​Darwood & Smitty - Chapter 8

It was back to the Apex in old Eli now, and this time security didn’t dare to slow them down. Soon, Darwood and Smitty were in the president’s office, rattling off their story, and the man seemed to grow weary as they spoke. As they finished, he sank into his couch and looked at them even as they still stood. “You know what it means,” he said, as if they did.

“Essentially that you have to keep the two sides united, even as you divide them,” said Smitty.

“No. Really, that’s what I’m already doing … or trying to do. But if Pluto is hell-bent on starting a war, I’ve got the odds stacked against me. People are easy to manipulate. One thing I’ve learned from history is that he who says it first gets first dibs on credibility. If I’m killed, it’s easy for Pluto to make it look like the corporations are starting a war; and if I push my agenda too quickly, it’s easy for them to make it look like the government’s starting a war. People get sucked into battle, and pretty soon Pluto sweeps in and takes over.”

The president huffed as he thought. “And all they really need to do is make it look like either of those things took place. So if they grow tired of trying to get me to screw things up, they don’t really need me to in the end.”

“So you need to draw first blood,” said Darwood, suddenly understanding and shaking his finger.

The president nodded. “I don’t know what it’ll do to the rest of my plans, but as president, you can’t expect your five years to go the way you’ve got them mapped out. You have to deal with crises as they arise. I thank you, gentlemen, for the information. I know what to do from here. I’ll see you again next week with the next package?”

“If we’re not tracked down by the Jovians before then,” said Smitty. “When they know that they’ve been ignored, I don’t know how long till we’re their number one prey.”

“Then we’ll all have to wish each other luck,” said the president, standing from the couch. He shook their hands, patted them on their shoulders, and looked on them with real gratitude before they were on their way again.
 
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But this time, there really was nowhere for Darwood and Smitty to go but home. The president had put them on indefinite leave from their job while they worked for him, except they’d still have to deliver his weekly package. And now that they’d gotten whatever information they could for him, there was nothing to do but wait until next week.

Only one problem: neither of them felt like playing sitting duck for any Jovians, Plutonians, or anyone else who might be unhappy with their day’s performance. They had been asked twice to sabotage the president, and they had twice ignored persuasive agents and took their messages directly back to Keane. So going home was less than appealing. And they weren’t about to stay with anyone they knew and put them at just as much risk. They had to find another option.

They had one advantage that they were eager to play with. Before they left Keane’s office, the president had given them each a debit card. “False ID,” he told them, “so no one can trace you when you’re buying things. Don’t lose it, though — it automatically scrambles your fingerprint to protect you, but that means that anyone else can use it too. It’s a fair amount of money to lose,” he said.

“How much?” asked Darwood, almost licking his lips.

“Well, don’t go out and try to buy Gates Tower, but it should cover your basic spending for a while. Oh, and guys … don’t do anything stupid like buying into the market with government funds. That’ll make a mess of things.”

The cards meant that they could escape to any hotel and pretty much stay hidden, if they could get there without being seen. But there were two problems. First, it wasn’t exactly easy to blend in when you were driving an Earth Express van. Sure, there were others out there, but they each had their own delivery areas, so they couldn’t just slip into an Earth Express procession and get themselves lost in the crowd.

The other problem was what Talathar had pointed out: when you’re talking with Earth’s president — and especially when you were thwarting the plans of bad guys — you could bet you were being watched. So how were they supposed to even leave the Apex without being followed?

By now, of course, the sun was sinking behind the myriad buildings of New York and dark was creeping in quickly. But night vision was plenty advanced, even in Earth technology, and it wouldn’t be hard for others to keep them in sight.

“We’re not exactly spies,” Darwood pointed out. “We don’t know much in the ways of evasion. If we’re on the road, we’ll be easy to follow. If we’re on foot, it might be easier to hide, but we’ll be so slow, we’ll still be easy to follow. For all I know, we could both have bugs slapped on us already and we’d never have a clue. So I say we just head out of town in Eli and keep an eye on our mirrors, see if anyone’s obviously following us.”

Smitty shrugged. He felt like anything they did, they were still sitting ducks, so what did it really matter? They weren’t going to outsmart technology that people on Earth had never heard of … or at least that he and Darwood had never heard of. So he nodded and Darwood gave Eli the order to get them out of town and head up into Vermont, where they were pretty sure they could find a nice motel snuggled into nowhere at all.

They zipped along the streets, getting out of the city slowly through the traffic and the falling dusk. Both men kept their eyes on their mirrors and, through the windshield, into the higher street levels to see if they could spot anything obvious. They doubted they would see anything, but after the day they had, it was kind of exciting and terrifying to think that they could have someone following them, and to think of themselves a little bit as spies. It made for a good adrenaline boost, but it was also going to get them on the edge — they wouldn’t fall asleep easily that night, no matter how snug and hidden a motel they might find.

“Say, Smitty,” said Darwood as they neared the edge of town, “you were always better at astronomy than me. What is that up there — Sirius? Venus?”

Smitty didn’t mind the break in concentration, especially for astronomy. “Let’s see,” he said, following Darwood’s finger to the sky. His brow furrowed. “Pretty bright, even for Venus. And we’re headed due north. Venus is over ….” He stared. Hard. “Darwood, that isn’t Venus. That’s gotta be a big cruiser on an upper street, or an enormous ship higher up. Not in orbit though. Something a whole lot closer.”

“You think …?”

Smitty shrugged. “It’s hard to tell until we turn.” He glanced at the HoloMap. “We’ll see in a few seconds.”

