man looked more stunned and terrified than furious now. “Some sort of neural blaster.” This remark seemed addressed to nobody in particular. His next was as squarely aimed at the hotel’s general manager as the neural blaster. “Good day, sir. You will kindly help us to escape.”
Himerance obviously took the man’s subsequent strangled gurgle as indicating assent, because he smiled, relaxed his grip a fraction and, looking at Yime, nodded down the corridor. “This way, I think.”
“What happens now?” Yime asked as they frog-marched the manager down the corridor. “How do we get off the planet?” She stopped and stared at the avatar. “
“No, we’ll be safer here, just for now,” Himerance told her, stopping at the lift doors and suggesting to the manager that he use his pass-key to priority-order an elevator car.
“We will?” Yime said.
The lift arrived; the avatar took the pass-keys off the manager, inserted them into the elevator car’s control panel, pushed the manager out of the car and stunned him with the neural blaster as the doors closed. Himerance looked round the elevator car as they descended towards a sub-basement not usually accessible to non-staff. A small puff of smoke came out of the control panel through the grille of the emergency speaker. “Actually, no, we won’t be safer here,” Himerance said. “The ship will snap-Displace us off.”
“‘Snap-Displace’? That sounds—”
“Dangerous. Yes, I know. And it is, though we are assuming it’ll be less dangerous than staying here.”
“But if the ship can’t Displace us now—?”
“It can’t Displace us now because it and we are both effectively static, giving the NR time to intercept the Displacement. Whereas later it’ll be coming through at very high speed, passing dangerously close to the planet, grazing its gravity well at high translight and attempting to fit the Displacement event into an ungenerous handful of pico-seconds.”
The avatar sounded remarkably casual about all this, Yime thought. It watched the screen indicating the floors as it counted slowly down. The lift car’s lighting, close overhead, made Himerance’s bald head gleam. “Providing it’s done at sufficiently high speed, that should leave the NR with insufficient time to arrange any interception of the Displacement singularity.” The avatar smiled at her. “That’s the real reason the ship is doing as the NR have demanded, and leaving; it’ll power up the whole way out, execute a minimum-radius-to-power turn and come straight back in, still accelerating, snapping us off and then heading for Sichult. The whole procedure will take some hours, however, as the ship gathers speed, both to make it look like it really is leaving and to make sure that when it passes us it’s going fast enough to confound the NR vessel or vessels. During that time we need to remain hidden from the NR.”
“Will it work?”
“Probably. Ah.” The car drew to a stop.
“‘Probably’?” Yime found herself saying to an empty lift as the avatar moved swiftly between the opening doors.
She followed, to find they were in a deserted basement car park full of wheeled ground vehicles. Yime opened her mouth to speak but the avatar pirouetted, one finger to his lips as he moved towards a bulky-looking vehicle with six wheels and a body that appeared to be made from a single billet of black glass. “This’ll do,” he said. A gull-wing door sighed open. “Though…” he said, as they settled into their seats. “Oh, do put your seat-belt on, won’t you? Thank you… Though the NR may well guess that the ship will attempt this manoeuvre and so either try to prevent or interfere with the Displacement. Or they might attack the ship itself, of course, though that would be rather extreme.”
“They just destroyed the ship’s drone and seem to be trying to kill us — isn’t that fairly extreme already?”
“It is, rather,” the avatar agreed reasonably, looking at the vehicle’s controls until lights came on. “Though drones, avatars and even humans are one thing; the loss of any is not without moral and diplomatic import, of course, but might be dismissed as merely unfortunate and regrettable, something to be smoothed over through the usual channels. Attacking a
“Thank you,” Yime said. “It is always salutary to be reminded of one’s true place in the proper arrangement of matters.”
Himerance nodded. “Yes, I know.”
In the distance, up a short ramp, a large door to what appeared to be the outside was rising open. “Many of these are automatic too,” Himerance muttered to himself. “That’s useful.”
Most of the other vehicles in the car park were turning their lights on; some were already moving, all heading for the ramp and the doorway.
“We’ll leave in the middle, I think,” he said, as their vehicle made a low, distant humming noise and moved smoothly off, joining the line of quickly moving cars. Judging by the ones she could see into, none of the others had any occupants.
“Are you doing this, or the ship?” Yime asked as they left the underground garage.
“Me,” the avatar said. “The ship left some ninety seconds ago.”
Outside, the enormous tunnel of the city was bright with artificial lights, the cupped spread of the place disappearing upwards and down into a faint haze. The far side of the city — a perpendicular jumble of mostly tall, variegated buildings — was only a kilometre or so distant but looked further away in the murk. Around them, the driverless vehicles the avatar had set in motion were all heading off in as many different directions as they could find amongst the city’s jumbled network of streets. Above, little tethered aircraft flitted back and forth along the great cavern.
As Yime watched, one of the larger empty vehicles a short way in front of them in a side-lane slowed, met with some hanging cables and was hoisted rapidly into the air.
“We’re going to do the same thing,” Himerance said, shortly before their vehicle followed the other one, though it then promptly headed off in the opposite direction.
Their vehicle rose quickly amongst the hundreds of cable-held craft.
They had reached a steady height and held it for about twenty seconds when the avatar sucked in a breath, the black glass around parted directly overhead then started to sink back into the sides of the vehicle. Before the retracting glass had reached shoulder level, Himerance’s arm flicked almost too fast to see as he threw the stubby tube of the neural blaster out of the vehicle. Immediately, the glass moved back up around them.
Moments later there was a flash from behind, quickly followed by a great thudding bang which left the vehicle swinging back and forth, causing it to slow automatically, briefly, to correct the oscillation. Himerance and Yime looked back to see a blossoming cloud of smoke and debris rising from near the centre-line of the cavern city; pieces of a great bridge, sundered in the middle, were starting to fall slowly towards the river on the tunnel’s floor. Directly above, more glowing pieces of wreckage and cinders were falling from a tiny, yellow-rimmed hole in the cavern ceiling. Echoes of the detonation slammed back and forth amongst the buildings, disappearing slowly down the tunnel city.
Himerance shook his head. “I beg your pardon. I should have thought they might trace that somehow. My mistake,” he said, as they drew level with a tall stone tower. The glass around them flowed fully down into the sides of the vehicle. The vehicle was beeping irately, though it was almost drowned out by multitudinous echoing sirens starting to sound around the city. They bumped gently against the summit of the tower.
“We need to get out,” the avatar said, rising, taking Yime’s hand and together making the small jump onto the grass beyond the tower’s parapet. The impact hurt her knees. The vehicle stopped beeping and swung away again, glass panels rising back into place as the cables above whisked it back to the heights.
Himerance hauled an old but stout-looking trap-door open in a flurry of earth and popping rivets. They hurried down an unlit spiral staircase and had descended about two complete turns — Yime following Himerance and trusting him to see in a darkness so profound even her moderately augmented eyes could register next to nothing — when there was a distant-sounding thud from outside. The tower shook, just a little.
“That was the vehicle we were just in, wasn’t it?” she said.
“It was,” the avatar agreed. “Whoever’s coordinating this is thinking commendably quickly. NR, almost certainly.” They thudded down more steps, spiralling downwards all the time, so fast Yime felt she was starting to get dizzy. It was hurting her knees and ankles and back, too. “Best not to tarry, then,” the avatar said, putting on a burst of speed. She heard and vaguely sensed him disappearing round the curve of the winding stair.
