Johnny Reb (7) "Hey," Mick called to him. "I just got some news about your route." As he spoke, Red's rig at the other end of the lot started up. A few seconds later it was moving toward the pump area. Just like any other trucker getting ready to fuel up and leave. Except everybody else had already been warned to stay away. Mick kept talking as he approached the big man. "There was a wash-out on Twenty-Three from the storm last night. South of Saginaw. If you're going up to Bay City, you might want to think about another route." The man looked at him, suspicious but trying not to show it. Had he successfully fooled the old man? Anyway, it wouldn't do to quit trying now. If he had been a trucker, he would immediately have questioned the notion that highway Twenty-Three had anything to do with the way to Saginaw. "Yeah?" He asked amiably. Red's truck, rumbling in second or third gear, made the last turn toward the pumps. "Yeah," Mick replied as he covered the last few yards he needed to. His last qualms were satisfied. Now all he had to worry about was how to stay well outside of arm's reach without looking obvious about it. "It's in kind of an awkward place, just south of Vassar. I just heard from one of the guys who came in this morning." Behind the man, at the other end of the pumps, Red's and Bobby climbed out of the truck and left it running. He wouldn't hear a thing over the clamor of Red's big engine. Their guns were already drawn, and their position gave them a clear shot at the man's back just as planned. They instinctively angled toward the pay booth where Melanie was holding the shotgun out of sight. In case they needed to fire without fear of hitting the pumps. Mick spread his hands, palms down and away from his sides. It appeared to be a calming gesture, but it was the sign he had told his helpers to watch for. It meant, "Here we go." "Mister," Mick said. Something in his tone alarmed the man and the fake trucker was instantly wary, looking like he could go for his gun in a heartbeat. "Relax. There are three guns pointed at you." The man's eyes went wide, but he became perfectly still. Someone less accustomed to violence might have at least twitched toward his weapon. "OK?" Mick asked. "We're still relaxing, right? Now I want you to move your arms out away from your sides just like mine are, and then go to your knees very, very slowly. OK?" There was hatred in the man's eyes, and fear because he must know what would be coming. Unfortunately, it was just in that moment that the Bolo began to move. From the far end of the parking lot came a sound like sheet metal tearing, and the big tank lurched forward by perhaps a few inches. Before Mick quite realized that he had been distracted, he felt a blow to his chest. As far as he could tell everything after that happened at the same time. He hit the pavement with the back of his head, the sky went black for an instant, there was a gunshot, and his daughter screamed. That last detail got him up on one elbow just in time to see Red go down, as the big man dove to the ground to avoid a shot from Bobby. Bobby had never been much good with a gun. The big man flattened himself next to the pumps, and Bobby didn't know what to do. He even had one more distraction that Mick couldn't see, until Melanie came running past the pumps yelling "Daddy!" All she knew was that there had been a shot fired, and she had seen him go down. She didn't see the man lying beside the pumps until he caught her by the ankles and she went down hard, losing the shotgun. As Mick scrambled to his feet the man was pulling her up from the pavement as a shield and yelling at Bobby. By the time Mick got back to his feet with his gun drawn, it was over. Bobby was holstering his gun and moving back toward Mick with his hands away from his sides, and the big man had Melanie between him and everyone. With a running truck behind him. The Bolo lurched forward another few feet, and stopped again. Mick realized that it was losing conscious control of its motor functions. Great fucking time for it. Very soon the only action it would be able to take would be to get away somewhere to die. Melanie squirmed and the man pressed the barrel so hard against her temple that it drew blood immediately in a thin line two inches long. "Daddy?" she whispered, looking straight at Mick from across the expanse of weathered cement. She was too quiet to actually hear, but he could read the word on her lips. He took a half-step forward, then stopped. The man shot a fierce look his way. Mick realized that he was still holding his gun, and holstered it gently. There was nothing else to do. Other customers were coming out from the dining room area, but there was no way any of them could get behind the man without being seen. Look, Ladies and Gentlemen! Come one, come all. See how the Innkeeper can continue to move although there is nothing but vacuum inside his body. He can stand and watch his daughter's abduction even without the benefit of viscera or muscles! He can open his mouth, but of course cannot speak since there is no air inside him and he has no lungs. As the others came up behind Mick, the big man pressed the gun to Melanie's head and smiled. "Well folks, I guess this'll be goodbye. I sure appreciated the hospitality. Not to mention the biggest payoff ever seen by a bounty hunter. You just make sure that our big tin buddy is still around when my pals get here. Right? That way I get my money, and you get your little girl back. OK?" He'll be a thin gray cloud by the time you get back, asshole. But by then nothing would matter. Mick was quite certain that the man wouldn't keep Melanie alive for five minutes after she outlived her usefulness as a shield. The man dragged her around so that the idling truck's hood stood between the two of them and the crowd, then all in an instant pulled the door open and threw Melanie into the cab with such force that she struck her head against the window facing the crowd. For a second an image passed through Mick's mind of her plucking the door's lock up and leaping from the cab before the big man knew what had happened. But the moment passed, and a second later the man clearly had the gun against her head again. Then the truck was thrown into gear, and beginning to move. Several truckers had their handguns out, and Bobby had picked the shotgun up off the ground, but no one could think of taking a shot into the cab. No one knew what would happen if the man had a couple tires shot out from under him. "Michael," his wife whispered. "He's going to kill her." At the words, Mick felt a breath come into him, but he still couldn't do any more than watch as the big truck slowly accelerated through its gears, down the length of the lot and onto the entry ramp to I-94. "Oh oh, you're stuck!" he told her when she was four years old, playing on the couch. The Great Wars were nothing more than a vague uneasiness somewhere in the