It seemed he'd done two things in addition to cutting contact with the Autocab dispatcher. He had activated a homing program—the cab was no longer heading to police headquarters. It was probably returning to Autocab itself—and the collision with the Havier showed that he had cut the cab's ability to pick up the transponders of other cars.
He heard the long blare of horns and the screeching of brakes-Fuck the cover—the sides of the cab wouldn't stop a bullet anyway. Nohar sat up so he could see what was going on. The cab had run a red light without stopping. The cab wasn't picking up on transmissions from the lights anymore. Or the street signs—it was accelerating. Nohar had blinded the robot cab as well as deafening it. It was following the streets from its memory.
Nohar looked behind him. Only one Havier was following—the one the cab had violently cut off wasn't in sight. The cop had to slow to weave through the chaos the cab had left in the previous intersection.
More horns, another crunch. Nohar was thrown flat on his back. Now his hip sent a crashing wave of pain that made his eyes water. Somehow, he managed to FORESTS OF THE NIGHT
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keep hold of the circuit board. He saw the front windshield split in half and fall out onto the road. Nohar staggered up and looked out the back. The cab had plowed through the front end of a slow-moving Volks-wagon Luce. The Luce had spun out and almost hit the pursuing cop.
The cab must have been moving over a hundred klicks an hour now. He was actually losing the cop. Even so, he wondered if pulling the circuit board had been a good idea.
He turned around to see where he was going. Down the road was a row of sawhorses dotted with yellow flashers. The city was digging up another hunk of road—
The cab's brain had no idea the flashers were there. They were topping one-twenty. . . .
Nohar slammed the circuit board back home and dived for one of the rear chairs, trying to get a seat belt around himself. The cab suddenly knew what was ahead of it and how fast it was going. The brakes activated, almost in time.
Whack, one sawhorse hit the front. The flasher exploded into yellow plastic shrapnel. The rest of the sawhorse flipped over the top of the cab. There was an incredible bump, thrusting Nohar into the seat belt. The belt cut into his midsection as the nose of the cab jerked downward. The front-right corner of the cab slammed something in the hole, and the rear of the van swung to the left. The left rear wheel lost pavement and the van tumbled into the hole. It rocked once and stopped on its side.
The seat belt and the brakes had saved his life. The cab had hit the hole only going thirty or thirty-five klicks an hour. Nohar was lying on the left side of the van, which was now the floor. Nohar was still for a moment, letting the fires in his right leg fade to a dull ache.
After the cops were done with him, Autocab would probably want his balls for breakfast. Hell, it was their
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own fault—a remote that gets disabled like that ought to stop.
Nohar unbuckled himself and smelled the dry ozone reek that announced the inductors had cracked open and melted. The cab was dead. Nohar stumbled out the remains of the windshield. Outside was knee-deep mud that smelled of sewer and reclamation algae. Nohar faced the round, three-meter-diameter, concrete mouth of a storm sewer buried in the wall of the hole. He didn't hesitate. He knew providence when he saw it.
He limped into the echoing darkness under the streets.
It seemed like an eternity in the colorless dark, slogging through the algae, listening to the echo of his own breathing, unable to smell anything but the sour odor of the water. The only redeeming feature of his slog through the storm sewers was the fact the air was cool. The water itself was cold, and after a while his feet had numbed to a dull throbbing ache that matched the pulse in his hip.
For once he was worried about Manny's admonitions about infection.
The one big problem he was facing now was that not only had he lost the cops in the sewers, he had also lost himself. From the Hellcats, he knew every inch of the storm sewers under Moreytown. But, of course, he had no idea where the storm sewers were under downtown Cleveland. He had lost his sense of direction a while ago, so he was going upstream—had to be away from the river or Lake Erie. The direction was somewhere between east and south. Eventually he would find an inlet and get his bearings.
The few times he was tempted to go into a smaller branch off of the main trunk he was following, he decided against it. While the trunk was arrow-straight, and an obvious subterranean highway for the cops to follow, he would have plenty of warning before pursuit FORESTS OF THE NIGHT 197
caught up with him. The slight phosphorescence from the algae was enough light for him to see a couple meters in any direction, the pinks would need a flashlight—that would give them away a hundred meters before they ever saw him.
It was also the only route that gave him enough clearance to stand upright. Nohar's time sense was screwed. He'd gone for what seemed like hours without sign of pursuit. He kept glancing at his wrist, but his watch was still with whatever Young's explosion had left of his clothes at University Hospitals. After an interminable period, the world began to lighten. At first Nohar thought it was pink cops with flashlights. However, even though the light let some blue back into his monochrome world, it was much too dim for pink eyes.
He drew the Vind and slowed his approach to the light ahead. It wasn't an inlet. It was a line of holes, large and small, that had been drilled through the concrete wall of the storm sewer. He ducked under a small one that was halfway up the wall, and crept up on a large ragged hole he might fit through. A glance through the hole only showed him a metal-framework scaffold that was draped in opaque plastic from the other side. The tiled floor outside came to Nohar's waist. Under the scaffold he saw a jackham-mer, a small remote forklift, a portable air compressor, and someone's hard hat hung up on one of the struts forming the scaffold. Nohar bolstered the Vind and hauled himself up with his good arm.
He climbed in, crouching under the scaffold. He paused and looked back over his shoulder. He sensed something was wrong, even though he didn't hear or smell anything. He turned around, kneeling on his good knee, and leaned slightly back out the hole. He was waiting the split second for his eyes to readjust to the darkness beyond.
He heard a splash and his hand went for the Vind.
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A hand shot out of the darkness, much too fast, and grabbed a handful of T-shirt and fur, while a shoulder hit him in the right thigh. He wasn't well balanced, and the way his leg was, it buckled immediately.
Things were going too quickly. He barely had time to recognize the arm belonged to a pink. Nohar tumbled through the darkness and splashed into the green algae water. His hand had only gotten halfway to the Vind.
His head went under for a moment . . .
Nohar came up sputtering. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness. Facing him, and pointing his own Vin-dhya at him, was a pink female. She had short, dark hair—black as the jumpsuit she wore. She was only 160 centimeters or so, maybe 50 kilos. Despite her size, the way the cords stood out on her wrists as she held the 12 millimeter told Nohar she was prepared to take the massive recoil of the weapon.
'FBI.' One hand left the gun, whipped a pair of cuffs at him, and was back bracing the Vind before Nohar could react. 'I am placing you under arrest. You have the right to remain silent ... '
The cuffs fit.
As she mirandized him, he noticed something. Her eyes, pupils dilated all the way, were reflecting light back at him. Her pupils glowed at him. He hadn't noticed at first, since a lot of morey eyes did that.
Pink's eyes did not have that catlike reflection.
She was a frank.
He stared at this small woman who held the Vind like it was a Saturday night special, and he realized he was scared shitless.
CHAPTER 19
