Cyber Way

CHAPTER 15

The truck swung off the dirt road and went bouncing and squealing through the forest. Ooljee wrestled wheel and suspension, somehow avoiding the army of trees that loomed dangerously in front of them.

A vast pulsating shape struck repeatedly at the careening pickup. Sparks flew from the composite frame every time contact was made. Lowering his window, Moody tried to get a better look at the impossible manifestation.

It had to have come from the alien web, the web that was all around them. They walked through it, breathed it. It imperceptibly thickened the fabric of existence. Now something denser had coalesced out of that region of rainbow threads and animate explosions, some kind of program sucked up by Gaggii’s manipulations to harass and frighten them. At which it was succeeding admirably.

Moody flinched as the glowing head twisted toward him. He fired reflexively, suspecting even as he did so that his shells were unlikely to have any effect on the force field or database or whatever the hell it was. But he’d been trained to return fire during an attack. Besides which, it was the only response at his disposal.

He remembered how Kettrick and the housekeeper had died. Here before him, twisting and contorting madly in midair, was the instrument of their death immensely enlarged. The tinier version Gaggii had invoked that night on Steel Key had killed two people. Its monstrous relative was trying to destroy their truck.

He recalled what Ooljee had told him about a hatathli being able to utilize one portion of a sandpainting. Gaggii was using a small part of the alien web. It was a device an ancient Anasazi might have found useful in dealing with an enemy, something formulated in familiar terms—if one could call a fifty-foot-long yellow and red serpent familiar. It continued to strike at the hood and sides of the fleeing pickup, trying to smash its way in.

Moody fired again. It was impossible to miss the gigantic writhing shape. The shot had about as much effect as he expected. It was like trying to kill a breeze. The snake was more concept than creature, a tenebrous serpentine program dredged from the depths of some hatathli’s thou-sand-year-dead imagination, a realized representation of old legends.

Meanwhile Ooljee was cursing in an extraordinary mix of English, Navaho, and Japanese as he struggled to keep them from compacting against the nearest ponderosa pine. This he succeeded in doing for a commendable length of time.

Forward motion ceased abruptly and without warning, accompanied by a tremendous metallic clang. Moody felt like the clapper inside a gigantic bell. His head swung forward to smack the dash.

Providentially cushioned by the restraint mesh, Gaggii escaped a similar concussion. The impact cracked the rear window, allowing the prisoner to kick out the rest of the glass. There was just enough clearance for him to crawl through to the bed of the pickup.

A dazed, groggy Moody tried to aim his pistol in that direction but he was having a hard time just hanging onto the suddenly heavy weapon. His head and vision cleared fast, but by that time Gaggii had vanished into the woods.

“He’s getting away!” Ooljee yelled unnecessarily.

“I can see that!” Moody forced open the damaged door and started to climb out, quickly withdrew his legs as the yellow vastness struck at them. Glistening yard-long fangs sent dirt and rock chips flying.

As his partner tried to get a bead on the violently twisting shape, Ooljee struggled with the truck, alternating curses with prayers. One of them must have worked, because the engine hummed to life. Slamming into reverse, the pickup bounced away from the tree, then rolled awkwardly forward once more.

The snakeshape struck at the front windshield, spidering safety glass tough enough to turn bullets and darts but not fangs the size of pickaxes. Moody threw up his arms to protect his face, but the glass held. It would not withstand a second such assault.

Ooljee swung around, did something to the wheel, and yelled at his partner, “Jump!”

Moody eyed the hard, rough ground outside. They weren’t going very fast, but still. . .

No time to argue. He popped his own door, tried to will into existence a depression filled to the brim with a hundred years worth of pine needles and leaves, and jumped.

Any local accumulations of vegetable matter had already been spoken for. They lined fox dens and squirrel nests, not the ground beneath the careening pickup. He hit hard, pain splintering his right shoulder. It felt like some crazyboy had taken a good whack at him with an iron bar. He rolled over a few times before coming to rest.

Struggling to hands and knees, he watched as the driv-erless pickup, headlights gleaming, rumbled away into the night with its brilliantly glowing yellow and red nemesis twisting and coiling above it. The snake thing struck repeatedly at the truck’s cab, attacking effortlessly, a mad manic mass of pulsating serpentine energy.

Let it expend itself against the unfortunate vehicle, he thought. Save your shots in case it comes looking for you.

“You okay?” An anxious, exhausted query.

Grimacing, Moody rose while clutching his injured shoulder, his useless gun dangling from his right hand. He’d hung onto it when he’d jumped from the truck, and he was damned fortunate not to have blown his guts out when he’d hit the ground.

His eyes tried to penetrate the blackness between the trees. “Any sign of our boy?” he muttered, ignoring his partner’s concern. Somewhere behind them the truck was rattling down a slope, still pursued by the malevolent yellow snake-shape.

Ooljee shook his head tiredly. “This is his backyard, not ours. He knows it, we do not.”

“Bet he ran back to his place.”

“If so, he will not stay there. And I do not think we should go after him. I do not think that a second reception would be either as indifferent or polite as the first.”

