Johnny Reb (8)
A greater delay will increase both of my mission's main risk factors: that the truck driver will deliberately kill the young woman, and that he will inadvertently kill or injure her by going out of control at high speed. In addition, by overtaking him at extreme speed as soon as possible I may achieve the advantage of greater surprise. I am aware that my appearance is daunting to humans. I consider for a further 0.022 seconds, and my decision is made. I go beyond battle-maximum to emergency-maximum acceleration, simultaneously extending tread-cleats to increase roadbed traction. I feel the thrill of red-line effort. Autonomous damage estimation processes irritate me with the knowledge that this acceleration shortens the expected life of my drive-train by five percent per quarter-minute sustained. It is well that those simple processes cannot comprehend my actual plans. Drive-train life expectancy is certainly the least of my worries. I have chosen to attempt to go through the overpass rather than around it, and plan to achieve my standard maximum sprint speed of 180 miles per hour before doing so. Rather than reversing my main turret to prevent it being torn away by my impending passage through the structure, I sight its cannon at the center of the bridge-span which I hope to penetrate and go to rapid-fire mode using armor piercing ammunition. At 0.55 seconds after my fateful decision I acquire target-lock and begin firing at my maximum rate of two rounds per second. My only hope of success is to cut the steel beams in the bridge before my impact. I deliberately lower my estimate of the amount of high-strength structural steel likely to be contained in such a structure. This decreases the distraction caused by my frantic damage-severity prediction processes. A human might say that I 'hope' to survive. "Je-sus Christ!" Bobby exclaimed. "He's goin' straight through the bridge!" The whole crowd of them had started running out onto the highway as soon as Johnny passed out of sight. They were getting him back in view just in time to see the last ten seconds of his charge toward the overpass. They had already been deafened by the jet-engine roar of Johnny's emergency sprint, but when the sound of his cannon barrage reached the group it shook the Earth beneath their feet and fell like blows on their chests. They could see the reason for the new tumult even from two-thirds of a mile away. Johnny's thunderous shots drew rapidly punctuated streaks of orange fire through the dust cloud that had arisen around the bridge-span. At the same time great cooling fins across his back glowed cherry red with waste heat as his on-board fission plant dumped tens of megawatts of power to his drive train. His still-accelerating treads sang a rising note against the roadway. "Go," Anne said squeezing Mick's hand painfully. "Go, Johnny," Mick echoed her, and Bobby whooped "Go for it Johnny Boy!" Then the Bolo disappeared into the roiling dust, and an instant later the entire cloud incandesced as if lit by a nuke. The crowd at the Wolverine felt the shock of the impact through their feet many seconds before they heard it. Until they felt the jolt in the truck, the big man hadn't so much as glanced in the rearview mirror. He knew he'd gotten a real good start on any possible pursuit, so he'd been much more intent on the road ahead. He knew that there was a place not too far up ahead where he could dump the girl, and where her body wouldn't be easily found. With that taken care of, he'd unhitch the trailer and easily outrun any possible pursuit. At that moment he felt something that might have been a bad misfire in the engine or even the blowout of a tire. He quickly looked up to the mirror to see if there were any tire fragments on the road, and got the surprise of his life. The man barely had time to register the fact that there was a big dark cloud boiling on the road where a bridge should have been not a mile behind him. Then the monstrous Bolo come bursting out of the cloud at a hundred and fifty miles an hour, shedding twisted re-bar and chunks of concrete from either side. On its great turret were two perfectly matched six-foot gashes on either side glowing cherry red with the heat of the collision, looking for all the world like war-paint on an Indian. "God damn!" the man exclaimed. Then the girl, whom he had forgotten about for a few seconds, the girl whom he had never in any case given much thought to except to consider her utility as a human shield, punched him in the throat. I have survived. At the last moment I was able to penetrate the dust-cloud with targeting radar well enough to sever the bridge's final structural beam with an armor-piercing round. As a result, I have sustained significant damage to my turret armor on both sides, but I remain fully functional. I am distracted for 0.007 seconds by the vivid damage-probability estimates which continue to be produced by low-level processes. Using controls available to me under Battle Reflex Mode I silence them temporarily. Perhaps after this engagement is concluded I will amuse myself by retroactively calculating the odds of my survival. For now it is more than enough to feel the hurricane-force winds buffeting my armor and cooling my wounds. As my mission begins its twenty-seventh second I am pleased that I have survived, and that fate has chosen this as my final mission. Because of