Core Punch Page 4

  Vi’d seen rain. NON had rain. It had always had rain. Raising it didn’t get it out of the rain. Probably brought it closer to the rain. But she’d never seen this kind of rain. She tossed her 72’r kit in the back, leaned against the skimmer to catch her breath, while Joe shed his pack. Man, if it was this bad this far from the eye wall, they needed to make sure they were well up before it got any closer. She hit the hatch control with her elbow. She might have been thinking a few more Grand Maw Maw not-approved words. It took its time lowering. When the hatch locked in place, she headed for the cockpit, leaning into the wind and using the maintenance grips along the side to steady herself in the high water. She clambered over the vestigial wings, glad to be out of the water for that few seconds. The specter of fire ants and other nasty stuff hung over her as she fumbled for the side hatch control.

  When it opened, wind and rain rushed in with her. She subsided into her sling with relief. Water cascaded off her and her gear, forming small pools on the floor. Of course, this hatch also took its time locking back in place. The wind and rain were worse from Joe’s side, and it was a relief when his hatch locked down. If auto-dry had worked, she’d have used it. It didn’t, so she dug out the towel she kept in her personal cubby and wiped off her face shield. When the towel was too wet to do any good, she tossed it back and retracted the visor. Muttering some more words Grand Maw Maw wouldn’t have liked. Another time she might have been worried that she knew so many. Since she didn’t have time, she retracted hand protection, then applied her attention to the skimmer controls. Time to find out how screwed they were.

  Technically, based on the skimmer’s specs, they were “fine.” The skimmer supposedly had all kinds of emergency tech, such as instruments-only flying and wind stabilization, oh, and emergency boost. Most of it had died long before the skimmer was gifted to Vi upon her promotion to homicide detective. The aging skimmer was the NONPD’s version of a hazing. You did your time, didn’t whine, did good work, and you got assigned something that actually worked fifty percent of the time. That was about as good as it got with their budget.

  And based on the weather data her portable tech was picking up from the under-city data bouncers, they were also “fine” where the storm was concerned. In fact, it shouldn’t be raining yet. She studied the sheets of water flowing off the view screen.

  “Do you get the feeling our data isn’t updating right?” she muttered, wondering why she was surprised something had gone wrong with this hunk of junk. She’d blame the skimmer slamming to the dirt, but their data had to have been off before that to be this off now.

  Joe, working on powering up the skimmer, shot her a look that was almost human. “Yes.”

  Vi sighed. She hated being such a girl, but… “I think we’d better call for pickup. This piece of crapeau isn’t rated for flying in this kind of wind.” Assuming they had a clue what kind of wind it was. Captain Uncle would be pissed she hadn’t told him about the course correction. They weren’t close enough for her to use her get-out-of-trouble Look on him. And if the wind kept banging stuff into them, well, that wouldn’t go well either.

  “I concur.”

  The skimmer powered up enough to give them some data access, the screens updating with a rapidity that was almost impressive. Didn’t even need a love tap—unless she counted the landing as one? If it been this nice before they left the skimmer on their frosty body hunt—she studied the data. Maybe she should be more careful with her wishes. Ignorance could be bliss.

  “Unfortunate,” Joe said, probably in response to her succinct, one-syllable sum up of just how screwed they were.

  “They won’t be able to send anything down in this.”

  Joe opened his mouth, but then nodded instead. She peered at him through the last rivulets of water running down her face. His brows were drawn together in a frown. Outside, visibility had worsened. She studied the weather data. So instead of hugging the shore, WTF’s eye wall was actually closing on the city. She adjusted the screwed dial up to FUBAR, threw in some holy freaking crapeau. Captain Uncle’s data must have been screwy, too. He’d have never sent her down here if he’d known WTF was this close. Now, when it was too late, she could see the radar data on the feeder band that directly concerned them. It was mostly red with slashes of ominous orange and yellow. The skimmer rocked as a particularly big gust buffeted it. She strapped in, though it felt a bit futile. It might help if they got picked up by a tornado, but even so, the landing was gonna be a bitch. The skimmer had not been designed for slamming against terra or firma.

  It was darker, though the flashes of lightning intermittently revealed the rising water. The skimmer was supposed to be airtight. They wouldn’t know right away if it actually was because of all the water they’d brought inside with them. And if they had to use engines and stabilization jets to hold position, how fast would that drain their power? She flipped off temperature control, just in case. They couldn’t afford the fuel drawdown if they were stuck down here for too long. There wasn’t available data on how this model of skimmer would perform in extreme conditions because its makers had thought there wouldn’t be any. Ah, hubris. Looked like they were going to get to test it, not in its prime, but when it was old as dirt. She better understood that phrase by the way. Her boots were caked with a bunch of it.

  “If we can ride out this feeder band—” Vi didn’t finish with the obvious. The timing was only going to get more challenging as WTF moved closer. There were feeder bands coiled inside feeder bands coiled around an eye wall that was feeder bands on mooncrack. And while they waited for that, it looked like they might get to check out the storm surge. She wished she remembered more about storm surge, what it did and when. All she remembered was that it could “rise unexpectedly fast.” And that the rise depended on where one was, something about tides and where the eye came ashore. WTF was moving in west of the city, which put them on the wet side. It was not good to be on the wet side of a hurricane. There’d been some blah, blah, blah in the news vids about how lucky they all were to not be dirt side this time. She didn’t feel lucky.