Eli pulled onto the skyway and angled off to the northwest. Smitty’s brow furrowed even deeper. The distant light was exactly in the same spot on the windshield throughout the turn and even as they headed in their new direction. Smitty smiled, then laughed. “It’s something on the windshield,” he said. He stretched his arm out and tried to wipe it off. “Must be on the outside.”

“Smitty, you can’t be serious,” said Darwood. “You know, sometimes you’re so smart that you’re stupid. Have you ever seen a light stuck on a windshield?”

“Yeah, but nothing could anticipate our turn exactly and move so quickly that it could stay in place from our perspective. It’s basically impossible.”

“That’s what I mean,” said Darwood, hitting a button for his window. “So smart that you’re stupid.” He stuck his head outside the window for just two seconds, then pulled it back in. “It’s not on the windshield. It’s in the sky. If they followed us that precisely, then they’ve got themselves locked onto our coordinates. Their computer’s keeping them in line with our headlights or something. And if they could move that quickly across the sky as we turned … then they’re god-awful fast.”

Smitty’s eyes bugged. “Waiting until we’re in a less populated area maybe?”

The two looked at each other. “U-turn,” they said together. With everything connected to the magnetic grid, there was no way to cheat the streets, so Eli had to wait for the first legal turnaround, then swung them back toward downtown NYC. The men watched their mirrors, and sure enough, the light began to grow. The game was on.

“Darwood, they’ll be on top of us in 30 seconds for sure. If they’re planning to fire on us, it’s all over.”

“Eli, take the next exit,” yelled Darwood, his adrenaline getting the best of him. Inside ten seconds, Eli hit the ramp. The men could see the single light break up into a number of lights from a single ship well above the highway system and fast approaching. “Take a left here, Eli. There’s an Earth Express depot down about a quarter mile. Get in there as fast as you can!”

Smitty looked at him, wondering what he had in mind. “I’m not living inside Earth Express the rest of my life, Darwood. I hope you’ve got a plan for getting out of there.”

“You’re not living out here for the rest of your life either, Smitty, unless you want your life to be really short. There it is!”

The ship was so close now, they could see that it was a mother lander — the biggest of the Jovian landing ships. It had to get in close for a clean city shot, but it had to be nearly in range. “Hard right and into the back entrance,” said Darwood. Eli lurched suddenly to the side and, as he did, a bolt scorched down from the sky and blasted a hole into the street. In a moment, Eli was sweeping into the Earth Express.

“Get out,” said Darwood the moment Eli parked. “If they’re desperate, they’ll blow apart the entire building. Grab some dummies!”

While androids were used for plenty of jobs, and while they could have been programmed for package delivery, the Earth Express union made sure early on that its workers wouldn’t be laid off because of robots. All the Eli vans were driven by computer, but a rider could always become a driver through manual override in case of computer malfunction or dirt roads. Since an android couldn’t drive, it was easy for the union to ensure that the world congress would never make it legal for androids to make deliveries.

Still, there were times when making a quick delivery meant big bucks to the company, and an under-the-table kickback to the union kept things quiet on the use of androids when union workers weren’t available.

The cops so seldom pulled over riders that it took a while before they first caught this infraction; after that, they started scanning Elis for life forms, and with such a high rate of pullovers on androids, the gig became unprofitable for Earth Express. That was bound to shut the whole deal down until someone devised the Lifesuit® for androids — something that mimicked the life readings of a human. Earth Express bought thousands of the suits, and the inventor went off to buy himself a mansion. Pullovers plummeted, and Earth Express and its union were back in business.

The cops basically shrugged. Once their scanning no longer worked, they had little incentive to pull over the Eli vans, and they just didn’t care about winning this one. So everyone was happy to let things go.

Darwood and Smitty were mighty glad about that fact just now. They ran to an android storage unit and started deducing how to break in before the storage manager swaggered up to them with a burly frown. “What do you boys think you’re doing?”

Darwood looked at him desperately. “Listen, there’s seriously no time. You’ve got a Jovian mother lander hovering outside deciding whether or not to blow this place apart because it’s after that van right there,” he said, pointing to their Eli. “We have got to get it out of here with two life forms on board if we don’t want to lose this whole building and everyone in it.”

The manager looked at Smitty to get confirmation that Darwood was absolutely nuts. But Smitty shrugged. “It’s true. I’d tell you to go outside and take a look, but I have no idea how long until they destroy this place. Could be half an hour or half a minute.”

“You boys ain’t shittin’ on me here, are you? Why would the Jovians want to —”

“No defecation whatsoever,” assured Smitty. Darwood nodded.

“Waaaait a minute,” said the manager. “If the cops are after you, why should I be helping you? I ought to just haul you outside and turn you over myself.” He huffed his chest and visibly tried flexing his muscles through his shirt.

“Relax, buddy,” Darwood told him. “Look here — we’ve got this letter from the president excusing us from work.” He pulled the thing from his pocket and showed the man. “The cops are the bad guys this time, and we’ve got to take care of this ASAP.”

The manager was still reluctant but, after glancing at the letter, compliant. “My wife’s going to kill me if I lose my job,” he said as he pressed his finger to the pad, then used an iScan to open the door. “Just two units,” he said.

​The men switched on two androids and raced them to the truck. “Here’s hoping,” said Smitty. They got the androids situated with Lifesuits on and gave Eli a West Virginian destination before offering it one last pat. It took off through the back doors again and whisked out into the night. Darwood and Smitty watched out a window in the direction the van should have been heading, and before long, they saw the mother lander move slowly through the sky from above their building, out in the direction of the van. They saw no bolts flash down from the sky. The ship would have plenty of time to fire on Eli as it headed off into the sticks.

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