the collision, my speed has fallen to 151.7 MPH. I continue emergency-maximum acceleration to regain full standard maximum sprint speed. The target vehicle is now 1344 yards distant and has reached an apparent maximum speed of approximately 98.5 MPH. Slightly faster than I believed was possible for that vehicle. It disturbs me that I can be surprised about so simple a matter, especially since Red's truck and was my home for many weeks. But immediately a much greater worry looms. Because Red's truck has only the lo-boy trailer which I once rode, I am able to see through the truck cab's rear window. Because the window is grimy and distant, I am forced to expend significant processing power to understand the little that is visible through it. I discern a flicker of movement, and then perceive a small explosion at the top of the cab roof that can only have one cause. The abductor has discharged his handgun through the roof! I desperately replay the events and examine them under high magnification even as I continue to accelerate rapidly. I believe that the young woman has attacked her captor, causing the inadvertent weapon-discharge. I waste 0.002 seconds in a mental activity that I believe a human would call 'wishing fervently' that she had not done so. My mission could end in the next few seconds if the man retaliates and kills her. After another 0.019 seconds my reality modeling and prediction routines produce a likelihood tree of the consequences of the young woman's actions. I realize that even if she enjoys some degree of success in her attack I will still almost certainly lose her. Any truck would be highly likely to go out of control during a fight in its control cabin, but this particular truck is especially unstable. I am aware from my experience as a passenger on it that Red's steering wheel requires several ounces of leftward pressure to avoid pulling in the opposite direction. As I see what I believe to be the young lady's hand moving to strike a third blow, I make what must certainly be my final decision in this mission. I defeat the simple software routines that govern my drive train, and command my powerplant to open to its maximum survivable extent. I begin accelerating without limit to speeds well beyond even the emergency sprint which I have already sustained for over 17 seconds. I immediately experience spectacularly vivid images of how a massive drive-train failure at these speeds would be likely to affect me. A surprisingly large proportion of scenarios show me actually somersaulting in the air and then tumbling end-over-end on the freeway. This has never before happened to a Bolo. I would very likely die. If other Bolos ever learn of my fate, they would most likely conclude that I had run wild because of some subtle damage to my high-level cognition capabilities probably sustained during my actions in the Battle of Montreal. Perhaps they would be correct. Pain screams through every element of my drive train from power exchangers to treads as I pass through 200 MPH. Damage estimation routines calculate that I will reach 50% probability of experiencing a catastrophic failure of some drive-train component within the next 15 seconds. Yet I am now gaining on the target vehicle at the rate of 50 yards per second. Assuming no drive-train failure, I predict a worst-case rendezvous time of 11.6 seconds. But I see my worst fears confirmed: the rendezvous will actually take place much sooner for good or ill. The truck is already beginning to go out of control in a configuration known as a 'jackknife.' My mission is now 40 seconds old. His first mistake had been to choose her as his hostage. Any of the truckers would have been an easier target. But Melanie was the girl, and this big fool was old enough to have been raised in a time when women were almost invariably helpless. Well then wake up and smell the coffee, shithead. She was one young woman who did not plan on dying so that a big unbathed moron could earn a bounty on a relic robot tank. The moron made his second mistake when, gawking into the rearview mirror, he let the gun move so that it was no longer pointing directly at her head. She had always enjoyed the sparring matches with her father and the farm kids. She had always liked throwing the punches, getting the holds, kicking the stuffed bags. But she'd never liked anything so much as punching this moron's fat throat with all her might. His gun went off, but she didn't so much as flinch. She had already told herself that it would happen. You should always tell yourself what's going to happen, and then don't be surprised. The shot went through the roof. The moron's mouth gaped open gasping for air, and his eyes looked like they were going to bug out of his head. And that thought inspired her second blow. Before he could react to her first punch, Melanie quickly struck again, this time with clawed fingers directly into the man's eyes. Just like she had done to the guy in the fight last night, but much harder. He screamed, jerking his head away and flailing with the revolver toward her head. She struck one final blow: a vicious punch with her knuckles straight at the back of his right hand. The gun flew from his grasp to the shadows on the floor of the cab just as she felt the sudden jerk of brakes. She felt the truck yaw sickeningly, the cab's rear end going hard to the left in a high-speed jackknife. But she had been