The sky, eventually, cleared of smoke. Red Crescents and Crosses came out after the camouflage. The gaps between vehicles widened. A polite, hesitant, mechanical cough here and there, and then a roar of combustion engines rose like applause. The truck settled to a steady hundred kilometres per hour in the slow lane. The Cadillac paced it, now edging closer, now dropping back.
‘This is beginning to get severely under my nails,’ Kohn said.
‘What can we do about it?’
‘Don’t know. Ah, fuck it…kill them at the first opportunity.’
‘Do you really mean that?’
‘Way I see it,’ Kohn said, ‘there’s no way whoever’s in that tuna-tin are terrs. Not their style, you know? They go for dispersed forces, raids, guerilla tactics. The military – UK or SD – would go for roadblocks, flagdowns. Tailing, now, that’s cop MO. Using a civilian car isn’t, especially one so obvious. That smells of political police. Or Stasis.’
‘The Men In Black.’ Janis shivered. ‘Wonder why they do that – the suits, the cars?’
‘Checked it out once,’ Kohn said. ‘It’s a fear thing. They were set up years ago when there was that big panic about, I don’t know, messages from space getting into the datasphere and churning out copies of alien software that would take over the world. Remember the TV shows? The Andromeda Strangers. Night of the Living Daylights. Nah, just after the war. Before your time.’
‘After my bedtime.’
‘Looking back now, I’ll bet they planted these stories. Anything to keep people worried about dangerous technologies falling into the wrong hands, and not worried about whose hands it was in already.’
‘You know,’ Janis said thoughtfully, ‘people used to talk about the Breakthrough, the Singularity, when all the technological trends would take off and the whole world would change: AI, nanotech, cell repair, uploading our minds into better bodies and living forever, yay! And it always almost happens but never quite: we get closer and closer but never get there. Maybe we never get there because we’re being stopped.’
‘Stopped by Stasis…and by Space Defense enforcing arms control…yeah, that’s how it works: software cop, hardware cop!’
‘Yes, let’s kill them,’ Janis said fiercely. ‘They’re a waste of space.’
‘Soon be dark,’ Kohn said.
Another border: Cumbria. Another armful of fine work taken from the back of the truck. Tax-in-kind: with most of the economy over the event horizon of cryptography, it was the only way to collect if the owners hadn’t cut a deal and let the state have the code keys. Tax-in-kind went all the way from roadblock rip-offs to US/UN sanctions where entire buildings, warehouses, factories were seized. Usually the owners agreed to operate in the open, where at least you knew the percentages. Except in Norlonto, of course: there they hid their money and handed over the goods at gunpoint if they had to.
At least so far no one had searched the truck. There was an etiquette to those matters, and transaction costs.
After a bit Kohn glanced at the fuel gauge and said, ‘Time to pull in. Could do with a stretch, anyway. Next service area.’
‘What about—?’ Janis jerked her head backwards.
‘We’ll see what they do,’ Kohn sighed.
‘Then kill them?’
‘You’re getting into this, aren’t you?’
The twilight became darkness the instant the truck glided into the halogen floods of the service area. Janis envied Kohn his glades. She could see the writing scribed on the sidepiece nearest her: mil spec 00543/09008. Kohn first drove to the refuelling points, paying cash for diesel oil and charged-up power cells, which were swapped for the spent ones.
‘That’s exactly what I need to do,’ Janis said.
‘Well, they don’t give part-exchange for body waste,’ Kohn said. ‘Recycling hasn’t gone that far.’ He restarted the truck and moved it around to the parking bays.
‘Our friends are just over there,’ he said, pointing to the far corner of the car park where she couldn’t see a thing. ‘Still sitting in the car. Probably don’t eat or shit, just need an oil-change every ten thousand klicks.’
‘I wish I had military specs,’ Janis said. She didn’t understand Kohn’s hoot of laughter, but was grateful when he reached into his pack and pulled out another set of glades.
‘They’re my only spares,’ he said, after he’d shown her how the cheek controls worked. ‘Watch them carefully.’
He put the helmet under his arm.
‘Set the glades to shade,’ he said. ‘We’ll look like tourists.’
‘Heavily armed tourists.’
‘That’s the only kind around here.’
Jumping down and walking across the tarmac to the cafeteria, Janis kept looking around her. These things didn’t just polarize light, they integrated it: the bright lights were stepped down, the dim enhanced.
‘They’re brilliant!’
‘Turn them down a bit then.’
‘Ha, ha. How do they work, anyway?’
‘I don’t know, but I suspect they’re not strictly speaking transparent – the front is a lot of micro-cameras, the back is screens, and in between there’s a nanoprocessor diamond film.’
She paused outside the toilets and stared at the pink Cadillac.
‘Huh,’ she said. ‘They’re eating doughnuts and drinking coffee from a flask. So much for your theory.’
‘That’s what they want you to think,’ Kohn said darkly.
Janis looked again. One black man, one white.
‘I’m sure they’re the ones who came to my lab,’ she said. ‘Goddess, to think I came all this way to get away from them.’
‘You have got away from them,’ Kohn said. He nudged her away from looking at the car. ‘Don’t you worry about that.’
The queues at the meal-machines were short.
‘Ten marks,’ Kohn said indignantly. ‘Each!’
‘Don’t be stingy.’
‘I spilled blood for that money.’
They chose a table by the plate-glass window where they could see the car and the truck. The glades disposed of the reflections, too. Janis found it disorienting to glance from the strip-lit interior – with its truck-drivers eating fast, families eating slowly, youths wandering around sizing up who might or might not be a user – out to the parked or crawling vehicles, and see it all as one scene. What effect, she wondered, would years of seeing like this – no shadows, no reflections, almost no darkness, no comforting distinctions between in here and out there – have on the mind? It matched, it fell into place with one aspect at least of Kohn’s, well, outlook.
She smiled at the thought, and saw Moh smile back.
Bleibtreu-Fèvre brushed sugar from the tips of his fingers, licked them, and replaced the plastic cup on top of the thermos flask. Always a damn dribble of dark liquid. He sighed and looked at his colleague, Aghostino-Clarke. The other man was dressed identically to himself, in a black jacket and trousers, white shirt and a tie the exact colour of coffee-stains. His suit was getting shiny in the same wrong places. His skin was very black and his eyes were brown.
It was lucky they had been prepared; but then, Bleibtreu-Fèvre thought smugly, preparation creates its own luck. When Donovan’s call came through, indicating that Cat had revealed her location and Moh’s, they’d been cruising around the perimeter of Norlonto. They’d been ready to do what they did – send the car into a screaming dash along one of the fast-access roads, the ones that normally only the rich and the emergency services could afford. He’d been right not to put much trust in Donovan’s ability to field a large enough force in a short enough time to deal with the problem, right to have the green partisans on stand-by alert.
That the Women’s Peace Community was near the border had been luck, however: pure luck.