CAR WARRIORS. # 1
THE SQUARE DEAL
A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK NEW YORK
CHAPTER I
A
data line at the bottom of the monitor screen ran the specs of the rig whose feed I watched in the production room of K660, The Eyes of the Central Prairie Here in Mannheim. The turret on the trailer mounted a cal fifty coaxial with a seventy-five mike-mike recoilless. The long-nose tractor itself carried a rocket pod on each front fender. The rockets' fifty-pound warheads were guaranteed to discourage roadblocks real quick, especially since they were backed up by the 40mm automatic cannon in the turret on the cab roof.
The data crawl didn't tell me whether the cab turret was separately manned or if the forty was remotely controlled from either the back turret or the driver—who had his hands full already, State 149 not being a real featherbed of a road. Whichever, considering the rig's armor and considerable
weight of droppable weapons, there was no way in Hades the bike gang following a mile back could pose a serious threat.
So why were the dirtballs following?
"Brian?" called Ditsy Wallace from the editing bay, where she faced a bank of monitors showing arena footage. Flames and the quick twinkle of muzzle flashes reflected from the lustrous black of her long hair. "If you're going to hang around, you can at least be useful. Come here and help me choose clips for tomorrow morning's Sports Highlights."
Ditsy was my age, eighteen, but she seemed a lot older. It wasn't just her father's money, though there was that too. Big Ben Wallace owned K660, owned Wallace's Hardware, and the Mannheim Bank, and Security Warehouse—and a lot of the rest of Mannheim through bank loans, real estate, and personal property.
When you own everything a man has, you're likely to start thinking you own the man himself; and chances are, the man feels that way about it, too.
"Ditsy," I said, "I think you ought to take a look at this local feed. Something funny's going on."
"News?" she said. She was beside me in an instant, moving as quickly and gracefully as a cat pouncing. Ditsy could have been a prime duelist if she'd wanted to train for it, but the only thing that interested her was TV. She had her heart set on anchoring a major market. Knowing how good she was—and how driven—I figured she'd get there, and sooner rather than later.
Nobody was interested in what Brian Deal's heart was set on. If anybody'd asked me, though, I might have said, "On Ditsy Wallace."
"We're getting the feed from a solo," I said aloud, "but there's a pair of trucks five miles ahead."
I typed commands into the console, splitting the monitor screen. The camera in the rear turret continued to feed a view of the bike gang onto the right side of the screen, but the left half showed the fuzzy running lights of a distant rig as seen from the cab turret.
"There's a sedan, too, in between," I added. "The two rigs up front passed it a few miles back. It's gray, so it doesn't show up."
Ditsy frowned at the monitor. "There's just eight of the dirtballs?" she said.
"Maybe ten," I hedged. "But not enough to knock over a rig by themself."
"They must have a roadblock set up ahead," Ditsy said decisively. She cut on the monitor beside the one I was using. "Do we have a feed from the lead rigs?"
"Negative," I said, glad I'd already checked that. "They're Blaskie Express. But I don't see logrollers trying to bite off three rigs at a time, either. That's about as survivable as jumping on a live grenade."
K660 was willing to buy the video feed from any vehicle running within a hundred miles of the station. That was Ditsy's idea, giving some real backbone to the station's motto— The Eyes of the Central Prairie. The signals were bounced to a comsat and then downloaded through the microwave link on the station roof.
Mostly the feeds were crap: bad road, alkaline prairie, and a lot of cows—exactly what folks around here saw every time they looked out a window. Now and again there was a shootup that was worth airing for local interest, even if it didn't amount to a hill of beans compared to commercial footage the station could have run instead. People liked to see their own kin and neighbors, especially if the locals smoked some out-of-town tourist.
Gypsy truckers were glad to supply video. The access fee the station paid was nominal, and the use fee—in the rare instance the feed actually got on the air—wasn't a fortune either. On the other hand, it was a little something toward the costs of running a rig—and a lot of truckers didn't mind the thought of being famous either.
