Cyberpunk (29 page)

Murphy, then? No, Murphy was hostile, but stupid. More dangerous to

himself than anyone else. I finished running my preliminary threat

assessment and decided I only needed to worry about Luger and Kao

Vang.

That’s when I shut that line of thought off cold. I wanted to keep

fixated on positives.

Positive:
It didn’t matter who had the drop point just north of me.

Doug Luger and Kao Vang would link up (Rules? What rules?) before

they started hunting me. That bought me some extra time.

Positive:
Because of some weird idea about fairness I was trying not

to think about it too much, but I had a dozen G-ration bars zipped into

my jumpsuit pockets. Hey, I never said Luger was
wrong
when he called

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me a smartass, did I?

Then I got the bottom of my positives list and the last item turned

out to be something of a puzzler, even for me. So I found a fallen tree,

kicked it to scare out the occupants (none found), and sat down to think

it over. Unzipping my jumpsuit, I reached down to my deepest, most

secure, hidden inside pocket and whipped out—

My trusty old Starfire 600 microportable computer.

Whipped it out, and looked at it, and wondered why the
hell
I’d

packed it along. Oh sure, part of it was basic fear of my bunkies going

on a find-’n’-trash mission while I was gone. I’d seen what they’d done

to Buchovsky’s stillvid camera and Murphy’s analog guitar. Real early

on, I picked up on how the staffers looked the other way while your

bunkies destroyed whatever it was made you different from a standardissue

skinhead. That’s their
job
, after all, turning normal kids into

faceless guys in dangerous green. It’d been over two years since

Lewellyn’s successor booted me out of the library, and I didn’t get much

chance to use my Starfire anymore, but it was still in perfect operating

condition and I considered that a victory, major.

I flipped up the waferscreen, opened the keyboard wings, and ran

my fingers over the touchpads. The batteries were at full charge; the

factory ROMware was intact and useful as ever. (“Take a memo, Miss

Jones: Twelve six-hundred-calorie ration bars consumed over seven

days yields an average daily caloric intake of 1028.5714, so Harris will

lose weight this week, but how much?
What if
we pie-chart out a sweat

coefficient of...”) I took another few minutes to verify the bubbleware

I’d written in myself. The curvilinear interpolations, polar equations,

Poisson distribution, chi-square test--yep, still there. The wicked little

crackersys and bandit commware that’d won me this scholarship to

Auschwitz North? Of course. Didn’t look like a promising place to find

a network to plug into, though.

The battery charge indicator ticked down to 99%.

After a few minutes of keystroking I decided that sitting on the log

was getting me two steps short of nowhere, so I closed up the Starfire,

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tucked it back inside, and continued my trudge to the lake.

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Chapter 14

The lake was one of your standard shallow, rocky, weedy affairs.

The map back in the briefing shed showed a good-sized marsh along the

east shore; when I got a look at it, I decided the marsh was even better

than advertised. Luger and Kao Vang’d have to either cross it or circle it,

and either way’d buy me considerable more time. Using some gauze to

filter out the big bits, I kneeled down and started filling my canteen.

While the water blurped in, I flagged on some small fish—bluegills,

I think—watching me from the reeds, which was another promising

sign. The ration bars’d get me through the week, but it helped to have

backup food located.

The last air bubbled out of the canteen. I stood up, popped in a

decon tablet, capped the canteen, and started shaking it. Fish, huh? How

did the S.I. say you catch fish?

He didn’t. He spent all his time talking about neutralizing

nonfriendlies, and never got around to fish. Maybe if the academy’d

been built somewhere where the fish were well-armed and unrepentant

Leninists...

So did the handbook say anything?

Yeah. It said if you were stupid enough to leave your rifle and

fishing pole behind whenever you were “at risk of participating in a

survival experience” (i.e., when leaving your home/bunker to buy

ammunition, food, krugerrands, or the latest issue of
Soldier of Fortune
),

you could pry off the brass end cap of your military-style web belt, spin

out a few feet of thread, and improvise a gorge lure from the brass.

I looked down at my belt, fondling the fused black plastic end.

Except for dress greens, nobody wears brass anymore. They say the

ChiComms have a targeting radar that can lock in on a metal belt buckle

at two klicks, stick an I-frag right in your belly button. I spent a minute

thinking about the updates I’d someday put in the handbook.

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Which was truly
bad
tactical. ‘Cause while I was standing there

shaking the canteen and thinking edits, concurrent with searching my

head for something to help me outsmart those little fish with their teeny

tiny little primitive brains, Luger came down to the opposite shore,

spotted me, and got a fix on my position. The first I knew about it was

when his voice came braying and echoing across the lake, “Ha-a-r-r-r-is!

