Jade Dragon (4 page)

With one hand on the wheel, Ko rooted through the contents of the
carry-on bag on his lap. In-flight toiletries kit. A dead d-screen. Half
a bottle of Copperhead mineral water. Some entertainment softs still in
the wrapper. And…

“Eyes on the road!” said Feng.

The Vector drifted hard, missing a slow-moving drop-top by less than an
inch. “I can do two things at once,” Ko held up the last object in front
of him. A corporate cellular telephone. “Crap.” These things were worth
a lot to the right people, and Ko knew half a dozen hackers who would
part with a lot of yuan for an intact celly with all the hardwired comms
protocols inside; but there was also the fact that these phones were
wired with satellite locator chips that could light him up like a homing
beacon. Ko tossed the bag into the back seat again and slammed the phone
on the dashboard three times in rapid succession, splintering the case.
A glimpse of wires and circuits peered out at him from a break in the
plastic. “Ah, why risk it?” Ko reached forward to open the window. “Best
to toss it, just in case—”

It rang with the gentle chirp of a nightingale.

“Hello?” The voice on the other end of the line was young and wary. “Who
the hell is this?”

Alice was watching Frankie very carefully. “Stealing cars is not a good
way to win friends and influence people, kid.” He kept his voice level.
“You should stop this before you get hurt.”

The reaction he got was exactly the one that he would have given in the
same place. “Screw you, wageslave! Go polish your shoes or something.”

“What are you trying to accomplish?” whispered Alice.

Frankie waved her into silence. “That was pretty slick what you did back
there. With the tanglers. That took balls. You gotta be good behind the
wheel to pull off something like that.”

“Don’t flatter me, pal.”

He kept speaking, ignoring the interruption. “Or of course, it could
just be that you’re lucky. Are you the lucky type? All balls no brains,
gonna wrap yourself around a lamp-post one day?” The words bubbled up
from inside Frankie, spooling out of some place locked in his past. It
was strange to hear Alan’s words coming out of his mouth, but there it
was. Suddenly he was inside that stupid kid’s head, thinking what he was
thinking, going where he was going.

“Eat my dust, suit. This ride is too fine for cashwhores like you.”

Frankie nodded. “Heh. Yeah, Mercedes Vector. Smooth, isn’t it? Like
driving on silk.”

There was something in the man’s voice that made Ko stop with his thumb
hovering over the disconnect key. It wasn’t anything he could
quantify… Just that ghost of a wish denied, the deep need, the thrill
that came from the drive. Ko could hear the faraway longing in the
corp’s voice, the mirror of it in his own. A memory of something his
sister had once said floated to the surface.
Octane in your blood. You
need wheels like other people need air.

“I did what you did,” the man was saying. “What are you, eighteen?
Nineteen? Blazing around Castle Peak Road and the turns over Tai Mo Shan
in some hyped up two-door, I bet. One step ahead of the greenjackets.
Making yuan off races and taking pinks where you can.”

“You don’t know me.” Ko looked around and saw that Feng was gone. The
denial sounded feeble in his ears.

“Yes I do. I used to be you. What, you think stealing cars and road
racing was invented by you and your buddies?”

Ko saw the honey-coloured glow of the WarPark emerge as he passed
Discovery Bay; they were doing one of the regular
Apocalypse Then!
promotions to bring in the punters, and the air over the theme park’s
dome was lit with tracer fire and controlled napalm bursts. All at once,
Ko understood what this creep was up to. “Weak, chummer, real weak. You
think you can play me, distract me so you can get up close?” He made a
spitting sound. "Let me tell you who I am, mister corporate man, mister
I-used-to-be-you. I’m not some highway punk you can step on. I got
connections, see, I’m
known!’

The voice came back, quick and sarcastic. “Who you with? The 14K or the
Wo Shing Wo? Pinching cars for them so they can ship them off to the
mainland? I bet you get a lot of yuan for that.”

The WarPark exit was coming up fast, and Ko eyed it. If he went in
there, it would be easy to ditch the Vector, slip away, maybe fence the
d-screen and the phone for some pocket change. But this presumptuous
suit was starting to piss him off. If he could get the Merc back across
the bridge, he could get it to the docks in Tsing Yi and sell it. Yeah.
Plenty of yuan for that.