Most of the big firms took another line, though. They figured their jobs—and their profits—were in transporting freight. Anything that glamorized goons who dueled on the highways cost the Brotherhood money and lives. K660 got no videos from them.
In fact, Ditsy had had to buy an up-armored mobile unit for K66Q right after she started her local service. The previous vehicle, a brightly painted box with a cherrypicker camera crane on the roof and a mini-studio inside, had been swept off the road by a Blaskie Express rig whose tail gunner then put a short burst through the powerplant with his Gatling.
Nothing personal. Just a little warning about how the big firms felt regarding K660's new policy.
"Do we have audio?" Ditsy asked. She plugged her right-ear-only headset into the console next to mine and keyed a frequency search without taking her eyes off the monitor.
The rig feeding us began to accelerate, and it looked as though the leading pair had throttled back slightly. The truckers didn't know what was going on either. They'd decided to form a tighter convoy, hoping that would scrape the dirt off the heels of the last-in-line.
"There was just hash the last time I checked," I told Ditsy. "They're still fifty miles north of Mannheim, and the atmospherics aren't helping CB propagation tonight."
The sedan had slowed also, keeping a constant three miles or so behind the leading pair of rigs. Though it was growing in the cab-turret feed, the civilian's smoke-gray paint job blurred the smaller vehicle into the background.
I thought I saw a ruby glimmer from the tiny turret on the roof of the sedan. If I was right, the civilian had used a laser rangefinder to paint the rig which bore up behind him at an increasing rate of speed.
Ranging other traffic, especially ranging a heavily armed rig, was rarely a good idea and frequently a suicidal one. Under the circumstances, a civilian in a spitball special could be expected to do dumb things in panic when he found himself sandwiched between rigs squeezing closer. It just showed the poor sucker understood the situation.
Ditsy stopped fooling with the audio. She reached over to my keyboard and typed just the command I was afraid she would enter. The data line on the monitor switched from the rig's armament to its identification:
spike-k special #114. koko talbert/driver.
And that, so far as Ditsy was concerned, was all she wrote.
"Shut it off!" she snapped as she pulled her headset out of the console. She turned her back so abruptly that the ends of her long black hair popped as they swayed behind her.
"Ditsy, something's going on here—" I said.
She turned again. I'd seen her angry before; often enough at me, because I didn't come up to speed fast enough or didn't have the go-for-the-throat drive she demanded from herself and anybody she liked—
Because I was pretty sure she liked me regardless.
But I hadn't often seen her this angry before.
"Listen to me, Brian!" she said in a voice like glass breaking. "Stannard Kames and his Spike-K operation aren't news on this station. Do you understand? Not unless they all die and go to Hell, where they belong! Now, turn that off and come help me—or get out and don't come back!"
"I'm sorry, Ditsy," I said. "I should have told you."
But (not that I said it aloud) I was right. A handful of dirtball bikers chasing fully-armed rigs was weird, and weird meant news.
I knew why Ditsy was mad. I'd been there when it happened: when five Spike-K cowboys in light pickups decided to pay back Big Ben Wallace for some of K660's editorials.
I live with my mom on the west edge of town. Liberty Street's paved pretty much as far as our house, but from there on out it isn't maintained, except that once in a while Spike-K cowboys dumped gravel in the worst of the potholes.
That's all there was west of here: the Spike-K Ranch. Stannard Kames didn't like anybody around except folks he owned. Back when first we moved to Mannheim when I was five, there were still a few independent ranchers rounding up salable herds from the cattle running wild since the Collapse.
Not anymore. Some of the independents had moved away. Some went to work for the Spike-K; I heard that Stannard Kames treated his people pretty decent, so long as they remembered to treat him like God Almighty.
Some of the independents were too stiff-necked to run or bend. There's a lot of empty land hereabouts, and men are buried under more than one piece of it.
Kames had a regular little empire, which included his own trucks to carry much of the ranch's supplies and dressed meat. Still, the Spike-K needed Mannheim, and it stuck in Stannard Kames' craw that he couldn't own the town outright.
Because Big Ben Wallace already did.
