Forests of the Night

CHAPTER 18

Nohar waited for the chaos at Thomson's condo to die down before he walked out on the street again. Harsk had called him a paranoid bastard, but he didn't want to deal with cops. Being this close to blatant arson, Nohar doubted he'd be let alone. Nohar had the feeling if he got too close to the cops now, he'd be hung out to dry.

He hung by a public comm, painfully aware of Angel's comment, "Moreys this far

west shine," He was glad rush hour was long over. The pinks had abandoned downtown Cleveland for another day, and the cops were involved elsewhere. The only pink Nohar had to worry about was an oriental rent-a-cop staring at him from the lobby of the Turkmen International Bank. The pink's suspicion was ironic. The pink was probably a Japanese refugee—during the Pan-Asian war Japan and India would have been on the same side, and both had been nuked into a similar fate.

Species before nationality, Nohar guessed.

The cab pulled up. This time, better neighborhood, the cab company sent a remote Chrysler Areobus. Nohar got into it, to the visible relief of the pink rent-a-cop. The van was brand new. Nohar could still smell the factory scent from the upholstery. No one had pissed in this one yet.

"Welcome to Cleveland Autocab. Please state your destination clearly.''

The computer started repeating itself in Spanish, Japanese, Arabic—

192

S. ANDREW SWANN

"Detroit and West—" not too close to Manny, just in case— "63rd. Ohio City." "Five point seven five kilometers from present location—" Nohar would have walked if not for his leg and the neighborhood. "ETA ten minutes. Please deposit twenty dollars. Change will be refunded to your account.''

Nohar slipped the computer his card, punched in his ID, and deducted the twenty dollars. There was a slightly overlong pause while the computer read his card.

"Thank you, Mr. Rajasthan."

The cab rolled out onto the Midtown Corridor, passed through downtown, and got on the Main Avenue bridge, heading west. Night had wrapped itself around the West-Side office complex. The buildings had shifted from chrome to onyx. Traffic was dead with the exception of Nohar's cab and the endlessly running cargo-haulers.

The cab reached the Detroit Avenue off-ramp—

The cab passed it, still doing 90 klicks an hour.

What the hell? "You missed the exit."

The computer was mute. Nohar tried typing on the keyboard provided for passengers. It was dead. So was the voice phone sitting next to it. Nohar began to worry about that pause over his card.

The cab passed the Detroit on-ramp, and two cars pulled off the ramp to follow it. Even in the dark, with his vision, he knew their make. Late-model Dodge Havier sedans.

Unmarked police cars were always Dodge Haviers.

Stupid. Of course the cops would put a flag on his card. They were probably going to have Autocab dispatch send the cab straight to police headquarters.

As if the cab was reading his mind, once it had picked up the shadows it took the next off-ramp, circled around under the bridge, and got back on the bridge—going east, cops in tow.

FORESTS OF THE NIGHT 193

If he was going to do something, he'd better do it quick.

Now he wasn't so glad he'd gotten a new cab. An older cab would have been fitted with a seat and controls for a driver. This cab's interior was totally filled with pseudo-luxury passenger space. Nohar had little chance to override the controls.

He got down on one knee and felt around the carpet between the forward two seats and the passenger console. When he found the edge, he clawed it up.

There had to be a maintenance panel in here. The cab had no hood, and the design people didn't have hatches on the outside to mar the plastic-sleek lines of the vehicle. The only other place for a maim panel would be under the damn cab, and if that was the case, Nohar would be in trouble.

Nohar held his breath until he saw the maint panel under the carpet. It had a keypad, and a red flashing light. A breach would alert the cab's dispatcher. Nohar looked back at the two Haviers behind him. Alerting dispatch wouldn't be a very big problem.

Nohar unholstered the Vind, wishing for the standard teflon-coated rounds, and fired a point-blank shot at the keypad. The gun bucked in his hand and the keypad exploded under him. Little plastic squares with numbers on them went everywhere in the van. It set off the car alarm. He looked back at the cops and saw them activate their flashers.

