the first corner when TSM’s heavyweight
went active.

Not one microsecond after the tank
crossed the line, everyone on the course heard a tell-tale whine. “The
two-minute warning,” I shouted to my partner moments before the news station
explained, “means TSM’s powering up his offensive capabilities. In this case,
it seems to be pulse lasers and missile launchers.” Much Star-Trek
techno-babble followed. Given the flash of the speeches, Mary told me the media
had probably been informed ahead of time. I had been chosen to be the
ceremonial first blood of this convention.

Not all weapons needed two minutes
to be usable. Mine only took a few seconds, but I didn’t activate my weapons
because I couldn’t hurt him, and I needed the style points. My only prayer was
to outrun him.

The comment-requested icon came up
for the local station. I put in a quick “Shh. Be vewy quiet, he’s hunting
wabbits.” About that time, I jumped the fence onto the grass of the park. I
headed for the trees bordering the sidewalk just to confuse his tracking
systems. I managed to miss the simulated “little old ladies” that frantically
pushed perambulators out of my way.

I cranked it up to sixty km/h
before realizing I couldn’t spin yet. Besides the cameras still watching from
the overhead blimp, in this soft ground, I’d slow to almost nothing. The
engines didn’t have any power to spare yet.

“Navigator to pilot, the hunter has
just entered the woods. Some of the other heavies are following in his tread marks
just to be lazy. Omigod, the lake. You’re going to hit the lake.”

Normally hitting water doesn’t hurt
a Ground-Effect vehicle. They’re a little like a pure hovercraft that way.
Unfortunately, man-made lakes tend to descend at a steep angle, and Ghedra
would sink nose-down into the sludge before leveling out. It would take no
effort for Elmer to blow me away from the back-side with the whole world
watching. One side of the lake had a waterfall, but I couldn’t remember which
one.

“Where’s the bridge?” I shouted.

“Right!”

I turned hard, just missing a glass
restaurant and more sparrows than you could shake a stick at. If I turned too
sharply in non-spin mode, I could easily flip myself over. I could hear my lift
compensators complaining loudly under stresses they were never designed take.
It’s not the speed they minded, just the sudden changes. Just after I crossed
the tiny bridge, Elmer was a little low on his aim and blew it out of
existence. I was so elated that he’d bought me some extra time that I almost
impaled myself on the high, wrought-iron fencing on the opposite side. A blur
of green flashed by on my screen as I banked through a wooden information
stand. Three networks listened to the crunch in stereophonic enhancement. I
bounced in the sand horseshoe pits, sliding across the wide sidewalk into the
street. “Warning, you have sustained damage,” said the collision subsystem.
Annoyed, I hit the MORE button. “Main grid has been damaged, maximum speed
reduced by 10 percent until repairs can be effected.” The second message came
from the referee expert system. No one else could tell precisely how hurt I was
because my qualifying times were so much lower than my true cruising speed. I
watched my heat gauge climb as the main grid did far more work than ever
intended.

A third message lit up the screen. “Twenty
second penalty to realign the grids and change facing.” What was worse, I
spilled my peanuts all over the control chair, and couldn’t take the time to
clean them off at this moment.

“Give me some good news, navigator.
Please.”

My reflexes were off tonight. In
the local games, I could have taken that turn easily. It must have been the
booze with dinner, but I wasn’t even legally drunk yet. Hell, I’d played night
games totally hammered before and not missed a beat. Something didn’t feel
right.

“Without the bridge, the big tanks,
including Trans-Siberian will have to go around the long way. You’ve bought
yourself another half a minute or so. Get moving.”

Because so many people were on the
wrong side, I gunned it down the center of the road as a compromise. I took out
a pedestrian crossing box as I streaked past the Hard Rock Cafe. On the
broadcast band, I said “Hey Doc, you missed!” and made a big kissing noise, ala
Bugs Bunny. Within minutes, the nickname “Fudd Motorcars” was stuck on TSM.

I was cruising back at normal city
speeds and had MTV cranked when I almost got my socks seared. A pulse cannon,
already charged, wheeled around a corner two blocks away. This was another TSM
model, middleweight. Evidently, he took off the safety at the same time his big
brother did. This gun wouldn’t kill me, but he sure could keep me pinned till
the rest of his team arrived. I took an extra loop around the traffic circle,
breaking away a block early, down an alley. He tried to follow me, but the
stress was too much for the flimsy frame. His bottom made the turn, but his top
kept going straight—separating just like I had predicted.

Out of the corner of my eye, I
watched the engine heat indicator on my control panel climb toward the red
zone. As I reach the alley, I decided it was now or never, and spun into
stealth mode. The increased air flow and aid from the other two grids lowered
the temperature and took me out of the danger zone almost instantly. I used the
break to wipe off sweat and guzzle down a drink. Once I reached the proper hull
speed and safe engine load, I used the passive cloaking to make my way toward
Piccadilly the back way.

“It’s working!” she said. “They
think you’re dead or cheating. The broadcast-band radio is going nuts.”

I was almost there when Mary warned
me. “TSM heavy, incoming. The broadcaster in the blimp spotted you on the
visuals and named the street. Sorry, hon’.”

I was still okay. They had to use
manual targeting on me because my IR pattern was too weak, and my transponder
would confuse most long-range devices.

“Radar lock established,” said my
onboard computer.

I floored it, and hit Piccadilly Circus going full speed. “Blanket ECM engage,” I ordered. I caught just a brief
glimpse of the giant Mecca of neon advertising in Piccadilly traffic circle.
About the time I reached Lily White’s, I saw the gridlock. Over a hundred cars,
and nothing was moving; I was going to crash.

Not thinking, I hammered the brake.
That didn’t stop me, just popped me several meters into the air. My momentum
kept me moving. As I came down, I could hear the rapid thumping of my vehicle
against the roofs of the ground cars. “Enemy unit is firing.” I accelerated
again, almost broad-siding a double-decker bus.

I found out later that the bastard
fired five missiles after me. On slow motion replay, one hit the car directly
in front of TSM on ground level. The next hit the fountain, another a silver
tanker, and the last two went into the eight-story building with the Sony ad on
it. I hit the pavement on the other side of the jam going eighty. A few seconds
later, I thought I was clear, on the road out of town when my controls froze
up. Cursing a blue streak, I ripped off my virtual reality head gear. The
console was still locked with no autopsy on the screen. “What killed me?”