The door opened more easily than Angel had expected it to. The kick that forced open the door of the bus shot her out over the neighboring lane. As she was in the air in the middle of the lane, she heard the screech of brakes and the sound of a deep-throated truck horn as the biggest cargo hauler Angel had ever seen bore down on her.
Cougar, back in the bus, fired in her direction. Angel could barely hear the shots over the sound of the truck closing on her. The bus door swung shut again and its window exploded outward with Cougar’s gunfire.
Adrenaline shot a spike into her skull and the pulse rushing in her ears competed with the truck horn in volume. She spent an eternity hovering over the asphalt, and she was afraid that the truck’s sloping chrome bumper was going to splat her before she even touched the ground.
Even as the thought crossed her mind, her shoulder slammed into the concrete. She pumped with her legs and rolled. The truck was so close she could smell the grease on the transformers. She rolled out of the way as fast as she could, not looking at the truck. She didn’t want to know how close it was.
She felt a breeze, smelled melting rubber, and heard the scream of a half-dozen locked disc brakes right next to her. She didn’t have to open her eyes to feel the mass of the truck’s cab shooting by her. She rolled once more, away from the truck, and made it to her feet.
Angel finally saw where she was when she got to her feet and began running.
She was bolting along the breakdown lane of the Golden Gate Bridge Freeway, maybe a hundred meters from the toll booths. Between her and the bus were three trailers’ worth of Biosphere Products’ algae derivatives. The tankers had come to a halt next to her, giving her some cover.
The sound of more gunfire behind her encouraged Angel to run even faster.
Fight-or-flight had kicked in big-time. Every cell in her body was screaming for her to get out of there. Her breath felt like a blast furnace in her throat. The world seemed cloaked in a bloody haze, but her senses seemed to be honed to a monomolecular edge.
Her body ran on autopilot while her conscious mind grappled with how she was supposed to get out of this. Where the hell could she go? In a few seconds one of those moreaus was going to round the end of this algae tanker.
Not even one second.
Angel heard Cougar pounce out behind her before the cat started shooting. Angel dived between the two trailing tankers as the machine pistol started barking. The shots missed her, but a few of them punched into the tanker she hid behind. There was a gurgling sound, and a sour vegetable odor began to permeate the area. Below the joint she was straddling, a pool of blackish-green ooze began to spread.
She only had a few seconds before the cat was on her. Angel bolted up the ladder to the top of the tanker.
She pulled herself on top of the tanker just in time to avoid another round of fire in her direction. There was the sound of more bullets clunking home and an even thicker algae smell this time. The adrenaline spike in her head rang with a supersonic thrum. The taste of copper in her mouth throbbed in time to her pulse. Her nose was on fire from her own breath.
She reached the opposite end of the tanker in two jumps, vaulting three hatches.
The shots were getting closer, and they were coming from more than one direction now. Below her, the tanker was bleeding algae like an alien behemoth.
At the end of the tanker she had a split-second decision to make. Behind her, Cougar was following her up, and she saw Lupus heading for the side of the first tanker. Instead of jumping to the next tanker and trapping herself, she jumped across—
To the roof of the bus.
In the air, she was already trying to think of where to go from there.
She landed on the bus, and the moreys inside started shooting. Gunfire began slicing through the roof toward her. She ran down the length of the bus, bullet holes erupting in her path. She reached the front of the bus and leaped, blind, into the next lane.
She landed, badly, on a slow-moving Dodge Electroline van. She had to grab an antenna to keep from rolling off the front, especially when the remote-driven program laid on the brakes.
Angel could see the toll area now. It was obvious that the folks down there knew something was up. Northbound traffic had all but ceased, and she could see a patrol car, flashers going, rolling down the breakdown lane toward them.
She had sat still too long. A bullet planted itself into the van’s roof perilously close to her head. The Electroline began rhythmically sounding its horn as its antitheft alarm went off. It sounded like a wounded animal.
She leapfrogged two stationary cars until she had reached the median. Southbound traffic was still moving. She sat as long as she dared, and then she jumped across the median toward a mid-sized automated delivery truck. The truck was a moving target, and she needed to avoid the collision sensors in the front and the rear.
She misjudged the height and hit the side of the trailer, broadside. She’d missed the collision detectors—the truck was still moving—but she barely had a grip on the top of the truck.
