James Swallow: Jade Dragon

A thought formed in Frankie s mind. “My bag… Where’s my carry-on bag from the plane?”

Ping looked at the floor. “In, uh, in the car.” He pointed in the general direction of the road.

“Don’t worry,” said Alice. “The moment the vehicle was stolen, the contents of your personal computer were nashloaded to our central server and then the machine was wiped. Your company phone was also automatically severed from our internal network.”

“That’s not what I was thinking.” He extended his hand to her. “May I?”

The woman gave him a dubious look, but passed him the vu-phone all the same. Without really being sure of what motivated him, Frankie hesitated with his finger over the keypad, trying to remember his own number.

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?”