"You have lost me again."
"Then listen, slot it! Granny comes along in the perfect vehicle for our purposes. Now, it doesn't matter that she hadn't been doing anything wrong, that she'd led an innocent life. We needed this truck, right?"
Lethe chuckled again. "Well, at least I am still following you."
Burnout slowed to take a long, winding curve, then punched it in the short straight-away. "Now suppose we left Granny alive. What's the first thing she's going to do when the next car comes by?"
Lethe's voice took on the cautious tone Burnout had noticed him using whenever he was beginning to fall behind Burnout's logic. "She would signal the car to pick her up?"
Burnout laughed. "Fragging right. And when that car stopped, what's the next thing she would have done?"
"I think I begin to see your reasoning. She would have notified the authorities of our activities."
"Score one for the spirit. I think you're getting it. You see, even if she hadn't been a smuggler, I'd still have had to geek her to keep Mercury from picking up our trail."
Another long pause. "That is, of course, where your reasoning goes astray."
Burnout grunted and slowed the Bison to maneuver around some deep potholes. "Astray? And what do you mean? My logic is rock-solid. I had to do what I had to do."
"Maybe I'm being a bit presumptive, and forgive me if I've not followed everything exactly, but if she was a smuggler, then…"
Burnout's supply of patience finally dried up. "Then what? Spit it out!'"
"If the woman was a smuggler, then, if I judge things correctly, the last people she would want to contact would be the authorities. So, by your reasoning, you could have left her alive and in no way jeopardized your agenda."
Burnout sat in the howling wind, realization drifting into his mind. He nearly missed the tight arc in the road way. He fought the Bison back into the curve, hearing the sound of branches snapping as the big tires caught and shredded some of the shrubs in the ditch.
In the long moments that followed, Burnout replayed everything in his mind. The squeal of the Bison's tires as it screeched to a halt in front of him, the stench of burned rubber and tar. The woman's shout, the feel of the door rending under his chrome fingers, the sight of the Predator as she pulled it from beneath the seat, and finally the sound of her neck snapping, dull and wet, her body going limp under him.
Now, Burnout had regained control of the big truck. He spoke in a soft voice, barely audible under the roar of the wind whipping in the open door. A normal person couldn't have heard him say, "You know, I hate it when you do that."
Lethe's voice was contrite. "My apologies. I did not mean to anger you. It is simply that I dislike death in all forms, and unnecessary death-"
"I've heard the speech. Frag, I hate this."
"Again, I apologize."
They came to a long stretch of straight road, just as the sun started to poke its head over the top of the eastern range. Burnout floored the accelerator, causing the big rig to jump forward like a live thing. "Well, I don't. I don't think I was wrong to nix her, even knowing that I could have left her alive. Even if she was a smuggler, Ryan has a pretty long arm. It might have taken him a bit longer, but he still would have found out what happened. But that's not the point, I guess. The point is that I made a split-second decision. When she pulled the Predator, I had two choices."
"Yes," Lethe said. "You have made your reasons clear. Even though, in hindsight, they may not have been as sound as you would have liked them to be, I understand that you did not make your decision lightly. I underestimated you, and you deserve better. Please accept, the apology."
A feeling ran through Burnout then, something he hadn't felt in years. In all his previous time under Slaver's command, he'd been treated as nothing more than a killing machine. Something to be pointed at the enemy and let go, and when there was no enemy present, Slaver had treated him as if he didn't exist, as if he was less than nothing.
He recognized the feeling. Respect. It felt better than any killing rush, or drug high. It was almost intoxicating.
He smiled. "Apology accepted."
They traveled for another twenty minutes in silence, because the road had deteriorated to such a level it took every ounce of Burnout's skill just to maintain speed.
Finally, Burnout's GPS indicated that this was the spot, and he pulled the Bison to the edge of the road.
In the early sunlight, a wide glen stretched off to either side of the highway. To his right, Burnout could see the charred remains of an old church in a far corner of the field. Across the narrow dirt road, an even older log cabin slumped toward the ground, years of neglect having finally taken their toll.
"This is it," said Burnout.
"This is what?"
"This is where the turn-off is supposed to be. That burnt building was still a little white church when I was a kid. The Kodiak once told me that old cabin belonged to his great-grandfather, way back before the Awakening."
Burnout turned his head to the left, and let the Bison roll slowly forward. "The old mail route used to be right here." On the left of the vehicle, there was nothing but dry, yellow wheat grass, stretching up to the tree line.
"There!" Burnout pointed to a break in the trees, which had been invisible from any angle but dead on. He turned the truck off the highway and coaxed it over the grassland. As they entered the forest, the overgrown road could only be made out as two separate ruts, too narrow for the Bison's big tires.
Burnout pushed the speed up as high as he dared, and for the next hour, they climbed. Higher and higher, taking switchbacks with deft, fishtail cranks of the wheel. The air grew thinner, and the soft breeze pushing in the doorway grew warmer as the sun heated up the afternoon.
The road, which had started out as a minimal thing, turned slowly worse, until even the Bison couldn't navigate the narrow, slippery track anymore. Finally, Burnout halted the vehicle.
"This is as far as the boat will go," he said as he shut off the engine. Actually he was surprised that they had made it this far up into the Montana Rocky Mountains. In the early morning sunlight, he could see the majestic, jagged rock face of Swan Mountain off to his right, and above, the rounded, pine-covered dome of Pony Mountain loomed. The scent of honeysuckle and huckleberries filled the air as a starling broke from cover and shot into the sky.
Burnout collected what remained of his gear. In the rear storage compartment, he found extra rounds for the twin Predators he now carried. Something about the rear space seemed wrong to him, the dimensions off by almost a meter.
He leaned forward, grabbed the carpeting off the rear wall of the compartment, and found the locked, hidden compartment. One swing of his fist and the heavy lock shattered.
Hundreds of BTL chips flew everywhere. Better-Than-Life were highly addictive simsense chips with sensory limits well beyond legal. Harder than drugs, and more addictive, these silicon babies burned users out, and many of them died.
Burnout shook his head. "Told you she was low-life. Now are you happy?"
"Luck."
It was a simple word, but it lodged deep inside Burnout's psyche and refused to be pushed away. He didn't respond, trying to concentrate on the tasks at hand. He shut the rear compartment, stuffed the extra clips into the duster's pockets. Checked the Heart to make sure it was secure at his side, then strode into the brush.
They climbed fast, Burnout's legs pistoning, his hands snatching for a hold on anything. Rocks and trees flashed by as he moved, his entire focus bent on covering ground. He disregarded the path they crossed after about ten minutes of climbing. "That's the way I went when I was a child. I'm pleased to see it's still in good shape, that means the Kodiak has been using it regularly."