ready even for that. You can't very well have a fight in a truck doing a hundred miles an hour and expect to get off easy. Melanie had already told herself that she was going to die, whether she fought or not. But she had resolved that she was going to take the moron with her. As the truck continued to skid, tires and joints screaming, her head was flung around to the right and she got a perfect view out her window of the highway back along the way they had come. Her eyes widened to admit the view of a charging Mark-III Bolo. Rather than being parked back at the Wolverine the gigantic tank was looming only a hundred yards away, as wide as the whole highway, roaring toward them at an impossible speed with showers of sparks and flame shooting forward from beneath its treads. As Melanie watched, this time truly helpless, she realized that the gigantic machine was beginning to skid sideways as though imitating the crashing truck. Simultaneously the monstrous gattling gun blazed with a high-pitched whine like a jet plane taking off, and the tank's titanic main cannon pivoted to point directly at her head. At a range of fifty yards to the truck I idle my treads, then throw them into full reverse. My drive train screams against the concrete. Every one of the thousands of nail-like tread cleats are lost within a single rotation. The friction of my treads counter-rotating against the roadway generates sufficient heat to cause the concrete powder and metal vapor thrown up by my braking to combust. The pain-sensors in my treads overload and cut out. As I see the truck begin to tip over I seize my final opportunity. I skid hard to starboard, matching angles with the vehicle and increasing my crash deceleration. With my port anti-missile gattling gun I fire a high speed burst at the coupling between cab and trailer, while tracking my main gun to point at the space just above the cab. I am also familiar with the internal structure of the truck through many weeks of idle study. The three-foot high space over the cab proper is Red's sleeping space, which he welded atop the original cab and cautiously fitted with strong roll-bars. I can only hope that they will support the rest of the cab's weight. At the last possible moment the coupling is severed, allowing the cab to come free. As I collide with the cab I impale Red's sleeping-cabin with my main cannon. I feel it punch through both the near and far walls, just before I collide broadside with the rest of the cab. I rotate my cannon upward, pulling the truck cab free of the roadway and its last tenuous entanglements with the large trailer. Continuing my clockwise skid, my left rear tread cowling impacts the lo-boy trailer and knocks it momentarily free of the roadway. It tumbles high into the air in a parody of my fears for myself of only a few moments ago. I am grateful for the small amount of inertia the impact allows me to shed. My speed relative to the cab at collision has fallen to twenty-one MPH. I hope that the passengers will not be too badly harmed by an impact of this magnitude. But the direct damage from my impact is not the chief danger to the cab. The surface of my cannon barrel is highly polished, and the force of my impact is more than sufficient to cause it to slide down the barrel rapidly. Our speed relative to the roadway is still slightly over 60 MPH, and I know that if the cabin falls free of my barrel my mission will fail after all. I elevate my main barrel rapidly, halting the cabin's slide with more than one foot of barrel length to spare. As I continue to skid, the truck cabin describes a complex ascending spiral through the air. I am suddenly able to see inside the cabin, and note with relief that the two occupants appear substantially unharmed. At that moment, one of Red's welds on the sleeping-cabin rollbar pulls loose. Our speed relative to the roadway is falling rapidly, but is still over 50 MPH. If the cabin falls and rolls it will still very likely prove fatal to the occupants. I turn my attention desperately to the welds that attach the sleeping cab to the main cabin. Another one is about to pull free. The remaining two will then give way immediately. For 0.03 seconds I watch in horror, believing that there is nothing to be done but observe the young woman die. How will I then return to the truckstop? How will I face them? But I am saved. A plan from the lowest levels of my reality-modeling capabilities explodes into my consciousness. For the first time in ten years I feel the lowest levels of my mind pouring all their efforts toward my chosen goal, rather than driving me to suicide. I act. Continuing in my spin, I rotate my main turret even faster, simultaneously elevating it so that its motion will not cause the cab to slide loose prematurely. The extra load that this maneuver places on the cab's rollbars is lateral rather than vertical, and they hold. As I spin the cab through the air I pour processing power into hastily-formed models of friction coefficients, moments of inertia, complex vectors in multiple overlapping Cartesian and polar-coordinate spaces all arranged, used, and discarded in milliseconds. Then I see the second weld failing, and in hundredths of a second I must alter every calculation to find the best solution possible within the few tenths of a second remaining to me. I commit to a solution, and the moment arrives. As my barrel reaches the best