Foundation (30 page)

“
You think we’re gonna catch him?” she asked.

“
We better. If we don’t, you’ll get back to your neat, glass cubicle and I’ll be the force’s laughingstock for the rest of my life.”

“
Why on earth did you have to care? You had your citizenship. Everybody else was happy with what you had found out: the Federals, the Transport Security Administration, your captain. So ... why?”

Trumaine walked around the car, then looked up at Faith and opened his mouth, about to answer her, when he realized by the smug smile that had curled Faith’s lips that he didn’t really need to—she already knew. He shook his head and groaned, feeling as stupid as one can be.

“
Get in,” he told her.

The car sped along the seaside freeway, dangerously weaving in and out of the traffic, hailed by a barrage of honking coming from the angry drivers it passed.

Trumaine was driving back to Credence as fast as possible. His brain was still whirring, trying to put into place as many pieces as he could of the big puzzle that was the Jarva case, before he confronted Benedict.

There was a reason, he thought, if the
TSA
had stopped delivering the feed to Credence; it was the fear of losing more spaceships like the Hibiscus. But why did the ship go astray? Trumaine wondered. He had asked the same question to Benedict and he had told him that the parasite feed created by the crawler might have caused a ripple that had set the ship off course. Seemingly, Benedict had no reason to lie about that and it might as well as be what had really happened.

Benedict’s crawler was responsible for the loss of the Hibiscus; if he was still in Credence—and there was no reason to think he wasn’t—there was still the chance that what had happened to the Hibiscus could happen again, to another ship.

Trumaine knew he was taking big risks not telling the
TSA
what he knew, but if he told them, Benedict would be alerted and would tell his crawler to run.

The quicker Trumaine was, the less the chance the crawler could read his mind—or Faith’s—and know all about them at once and, again, run.

He slammed his palm into the horn button and held it there as he overtook a couple of slower vehicles, whose drivers saw fit to greet him in the same way.

Faith, not used to this kind of driving, grabbed hold onto the passenger handle, at the same time trying to cover both ears with her one free hand. From time to time, she would dare shift her eyes to the road and realize with a sickened groan that the danger was far from being over.

“
Do you think he’s still at Credence?” she asked with a croaking voice.

“
Where else? Hiding among Credence’s believers is the perfect cover for him.”

“
What if he isn’t there?”

“
We’ll wait for him, he will come back.”

“
What’s your plan?”

Trumaine looked at her for a moment and grinned.

“
You are my plan. From now on, you will be my eyes and my ears, I can’t find the crawler without you. That’s why I need you to expand your mind and be alert—we must find him. Search everybody’s mind for any clue; see if they have memories of Jarva’s bunker, of the murder, of the murderer. We shall need to keep it quiet; if Benedict realizes we’re back at Credence, he might tell the crawler and he’ll flee.”

Suddenly, a distant, mounting noise came from behind the car—it was the deafening and disturbing growl of a powerful engine that was anything but electrical—but neither of them paid it any attention at the moment.

Faith looked pensive. She closed her eyes and exhaled slowly, expanding her mind.

“
Are you already on it? Do you feel anything?” Trumaine asked her, at the same time steering wildly to pass a pickup truck loaded with what looked like oil drums.

Faith, who looked paler with each swerve, kept her eyes shut, trying to focus.

“
It’s called yoga ... I’m trying to compress my diaphragm ...” she said in a whisper, looking green.

“
That helps you focus on the crawler?”

“
It helps me not to vomit ... but it ain’t working ...”

Trumaine snorted. He drove straight for a while, then, again, the unmistakable roar of what could only be an obsolete internal combustion engine shook the car. This time, it felt very close. The growl droned on, saturating the air, making their eardrums throb. All the same, they didn’t pay it any heed. Only when a truck’s horn blasted hard right behind the car did they jump in their seats.

Faith jerked upright, her sickness forgotten, trying to see through the back window.

“
OH MY GOD!” she shouted.

“
What!?”

Trumaine glanced at the rearview mirror and saw it ...

It was the biggest vehicle Trumaine had ever seen in his life—a monster vehicle. It was an ancient, heavy, massive and cumbersome eighteen-wheeler semi-trailer truck, under whose hood spun an inline six-cylinder, direct-injection, turbocharged sixteen-liter engine capable of producing up to six hundred horsepower.

Whatever that meant, seeing it mercilessly crunch the road under its twin tires, felt oddly overwhelming.

Internal combustion engine vehicles had been withdrawn from the roads about a century before. The few still roaming the streets could be counted on the fingers of one hand, needed a special authorization to travel and were mainly used for antique shows or advertising scopes.

That monster looked like a horizontal building some deranged mind had provided with wheels and must weigh as much. It was more than two-hundred years old and it had probably been stolen from some automotive museum. In fact, that thing should be decaying, its parts broken, engulfed in rust and dust. Hardly capable of starting up, it shouldn’t possibly move.

Unfortunately, both the earsplitting bellow of the monster engine and the steady column of smoke the overhead chimneys spit out said otherwise; it was well alive and kicking ass badly. Some nut had spent endless hours to put that dinosaur, remnant of the old industrial era, back into shape. With infinite care, he had disassembled it into its smallest bits. He had carefully researched and replaced the broken parts and the parts that were useless because they had worn out.

