Jailbreak
Each second, twelve thousand cubic meters of water smashed headlong through a bottleneck thirty-five meters wide. They hadn't called it Hell's Gate for nothing.
Generations had come to this place and gaped. Cable-cars had swung precariously across the canyon, fed raging whitewater vistas to thrillseeking tourists. Utilities had wept over all those wasted megawatts, billions of Joules pouring uselessly toward the ocean, unharnessable. So near and yet so far.
Then the world had begun wobbling. It had listed to one side, then another; the machinery that kept it upright seemed to get hungrier with each passing day. The Fraser was dammed a dozen times over to feed that appetite. Hell's Gate had held out the longest: untouchable at first, then merely prohibitive. Then almost economical.
Finally, imperative.
The Big One had slipped through the mountains like a guerilla, shattering here, merely tapping there in gentle reminder. It had crept past Hope and Yale without so much as a broken window. Hell's Gate was a good two hundred klicks upstream; there would have been reason to hope, if no time to.
A torrent of Precambrian rock had destroyed the dam and replaced it at the same time; the Fraser had exploded through the breach only to slam into an impromptu wall of collapsed granite half a kilometer downstream. The impoundment had not emptied but lengthened, north-south; the broken dam now cut across its midpoint, torn free at the western wall, still fastened at the east.
The TransCanada Highway was miraculously etched halfway up the east canyon wall, a four-lane discontinuity in a sheer ascent. At the point where dam met mountain, where highway met both, a barrier had been dropped from the sky to block the road. Botflies floated above it, and above the arched gray scar of the spillway.
Overnight, the Strip had moved east. This was its new border. Robert Boyczuk was supposed to keep it from moving any farther.
He contemplated Bridson across the chopper's interior. Bridson, her upper face cowled in her headset, didn't notice; she'd been lost in some virtual pastime for over an hour. Boyczuk couldn't blame her. They'd been here for almost two weeks and nobody'd tried to break quarantine except a couple of black bears. A number of vehicles had made it out this far in the few days following the Quake, but the barrier—plastered with quarantine directives and N'AmPac bylaws—had stopped most of them. A warning shot from the botflies had discouraged the others. There'd been no need to show off the pacification 'copter lurking behind the wall. Bridson had slept through most of it.
Boyczuk took his duties a bit more seriously. There was a definite need for segregation, nobody questioned that. Everything from Nipah to Hydrilla would sneak past the borders given half a chance, even at the best of times; now, with half the coast gone and the other half fighting off the usual gamut of rot-bugs, the last thing anyone needed was all that chaos spreading farther inland.
Inland had its own problems. There were more than enough borders to go around no matter which way you looked. Sometimes it seemed as if an invisible spiderweb was spreading across the world, some creeping fractured network carving the whole planet into splinters. Boyczuk's job was to sit on one of those edges and keep anything from crossing over until the state of emergency had passed. Assuming it did, of course; some places down in South America—even in N'Am, for that matter—had been under 'temporary quarantine' for eight or nine years.
Mostly people just put up with it. Boyczuk's job was an easy one.
"Hey," Bridson said. "Check this out."
She rerouted her headset feed to an inboard screen. Not a VR game after all. She'd been riding the botflies.
On the screen, a woman crouched on cracked asphalt. Boyczuk checked the location: a couple hundred of meters down the highway, hidden from the blockade behind the curve of the western precipice. One of the 'flies out over the dam had caught her around the corner.
Backpack. Loose-fitting clothes, hiker's clothes. Upper part of the face covered by an eyephone visor. Black gloves, short black hair—no, a black hood of some kind, maybe part of the visor. As a fashion statement, it didn't work. In Boyczuk's humble opinion, of course.
"What's she doing?" Boyczuk asked. "How'd she even get here?" No sign of a vehicle, although one could have been parked farther down the road.
"No," Bridson said. "She's not serious."
The woman had braced herself in a sprinter's crouch.
"That's really bad form," Bridson remarked. "She could sprain an ankle."
Like a stone from a slingshot, the intruder launched herself forward.
"Oh, right," Bridson said.
The intruder was running straight down the middle of the highway, eyes on the asphalt, dodging or leaping over cracks big enough to grab human feet. If nothing stopped her, she'd run smack into the barrier in about a minute.
Of course, something was going to stop her.
Beeping from the botfly feeds; the intruder had just entered their defensive radius. Boyczuk panned one of the barrier cams skyward. The 'fly closest to the target was breaking ranks, moving to intercept. Programmed flocking behavior dragged the adjacent 'flies forward as well, as though all were strung on an invisible thread. A connect-the-dots pseudopod, reaching for prey.
The runner veered toward the edge of the road, glanced down. Ten meters beneath her, brown boiling water gnawed ravenously at the canyon wall.
"You are approaching a restricted area," the lead botfly scolded. "Please turn back." Red light began pulsing from its belly.
The intruder ran faster. Another glance down at the river.
"What the fuck?" Boyczuk said.
A little patch of pavement exploded in front of the runner: warning shot. She staggered, barely keeping her balance.
"We are authorized to use force," the lead botfly warned. "Please turn back." The two 'flies behind it began flashing.
The runner dodged and zig-zagged, keeping to the west side of the road. She kept looking down…
Boyczuk leaned forward. Wait a second…
Behind the runner, water raged against a brutal jumble of sharp-edged boulders large as houses. Anyone falling in there would be teeth and pulp in about two seconds. Closer to the barrier, though—in the lee of the dam's near, unbroken end—the water might almost be calm enough to—
"Shit." Boyczuk slapped the ignition. "She's gonna jump. She's gonna jump…"
Turbines behind, whining up to speed. "What are you talking about?" Bridson said.
"She's gonna—ah, shit…"
She stumbled, swerved. Her feet came down on loose gravel. Boyczuk pulled back on the stick. The chopper whup-whup-whupped slowly off the ground, ten measly seconds start-up to lift-off, the envy of fast-response vehicles everywhere and still just barely fast enough to clear the barrier as the woman with the backpack skidded, flailed, launched herself into space, not where she was aiming, not the way she wanted, but no other options left except brief, spectacular flight…
The botflies fired after her as she fell. The river swallowed her like a liquid avalanche.
"Jesus," Bridson breathed.
"Infra," Boyczuk snapped. "Anything comes up even half a degree above ambient I want to see it."
The Fraser raged endlessly beneath them.
"Come on, boss. She's not coming up. She's a klick downstream by now, or parts of her anyway."