possible rotational speed I suddenly lower it, allowing the truck cab to slide off it just as the last welds are pulling away. As my speed falls below forty miles per hour, the two remaining pieces of the truck arc through the air almost directly backward along my line of line of motion. In the moment when the cab reaches the top of its trajectory I see that I have succeeded. Its motion relative to the roadway is below five miles per hour. It strikes the pavement and bounces, but does not tip over. As I complete my skid of hundreds of yards and grind at last to a halt, the truck's bouncing also damps down to motionlessness. The air around us seems unnaturally quiet now, as though the thunderous sounds of our chase have stilled all other noise. Every human, animal, and insect capable of perceiving sound within miles of this spot has heard some echo of our chase. Even the breeze seems stilled. Slowly, my treads and rear heat exchange fins begin to cool. The young woman rights herself within the cabin and stares out the window toward me, white with fear. And behind her I glimpse her abductor. He is also struggling to come fully upright after having been pressed against the driver's side door by our spin. He is conscious. Where is the gun? With my rearward optical and radar sensors I rapidly scan the roadway and surrounding shoulders and grass for a thousand yards back along the path of our chase. I detect old bottle caps, coins, and scraps of aluminum foil. If the handgun is not on the roadway, it is still inside the truck cabin. I snap-unship my top starboard antipersonnel machine gun: the same one that I once pointed at the young woman's father. I aim less than a tenth degree to the right of her neck, judging all relevant motions, and fire a single round. It covers the distance to the truck in 0.025 seconds. Passing two inches to the right of the young woman's neck, it impacts her abductor's chest just to the left of his heart. The active-fragmentation round has a seventy degree destruction cone in unarmored human flesh. It blows him against the driver's side door and forces the door off its hinges. The door, and his remains, land twenty yards away further down the road. The man may well have been willing to surrender, and I am nearly certain that he would have been convicted in a trial of his peers. But after all, I am a soldier: not a policeman. "Miss Goulish," I address the young woman. In the immediate aftermath of Battle Reflex Mode, I find myself uncertain of what to say. "I hope I find you well." When they saw Johnny come rumbling back around the bend in the highway, Melanie was standing right on top of his main turret with both arms straight out as though she were flying. She looked like the Queen of the World. "You better get inside, Scout. Get some rest." Pushing her gently away, Mick directed a special look at his wife. "Get her inside." Since before the Wars, that look had meant I'm serious and today it worked as well as it ever had. His two women took a few steps toward the Wolverine, then Melanie complained and they stopped. Her mother looked back just in time to see that Mick was walking into the middle of the highway as though to bar the Bolo's path, although it wasn't moving. Then she saw that he was drawing his gun. From the center of the highway the Bolo, filling most of both lanes, looked as big as a house. It had seemed to go almost dormant after letting his daughter climb down, as though it might be a 150-ton steel cat, letting the sun warm its new scars, letting the noisy truckers approach it, making no complaint even when they ran their hands on its big treads and slapped the flintsteel armor. Nevertheless, before Mick could get his handgun drawn and pointed, the Bolo had simultaneously depressed its main cannon to bear on him and deployed its antipersonnel gattling guns with a sound like a telephone pole snapping in half. Once again the truckers scattered away from the machine cursing in surprise and looking around to see the source of the trouble. What they saw was that their host had apparently lost his reason. Mick aimed his weapon at the center of the vast machine, gripping it with both hands in front of him, vaguely pleased that his hands remained steady. He told himself that its instant weapon deployment had been instinctive, like a human flinching at an unexpected noise. It probably could not help but point them at him so long as he pointed a gun at it. No matter how insignificant the gun. "Bolo unit JNY-013!" Mick had to shout to be audible over the truckers' confused shouts as they continued to clear away from both the Bolo and their mad host. Anne, Melanie, and Bobby and probably everyone else were yelling things at him. While staring down the Bolo's main cannon he had no trouble ignoring them all. He told himself that if the machine had actually decided to kill him he would have been dead before ever becoming fully aware that the weapons had moved. Still, seeing the hollow end of a large cannon has a way of concentrating the attention. There ought to be some humor, he thought, in pointing a 9-millimeter handgun at a Mark-III Bolo. A remote part of his mind decided that any humor would best be found later, if at all. His thumb stroked the gun's safety, making absolutely sure that it was firmly set. He certainly didn't want to surprise the big guy any more than necessary.
Copyright © 1999 Michael Goulish |