Lesser Gods (4 page)

He proved as steady as a concrete wall encased in brick.

My teeth jarred as I bounced off him.

I beat away a blade aimed at my left eye, dodged, and weaved, and cursed, stumbling into one of the Harvies just as he twisted and became off balance, somehow bowling him over in the process. I then half fell, half leaped over his junkyard body and for a moment found myself free of my attackers.

A junkyard on wheels scooted to block my escape, his body oscillating back and forth as he attempted to anticipate which way I would duck.

Terror inspired my adrenaline-fueled legs to move in a blur of motion that still felt nightmarishly slow. I fought my way through the snatching appendages and blades, clearing the last of the gang while suffering only minor cuts along one of my arms.

Three giant steps sped me toward the curb. I knew their wheeled feet would have trouble stepping up onto the sidewalk without pausing to shift wheelbases. I hoped that would buy a few precious moments to get ahead of the pack that pursued me like hounds after a rabbit.

As I leaped onto the sidewalk, I holstered my pistol and executed a long-practiced twin kick of the toes of my boots; the in-line wheels embedded in the thick soles of the shoes snapped down and locked into place beneath my feet. In another fraction of a second, I was skating for my life, jumping over dead rats and piles of trash to keep from stumbling as I fled.

Behind me, the Harvies, servos groaning, climbed the curb. Having apparently skipped their last lube job during maintenance cycles, they squeaked forward in hot pursuit. Once on the straightaway, they made up for the lost time climbing the curb, the wheels that replaced their legs speeding down the concrete just a terrifyingly short distance behind me.

Our raucous parade of the defenseless and the dented sailed down the street, navigating plastic garbage cans and sending trash careening in our wakes wakes like garbage barges on methamphetamine. For thirty seconds I pumped and pushed, traveling faster than I ever had before.

I reached a relatively uncluttered stretch of sidewalk and chanced glancing backward over my shoulder, half hoping the Harvies would have given up the chase.

They hadn’t.

I had attained a faster speed than they could, gradually putting distance between us. But I knew, just as they did, that it was only a matter of time before flesh and bone would grow tired and my lead would dwindle.

Then motorized wheels would grind forward relentlessly, maintaining a constant speed that would eventually nibble away the distance between us until they were chewing on my tail.

And I couldn’t sustain my speed much longer.

Already my lungs felt like they were going to explode and my heart danced heavily in my chest. And a cramp threatened to immobilize my left calf.

I’m dead meat on wheels
.

Louis Berlioz

It was only my fifth mission, but I enjoyed my job — after all, it was one of the few where you were paid to take drugs.

Legally.

And with a nice health plan to boot.

I worked for Untied Interplanetary Mining. UIM hired us to run remotes. The operation was expensive, but still cheaper than putting men out past Mars to harvest the asteroids of all sorts of rare metals and compounds that were hard to impossible to manufacture here on Earth.

The heart of the operation used a system based on quantum entanglement. Fortunately I, and the other operators, didn’t have to understand how it worked. All I knew was that when I moved here on Earth, my robotic counterpart a bazillion miles away (give or take) in space moved instantly as well, without the hours of delay it would take a radio wave to travel the distance through space to get to it.

The catch was that the system demanded those of us operating through the system to our distant robotic selves be under with Jet.

Thus our near addiction to the drug.

But there was little danger, we were on for an eight-hour shift and then off for eight days, a system that gave us lots of time to spend the small fortune we made with each “trip” out to the orbiting mining ship.

I’d discovered that Jet transformed the experience of running our automatons into something that was almost like being where they were. One minute I was closing my eyes here on Earth, the next opening them in a mining ship deep in the asteroid belt. I’d only done four missions, but found the experience almost as addicting as the Jet we needed to enhance our work.

Today was a little different. Some big wig was coming in to talk to us.

My buddy Sam had been showing me the ropes, taking me under his wing from my first mission on. He’d been working with the company for four years and was the oldest on the crew, outranked only by our grumpy foreman Gus Franklin.

“Meeting with the big wig,” Sam said as we walked down the hall to the conference room. “Big yawn.”

“More like,” I said, then jammed my fingers down my throat and mimicked a gag.

Sam laughed. “Yeah, Louis, more like that.”

A few minutes later we were seated at a fake oak table and the suit droned on and on about the new and improved Jet we were going to use, how safe it was, and, oh, yes, be sure to sign your waivers before you leave.

Right.

“New and improved” generally only meant “new” and — if you were lucky — not degraded or outright dangerous. Probably some scheme from a corporate bean counter to save a little cash.

“Hopefully the crap doesn’t cause our heads to explode like junkies,” Sam quipped as he signed the waiver.

The suit glared at us as I nodded grimly, following Sam’s lead, feeling like I had just signed a pact with a corporate manager with cloven hoofs. But as was always the case when selling one’s soul, the pay was good. So we all went along with it and signed on the dotted line.

Jeff Huntington

We sat in a paneled office overlooked by shelves of leather-bound books and the smoky ghosts of pipe tobacco. I sat in my wheel chair. I slipped the unsealed envelope containing my bribe that was not a bribe across the wide oak desk to the Dean of Students, who sat enthroned in his leather chair, pipe hanging limply in his lips.