He had put it all together again, welding and assembling, tightening the bolts with the required torque force, registering pulleys and belts, replacing the obsolete rubber tires with new, durable ones made of synthetic polymers, polishing their chrome wheel caps. Until, one day, it had roared to life as once before, like a daredevil giant.

Someone had stolen that masterpiece of forgotten nut-and-bolt craftsmanship and had put it on its turf again.

Why? was the question that rose in Trumaine’s head; he didn’t have to wait any longer to know the answer.

The horn of the semi blasted away, careening down the freeway, ramming his way into the traffic, slamming aside the other vehicles as if they were bottle caps, sending them cartwheeling into each other and into the Jersey barrier.

When the monster got rid of them, it veered again on the road, speeding on, headed for Trumaine’s car ...

It swallowed the road like a starved shark looking for anything it could set his jaws into to quench its hunger.

A fearful Faith looked up at Trumaine and spoke for both. “That thing is after us!” she squealed.

Trumaine sped into the next lane, but it was crowded with commuters, so he had to slow down once again.

“
Who is it? Is it him?”

“
I don’t know!” protested Faith.

“
Search his mind! Find who he is!”

Faith closed her eyes, trying to concentrate, when the car lurched forward and they with it—the eighteen-wheeler had reached them. Its three-foot-high front fender shone nastily, looking like a giant mallet as it hit the car with a crunching noise, shoving it into the back of the next vehicle—a van.

The semi rammed the unmarked car a third time.

This time Trumaine saw an opening on the left and flung himself into it, overtaking the van. The car bolted onward, momentarily escaping the chasing truck, but the doomed van had no room to maneuver.

The truck ran into it and sent it spinning out of control; the van crashed into the Jersey barrier and ricocheted back on the road, under the truck’s massive tires that crunched it mercilessly.

The semi jerked and shivered as it ran over the heap of metal and plastic that was the van, setting to chase once again in a cloud of dust and debris.

About nothing remained of the van—only its crumpled safety cell. It cracked open, letting out a sickened and bewildered old man. He attempted twice at getting on his feet, but his legs were so shaky he slumped disconsolately to the tarmac.

Trumaine kept his eyes on the road, forcing himself not to look back at the chasing truck.

“
SO!?” he asked.

Faith had been holding her fingers to her temples, her eyes closed, trying hard to find out who was at the wheel of the semi, but her head kept bobbing around with the lurching and drifting car, so she opened her eyes again.

“
I can’t focus this way—LOOK OUT!”

Trumaine jerked the wheel, avoiding the colliding side of the truck, which had gained on them, coming alongside them.

“
Son of a bitch!” he protested.

Trumaine zigzagged through the traffic, putting more cars between him and the eighteen-wheeler, but the overwhelming semi pushed in, sweeping off the other vehicles, forcing Trumaine’s unmarked car closer to the Jersey barrier ... The concrete wall approached fast, looking like a coarse-grained ribbon of sandpaper that would soon scratch them to dust.

The semi and the electric car careened on, side by side, at an impacting angle with the barrier. Trumaine stepped on the gas, but he knew already he was never going to outrun the endless semi.

“
He’s going to kill us!” squeaked Faith from her seat at seeing the barrier march steadily toward them, closing their escape route.

Only inches remained on either side of the car, before it hit something: to the right was the scraping concrete, to the left the crunching wall of synthetic rubber that was the tires of the truck.

A bewildered Trumaine looked left and right, then jammed on the brakes, locking the tires—they shrieked and moaned in protest, barely stopping the lighter vehicle before the massive semi did.

The truck sped on like a bullet, passing Trumaine’s car, impacting the concrete wall like a freight train—it soared up like whirling surf, almost climbing over the barrier, then crashed back into the road.

Trumaine and Faith watched on, gasping, driving around the devastating wreck that was the tractor of the eighteen-wheeler ...

Then, unbelievably, the motionless semi sputtered to life once again.

Its fenders twisted, its windshield cracked, losing bolts at every inch it made, the upbent tractor scraped along the Jersey barrier like a beached shark, until its front wheels gripped the asphalt. With a hideous moan, a jolt and a shiver of metal, again the truck set to chase.

Trumaine, realizing with dread the nightmare was starting all over again, sped toward the middle of the road, drifting dangerously into the opposite lane, where the traffic seemed to have diluted a bit now.

An oncoming bus forced Trumaine back into his side of the road, allowing the whining semi to reduce the gap.

Trumaine turned to a scared Faith, trying to reassure her.

“
Don’t worry,” he said. “That prehistoric junk can’t beat electric technology. We’ll smoke him like that—you’ll see.”

Once the bus was gone, again Trumaine flung himself into the opposite lane. As he stepped on the gas—it was an electronic speed variator, of course—the car’s electrical engine whirred to a reassuring howl, thrusting the vehicle onward.

A grin replaced the scowl on Trumaine’s face as the semi begun to lose ground and shrink behind them.

“
See? I told you—”

He didn’t even finish saying that when the car suddenly lost speed. A disbelieving Trumaine glanced at a blinking message on the dashboard saying:
BATTERY FAILURE - REPLACE BATTERY.

Wide-eyed, he looked at a scorned Faith, then back at the dashboard, then back at her—it wasn’t his fault!

“
Damn car!” he swore, slamming his fists on the wheel.