Where the keypad had been was now a smoking rectangular hole. The sour odor of burning insulation filled the cab. The magnetic lock had only been on the maint panel for the deterrence value. The dumdum had scragged it. Nohar hooked his hand into the remains of the keypad and pulled out the panel.

From the light of the flashers, he could tell the cops were pulling up next to him. He kept low. If the cops had heard the shot, they wouldn't hesitate to blow his head off.

Under the maint panel were the electronic guts of

194

S. ANDREW SWANK

the computerized driver. Now he had to think fast. The sky was suddenly visible out the side windows. He was passing over the Cuyahoga River. The three cars were hitting downtown Cleveland, and soon after would be at police headquarters.

The circuit boards were labeled and color-coded. Nohar pulled the one labeled "RF Comm." That should cut the signals from dispatch—he hoped.

The Haviers were pacing the cab, one on each side of the center lane. The second the three cars hit downtown, the cab pulled a hard left—against the light. There was a skidding crunch as it clipped one of the Haviers on the inside of its turn. Nohar was thrown against the right wall. He grunted as the impact reawakened the wound in his hip.

It seemed he'd done two things in addition to cutting contact with the Autocab dispatcher. He had activated a homing program—the cab was no longer heading to police headquarters. It was probably returning to Autocab itself—and the collision with the Havier showed that he had cut the cab's ability to pick up the transponders of other cars.

He heard the long blare of horns and the screeching of brakes-Fuck the cover—the sides of the cab wouldn't stop a bullet anyway. Nohar sat up so he could see what was going on. The cab had run a red light without stopping. The cab wasn't picking up on transmissions from the lights anymore. Or the street signs—it was accelerating. Nohar had blinded the robot cab as well as deafening it. It was following the streets from its memory.

Nohar looked behind him. Only one Havier was following—the one the cab had violently cut off wasn't in sight. The cop had to slow to weave through the chaos the cab had left in the previous intersection.

More horns, another crunch. Nohar was thrown flat on his back. Now his hip sent a crashing wave of pain that made his eyes water. Somehow, he managed to FORESTS OF THE NIGHT

195

keep hold of the circuit board. He saw the front windshield split in half and fall out onto the road. Nohar staggered up and looked out the back. The cab had plowed through the front end of a slow-moving Volks-wagon Luce. The Luce had spun out and almost hit the pursuing cop.

The cab must have been moving over a hundred klicks an hour now. He was actually losing the cop. Even so, he wondered if pulling the circuit board had been a good idea.

He turned around to see where he was going. Down the road was a row of sawhorses dotted with yellow flashers. The city was digging up another hunk of road—

The cab's brain had no idea the flashers were there. They were topping one-twenty. . . .

Nohar slammed the circuit board back home and dived for one of the rear chairs, trying to get a seat belt around himself. The cab suddenly knew what was ahead of it and how fast it was going. The brakes activated, almost in time.

Whack, one sawhorse hit the front. The flasher exploded into yellow plastic shrapnel. The rest of the sawhorse flipped over the top of the cab. There was an incredible bump, thrusting Nohar into the seat belt. The belt cut into his midsection as the nose of the cab jerked downward. The front-right corner of the cab slammed something in the hole, and the rear of the van swung to the left. The left rear wheel lost pavement and the van tumbled into the hole. It rocked once and stopped on its side.

The seat belt and the brakes had saved his life. The cab had hit the hole only going thirty or thirty-five klicks an hour. Nohar was lying on the left side of the van, which was now the floor. Nohar was still for a moment, letting the fires in his right leg fade to a dull ache.

After the cops were done with him, Autocab would probably want his balls for breakfast. Hell, it was their

196 S. ANDREW SWANN

own fault—a remote that gets disabled like that ought to stop.

Nohar unbuckled himself and smelled the dry ozone reek that announced the inductors had cracked open and melted. The cab was dead. Nohar stumbled out the remains of the windshield. Outside was knee-deep mud that smelled of sewer and reclamation algae. Nohar faced the round, three-meter-diameter, concrete mouth of a storm sewer buried in the wall of the hole. He didn't hesitate. He knew providence when he saw it.