I'd never say it to Ditsy, but the reason her dad and Stannard Kames hated each other so was that they were too much alike. Things smoldered on for a long while like a fire in a coal seam, not quite breaking the surface. Kames tightened his grip on the cattle business, while Big Ben Wallace bought up the town and loaned money to all the fenced-crop farmers between here and Welborn, north of the Interstate.
Then Big Ben started running editorials on K660, right in prime time, saying the only use for cowboys was fertilizer and even then they stank up the soil. I don't think he meant a whole lot by it—just a little prod at Stannard Kames, who didn't own a TV station to get back at him.
Three nights later, Big Ben walked out of the station as his chauffeured car pulled up in front to carry him home. Five Spike-K pickups passed, accelerating down State 149, and sprayed the car with yellow paint. The trucks were high- sprung off-roaders. Two of them bounced up on the sidewalk to make sure they got full coverage. They took off at full honk, into Mannheim proper and then west for home on Liberty Street.
What Big Ben should have done was go back inside the station, have his car cleaned—and maybe wait till he cooled down to decide whether or not he really wanted to push things farther with the Spike-K. Instead, he hopped into his car and screamed at his chauffeur to get after those scum-suckers now!
Big Ben could afford the best. He rode a gas-powered Grenadier luxury model with heavy armor and a pod of laser- guided missiles on a disappearing mount that didn't spoil the lines of his car. Because the mount wasn't deployed when the cowboys made their statement, the paint hadn't done it any harm. The shutter of the stabilized targeting laser was gummed shut, though.
The chauffeur had a palm-sized patch of clear windshield to see out of and he had to twist to use that, but he wasn't dumb enough to tell his boss they ought to sit tight. Big Ben raised the missile launcher and bent over the backup optical periscope built into the mount.
I was sitting in front of our house, wishing I was somewhere else and somebody else, when the pickups went by like sparrows chased by a hawk. When they hit the gravel, they raised a dust cloud better than any smokescreen, but I didn't guess it was going to help much. Big Ben's car was right behind them, already doing twice the pickups' best speed and still accelerating.
Big Ben fired as he came on. The backblast from the launcher was a yellow flash. The crack of each missile going supersonic was right on top of the dull whump of ignition— but before I heard any sound, the warhead had already raised a column of dirt well down the road ahead of the intended targets.
It's next to impossible to hit somebody at any range with an unstabilized weapon when both of you are bouncing over potholes. Besides, Big Ben was a businessman, not a duelist. Pretty quick, though, the car's superior speed was going to put its ram plate in the cowboys' back pockets. The Grenadier carried a reload pod for the launcher, and at point- blank range, the missiles would put paid to the jokers from the Spike-K.
One after another, the pickups went airborne. They were so close together that it looked like a circus act. One of the trucks got crossed up in the air. The driver managed to save it after all, though the fishtail when he landed back on the gravel looked like a bomb blast.
On their way in town, the ranch hands had removed the culvert where the road crossed a dry wash. Their light off- road vehicles hopped it safely. The heavy car behind them nosed into the far side of the gully and flipped end-for-end at least six times. Then the gas tank exploded, and the dust cloud didn't settle for half an hour.
Spectacular isn't the word. The wreck would have made national TV if there'd been anybody around to film it; but there was only me, thirteen-year-old Brian Deal, with my mom crying for me to get inside before a stray bullet blew my fool head off.
The Grenadier had first-rate crash protection. The airbag collapsed so the steering column impaled the chauffeur after the third or fourth impact, but Big Ben came through the whole business alive . . . only with a broken back, and no use of his legs ever again.
Big Ben Wallace had always hated Kames and the Spike-K Ranch. After the wreck, I think Ditsy hated them even more than her father did.
"Okay, Ditsy," I said with a last regretful glance toward the screen. "What d'ye want in particular for Sports Highlights?"
The studio phone rang before my hand reached the monitor's kill switch. I lunged for the handset, because I knew who it would be. Ditsy was closer and got to the phone first. The smile she gave me as she listened was hard and emotionless. "Yes, he's here, Mrs. Deal," she said. "I'll put him on."