The balding monarch opened the envelope as if it were Pandora’s box, and extracted the check, studying it for a full minute, like a vulture surveying a fat corpse. Then he leaned back with a creaking of leather and tight ass to clear his throat. “Let me see if I have this right, Mr., uh, Huntington. If we let you pursue a double degree in chemistry and biology here at the university, you’ll make this, uh, donation, of one hundred thousand dollars?”

“That’s correct.”

“I’m not sure… We are grateful. But…” His voice seemed to vanish meekly into the smoke hanging next to the ceiling.

“It’s simple,” I said. “Your university, these departments, have the best reputation in the country and are also the best equipped. I need certain knowledge to continue my line of business research. My GI bill has helped, but I want to learn more. I need unfettered access to learning. And since your board of admissions won’t admit me, I need to have a few rules…”

“Broken?” The dean’s eyebrows arched as if trying to cover his bald head.

“No, no,” I reassured him. “Only bent. In just the tiniest way.”

The dean looked through my transcript for a moment, fidgeting and worrying the papers as if trying to rearrange the print with his fingertips. “It would be unorthodox for us to let you into our program with your, uh, record. And I, we, can’t guarantee your grades if we were to let you in.”

“I’m not buying degrees or grades,” I replied, fastening my one good eye on him.

“That would be, uh, unethical.”

“Of course it would. I’m only asking to be accepted into your programs. After that I’ll sink or swim on my own and the money is the college’s regardless of how well — or how poorly — I do.”

The dean sighed as if he’d agreed to be raped, and carefully replaced the check into the envelope and hid it in the top drawer of his desk. Then he stood and came around his desk, hand outstretched. “Mr. Huntington, welcome to our University.”

Ralph Crocker

A volley of shots echoed from behind me; bullets ricocheted like angry hornets as I raced on. Another fusillade thumped on my body and produced dull pain in my leg and back as slugs were absorbed by my plastic armor, bruising the skin below. I lowered my head to protect it behind the high neck of my ballistic vest and concentrated on maintaining my speed, trying not to become distracted by the gunfire behind me.

I knew I must devise a plan other than simply fleeing if I were to save my hide. To continue would eventually spell certain failure. Perhaps, I thought, if I can just get to the end of the gang’s turf. Then I’d be free — at least until I ran into the next band of hooligans.

My hopes were dashed when I saw movement a block ahead of me. Six more Harvies rolled across the street and sidewalk, blocking my escape, their long, outstretched claws snapping to show they meant business. Two of them unfurled capture nets, and one had a machine gun turret where his head should have been.

Obviously time for me to devise a Plan B. Either that, or resign myself to being sliced and diced when I reached the barricade of well wishers forming in front of me.

I glanced at the street ahead, searching for some way out. And there it was: A sign proclaiming “Sporting Goods” halfway up the block between me and machine gun head.

I had an idea.

Reaching down to my thigh, I unlocked and released the mini-claymore and then, with shaky fingers, peeled the backing from it, exposing the sticky surface underneath. I slowed just enough to slap the claymore onto the thick armor plate of a rusty postal box as I whistled past it.

Speeding up again, I could now see the machine gun ahead of me being trained at my chest. But as I expected, the Harvey held his fire, knowing if he could avoid damaging me, my body would be worth a lot more to the snatchers that bought parts from them. The machine gun would only be employed as a last-ditch method of stopping me. The other Harvies were spreading their nets, hoping to capture me alive for minimal damage to the body parts on skates headed their way.

I glanced back.

My pursuers were nearly even with the postal box. I slowed to a stop and thumbed off the cover of what appeared to be a decorative insignia on my vest, exposing the claymore’s remote firing button underneath. As the group tailing me came into range, they slowed, realizing they were in danger.

But they were too late.

I pushed the button. There was a resounding explosion and a cloud of smoke and dust rose over the place where they’d been.

I didn’t wait to see the results produced by the spray of high velocity plastic fragments thrown in a wide swathe across the street behind me. With any luck I would have gotten nearly all the Harvey’s, but there now had to be fewer working models behind me than in front. I went a few more feet and then slammed to a stop alongside the sporting goods store, turned, and glanced back.

Luck had been with me. All the Harvies that had been pursuing me were down, with only a few showing even a hint of life, their clawed arms snapping and thrashing madly in their death throes.

Seeing that I was no longer boxed in, the machine gunner fired a short burst; the armor-piercing slugs cracked through the air over my head as I dived through the wide portcullis leading into the cool interior of the sporting goods store, a business I hoped, given its location, would be devoted to death and mayhem toward man and animal alike.

My hope was fulfilled. While the store displayed a few obligatory bows and arrows and an ancient Frisbee that looked as if it might have been an original, in keeping with its location, most of the merchandise behind bullet-proof display windows was armament — everything from grenades to mortars to flame throwers and all stops in between.

“Need to do some business,” I said loudly over the machine gun fire on the street. I held up the smart card Death had given me so the wizened man behind the thick bullet-proof glass could see it.

The sight of a card full of creds brought a rising smile to the dealer’s face, wrinkling his skin until it looked like his skull might crack. I shoved the card into a reader for a quick cred check. The unit glowed green and “500” appeared in its readout.