Holes started blowing in the side of the trailer, all around her.
Even when hyped up for combat, one of the lepus deficiencies was pitiful upper body strength. She pulled as hard as she could, but her arms weren’t strong enough to pull her up the sheer side of the trailer.
Panic spread through her like a fever as more bullets slammed into the side of the trailer. She began kicking like mad, desperately searching for some purchase on the smooth side of the truck.
Her right toe found something and she thrust herself up. Even as the jagged edge sliced into her foot, she knew that she had found a large bullet hole.
The push landed her half on the top of the thing, her ass hanging out over the side. She had to scramble like mad to get a foothold before her grip slipped. Her feet slid around in a smear of blood before she anchored herself on top of the trailer.
Even as she fought like mad to avoid becoming street-pizza, she had the satisfaction of seeing the two moreys on top of the tanker beat a retreat from the advancing patrol car.
She managed to hang on until it made the off-ramp.
• • •
When it came right down to it, the way things were going, she should have expected the scene that greeted her. The autocab wove its way through Chinatown but never made it to the address she gave it because Post Street was roadblocked above Grant.
Cops were out in force, as were at least twice as many unmarked sedans. Suited men in sunglasses spoke into small radios and sported stubby—but nasty-looking—automatic weapons. Two utility vans were parked behind this forest of lawful authority, right in front of that post-modern chromed-Asian monstrosity that Kaji Tetsami called home.
The cab idled and waited for her to punch in an alternate destination.
She stood on the seat and watched Mr. K’s quasi-legal organization collapse. She watched it for close to ten minutes. It was overwhelming. Suited agents came and went from the building. A few remained stationed next to the utility people. Some sort of argument was going on over there. One of the utility people was gesturing violently, waving a clipboard computer for emphasis.
The other utility people got out the sawhorses and the little flashing yellow lights and sectioned off an area in the middle of the intersection of Post and Kearny. When they got out the jackhammer, Angel could figure out what they were doing and decided she didn’t want to see any more.
She told the autocab to take her to the nearest available hotel. Since this was San Francisco, that only took half a minute. Most of that was the cab backing and turning around the mini traffic jam the roadblocks had caused.
Not caring much about carrying cash, or computer records, or much of anything else, she stopped at a bank kiosk and downloaded two grand of Byron’s money. The desk at the Chancellor was run by a human, not a computer, and the man had enough reserve not to blink much when she demanded to pay cash for one room for one night. It didn’t really matter much to Angel that the hotel was going to have a hard time forgetting her. All the subterfuge was getting to be a little too much for her.
When they handed her a stylus and requested she sign the electronic register, she signed it, “John Smith.”
She got to the room, locked the door, and collapsed on the bed.
“May you rot in Hell, Byron.”
Mr. K, her only ally in this, had just gone under, leaving her very much alone.
Angel stayed in bed a long time, staring at the ceiling and shaking. She was exhausted, but she was too keyed up to relax. She let her mind run around in circles. It was noon before she felt calm enough to do a few of the things she needed to do.
The first thing she did was call DeGarmo, the lawyer. Of course he wasn’t at the office on Sunday, but he’d done her the service of putting her on his comm’s short list of calls that could be forwarded.
His home comm barely buzzed once. “Miss Lopez, Angel—are you all right?”
Angel laughed because there was no other socially acceptable way to react to the question. “I’m alive.”
“The police—”
“—are looking for me, right?”
DeGarmo nodded. “A Detective White, in particular.”
“Well, hold off telling them where I am for a while—”
“I’ll respect that, but I have to advise you—”
“Skip the advice, I need you to do a few things for me.”
“Like?”
Angel felt a strange sense of finality. She hesitated a few seconds before she spoke. “Byron’s ashes—” She sucked in a breath.
“Yes? I have them, I’ve been waiting for—”
“You handle the arrangements. Dump them, bury them. I don’t care. Just invite all those other heirs of his.”
“Are you sure?”
Angel closed her eyes and nodded. “I don’t want any part of it.”
“Is that it?”
“No, my roommate—her name’s Lei Nuygen—is in St. Luke’s Veterinary Hospital. I want you to take care of her medical expenses. Surgery, medicine, rehabilitation, all of it.”
He nodded again.