“Hey, corp, listen.” He leaned in to whisper into the cellphone. “Maybe
you’re not lying to me. Maybe you used to be a fast-mover back in the
day. But that was then. You sold out, chummer, pissed away your freedom
for a nice suit and an office cube. Now all you’re fit for is sucking my
fumes!” Ko slammed the phone hard against the dash and stamped on the
accelerator again. He cut across the lanes and surged into the feed
towards the city.

Frankie looked at the phone. “He… Cut me off.”

“I see the vehicle,” said the Monkey King. “He’s going for the bridge.”

“Deal with him.” Alice took back the phone and frowned. “This has gone
on for too long already.”

Acceleration pushed Frankie back into the seat and the passive restraint
around his belly went taut, the memory plastic reacting to the velocity
change. He tried to peer over the shoulder of the driver, but the masked
man filled the seat, and he could only manage glimpses of the road ahead
and the ghostly digits of the head-up display painted on the inside of
the windscreen. The towers of the Tsing Ma Bridge were growing before
them, blinking with cherry red strobes at their tips.

Monkey King touched a panel on the dash, revealing an array of
flip-switches for the Vector’s weapons systems. “I would like permission
to employ lethal force.”

Alice gave Frankie the smallest of looks and shook her head. “No. Secure
the vehicle and criminal intact, please.”

He didn’t bother to say what all of them knew; that the security agent
was probably good enough to take out the kid with only minimal damage to
the other Merc. Alice was trying to present a non-threatening face.
Frankie suspected that if he had not been in the car, the answer would
have been very different.

The driver tapped a control and from the front bumper came a clack-hiss
of oiled components. Along the Vector’s prow, the polycarbonate impact
buffer parted to allow a series of hydraulic ram plates to emerge. Each
had a saw tooth look to them, patterned with square spikes like the face
of a tenderising hammer. Volters whined up to capacity, contact triggers
released and ready for an impact.

“There,” said the Monkey King with a slight incline of his head. Frankie
caught sight of the rear of a silver sedan as it passed around a
shuttlebus and crossed the first archway of the bridge.

He became aware of Alice watching him. “Was that true?” she asked, with
a very faint hint of distaste. “The things you said to the thief, that
you were once in a gangcult?”

“It wasn’t a gangcult,” he said automatically. “Not like the Americans
have. Just stupid kids and fast cars.”

“And yet you made something of yourself.” The words were so bland and
neutral, Frankie could not be sure if she were complimenting or
insulting him.

Ko saw the second Vector coming when the backwash from the bridge
spotlights caught the gunmetal shape in their glow, a silver shark on
dark asphalt. Then he was rumbling over the causeway and on to the
bridge proper. The two kilometre stretch of flyover arced from Ma Wan to
Tsing Yi island over the Lamma Channel, and below Ko could make out the
boxy shapes of cargo submersibles, nosing through the sluggish water
toward the floodlit freight terminal. All he had to do was get down
there, and he’d be golden.

Feng was standing on the lip of the bridge and pointing into the sky. Ko
sped past him, almost too quick to register the guardsman there with one
hand pressing a smoke to his lips and the other stabbing at the
northwest. Ko looked where he pointed and saw flickers of light moving
toward the bridge, the glint of reflection from the spinning rotors.
Police helo-drones, fast little ducted-rotor aircraft bristling with gun
pods.

The other Vector was coming up fast. Ko swerved to avoid another slow
mover and boldly cut across the path of the pursuing car. The corp
driver gunned his engine and followed him across the lanes, never once
losing a moment of concentration. The second Merc surged forward and
slammed into the rear of Ko’s car. He heard the rear bumper crack under
the impact, the deep hum of electric discharge.

Ko had the weapon pallet open already. He didn’t really like dropped
munitions—they always seemed a little unsporting to him—but this wasn’t
a situation he could be friendly about. Ignoring the fans of lasers
sweeping down the bridge toward him from the drones, he tap-tapped the
drop switch and let a cluster of poppers tumble from the rear
compartment as he pulled away. The size of tennis balls, the small
spheres bounced once-twice-three times to arm and then detonated in
loud, bright explosions. More a disorienting, less a destructive weapon,
poppers were designed to baffle a tailgater rather than kill them.

