“You hate the Army, don’tcha?”
She blinked at him. “Why do you say that?”
“I’m maybe not the brightest bulb on the string, Captain, but I’m not completely stupid. I
She didn’t speak to that. It wasn’t supposed to show, though. If Carruth here could see that—and he wasn’t exactly a candidate for Mr. Sensitive—then somebody else could. She would have to work on that. It wouldn’t do at all for people on the inside to be looking at her squinty-eyed. Certainly not Mr. Jay Gridley.
“So, now what?” he said.
“We’re back to one decent buyer. If he’s legit, we talk deal. If he pans out, we’re done. If not, we keep trolling the waters.”
“Think ole Benny is gonna want another token of our ability to deliver?”
She shrugged. “Maybe. Whatever it takes. I’ll call you as soon as I have something.”
“Yes, ma’am. You do that.”
After she was gone, Carruth ordered a beer and listened to the jukebox. He liked country music, and a truck- stop bar was as good a place as any to have a beer. Truckers and cowboys, though most of the guys in Western gear here would be all hat and no cattle. There might be a few real ranchers who dropped by—they still had farms and ranches in this part of the world. Carruth had grown up in cattle country, at least partially, outside of Denver, and he had some good memories of that time. First girl, first woman, first beer, first bar fight, all as a teenager. One of the reasons he went into the Navy had to do with the last of those bar fights, in which a loudmouth asshole had bought himself a week in the local hospital when he pissed Carruth off. The judge, an ex-Marine, thought that the service was a good place for boys who liked to mix it up, and Carruth agreed with him—given the other choice, which had been doing a few months working on a road crew out of the local jail.
So he joined the Navy, found he had a talent for warfare, and was accepted into SEAL training, where he did real good. He’d always been a swimmer, no fear of the water, and the physical stuff was challenging, but something he liked doing. He was big, strong, got the training, and nobody messed with him. There were a lot worse ways to get by in life.
He sipped at the bottle of beer. Of course, there came a time when he and the Navy found themselves at odds and he had more or less been told to leave under his own steam or be tossed out, but he had learned a trade, and he’d done okay since. This deal with Lewis would be his ticket to freedom. He could travel, live high, enjoy his life, work or not as he felt like. There was risk—but, hell, all life was risk. You could get caught in an earthquake, be hit head-on by a drunk driver, or have a heart attack—you never knew when your number was gonna be up, and Carruth figured that it was best to live life to the hilt before God tapped you out.
He finished his beer. At the pool table closest, a couple guys in baseball caps wrangled over something. Time was, he’d have moseyed over that way and looked to put himself in the middle of whatever was going on, and maybe got into kicking some ass. He couldn’t risk that now. There was too much riding on him staying out of trouble. Time to pack it up and go home. That mess with the Metro cops? That had sobered him. The big gun under his jacket was worth his neck just being on his hip—
A sudden thought ghosted through his head, and it went by so fast he almost couldn’t snag it. The gun, something about the gun . . .
Carruth sat there stunned, unable to move, held in his chair by the realization.
Well, yeah, okay, blowing up the Humvee full of soldiers a few minutes later had kind of taken over the memory of that night, the first guy he’d tapped had faded, but still. Stupid!
He dropped a ten on the table to pay for his beer, stood, and headed for his car. He had to hide the big revolver. The cops all talked to each other these days—feds, NCIC, everybody—and sooner or later, somebody was gonna notice that the ballistics on the BMF slug that nailed the Army guy in Kentucky matched those on the bullets that hammered the D.C. Metro cops. It might not happen soon, but it would eventually. Now he had three dead guys notched on the big honker, and a line between them. It wasn’t as if it had his name on it or anything, but Jesus, carrying it around really wasn’t smart. If he had to shoot somebody else, they would start triangulating in on him. They already had too much information; he ought not give ’em any more.
He didn’t have to destroy it. He could get down in the crawl space under his house, wrap the piece in a plastic bag, stick it under the moisture shield. Nobody would find it there by accident, and if they found it on purpose, he was screwed anyhow.
He should have done it as soon as he had capped the Metro cops, he knew that. He just hadn’t
But if he wasn’t the brightest bulb on the string, he also wasn’t the dimmest one, and he needed to get his act together. He had a SIG, an S&W, he could use one of those, and they were enough gun for soft targets like people. When it was all done and he had money coming out the wazoo, he’d buy another honker or two, and maybe move someplace where it was legal to carry, get a license, and never have to worry about it again. Yeah. That was the way to go.
He headed for his car. If he could get home without being pulled over by a state trooper, he’d be fine. And he was gonna drive real careful. . . .
High over the ice, Jay Gridley considered the geekiness of programmers. He’d long known that while people in most professions tended to enjoy in-jokes, programmers in general tended to take it to the extreme.
Like this VR, for instance. It wasn’t his, but somebody had put a lot of thought into it. A lot of silly thought . . .
Down below, thousands of Adelie penguins waddled about, moving little chunks of ice from a huge white pyramid in the middle of their rookery. Adelie penguins were the ones most associated with the classic “tuxedo” look—black and white with the white ring around their eyes.
What Jay was really doing was looking at a huge records database at MIT. He’d come to see if he could check the data logs from the Troy game. Those records had naturally been stored and archived—put “on ice,” so to speak.
Ice tended by penguins. Geek joke one.
Men dressed as arctic explorers stood in a huge queue in front of several desks, each one manned by an identical green-garbed figure with black question marks stenciled onto his fur costume. The explorers were actually information requests—from a variety of sources—and the green figures were the processors that directed searches via penguin to the ice cathedral.
The guys behind the desks were out of the old Batman TV show.
But flacking the metaphor even further was that each of the portly penguins much resembled “Tux,” the famous penguin mascot of the Linux operating system.
Said mascot had been named not due to its appearance, but due to the fact that a man named Linus Torvald had written the key kernel of the OS—itself based on another operating system called Unix. The name for the penguin had apparently come from
And the final self-referencing gag in this scenario—at least the last one that Jay saw—was that the VR scenario was actually being run on a cluster of Linux-based systems.
It was a little over the top, but he understood it. If you can’t have fun, why bother?
In his current guise, Jay was a Skua gull, one of the natural predators of Adelie penguins, the eggs and young