Moody grunted agreement as he stared into the woods. His shoulder throbbed and he was mad—at himself more than their former prisoner. They should’ve stripped him bare-ass and slapped sealant tape over his mouth, though his chanting probably had far less to do with generating the snakeshape than did the cleverly disguised transmitter on his wrist. For all they knew, the tiny device was capable of running every molly in his house.

Ooljee was right: it would be stupid to try and take Gaggii again tonight. Having conjured up one lethal tactile program, he could probably conjure another, and they no longer had the hard shell of the pickup cab to protect them. They would need backup after all, enough to handle Gaggii no matter what he called up.

Their police spinners, built to military-level specifications, were undamaged. If they could just get to a phone, any kind of phone, they could fill the woods around Gaggii’s house with riot squads. It meant a long walk back to the road, and at this time of night, probably an additional hike all the way to the main highway.

Meanwhile Gaggii would be busy at his place—doing what? Barricading himself in, emplacing defenses, or preparing to flee? Or maybe he was so sure his fanged tactile had taken care of the two intruders that he would relax? Moody knew better. Someone as smart as Gaggii wouldn’t take that chance. Arrogant he was, but not stupid.

No, he wouldn’t be accommodating enough to linger in the vicinity. He’d run. If they could get to a phone in time they might be able to throw a cordon around the county, if not the state.

“That is how Kettrick and his housekeeper were slain,” Ooljee was saying.

“Yeah. With a smaller version. Forensics wouldn’t have figured it out in a million years.” Moody didn’t have the faintest idea which way they were going. Much simpler just to follow his friend.

They descended into a shallow arroyo, jumped a foot-wide creek, clambered up the far side and immediately dropped into defensive crouches.

Smoke drifted capriciously through the trees, but there was no sign of the monstrous glowing serpent-shape. Either the program had run down or Gaggii had called it off. They advanced warily on the pickup.

Moody yanked open the door and started to reach inside. He stopped as soon as he saw that they would not be able to use the truck phone to call for assistance, because it was no longer there. Nor was the front half of the truck. In its place was a cooling lump of metal and composite about four feet high. The pickup’s bed was still intact, but the cab and engine compartment had melted like a chunk of pork fat in a pot of greens.

Moody tried to imagine the snake-thing clamping tight to the truck and expiring in a burst of incredible energy. It must have been quick; a single violent spark lighting up the night, completely overloading the electric engine’s surge suppressors. In addition to the body itself, the intense heat had melted all four tires.

Gaggii had called it up to rescue him, but he hadn’t had time to program it selectively, Ooljee was thinking.

“He directed it to attack the truck, but not us. So when we jumped out it ignored us. That is what I prayed would happen.”

“What if you’d been wrong?”

Ooljee shrugged. “Then we would have had to rely on your shooting. I thought flight the better option.”

“Too bad it didn’t start a fire.” Moody glanced at the surrounding trees and brush. “Might’ve brought a ranger out to check on it. I don’t think what’s left of the truck is putting out enough smoke to be noticed from a distance.”

“Doesn’t matter. We must get back to the main road.”

“He’s used the web to kill twice, and he tried to kill us with it.” Moody spoke as they strode through the trees. “He’s learning how to handle the infernal thing.”

“He still needs a mechanical interface to access it,” Ooljee pointed out. “The bracelet was only a link to whatever setup he has constructed in his house. Take that away from him and he is harmless.” He considered aloud. “He must have used it to make contact with his home molly via a cableless modem at Kettrick’s house. I wonder what he intends to do with it besides defend himself?”

“You heard him.” Moody felt like he was carrying a fifty-pound pack on his back. In a sense he was, except that he had the location reversed. “He’s the ant who’s figured out how to use the garbage. Or if this web was set up with a purpose in mind, he’s trying to figure out what that is.”

“No one will believe what happened to us here.” Ooljee squinted into the night, changed direction. “We will have to say he had a gun, or that the truck sprung a wheel. II we go into a station and say we lost our prisoner because he was rescued by Klish-do-nuhti’ i they will lock us up instead of Gaggii.”

“Say again?”

“Klish-do-nuthti’i. Endless Snake. It appears in many of the Ways.” He nodded back over his shoulder. “Or maybe it was only Ah-yah-neh, Big Snake.”

“Got a lot of snakes in your religion, do you?” Moody was in no mood to be understanding.

“All kinds,” the sergeant admitted readily. “Crooked snakes, water snakes, arrow snakes: they are as common to us as fleas are to you in Florida. It is not surprising that the spirit a hatathli would call up to protect him would take that form.”

“He’s not a hatathli, dammit!” Moody was good and frustrated by their failure to bring Gaggii in, after all the time and effort that had been expended in tracking him down. He felt angry and helpless. He was not going to let reality slip away from him too.

“He’s just a good weaver who’s stumbled across the web to end all webs. He hit back at us with technology, Paul. Not metaphysics or spiritualism. ”

“I did not mean to suggest otherwise.” Ooljee started up yet another slope. Moody followed, sucking air. “But he clearly understands sandpaintings, and probably the Ways as well. There is nothing that says a weaver cannot also be a trained hatathli.

