Red Shift: The Odds (Censored version) Read online

Chapter 8

  As he pulled out of the access ramp and onto the private road, the lack of lights was apparent. Dammit, Jack thought to himself, I have no idea where the hell I am. Well, I guess I went down the rabbit hole, got shafted by the hatter, and copped a gob of Wing’Tan jizz while I was there. His thoughts were interrupted by Ping’s voice.

  “Yo, rise and shine cowboy. Time for a shake-down of your kit. First, don’t think about bad things too hard, your helmet is connected to our Alias Neural Network, when you use the controls the system will learn your brainwaves and other physical reactions to the inputs. As it does, it will start to anticipate your actions, and in time, you won’t need to use most of the controls.”

  “So this bike is going into my brain?”

  “Nope, it’s already there, we took a scan while you were messed up in surgery and got to work assimilating. Another few days and you’ll be more hooked up than the Lawnmower Man.”

  “Who the hell is the Lawnmower Man?”

  “C’mon chief, you never saw The Lawnmower Man? One of the greatest movies of the 1990s. Jobe was the main character, dumb bugger that got jacked into a VR programme by a scientist to help him. He became crazy smart and messed up half the town using his thoughts alone.”

  “How quaint. So I’m the dumb bugger. Teach me, oh great one.”

  “Love to. So in front of you is a holo-display with a menu to the right. You can see that when the bike is going, even if you lose the helmet. You have options for GPS, bike stats, HALO, armoury, which by the way we’re going to add to soon.” Ping gave a chuckle of self-approval.

  “So I just tap away to see the stats on my visor right?”

  “Yeah, and if you don’t have your helmet, it will show up on an enlarged holo-display on the wind shield, but won’t be as effective.”

  “Time to open her up and see what we can do.”

  “I’ve uploaded your GPS co-ordinates. We need you to grab a chip and deliver it to a politician on the other side of town.”

  “What, we’re working for The Man now?”

  “No idea Kimusabe, didn’t ask, value my life too much. Know what I mean?”

  “Yeah, I get it, grab the chip and drop it off, shut up and come back.”

  “Hole in one, son. Last thing: The guy that has the chip doesn’t exactly know we’re taking it, so you’ll have to get in and out quick, and don’t make a mess of it. The chip will be in his car, where the Live-locator GPS would normally be under the front bumper. Co-ords up on your GPS now, see you soon.”

  Jack looked down to activate the GPS, but as he was about to hit the button the GPS came up before he took his hand off the handle. “TLM is catching on fast, little man.”

  “TLM? What are you talking about?”

  “The Lawnmower Man, my second brain. Who’s the dumb-arse now?” Jack let out a laugh, and Ping followed suit.

  As Jack loaded HALO, he dropped it down a gear and opened the throttle. The acceleration was instantaneous and hard, damn hard. As he watched the tach go through fifteen thousand rpm, he kicked to third; a few seconds later it was hitting redline again. Kicking into fourth, he was already moving at 250 kilometres an hour and didn’t look like slowing. He could see the nose expanding, and didn’t feel like the bike was in any sort of trouble. In fact, it felt like he was doing little over a hundred.

  Coming to a twenty kilometre straight, so says HALO, he took the chance to look around. The countryside was almost barren. Scatterings of rocks and the odd cactus with hills either side reaching up to the top of what was a deep canyon. He could see the odd red or blue flash near the side of the road, animals he figured, but nothing showed up on HALO.

  Nearing the end of the straight, a warning flash came up stating “right corner ten seconds” in an iridescent red glow at the top of his visor. As he eased off the throttle, the bike slowed to around 180 kilometres per hour which was way too fast to take the turn. He dropped it down two gears, leaned hard and prepared for the bike to slide out. It didn’t, but the g-force of the slingshot-like turn almost made Jack pass out.

  “Holy crap! How did I not wind up coyote cuisine at that corner? That was nuts.”

  Ping got on the radio. ”Your tires are a polymer that has nano-tech particles integrated. As the tire heats up and deforms from the pressure of loading-up on extreme cornering, the nanites redistribute the mass within the tire, increasing the traction surface.”

  “What the heck? Monkey boy. Remember?”

  “Yeah, so the faster you corner the more the tire spreads out to take to load. To a point. We reckon you can take corners at around ten g’s, but you’d probably pass out first. Fifteen kilometres from target, radio out.”

  As Jack came over the brow of the hill, the lights of the settlement glowed up like a million fireflies. He let HALO show the way. The satellite overlay of the property now to the right of his vision showed two access points. With live satellite imaging, he could see there were two cars out front, and no one at the gate. The simplest solution seemed to be ride up, roll under and grab the chip, saddle up and get out of dodge.