Ditsy could have spit as she gave me the handset and it wouldn't have made me feel any lower.
"Mom, please!' I hissed into the phone. "I've told you not to call me here!"
"Brian, you know how I worry about you walking home so late at night," my mother said in that sad, calm tone that made me want to climb the walls. She'd never raised her voice to me, but whenever I did something wrong—and "wrong" the way Mom defined it was "anything that made it seem like Brian had a life of his own"—she sounded like I'd been whipping her with barbed wire.
"Mom, I'll be all right," I said, trying to pitch my voice low enough that Ditsy couldn't hear. She was facing the bank of arena images again, pretending she didn't know what was going on. "I've got my grenade launcher, and—"
"You're all I've got, Brian, ever since my John left me," Mom plowed on, following a script I must have heard once a week in the twelve years since my brother drove away from the house and disappeared. "It's not safe to walk at night, you know that, and my heart just freezes until I see you're home safe."
"Then let me buy a car, Mom!" I said. "I can afford one now with my job. Erculo would sell me a fix-up—"
"Oh, Brian," Mom moaned. "So that you can go off and leave me without so much as a call in twelve years like your brother John? Is that what you want?"
Sometimes, Mom, that's just what I want. Aloud I said, "Mom, I'm going to hang up, now. I'll be home soon. If you call back again tonight, I'll never come home again. I swear it."
I think I meant it. I could sleep the night in Erculo's shop, and the next morning there was bound to be a rig going somewhere with room in a blister for a kid with a lot of simulator experience although none of the real thing.
Mom heard something in my tone, anyhow, because she said, "You don't know how you hurt me when you act like this, Brian, darling," like she was heartbroken. But she hung up, and that was what I wanted as much as anything I could imagine right then.
I put the handset down. "I'm sorry, Ditsy—" I started to say.
She turned around sharply. "Yes, you're always sorry, aren't you, Brian?" she said. "Maybe someday you'll manage to be something instead of just being sorry, sorry, sorry!"
I don't know what I would have said then—maybe nothing, just picked up my grenade launcher and walked out the door. But that was when it happened on the monitor.
The bike gang was still a pattern of distant shadows on the right side of the split screen. They hadn't come any closer to the truck during the time I'd been on the phone with Mom.
On the left split, the leading rigs were within a mile and a half of the cab-turret camera. The gray sedan was only about 500 yards off the front bumper. I reached for the monitor switch again, thinking that the civilian car was going to have a rough time from the bikers unless it closed up tighter to the rigs than it'd done so far.
The sedan, its stabilized laser target probe painting the Spike-K rig, swapped ends in what looked like no more than its own length.
"Ditsy!" I shouted.
I'd never seen anything turn like that from highway speed. Even if the tires managed to grip—and they did—G-forces must have slammed back the driver as if he were in a centrifuge. The TV image of the smoke-gray sedan swelled for an instant as the cab gunner tried to sight on a vehicle he'd pretty much ignored for fear of the bikers and what they might be chasing the rig into.
He was too late.
There was an open gunport in the center of the sedan's nose. As the stubby gray vehicle swung to bear on the Spike-K rig, the port spewed a bottle-shaped flare: plasma, atoms stripped of their electrons by a jolt of electricity. The fluorescent, yellow-orange cloud hid the sedan momentarily.
For an instant, the trailer camera held a steady image of the bikers while the image from the cab bucked skyward. Then both cameras oscillated wildly as the rig jackknifed. Both halves of the screen blanked within a fraction of a second of one another.
I let out my breath slowly. Ditsy stood beside me, professionally interested again.
"Brian?" she asked. "Did you shut off the feed?"
"No," I said, "somebody else did. He fired one shot. And he took out a fully armored rig."
CHAPTER 2
T
he most unusual thing about the white sedan that drove past the crash site was just that: the driver slowed only enough to pass between the wreck and our tow truck across the road. Then he breezed on down State 149 toward Mannheim instead of rubbernecking like most folks, hoping to see blood.