I’m coming to ge-e-t-t y-o-o-u!”

Zutcakes! I dropped my canteen, scooped it up again, lit out into the

trees; charged up the lake bank, through some scrub pine, plowing into a

raspberry patch and through it, then diving into the high grass—

A hundred yards later, face stinging from whipped branches, my

hands scratched and bleeding from the raspberry thorns, I finally beat

down
my
teeny tiny little primitive brain and pushed it back into its

partition, then asked myself the big question:
Why are you running?

‘Cause I’m scared, is why! ‘Cause two years of threats and bullying

and rabbit punches in the dark have paid off. Luger has me programmed

for scared pissless and he has me programmed
thorough!

That’s when the little voice in my head started telling me I was an

idiot for even thinking about taking Luger out. No staffers to buffer us

was
his
advantage! The full-contact rules meant there was almost no

limit on what he could do to
me
, especially with Kao Vang to perform

for! My ComSurEx mission wasn’t going to be zeroing Luger’s account.

It was going to be true
surviving
.

Think, think, think! I beat the panic back down again and tried to

fudge up some plans. First instinct was to do a fast fade west, into

Buchovsky’s territory, and keep moving. With luck and a head start,

they’d just chase me around the lake for a week.

No, I ran it in my head and it didn’t work. They’d stick to the shore;

I’d take to the woods for cover, and my path’d be lots longer then theirs.

A flat-out run’d burn calories, too, and waste water. All they’d have to

do’s stay between me and the lake and pick me off when I came down to

refill my canteen.

I kept trying to kickstart my cyberpunk mindset, but it just sputtered

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and died. The parachute? It’d have to go; I didn’t need the extra weight,

and no point making a camp without a palisade around it and an army to

defend it. I hid the ‘chute pack as best I could in the tall grass.

What next? I didn’t know, dammit, I didn’t know! I needed a

process, a plan, a really good piece of strategic think! I needed

something to stuff into the mouth of that voice that kept yelling, “Forget

thinking, Harris! RUN!”

I needed more information, is what I needed. Kludging together a

working set of nerves, I started hiking northeast, right into the mouth of

the beast.

Block that thought, and fixate on the marsh. You need to learn more

about the marsh. Never mind what’s on the other side. Thinksing a drill

chant to keep the feet moving.

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

#

By noon I’d scouted enough to know they’d have to be nuts to try

crossing the marsh. Instead they’d circle it, go way east; this started to

suggest the kernel of an idea to me. Maybe what I needed wasn’t a

regurge of my military strategies classes, but some good ol’ cyberpunky

role-playing gamethink. How does Luger think my mind works?

Easy. Luger’s paradigm of Harris is a frightened, wimpy,

“invertebrate coward” (Luger wouldn’t know the difference ‘tween that

and inveterate) who’d be scared irrational, run west. If Luger could just

stay on his heels, keep him moving, run him down...

Inference:
Luger’d worry about the time he lost to circling the

marsh. He’d cut corners, beeline from the east end of the marsh to the

last contact point on the south shore of the lake. If I tucked myself up

near the edge of the marsh and went subtle for a day or two, he’d go

right past me. If he was real good at tracking, he might get to the contact

point and find I doubled back, but by that time I’d be behind him.

Which opened up a whole new range of interesting possibilities.

The rest of the day was a tense unevent. When the hungries got too

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bad, I took a bite of ration bar and munched it slow. Otherwise, I spent

my time scouting for more food backups and an invisible place to sleep.

The food prospecting was a total waste. The berries weren’t in season,

and I didn’t find anything else I wanted to stick in my mouth. The bed

hunt went better, and towards dusk I carefully, tracklessly, worked my

way back to a thick patch of ferns, burrowed deep into the middle, and

settled down for a good night’s sleep.

I should have known better.

Me and the deerflies had been having a running skirmish all day, but

after dark the bugs hit in battalion strength. Black flies, gnats,

mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds—a few hours of futile swatting,

and I pulled up my hood, zipped shut everything with a zipper, tried to

internalize, and found my hungry tummy sitting there waiting to have a

word with me. The stomach and I argued for a while about whether I

should eat another ration bar, until the feel of little buggy feet on my

skin got so bad I pulled out the Starfire, filled the display with 80

columns by 24 rows of 8 (you’d be amazed how much light that makes),

and risked fifteen minutes’ light picking wood ticks off.

By the time I was done debugging, sleep was truly unreachable.

Each twitching hair and flowing bead of sweat became a tick crawling