CHAPTER 6

Cliché: Another Word for Inevitable

Charles waited until the rebel was gone, then smiled.

"Good news, the Manty team didn't get captured. The people who were picked up were all locals; they don't know what happened to the Manties."

"How do you know that?" Rachel asked.

"Between the Admiral and me, we managed to hack into the police databanks," Charles said with an impish grin.

"What?" Rachel shouted. "Are you crazy?!"

"Shh, keep your voice down," the admiral replied, gesturing at a dataport. "We were clean. We were already inside their physical security and their electronic security was laughable."

"Why take the risk?" she asked. "What if they tracked you internally?'

"Not much chance of that," Charles said, buffing his nails on his tunic. "I, am a genius."

"Well, genius, we're going to need to change locations," she snapped. "You have five minutes to make it look as if you were never here."

"Women," Charles said with a shake of his head. "Never satisfied."

"Men," Rachel replied. "Never paranoid enough."

Mullins smiled through the window as Rachel grounded a beat up air car in front of him.

"Hi, lady, can I get a ride to the Metropolitan Museum?"

She looked at him for a moment then shook her head. "We don't have a Metropolitan Museum; it got destroyed in the Peep War and never rebuilt. What did you do to your face?" He was much heavier looking with fat cheeks and dark hair in place of his natural aquiline blond look.

Mullins slid into the seat and worked his jaw. "Charles blackmailed our supply guy into giving him the latest and greatest ID kit. And it seemed like a good idea to change identities again."

Rachel had been unwilling to let them stay in the basement another minute and, realistically, they had already been in one place too long. She had led them back out through the sewers and tunnels to a temporary hide and told them to meet her in twenty minutes. That had been more than enough time for Charles to produce a few new local identities for all of them except the admiral. He had a new ID as well, but unfortunately the retina scan wouldn't match up.

"I've got another hide you can move to," Rachel said, pulling the car up and into traffic. Prague was no longer a rich world but the traffic was still fairly heavy, stacked up at least six levels. The ground level was relegated to hover-trucks with the next three levels dedicated to general traffic and the top two to "platoon" groups: cars moving under computer control over long distances. East–west streets were on interleaving sections with north and south so that only the ground level had to stop at intersections. This also created "dead zones" between lanes that the more aggressive drivers used for passing. "But it requires going up on the surface and with all the patrol activity . . ."

"How bad is it, lassie?" Charles asked as a patrol van passed overhead fast enough to rock the shuddering car. The van had been in the dead zone and at the intersection it quickly cut downward into a parallel lane then back up to pass the slower traffic.

"Lots of roadblocks, lots of random stops," she said. "StateSec is even more intrusive on the conquered planets than they are on Haven. I think we got you hidden just in time. It took them about a day to get organized and now they're all over the place. Oh, by the way, there's an all points bulletin out for Tommy Two-Time. A person of your general build was seen going into his shop but all the surveillance equipment was disabled or destroyed. You . . . wouldn't happen to know anything about that?"

"Tommy, he sleeps with the fishes," Mullins said. "God, I always wanted to use that line!"

"You are so weird," she snorted. "I think this is just about the time to have a car chase. It's always about this time in the movies. What do you think, Mister Super-Spy?"

"I've always managed to avoid them," Johnny admitted. "I hate flying, actually."

"Well, good," Rachel said as she rounded a corner. "Hopefully our luck will hold out."

"Or, maybe not," John said as he looked at the line of cars.

"This was not here an hour ago," Rachel snarled at the roadblock.

"It's cool," Mullins replied softly. "My ID should pass just fine. Just play it like any normal roadblock."

"What about the admiral?" she asked.

"Retina scanners sometimes act up," Charles answered. "All the other data will match just fine. And the local police retina scan for the admiral is wrong."

"You didn't tell me you diddled the ID database," Rachel hissed.

"You didn't ask," Gonzalvez replied with another grin. "Anyway, the retina scan should come back garbled and everything else will pass. They'll let us through."

"Okay, but I don't like it."

"And don't try to run," John added. "This POS will never be able to out-fly the police vans. For that matter, we'll be zoomed in on from every direction and they'll be tracking us a half a dozen ways. Just play it cool."

"I am," she replied as the first van passed, scanning her registration. It swung around behind her and took a position above and behind. "I was," she continued.

"That's not good," John said. "They don't scan ID internally, so they had to have reacted to the registration. Who's this registered to?

"Me," Rachel said, adjusting her rearview mirror and checking her lipstick.

"I think they're on to you, Rachel."

"I think they are too," she sighed, touching up her hair. "Damn it, Johnny, I did not need this crap."

"Okay, on my mark we kill everyone in sight," Charles said with a snort. "Or at least try."

"Hopefully it won't come to that," Rachel replied quietly. "And unless it does, don't do anything stupid."

Mullins looked around at the block. There were four cars in front of them, three like themselves hovering at about five meters and the first one grounded and being checked by the local constables. There were two police vans there, and the one behind them. As he watched, two of the constables at the block walked back to their own vans, one going to the rear.

"I think we're screwed," Mullins replied. There was an alleyway on his side, but the vans were going to have IR sensors so unless they could get underground and lose the cops on foot, they weren't getting away. "When I say 'now,' put the car in drive and jump out on my side; hopefully some of them at least will chase the car."

"I don't think that's an option either," Rachel said as one of the two vehicle cops extracted what looked like a rocket launcher and fired at her car.

"JESUS!" Mullins yelled, pulling open his door as the rocket slammed into the side of the vehicle.

But instead of an explosion, there was a simple "pop" and the car shuddered in mid-air.

"EMP round!" Rachel yelled. "Get back in the car!"

