I flexed my right arm; it was still slightly sore from the recoil when I had taken out the spy-eye. My wrists and ankles were a bit chafed, and my mouth was dry. I thought I might still be feeling a trace of whatever had put me under, as well. Other than that, I seemed to be all there and reasonably sound.
That seemed to be about all I could do with my eyes closed. I put my hands over them and opened them a slit.
That wasn't too bad. If I squinted and blinked a lot, I thought I could manage. I moved my hands a little, so I could peek through my fingers.
I was still in the cab. It wasn't moving. It was lying on the ground, cocked at an odd angle. One door was slightly sprung, which I figured would account for the wind noise. Other than that it looked pretty much as I remembered it; the access panel was still open, bare circuitry showing. The seats were inert, the screens all dark, the readouts all blank, and not even the system-failure lights were still glowing-at least, not that I could see in the glare.
All the colors seemed wrong because of the light, but I didn't doubt for a minute that I was still in the same cab I'd passed out in.
The entire upper bubble was transparent, though, and the scenery outside wasn't anywhere in Nightside City. It wasn't on the nightside at all. The entire sky was a blindingly bright pale blue that was almost white; I knew it wasn't really white only because it was streaked with thin, high, fast-moving clouds that were really white. That sky was terrifyingly alien, awash in more light than I had thought the universe could hold.
The only other thing I could see, in any direction, was bare ground, and that ground was sand and rock-gray sand, black rock, mostly, with streaks of brown here and there. It stretched off to an impossibly distant horizon. I'd lived my whole life at the bottom of a crater; I'd never seen a real horizon before, except in vids, and all that openness was absolutely terrifying. Nothing stood between me and the rest of the universe but open plain.
And light blazed off everything, intense white light, blinding light, brilliant light. It sparkled off the sands, off the rocks; it prismed rainbows off the cab's bubble.
It was beautiful, in a painful sort of way. I'd seen light that bright, in a small area, for a moment or two, but to see an entire vast landscape, from one horizon to the other, ablaze in that glare-it was a new experience for me, and one that I couldn't help but appreciate, despite my sorry situation.
I knew, though, that my situation was bad. The bubble might provide a little protection-though probably not, since there was no need for any such protection on the nightside-but I knew the sun's ultraviolet had probably already done a good bit of skin damage, and maybe eye damage as well. I might be dying; I might already be in desperate need of medical treatment.
And of course, I wasn't about to get that treatment. I had no idea where the hell I was, except that it was on the dayside-since I was in the same cab, I had to assume I was still on Epimetheus. I knew I couldn't count on planetary rotation bringing me the safety of night any time soon.
If I wanted the night, I'd have to go to it; it wouldn't come to me.
It was pretty clear that nobody was going to come and get me, either; I'd have to get back to the nightside on my own. Nobody kept track of me. Nobody would notice I was missing until it was too late. My only family on the planet was my brother 'Chan-he called maybe once every four or five weeks, and his last call had been a week ago. I still had a few friends, but if they noticed at all, they wouldn't worry if I didn't answer calls or show up at Lui's for a few days; I'd done that before, when I was working or busy or just depressed.
I wondered whether anybody might miss the cab and come looking for it, but then I dismissed the idea. I'd already noticed, before I passed out, that it looked like an independent, and a glance at the hardcopy license and ownership statement next to the passenger readout screen confirmed that. This cab had been as much a loner as I was, bought free from Q.Q.T. over a year ago.
I looked up from the statement to that open access panel and all the obviously dead inboard systems, and I shuddered at the thought that I might have to get out and walk in the sunlight.
That wasn't certain yet, though. I leaned forward and poked around a little.
The motherboard was snapped in two, and the central processor, the brain, was crushed; the cab itself was dead, beyond any possible doubt. I prodded a few other systems. None of them were working, but most of them looked intact, and after all, the poor lobotomized thing had probably flown here under its own power. If Orchid and Rigmus-I figured Bobo had to be Bobo Rigmus, of course-had been able to make the corpse fly, I thought maybe I could, too. There had to be a patched-in slave program somewhere that had worked the drives.
I couldn't get any current anywhere, though. Something had cut the power feed. At first I didn't think that was necessarily irreparable.
Then I got past the firewall and got a look at the main power plant.
They'd put some sort of timed charge on it, I guess. However they'd arranged it, one whole side was blown out.
Fortunately for me, it was a side that faced away from the passenger compartment; otherwise I'd have been dead, which was probably what they had intended. They probably expected the whole thing to blow, which would leave me as just a little more radioactive debris. Instead, I was alive, but I'd probably caught a good dose of radiation all the same, and that side of the cab had probably left a streak of hot dust for a dozen kilometers before the poor thing hit ground.
The power plant was just scrap now, which meant that the cab obviously wasn't going anywhere, but I'd survived. I'd bought myself a slow death instead of a quick one.
Or had I?
I was having trouble taking it all in-everything was so alien that I couldn't just accept it as it appeared and go on from there. I had to think it through.
Just what had happened?
Obviously, Paulie Orchid and Bobo Rigmus had taken me and stuck me in a sabotaged cab and sent me out onto the dayside to die. But why?
I could make a pretty good guess. If I had turned up dead in the city, inquiries would have been made. My ITEOD records would have been pulled, and although they weren't as complete and up-to-date as I might have liked, they'd show that Sayuri Nakada and the Ipsy were up to something, and that I had been investigating that.
Somebody would be able to put the clues together, and the whole scheme would have been crashed.
But if I just disappeared, none of that would happen. At least, not for some time, not until somebody realized how long I had been gone. It could take weeks, maybe longer. And when it did show up, nobody would be sure I was dead; my ITEOD records would remain sealed until somebody got a court order. And nobody was likely to bother with that.
Nobody was going to find me there on the dayside. My body would just dry up and weather away.
And if they did find me, me and the cab, there would be no hard evidence that it was murder, that it hadn't been a bizarre and inexplicable accident or a particularly weird suicide.
It was a pretty damn good way of disposing of me, really. It got around the ITEOD files nicely. I had to admit that. I wondered who had thought of it. I'd have picked Doc Lee if I had to guess.
But why? Clever or not, why did they bother? Why was I so great a threat that they were ready to go to all this trouble to kill me secretly, rather that just telling me what was going on?
I didn't know, and there in the cab I didn't see any way of finding out. All I knew was that they had sent me out here to die.