future, like dark clouds thin on the horizon. Sure you can kind of see them but don't worry about it. Right now the sun is still shining and you can still take time to play with a little girl. She would laugh and scream and struggle like crazy as he held her immobilized against his chest. "I want to go to Mommy!" she'd yell. "Oh, I know you do," he would tell her. "But stuck people can't move." She would flail and kick with all her four-year-olds uninhibited might, and Mick would have to watch to make sure she didn't do some real damage to somebody. To him, mostly. Pretty soon he would start to worry that maybe she really did want to get away, so he would allow her to miraculously escape. She would run five steps away and stop and turn toward him again, then run back to repeat the whole routine. The truck upshifted into its first real highway gear already five hundred yards away, traveling faster and its noise already starting to fade. Everyone was still standing there silently, as though they had already witnessed a murder. In fact, Mick realized, they had witnessed a murder. Red had taken the shot in his forehead and lying face down in his blood. But with Melanie they could still hear the sound of the truck receding. She was still alive. Before anyone could quite bring themselves to speak, in the instant before some trucker or other would say something stupid about giving pursuit in trucks, Mick heard another noise. It was just the faintest creak of metal this time but it came from the far end of the lot: the same place as the noise that had distracted him. He turned toward the sound as slowly as in a dream, feeling its direction as if a line of invisible laser-light had suddenly connected his forehead to its source. The Bolo was sitting there at the far end of the lot, perfectly still. "Johnny," Mick said, not loudly enough to be heard if it had been a man. But he knew that it would hear him. He started walking toward the big machine, and then jogging. "I am nearly unable to control motor functions," the machine quickly stated as he came up to it. The others, following more slowly, were stopping twenty yards back. "I will almost certainly be unable to perform an illegal pursuit. My Rules of Engagement forbid me to engage civilian targets in policing actions. I am permitted only to inform civil authorities and track the target using passive sensors." "Johnny!" Mick shouted this time, stepping forward. "That bastard is going to murder my daughter and dump her in the ditch ten miles down that road! Do you understand that?" His vision blurred, and he fought to keep his voice from shaking too much. "Now you listen to me, goddamn it! You are going to chase that goddamn truck and bring her back alive! You do it for me! You bring her back to me!" The Bolo fell silent. <104,286,635 rules searched: 84,750 relevant> < priority 1 reasoning process requests emergency processing power: granted.> <<>> Less than two seconds after Mick finished his demand, Bolo Unit of the Line JNY-013 "Johnny" engaged his right tracks to thirty MPH while reversing his left tracks at the same rate. The effect was to spin his one hundred and fifty ton bulk counter-clockwise like a top, throwing outward-spiraling plumes of dirt thirty feet into the air. Bobby started to shout some encouragement, but any human voice was inaudible in the sudden roar of treads. The sound of Johnny's motion was far outside the experience even of truckers driving the big rigs. In 1.2 seconds Johnny rotated his body one hundred and sixty degrees, aligning himself on his desired bearing. He achieved emergency acceleration three tenths of a second later, as his run across the pavement began. Aging concrete powdered beneath his tracks and shot out in a twin twenty-yard-long rooster tail behind him. He passed through a gap between two rigs that was wide enough for his body by several inches. It would have been as easy to go straight through one of the rigs, but Johnny judged that it would have stolen too much valuable momentum. Bobby, who had been about to shout encouragement again found himself gasping instead: the nearer of the two rigs was his. After accelerating for fifty-three yards, Johnny passed between the two trucks at a speed of just over forty miles per hour with less than two inches of clearance on either side. It was a much more comfortable margin for the Bolo than it was for Bobby. Johnny had little choice but to pass through Mick's chain-link fence. He rushed through it as though it were silver fog, flattening one whole side of the patchwork cyclone fence and bending a dozen or so of its two-inch steel pipe posts flat to the ground. Nearer the center of his passage the posts did not bend but sheared off at ground level. The noise of the destruction was completely lost in the roar of the Bolo's still-accelerating treads. In the second-and-a-half that he took to cross the Wolverine's parking lot, Johnny made a decision to ignore the highway on-ramp since using it would have required two deflections in his course rather than one. There was a kind of ditch, but very broad and shallow, between the parking lot and the shoulder of the old freeway. Johnny achieved seventy miles per hour just as he hit it. He came out the far side of the ditch airborne, his entire bulk arcing four feet off the ground, then struck the roadway with such an impressive display of sparks that it seemed to the crowd in the parking lot that he was about to spin right off the road again. Instead, Johnny recovered his traction immediately by counter-rotating one tread, and a scant second later was rocketing due east on the highway. In the few moments before they lost sight of him behind the wooded land surrounding the Wolverine, the onlookers understood something about Bolos. Johnny wasn't as much a big smart vehicle as he was a big smart animal. He suddenly seemed more like a three-hundred thousand pound jaguar, with durachrome shoulders and treads instead of legs. Seventy-five milliseconds after achieving an acceptably stable grip on the surface of I-94, I sight the target vehicle. It is now approximately 1650 yards downrange. Doppler radar indicates that it is has attained a speed of 65.1 miles per hour, and is continuing to accelerate maximally for an unloaded vehicle of its type. It is likely to achieve a maximum speed of 943 miles per hour. At standard battle-maximum acceleration I would normally overtake the vehicle in between 115 and 121 seconds. However, an obstacle looms between me and my quarry. Twelve-hundred and eighty yards ahead, an overpass-bridge crosses the freeway with a maximum clearance of 14 feet 4 inches. Even on depressed treads and with main cannon reversed, my minimum turret height would be 17 feet 6 inches. Yet, going around the obstacle would force me to slow considerably, greatly increasing both my time-to-intercept and the associated uncertainty interval.
Copyright © 1999 Michael Goulish |