“Last, I need you to transfer my money—” Angel brought out the black ramcard Tetsami had given her. “It’s a bank in Zurich . . .”
After she had talked to DeGarmo, she called Frisco International and reserved a seat on the midnight ballistic to Toronto. Toronto was a nice place since it was out of the country and she could swing it without a passport. In Toronto she figured she had enough grease to pull out some sort of ID arrangement, legal or not, that could get her a lot farther.
She had committed herself. She was getting the hell out.
She pulled out her tickets and looked at them. The game with Denver was in three hours. She had box seats near the fifty yard line. She wondered if it was a good idea to go. She could try and lay low until the flight. But she knew that if she didn’t ditch Byron’s data, she’d be looking over her shoulder all the time. If she was lucky, everyone would still think she had the only copy—after Mr. K’s organization collapsed she just might—and once she handed it off, no one would have a reason to hound her.
Or at least no reason to hound her to another continent.
If she didn’t give up the data, she’d be crazy or dead long before the election.
• • •
At three, another autocab dropped her off at Hunter’s Point Boulevard. It wasn’t because she wanted to walk a few kilometers to the stadium, but because of the godawful traffic that was clogging the whole Bayview area.
She walked along the side of the road and looked at the cars. Kilometers worth of road were lined with moreaus packed into vans, pickups, and old Latin American land-yachts. One babyshit brown pickup with particleboard walls on the bed must have been carrying at least a dozen rodents. The smell of alcohol was as thick as the smell of excitement. The Earthquakes’ white and blue thunderbolt logo was flying on flags, plastered on cars, on windows—she even saw one jaguar who’d dyed the fur on his chest.
There was the normal whooping, calling, and carrying on. Like every big game.
But it wasn’t like every big game.
As she walked along the side of the traffic jam, making better time than the cars, she could see signs of the tension that was hanging just below the revelry. It wasn’t just the fact that the fans were louder and more raucous than usual. More than once she heard something break in the distance. Quite a few things were getting tossed on the sidewalk—empty drink bulbs, toilet paper, food, clothing, and, in one case she saw, even a passenger.
It wasn’t just that there were twice as many cops directing traffic as there’d be for a regular game, or that, while the cops on the street were normally attired, the ones in the idling patrol cars wore full riot gear. It wasn’t just the two SWAT vans she saw.
It wasn’t the dozen or so newsvid aircars that hovered over Hunter’s Point like locusts over a field of grain.
The clearest sign that something different and very wrong was going on was with the pink fans. Nonhuman football had as many human fans as moreys, and it was human money that really supported it. Maybe half the take at the Hunterdome gate was normally from the human spectators.
In the mile of traffic she walked by on her way to the Hunterdome, she saw three human-occupied cars. In each case, there was no reveling fan inside. Each human driver had locked the doors and sealed up his vehicle like a tank going into a war zone.
On each driver’s face was an expression that said, “This is not a good idea.”
If anything, the proportion of human fans decreased as she approached the Hunterdome. The dome itself looked like the upper third of a gloss-black bowling ball. Angel approached it as just another one of the thousands of fur-bearing people who were clogging the parking lot.
A half-hour before game time, just as she was nearing the gate, the surface of the dome activated. Predictably, it was for a beer commercial. Outside, the dome was a giant display ad, inside it was the single biggest holo screen on the West Coast.
She entered the gate as, above her, a twenty-meter-tall tiger was kicking back some brew bigger than she was.
For a half second she almost panicked when her card was passed through the meter. After all the fiddling that had been done to it, would it read properly? Would the reader fuck with the data that everyone was knocking themselves out to get?
It was only a moment, though, and then the young canine who read the ticket directed her up and to the left.
She passed a refreshment stand—the lines were long enough so the people near the end would probably miss the whole first quarter. She decided not to get something to eat. The air was ripe with hot dog, and cooking meat made her queasy.
Despite the crowd, when she broke out into the stands, she could tell that it wasn’t going to be a sellout. She could see it in the stands as she made her way down to the fifty yard line. Way too many empty seats for this important a game. She had a feeling that each empty seat represented a human season ticket holder.
So, she was in shock when she got down to her seat and found a human sitting in it. A human she knew.
For a second time that week she asked Detective Kobe Anaka, “What the fuck are you doing here?”