“If the term metaphysics bothers you, perhaps we should call them mwtaphysics. Mysticism is just a name, my friend, for a different level of reality that we haven’t learned how to tap into yet. Try going back eight hundred years and telling one of my ancestors that the spinner on my belt or the watch on your arm is not powered by magic. Tell me that the cutting edge of modem science does not sound more like something out of a sandpainting than a textbook. Take particle physics, for example.”

“You take it,” Moody said with a snort. “I’ll have pastrami on rye.”

Ooljee was not dissuaded. “Particles that have names like smart, and lazy. Forces called weak, up, down. Colors. Is that physics? Or the chant of hatathlis? Take modem recombinant metallurgy. Nothing more than alchemy without the pointy hats. Even a couple of hundred years ago who could have imagined metallic glass, or carbon-alloy shuttle bodies, or all-ceramic engines? Not to mention molly sphere storage.

“Where lies the line between sorcery and science? It is only a matter of terminology, my friend. This web is another place we are just finding out how to visit, the way people decades ago learned how to make photons line up to lase. One more step. Primitive peoples did not understand radio or television because they could not see the signals in the air. That does not make the vid magic. We can’t see this alien web, but we know it is there.”

“There’s the road. Let’s access it." Moody nodded ahead, where the welcome strip of pavement slashed through the forest. “One thing I promise you, my friend. Whether weaver or hatathli, if Gaggii so much as sneezes the wrong way when we get our hands on him again, I’m going to blow his head off.”

“Is that standard Greater Tampa departmental procedure?”

“Naw. That’s Vemon Moody procedure.” The detective wheezed his way up the embankment.

“You are angry. I am angry too. It will not help our situation to give way to anger.”

“Maybe not, but it sure feels good. Want to go back to his place?” He bent over and rested his hands on his knees, breathing hard in the center of the empty two-lane road. The east-west laser pickup strips shone softly in the faint light, waiting to guide the next vehicle that came this way.

“No. He will surely be ready for us if we try anything so foolhardy.”

“How’re we gonna fight something like that—what’d you call it? Endless Snake?” He gestured with his gun. “Might as well have thrown dirt clods at it.”

“It is some kind of tactile program. We must either get to him before he can access it, or else assemble enough firepower to convince him that no matter how much damage he does, he won’t be able to escape.”

Moody nodded, straightening and stretching. He eyed his partner quizzically. “You scared?”

“You bet I am scared, Vernon Moody. Gaggii is learning how to use the sandpainting’s web. Maybe it is no more than alien garbage, but that is enough. I consider myself good with a spinner, but this is beyond me. I am a practical weaver, not a theorist. We need the help of someone who can deal with Gaggii on his own level. We need some heavyweight advice.” He looked past his colleague. There was a light in the distance, coming up the road.

Ooljee fumbled with his service belt. “I am scared because Endless Snake may not be the only program Gaggii has learned how to invoke.” He held up a compact road flasher, began to wave it over his head. The oncoming lights slowed.

Moody turned to regard the woods. Somewhere back there was the turnoff they’d taken earlier, the dirt track and bridge that led to Gaggii’s home. He hated the idea of abandoning a suspect this close at hand. It went against his every professional instinct.

Instinct and experience counted for nothing now, he told himself. This was not a case where standard police procedure applied. Hell, this wasn’t a case where standard reality applied. Besides, there was no guarantee Gaggii had gone back to his place. Maybe he’d kept a car hidden in the woods for a fast getaway. It was gratifying to think they’d upset him, maybe panicked him.

They knew who he was now, exactly what he looked like. They’d bottle up the escape routes. Gaggii wouldn’t be able to cross a border, board a shuttle, buy a tube ticket without being recognized. He was free, sure, but within an area soon to be severely circumscribed. When they located him again, they’d jump him so fast he wouldn’t have time to say boo, much less utter any elaborate chants or threats.

Regrettably, the driver did not have a earphone. He didn’t even have a road scanner. But he did drive them, rattling and banging all the way in his ancient pickup, to the outskirts of Window Rock.

They stopped at the first public phone, Ooljee leaping out to slap his spinner against the emergency terminal while Moody waited nearby—cold, tired, and hurting. Little yeis were excavating his shoulder, hacking away with arrows and medicine knives. It was a relief to see the phone screen light up with the image of another officer sitting calm and relaxed in a warm station.

Ooljee spoke rapidly in a mix of Navaho and English. When he was finished he clicked off, removed his spinner, and walked back to stand next to his partner. Together they watched the road, busy with tourists and commercial travelers.

“Official word is: pick him up now. You want to get some rest and talk to him when they bring him in?”

Moody hugged himself, half-jogging in place to keep warm. He was nearly unconscious from the unaccustomed exertion and lack of food. He knew they could check into a hotel, have something to eat, or borrow a cruiser for a quick ride back to Ganado.

“What do you want to do?”

“My friend, you know me a little by now. Do you think I am crazy?”

“That’s what I thought.” From the depths of his exhaustion Moody dredged up a grim smile.