The second Vector skidded a little as one of the front tyres deflated;
but in the next moment the wheel was refilling itself and the Mercedes
made up the distance again. Ko swore under his breath. The driver of the
other car was now visible in the wing mirror. Was that guy wearing an
opera mask?

The Vector rammed him again and broke off the rest of the bumper and
number plate, grinding them to shards beneath the Merc’s wheels. Ko
flicked a glance up at the drones. The robot flyers were deploying taser
catapults, ready to fire electro-harpoons into the car’s hood to shock
the computer-controlled engine to death. One hit would turn the Vector
into an expensive roller skate and Ko would coast to a halt, sealed
inside a steel coffin until the APRC came to arrest him.

“I don’t think so.” Ko thumbed another switch and ignited the one-use
smokescreen canister in the boot. Instantly, a thick cloud of inky blue
haze coughed from the back of the Vector, fogging the highway.

The Monkey King made the little tutting noise again as the smoke
enveloped the car, and he tapped a control on the steering wheel. A
glimmer of light washed over the windscreen and suddenly the highway
ahead was rendered in computer-generated gridform, data feeding from the
hood’s radar sensors to the head-up display. He turned the Vector into
the fugitive car and rammed him a third time, pressing the arcing
electric probes into the exposed innards of the vehicle. The thief
swerved again and slammed on the brakes, dropping away past the driver’s
side. In the back seat Frankie saw a blur of silver vanish behind them;
then they emerged from the smoke cloud and into a glitter of red
targeting lasers.

The police drones lost the stolen vehicle just for a moment in the swath
of blue mist, the metallic particulates in the discharge baffling their
sensors. But traffic control had given them a target sillhoutte to look
for, and, when the shape of a sliver Mercedes Vector flying YLHI colours
presented itself, both the robots fired without hesitation. The first
harpoon went wide, clattering uselessly against the crash barrier; the
second struck the bonnet and locked, a combination of molecular glue and
magnetic coils holding it fast. The dense capacitor in the harpoon’s
head released a massive bolt of power into the engine and killed it
instantly. The Vector turned into an uncontrolled skid that rammed it
into a bridge stanchion. The car described a seven hundred and twenty
degree spin before coming to a shuddering halt in the nearside lane.

The drones started to bark pre-recorded phrases, ordering the people
inside to remain where they were and not attempt to leave their vehicle.
Neither unit spent any time scanning the other silver Mercedes Vector
that raced away past the stalled vehicle, the horn sounding three times
in a rude salute.

In the back seat of the dead car, Frankie Lam watched the other Vector
vanish toward the city and fought down the urge to laugh.

Rikio had an Ushanti sub-machinegun in his hand as Ko stepped out of the
sedan. “What the hell is this?” he demanded, waving the weapon around,
taking in the whole of the dockside warehouse around them with an
exasperated gesture.

“Reckon you might like it.” Ko showed teeth, keeping his tone fast and
light. He knew better than to underplay it when dealing with triads,
even low-level Red Poles like Rikio. “Mostly intact, bit of bumper
damage…”

“I’ll say,” said the gunman, craning his neck to look at the wounded
rear end. “Why’d you bring this trash here?”

“Trash?” Ko spat. “How many of these you get to see, Rik? It’s hot off
the highway, man. Hell, even if you chop-shop it, this sweet ride will
make you your bonus for the month—”

“Hot is right,” said the other man, letting his free hand wander through
his five-toned punch-perm. “Get this outta here. I don’t know you. I
ain’t seen you.”

All at once, Ko’s studied cool disintegrated in a jolt of anger. “The
fuck? What did you say to me?” He grabbed a handful of Rikio’s green
silk shirt and snarled at him, oblivious to the machinegun. “You just
cut me off ’cos you’re too chickenshit to take this?” In a flash, the
adrenaline rush and the latent anger he’d been nursing all day came
together in a single outburst. “We came up together, man! Now you act
like you don’t know me?”

“Back off.” Rikio pushed him away with the muzzle of the Ushanti.
“You’re not 14K, Ko. You could be, but you’re not. You’re a loner. That
means I don’t have to do you any favours—”