  Whatever, she had to phone home. She still hesitated. Captain Uncle was going to burn her already uncomfortably hot backside. She sighed. “Might as well get it over with.”

  His gaze shifted her direction. “I believe that would be wise.”

  Something in his tone made her uneasy. She activated a channel. Nothing. Didn’t even get the not-connected hum. She tried a love tap. Another. Followed them with a hate tap. That was odd. Could always get a not-connected hum. Though this was the skimmer’s first serious storm test. And there was that bang against terra soggy. “Do you think the storm is affecting communication?”

  There was a lot of electrical activity out there. And the winds. Could WTF have already taken out the communications network up top? It wasn’t a ridiculous worry. Grand Maw Maw had better tech than the NONPD. Oh, budget, the curse of all our lives….

  He hesitated. “That is the most logical supposition.”

  He’d never made logic sound so dubious. She felt a chill despite the heat building both inside and outside the skimmer. She looked around, but there wasn’t anything to see other than the rain.

  “Do you know why the authorities waited so long to retrieve these dirt-siders?”

  The question seemed a bit random, but Vi wasn’t adverse to a distraction. “That’s right. You weren’t there when it came up.” Vi rubbed an errant rivulet of water out of her eye. “They popped up on the sensor, rather like our corpse, between the last two feeder bands. Captain Uncle thought maybe they’d been using some temperature screening stuff and either changed their minds or it got damaged. If they are getting nervous it should make retrieval easier.” She could hope. Hope was good. It was like bright and stuff.

  “Curious.” She arched a brow at him and he added, “That both the dirt-siders and the corpse were hidden from the sensors.”

  She frowned. “Yeah, but—” What did it mean?

 
“The weather is an unpredictable element,” he said, as if following a line of thought all his own.

  “Which could have been predicted to be unpredictable,” she felt compelled to point out, though it shouldn’t have been quite so unpredictable. “Do you really think both events were deliberate?”

  “I have a suspicious nature,” he admitted, like that was a news flash.

  “But what’s the end game?” she asked.

  “Unclear.”

  “Sabotage isn’t logical,” she offered, a bit uncertainly. Though it would be ridiculously easy to sabotage this piece of crapeau. Just give it a good kick. Still…too much about this felt wrong. And one thing she’d learned was to trust her gut when things felt wrong. “Logically, someone would have had to be out in this to un-screen our vic. And mess with our tech—which could have been overki—unnecessary.” Unless they had some really cool something that could do those things for them. She added, though she wasn’t sure what it meant, “The vic is a dirt-sider.”

  A squatter, someone out of the tech loop, in fact. A little person, barely on the grid. Who might have died the same way a crime boss had died, but wouldn’t that be something a killer would want to hide? All of this seemed designed to draw attention, to make them suspicious. Okay, going with attention getting, whose attention was someone trying to get? They couldn’t have known she and Joe would be the ones to come down. Could they? If there’d been anyone else, Captain Uncle would have sent them. Unless whoever it was had made it look like they were the only ones? Okay, getting paranoid. She’d pissed off a few perps in her day, but she couldn’t call to mind anyone who would take this route to hose her. Or be smart enough to pull off the tech tinkering.

  Joe?

  His people might have the tech that could do this, but why? If they wanted to get him, why wait until he was in another galaxy? She shivered, despite the heat, stared at the heavy rain like she could see through it. Was someone messing with them? If they were, what did they want?

  * * *

  “We need to—” Vi stopped, managing to maintain her charm despite the scowl.

  She did not like inaction.

  Neither do I. Lurch felt most wry.

  How could we anticipate this move? Joe wasn’t even sure their tech problems had been caused by it. Their problems could be the inevitable result of aging technology. If it was Lurch’s enemy, well, the hunter had become the hunted so quickly, he did not know how to react.

  I believed I’d learned to expect the unexpected.

  Joe frowned. How can one expect the unexpected?

  It is a challenge. Humor lightened the nanite’s tone for a second. It thought so intensely, it was like having heartburn. My apologies.

  The burn eased some. A discreet expulsion of air also helped, though it tasted most unpleasant.

  “We can’t get to the city until the wind dies down,” she said, “but the water is rising. From the rain or the surge? No way to know for sure with the tech acting up. This boat is supposed to be watertight, but, well, if this is the storm surge, it could surge us into a wide choice of objects not that far from our parking place.”

  It was true that flooding waters could be quite forceful. Enough to carry debris that could impact on their craft, even if they didn’t change position.

  They should not fly.

  They could not safely remain dirt side.

  “Perhaps we should attempt to hold position above the water? Fly low?”

  “And burn up our fuel?”