  As he rode past the first entrance he could see there were three men standing under the eaves of the Porte-Cochere. They weren’t up on the Sat, so they must have signal jamming over the property. Things just got a whole lot harder.

  “Ping, we got an issue, they‘ve got signal jammers, guards, and god knows what else up there. Plan A just went to liquid crap.”

  “What did you expect rookie, a walk in the park? You didn’t get a few million credit of hardware and a gold-pass to Wing’Tan membership to smell daisies and screw models. I’ll work on what I can from here, but to be honest, these guys have some serious hardware by the look of the signals I’m getting bounced. I’m not gonna snoop too much or they’ll be aware.”

  “Right, thanks for three-fifths of bugger all. You sure I can’t blow through the main road and take them out?”

  “Boss says quiet. They can’t know what you’ve taken until at least nine am tomorrow morning. Don’t ask, I didn’t.”

  Jack pulled up about a kilometre past the house and hid the bike behind some scrub off the side of the road. Looking out he could see lights of the twin cities from his elevated position. He didn’t really have his bearings yet, too much going through his brain. He grabbed his kit bag the team had given him and had a rummage through. There were laser-ranging binos, two modified Tasers, one had the old bio-hazard logo on the side, so he figured he’d keep that one turned off unless things got serious. There was a sheathed ten centimetre blade, a coil of titanium rope with a retractable pick and a Glock impulse pistol.

  The north boundary of the property was bordered with a three metre high stone wall. It offered the most cover as it was away from the access road and had no lighting nearby. Walking along the verge between the road to his right, and the cliff on his left, he couldn’t hear or see anything untoward. Every thirty seconds or so he would stop, wait, listen, then move on.

  There were a few old pine trees in fairly close proximity to the wall, but it wasn’t until he was almost under them that he realised a few branches were overhanging the wall. He awkwardly climbed the tree nearest the cliff, having no torch on made it harder, but he didn’t want to alert his presence.

  Sitting on a branch about the same height as the top of the wall, he could see into the property clearly now. There was a small building about three metres from the wall and slightly to his left, which would provide good cover. Beyond that there was a large lawn with no cover of note for thirty metres. Beyond that and to the left was the main house. It was a three storey Georgian style house with uplights washing the marble clad walls. The garage was adjacent with a Porte-Cochere linking the two buildings, as he had seen on his Sat image.

  Although the front lawn was open, it was the preferred path. It appeared that the living and entertaining areas opened out to the space facing the cliff, and the view of
course. From where he was sitting, Jack couldn’t see anyone outside the parked cars now. He waited, and a minute later two men appeared, loitered for a moment, and then walked off again. Jack noted this occurred every four minutes; they must be on a regular patrol. This was both good and bad. Good because he knew his window of time, bad because both men had the gait of ex-military, and each of them had twenty kilos on him, all muscle.

  Going through his plan in his head for the next ten minutes, he noticed a glint out of the right corner of his vision. Looking closer he could see it was a field-motion sensor. Getting the binos out, he noted it was a “drum thumper”, what the boys in the Force named their proximity sensors. They emitted a hyper-sonic wave on trigger that blew the eardrums of anyone within ten metres, and rendered them unconscious.

  “Ping, I got a problem. This place has ex-mil guards, and a bitch of a perimeter security system. We need a plan.”

  “What are you dealing with?”

  “Regular patrol, hyper-sonic sensors, and possibly an auto-targeting impulse weapon I just picked.”

  “Oh, so not much then,” he coughed, and Jack could almost hear him smiling. “Right, well I can try to get around their security and disable it temporarily, but they will know within thirty seconds and be looking for you.”

  “That ain’t gonna work —” Before he could finish a Sling Shot whipped past. Looking down the cliff, Jack could see an airfield.

  “New plan Ping, there’s an airfield below. Find a drone there, take control, and crash it into the transformer I saw at the south end of the property by the road. Even if they have back-up generation, it will take a few minutes to get online, and a few more for the security to be up. In the meantime while they’re checking out the commotion down there, I’ll be in and out at this end of the property.”

  Jack sat waiting, checked he had no loose clothing, the pack was closed and belted tight, and crawled out to the end of the branch, and waited. Looking down he could see there was nothing to land on but lawn about four metres below. It was going to be a rough landing. He started going through the drills he was trained on so long ago, how to fall, break, roll, and spread the energy. Going through the muscle flexes, he was interrupted by a high pitch whirring to his left and below.