There was plenty of blood if they knew where to look. The driver's body, the big pieces of it, was under a tarp waiting for a crew from the Spike-K ranch to pick up. I was the guy who was going to have to sponge out the cab, though, after Erculo and I towed the rig back to the shop.
The tail gunner was under the tarp also. She'd been killed cleanly in the crash, but a biker had worked her body over with a length of triple-row primary chain.
I thought about bike gangs in Erculo's simulator—neat electronic figures that flipped or exploded in the simulator's
sight picture. I'd never shot at anybody for real. I wanted to, now that I'd seen the woman's body.
"Gimme twenty inches of Fibrex, Erculo," I called from where I balanced over the hitch. The trailer lay on its side, while the tractor had landed top down in the yellowish alkaline soil, but they were still coupled. That was the first thing we had to take care of before we towed the two parts of the rig in separately.
Half a dozen cars pulled alongside the wreck, spinning up their motors out of gear. They had fins welded to the driveshaft housings on their undersides to amplify the rotary whine into a high-pitched squeal. I kept my back turned.
"Hey, Deadeye!" Jack Terry called from the lead car, with i'm bad painted across the hood. "Did you do this yerse'f?"
"Move along, Terry," boomed Lynx Feldshuh through the public address speaker in the front turret of his police van. "Now—or I unblock the road myself."
Strictly speaking, Lincoln Feldshuh was town marshal, so this stretch of highway was outside his jurisdiction. The Lynx wasn't the sort who spent a lot of time on legal niceties; and anyhow, just about the whole town of Mannheim was parked up and down 149, guessing about what had happened—and how.
"Sure, Marshal," Jack called over the nail-scraping whine of his car. "Just talking to my friend Deadeye here. I figure he's the only feller around could've made a kill like this, don't you?"
The hydraulic traverse of the police van's front turret purred. Jack got the message. He slammed i'm bad into gear and led his pack away to find parking off the road.
Jack Terry and his gang, the Pirates, were wannabes from
Mannheim and the farms east of here. Maybe I'd have been one if Mom had let me have a car, but I hope I wouldn't ever have been that stupid.
Their cars were junk. "Bolt-on specials," Erculo called them sneeringly, but they were worse than that. None of the gang could afford proper custom work. They bought bits and pieces from wrecks, then attached the parts to their cars with clamps, bad welds, and baling wire.
Jack had reaper blades bolted to the front fenders of i'm bad. He wasn't nearly as bad as he was dumb. He'd mounted a 20mm Gatling gun where the passenger seat had been so that it could fire out through a hole in the front grille.
Since the chassis came from a compact, a burst from so powerful a gun mounted off the centerline would throw the little car right off the road. Heck, a long burst would spin i'm bad like a top, though I didn't think the Gatling would get off more than a few rounds before jamming. The mount wasn't solid enough.
Jack had two machine guns firing through side ports in the back. Usually one of the younger Pirates or Jack's current girlfriend rode in a jumpseat to load them, but the firing switch was on the steering wheel. I'd seen him plenty times outside of town, cutting brodies and spraying the landscape with the machine guns.
The other five cars were pretty much the same—or worse. Billy Bristow had managed to sling an ancient 105mm recoil- less rifle under the jacked-up chassis of a mid-size. I know he'd never tried to fire the big gun, because the backblast of the recoilless rifle would have blown the whole rear end of his car a hundred yards down the road.
Billy had tried to make a deflector baffle out of sheet metal, but anybody with half a brain could see it was inadequate. The vents required to make a recoilless rifle work on a vehicle double the weight of the installation and slow the rate of fire way down, because of the extra metal that has to be swung out of the way in order to load. Billy's gun was pure brag, but he and his little brother Ben rode their dragon wagon like they were real kings of the hill.
Weapons were sexy, so Terry and the Pirates had guns and drop-packages attached to every corner of their cars. Their armor was a hodgepodge, bolted on in chunks. Some of it was pretty heavy, taken from tractor cabs and the plating of wrecked luxury cars, but t...
allforjesus2001