He limped into the echoing darkness under the streets.

It seemed like an eternity in the colorless dark, slogging through the algae, listening to the echo of his own breathing, unable to smell anything but the sour odor of the water. The only redeeming feature of his slog through the storm sewers was the fact the air was cool. The water itself was cold, and after a while his feet had numbed to a dull throbbing ache that matched the pulse in his hip.

For once he was worried about Manny's admonitions about infection.

The one big problem he was facing now was that not only had he lost the cops in the sewers, he had also lost himself. From the Hellcats, he knew every inch of the storm sewers under Moreytown. But, of course, he had no idea where the storm sewers were under downtown Cleveland. He had lost his sense of direction a while ago, so he was going upstream—had to be away from the river or Lake Erie. The direction was somewhere between east and south. Eventually he would find an inlet and get his bearings.

The few times he was tempted to go into a smaller branch off of the main trunk he was following, he decided against it. While the trunk was arrow-straight, and an obvious subterranean highway for the cops to follow, he would have plenty of warning before pursuit FORESTS OF THE NIGHT 197

caught up with him. The slight phosphorescence from the algae was enough light for him to see a couple meters in any direction, the pinks would need a flashlight—that would give them away a hundred meters before they ever saw him.

It was also the only route that gave him enough clearance to stand upright. Nohar's time sense was screwed. He'd gone for what seemed like hours without sign of pursuit. He kept glancing at his wrist, but his watch was still with whatever Young's explosion had left of his clothes at University Hospitals. After an interminable period, the world began to lighten. At first Nohar thought it was pink cops with flashlights. However, even though the light let some blue back into his monochrome world, it was much too dim for pink eyes.

He drew the Vind and slowed his approach to the light ahead. It wasn't an inlet. It was a line of holes, large and small, that had been drilled through the concrete wall of the storm sewer. He ducked under a small one that was halfway up the wall, and crept up on a large ragged hole he might fit through. A glance through the hole only showed him a metal-framework scaffold that was draped in opaque plastic from the other side. The tiled floor outside came to Nohar's waist. Under the scaffold he saw a jackham-mer, a small remote forklift, a portable air compressor, and someone's hard hat hung up on one of the struts forming the scaffold. Nohar bolstered the Vind and hauled himself up with his good arm.

He climbed in, crouching under the scaffold. He paused and looked back over his shoulder. He sensed something was wrong, even though he didn't hear or smell anything. He turned around, kneeling on his good knee, and leaned slightly back out the hole. He was waiting the split second for his eyes to readjust to the darkness beyond.

He heard a splash and his hand went for the Vind.

198 S. ANDREW SWANN

A hand shot out of the darkness, much too fast, and grabbed a handful of T-shirt and fur, while a shoulder hit him in the right thigh. He wasn't well balanced, and the way his leg was, it buckled immediately.

Things were going too quickly. He barely had time to recognize the arm belonged to a pink. Nohar tumbled through the darkness and splashed into the green algae water. His hand had only gotten halfway to the Vind.

His head went under for a moment . . .

Nohar came up sputtering. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness. Facing him, and pointing his own Vin-dhya at him, was a pink female. She had short, dark hair—black as the jumpsuit she wore. She was only 160 centimeters or so, maybe 50 kilos. Despite her size, the way the cords stood out on her wrists as she held the 12 millimeter told Nohar she was prepared to take the massive recoil of the weapon.

"FBI." One hand left the gun, whipped a pair of cuffs at him, and was back bracing the Vind before Nohar could react. "I am placing you under arrest. You have the right to remain silent ... "

The cuffs fit.

As she mirandized him, he noticed something. Her eyes, pupils dilated all the way, were reflecting light back at him. Her pupils glowed at him. He hadn't noticed at first, since a lot of morey eyes did that.

Pink's eyes did not have that catlike reflection.

She was a frank.

He stared at this small woman who held the Vind like it was a Saturday night special, and he realized he was scared shitless.