  “Yo, Jack, I’ve got a Raven!” Ping was more excited than a fat kid eating candy. “No idea why there was a Mil Drone there, but this thing is a blast!”

  Jack saw the drone sweep past the property beyond the cliff, rolling and flicking at angles that would cause anything without Gen3 ion-plasma tech to lose lift instantly. Creating an acrobatic display in front of the house aroused the attention of what looked like everyone at the house. Not waiting to see what Ping would do next, Jack jumped down.

  He hit the ground hard, but rolled away and behind the shed without setting off any sensors. A few seconds later, there was a large explosion at the far end of the property, and the area plunged into darkness. Without hesitating, Jack sprinted across the lawn as fast as he could, and slid under the front of the vehicle. With his chest pumping, he tried to control his hands enough to get out his knife to cut out the locator box. Ten seconds later he was rolling out from under the truck with the box in his pocket, and made a run for the shed again.

  As he rolled around the corner, he heard the noise of people running down the lawn. His heart pumping and his vision switching, he could only see red bodies moving, no one coming towards him. Grabbing his rope out, he flicked it at the tree. A split second later the piton expanded and a jet of gas accelerated the unit deep into the trunk. Jack scaled the wall and swung over without looking back.

  As he walked back down the edge of the road, he could see the commotion 400 metres back. There were flashing lights, and the property had power again. There were no vehicles moving his way, so he figured they either picked it for an accident, or hadn’t thought about espionage yet.

  “Jack, you there?” Ping’s voice came over the helmet comm loud and clear.

  “All clear, I have the package, and I’m en-route back to the hangar. See you in thirty minutes.”

  “OK, just so you know, everything you’ve done in the last two hours has been monitored, tracked, and analysed.”

  “Right, leash up my arse treatment, huh?”

  “Something like that. Good work.”

  Jack pushed the bike out onto the road and started up. He didn’t need an ignition starter key, as he thought about starting the bike it went through the start sequence automatically. He rolled out slowly so as not to raise attention, and rode without the lights on using HALO. Winding down the long open roads, he could see the coast moving away from his right, and the large expanse of the twin cities looming.

  He knew where the cities were, and finally had his orientation. It was a remarkable sight at night, the original city of Sydney near the coast on his right sprawled out along a large area of now mainly barren land. It was connected via what looked like a series of cables, being freeways, running inland to the new city, which was built on the slightly elevated ground seventy kilometres inland, past what used to be Penrith.

  The drought may have stopped fresh water allowing the original city to expand, but it didn’t stop the sea level rising and compromising large swathes of land. The so-called “experts” predicted that the patchy looking coast city would be all but dysfunctional in another fifty years. Already there were suburbs nick-named “Little Venice”, “Bigger Venice”, “The Swamp”, and so-on. It was for the most part a piece of history, a living museum soon to be taken by the earth it was built upon.

  Sweeping around the base of the hills, the road spread into a large freeway with satellite feeders coming in. It was late, and there wasn’t a lot of traffic, so Jack opened her up. He quickly flicked through the first few gears, and realised the gear shifter felt more like a switch not a mechanical lever. Before the next change, he thought about making the kick as he felt the revs going over twelve thousand. The bike responded and changed up accordingly, before he got a chance to move his foot.

  “Bugger me, all I have to do is sit here and enjoy the ride!”

  As he clicked over two hundred, there was a fifteen kilometre stretch ahead. He dropped it down and tucked in, focussing on the road ahead, he twisted his right hand hard back and gripped with his thighs. The bike went through 250, changed up, redline again at 310, change up, winding through to 390 kilometres per hour he glanced at the nose which was now over a metre in front.

  HALO showed clear road for another seven kilometres, no potential collisions. Keeping focussed the bike kicked up again onto the top gear, and nearing 450 kilometres per hour. The road was now irrelevant, the nearing interchange was less than three kilometres away, or half a minute at his current speed. All around the horizon in front was appearing a bright blue, and from his peripheral the background a deep red.

  Jack eased off the throttle and went through the thought process of decelerating and keeping on a straight line. He felt the handles rigid, but the front wheel was flickering ever so slightly. The on-board systems had taken control of maintaining a safe trajectory while the front end loaded up under the heavy G-forces that were coming in.

  At a mere 180 kilometres per hour, Jack swung off the freeway, following the GPS onto a side road that headed inland away from the cities. Fifteen minutes later he was coming to the entrance of the property, no gate, no sign, nothing of note. His helmet was recording the dozens of sensors and signals checking his authenticity, each giving a tick to the right of his vision. Jack pulled into the hangar to see Seek and Trina waiting with grim looks on their faces.