"It's dead!" Mullins said but the sudden shudder as it lifted upward belied him. Then he was thrown backwards in his seat. "Whoooaaa!"

Mullins had been in enough simulators to have a fair clue about how many Gs he was pulling and the little "rattletrap" car was accelerating far too quickly for its appearance.

"Friends in low places?" he grunted.

"My cousin's a mechanic," she hissed in reply, banking around the side of a building at the sight of blue lights in the distance. The car narrowly missed the side of the far tower, actually tapping on one of the empty flagpoles jutting out from it. "He installed an engine from an old Prague Defense Force mobile gun. It's designed to drive a mini-tank."

"How did it survive the EMP round?" Mullins asked. "We should have been sitting on the ground!"

"It's a military engine," she said, in a tone reserved for a not very bright four-year-old. "Ever heard of shielding?"

He glanced behind them and winced as another police van joined the chase, slipping into the upper lane to prevent a break in that direction.

"They're going to be tracking us on the satellites," he mentioned. "Not that it looks to matter."

"I've got the transponder turned off," she commented. "But you're correct about them being able to track us visually. Not that it matters at the moment. But hang on."

The traffic ahead was slowed by an air car in the center middle lane that seemed incapable of making up its mind. The driver was either old or drunk because the car was weaving a pavane up and down, crossing through the dead zones and nearly entering the lanes above and below, as well as from side to side.

Rachel appeared not to notice, diving into the lower dead zone and accelerating towards the car fast enough to rattle the cars above and below in her wash. Just as it seemed she would hit the wandering vehicle it drifted upwards and she slid through the slot into the relatively open area ahead of it. As they blasted past, Johnny caught one brief flash of a white patch of hair and a pair of hands that clutched the steering-yoke at least six inches over the driver's head.

Unfortunately, Rachel's maneuver placed the car in the intersection, going the wrong way. Her sudden appearance in the cross-lanes caused cars to veer in all three dimensions and windshields in at least a half dozen cars turned blue as the auto-pilots went into spastic fault-mode.

Mullins looked back and shook his head in wonderment at the snarled mess behind them. Half the cars that had been around them were down or bouncing from side to side, the police vans had either grounded or slammed into the surrounding buildings trying to avoid various obstacles and the intersection was filled with cars on apparently random ballistic tracks.

"You just made yourself very unpopular in this town," he commented.

"Stuff happens," Rachel said, pulling all the way up into the control lanes and then down to avoid a slow section of traffic. "I was getting tired of Prague anyway."

"Oh," he said as she banked through the next intersection, slammed on the brakes and turned into a mostly abandoned multistory garage. "So this isn't the first car chase you've been in, is it?"

"No," she replied, raising the car up a story through an open hole and then spinning it to tuck neatly between a pair of rusted hover-trucks. There was nothing else on the level, but while the position gave a good view of the garage, it was nearly impossible to see the car where it sat. She quickly shut down the counter grav and then looked though the back window.

"And now we go?" he asked. "We're out of sight; we should . . . leave. Right?"

"Wrong," she said, looking at her watch. Outside the sound of sirens got louder and louder. There seemed to be quite a few of them.

"They'll have picked up the signature of the engine," he pointed out. "They'll be looking all over for it."

"You think?" she asked. She looked at her watch again and then nodded. "Time." In the distance there was a dull boom. A moment later the sirens began to fade. She leaned forward and fiddled with an almost unnoticeable knob under the dashboard then turned the car back on. It no longer throbbed or rattled.

"Your cousin?" Mullins asked dryly.

"He's a very good mechanic," she replied, pulling out from between the trucks and dropping back down through the hole. Turning right she pulled around a stairwell and parked beside a stripped air car. Johnny didn't recognize the model—presumably it was a preinvasion Prague design—but it was pretty and clearly made for speed.

"Give me a hand," she said, leaning down and pulling a lever.

Johnny shook his head as the body of the car lurched slightly then he joined her in lifting it up and away from the chassis.

"I've really got to meet this cousin of yours," he said. The sports car body, like the clunker body, was made of lightweight plastic and dropped onto the "rattle-trap" chassis perfectly. In under thirty seconds a slightly the worse for wear sports car rocketed out of the top of the garage and into the sky.

"My, that was refreshing," Mullins said. "Okay, Rachel, give. Your average stripper doesn't have a military grade, shielded turbine in her car. In fact, on Prague, she doesn't even have a car."

Rachel sighed and shook her head. "I do a few things more for the resistance than I told you. I'm not an agent for them, but I do mule work and also some of what you would call 'tradecraft'; your lecture about putting a mark on a box wasn't the first time I'd heard of that. And I really do have a cousin who does conversions on vehicles; I'm the person who gets them to the resistance. And he does other work, including some sabotage. He's surveilling us and had placed a bomb on a chemical plant. When he saw us blocked in he set it off. Then the police had more important things to do than chase down a hooker who maybe had met one of the suspects they are looking for. And, of course, I'm very good friends with one of the local resistance leaders."

"Very good friends?" he asked.

"Is that all you can ask about?" she asked in exasperation. "If you're going to worry about each of my friends you're going to spend all your time on that subject alone. I've got a lot of friends, okay?"

"Okay," Mullins said with a shrug. "As long as we can get you off planet before your friends can't keep you alive."

"I've reluctantly come to the same conclusion," she said.

"Who is this vehicle registered to?" Mullins asked as a police van swept through an intersection; it's car-comp would have automatically scanned their registration as it passed.

"The local StateSec commander's daughter," Rachel said with a faint smile. "As long as we don't have to go through another block, we're fine."

She pulled into another multistory car-park and placed the car in an out-of-the-way corner.

"They were going to be tracing us as soon as they reviewed the data from the satellite," she continued, getting out of the car. "So we need to get down in the underground again."