  Joe leaned forward and scrolled through the weather data. Even if it was not up to date, it did have some predictability to it. “The bands do not follow the same track inland, because the hurricane is moving ashore from east to west. Do you see that angle?” He pointed at the screen. “Assuming this is correct, or close to correct, the airport where the dirt-siders await rescue will be affected later than this position. That is also where any help will be sent, if HQ becomes concerned about our non-appearance and the sensors are unable to locate us in the storm.”

  He doubted anyone would be surprised to lose the sensors in the melee of the storm. In their various briefings, Joe had sensed a high level of expectation that many systems would fail.

  “It’s where we were supposed to go.” Vi sighed. “I should have notified HQ that we were taking a side trip, though I’m not sure that would be much help right now.”

  Would they have been allowed to get through if they had decided to call in the change? He wondered. They might have received advanced warning about the storm and had time to escape, if it were involved in their current difficulties.

  “But we can’t fly there, not in this—” she stopped, possibly unable to find a description adequately negative.

  Her people have let their hurricane knowledge languish for many years.

  They are not the only ones to rest on their status quo. Joe felt Lurch acknowledge the hit.

  “When we were making our approach, I could see the remnants of old transit lanes. If we modify our lift, stay above the waterline, we might find some protection from the most extreme winds while we use these lanes to work our way to the airport.”

  And if this is a hostile act, an attempt to force my exposure, it might frustrate that. Perhaps tip the status quo our direction?

  It might even require it to expect the unexpected. Lurch felt amused.

  “Can you follow them from memory?”

  Joe smiled. “No, but your raised city is very like the city that was, is it not?”

  She brightened. “We use our map of the raised city as a guide down here. I like how you think, Dzh—Joe.”

  Joe concealed a smile at yet another failure to say his name.

  She turned from him and stared outside. “We can’t fly blind at low altitude.”

  “It will be difficult,” Joe acknowledged, wishing—but if he told her the truth, even if she believed him, it would put her at greater risk. “I can, perhaps, see further than you. Alien eyes.” He half grinned at her. “If you transfer drive control to my station—you can navigate, since you are more familiar with the city than I am.”

  The strain in her face eased with a task to perform.

  Lurch could have transferred control for him, and it could have done much to repair their failed systems, but care must be taken not to expose its existence if this were the trap they’d been expecting. If the skimmer had been tampered with, then triggers would be in place to expose the nanite if it attempted to assist with the tech. The best Lurch could do for them right now was enhance Joe’s vision and reflexes.

  “If it will transfer,” she said, applying more of her “love” to the controls.

  That depends on the game it wishes to play.

  For a few seconds, Joe wondered if it had also disabled their engines. When they activated, he did not know whether to be relieved or worried.

  It seems we play the slow game. For now.

  For now, Joe agreed. Between the lash of the rain and the force of the wind, even the boost from Lurch only gave him a few meters of forward vision. The landscape was wild, the trees bending almost to the ground, then whipping around violently. It would be challenging to discern shadows from obstacles until they were upon them, and controlling the skimmer in the high wind created additional difficulty, even with automatic stabilization thrusters. The water had risen enough to begin splashing over the front of the skimmer and he felt it shift. Remaining there was filled with risk as well. It was now or never.

  “It’ll be slow going,” Vi said, both looking and sounding frustrated.

  “Yes. But better than not going.” He hoped he was correct in this, as he eased up and began their initial lift.

  Vi gripped his arm, causing a disturbance to his thought process. The bright look in her narrowed gaze did not help the problem.

  “I have an idea.”

  3

  “There’s a sort of hack,” Vi said, her body bent double as she struggled to get the panel off the underside of console
. “One of my cousins showed me how to do it. We had this April Fools’ thing going and we needed to track, well, someone.” She reached up for a tool, caught his eye, and grinned. “First advice, first day, learn how your crapeau works so you can mess with it and not get caught.”

  Admirable.

  Lurch was inordinately fond of rule breakers. The speed at which she was able to access the internals of the console indicated a familiarity with the technology that would not be pleasing to those tasked with keeping the equipment operating at “optimal.”

  “It’s all spin,” Vi had told him early on when he had pointed out the difference between assertion and reality. He’d arched his brows and she’d added, “Don’t believe half of what you’re told and that half, well, lower your expectations by another seventy-five percent. Why do you think I call this place the Big Uneasy?”

  “This might not work, but if it does…” She applied pressure to the tool, before concluding, “…we might have a fighting chance.”

  Any chance was better than their current odds, Joe knew, studying the barely visible landscape, while trying to hold position just above the water level. Waves slapped against the underside of the skimmer, while rain poured past them at a wind-driven angle. It was not an optical illusion that it appeared to be “falling” sideways. It was disturbing. And somewhat disorienting. While he did not believe it was pure chance that resulted in their current predicament, like Vi, he had difficulty perceiving its end game. The situation appeared to be as fraught with peril for it, as it was for them. Could it be observing them from a safe distance? What was safe in this storm? The city above was also at risk as WTF moved in. One thing his people had learned, when technology tried to take on nature, nature usually won.

  It might just want us dead.

  There are simpler ways of achieving that.

  I told you it had a flair for the dramatic. Perhaps it is toying with us.