Skylock

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2002 by Paul Kozerski
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com
ISBN: 0-7434-3570-2
Cover art by Gary Ruddell
First printing, November 2002
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH
Printed in the United States of America

Moses then told Aaron,
Take an urn and put an omer of manna in it
Then place it before the Lord in safekeeping
for your descendants.

—Exodus 16:33

Hoping they had also turned off the mines, Trennt cut back hard for the barrier wire. But his swing went wide in the soft loam and the Chevy slid outside its tight umbrella of supporting fire. He felt the vehicle buck and nose with hits from his own people. Through the dusty swirl of his dashboard, he saw the oil gauge bolt, tremble, and plummet. A quick gush of rank steam licked over the windshield. One of the big farm rounds had split the night pony's engine.

"Not now," he pleaded. But the Chevy's hurt was too big to cure with a wish. She was fast going lame.

Trennt managed to straighten his broad, shearing turn and throttled hard, back toward the farm. His engine now groaned with slapping pistons and dry, hammering valves. Beneath the hood a speeding tick sprouted, quickly growing to a chorus of screaming metal.

June 24, 2050. What remained of California had been written off as frontier. Too little American influence. Hardly anything left recognizable or worthwhile after the Quake. In this, the midpoint of its first century, the new millennium held little in common with all the technological greatness which had preceded it.

Far up here though, all the tragedy and ruin seemed part of some other world. Lost to view from the great wretched masses, a tiny bit of rare technology tracked silently along the border of near-space, headed toward a far distant Midwestern retrieval site and the complex network of couriers waiting to deliver it into anxious scientific hands.

Accompanied only by the low hum of its motor, Solar High Altitude Powered Platform 216B6 and a dispersed fleet of its siblings cruised the thin North American air nonstop. Some performed the routine daily function of measuring ozone concentrations and dust content of the upper atmosphere. Others gauged the polar magnetic shift or the growth of unexplored quake rifts some twelve miles below. But certain units, like 216B6, were dedicated specifically to watching the sun itself for the dreaded signs of its healing.

Bursts of intense solar radiation had long ago fried all spy, weather, and communications satellites into useless orbiting junk. So this type of inexpensive vinyl glider had become the government's feeble eyes to the outlands of both space and ground.

Powered by a toothpick prop and pusher-type electric motor, SHAPP 216B6 ran directly off the harsh sunlight during daytime hours and a bank of lightweight membrane batteries at night. The SHAPP's optic orange color had long been faded to a pale yellow. Made brittle by constant immersion in lethal ozone baths and high-altitude acid sleets, its fuselage and wings were riddled with pinholes from micrometeorite hits and passage through volcanic dust clouds.

Still, the glider doggedly held to the 100 mph pace programmed at its launch those many weeks ago. Leaving the NASA/Crop Research Division research station at Fort Collins, Colorado, 216B6 traversed the great wasteland of America, spread dimly out 60,000 feet below. It crossed cities broken down to kingdoms, towns fallen to clan rule, regions sterilized by the North American Flu epidemic—or worse.

Ironically, none of the damage had resulted from war. Not a nuke had fallen. Not a gun had been fired. All the ponderous volumes on nuclear winter were just so much idle trash, for after a couple million years of putting up with mankind's antics, it seemed Mom Nature herself had finally decided to intervene. Realizing her error in sparing the rod, she now meant to yank the rug from under her sloppy tenants through the simple, but effective, mechanism of global hunger.

Politically, Washington had held out the longest among its worldwide counterparts. Then it too followed the rest of the world in closing down its bankrupt central government. But where even the Wall Street crash of 120 years prior had at least left a rubble pile from which the nation could rebuild, here now was only a smoking crater. The grand experiment was over; Uncle Sam, dead—and left unburied.

A hasty bureaucratic reorganization was devised that split the country along supposedly more manageable, regional lines. Blocks of states were cleaved from their federal union and turned back to the cloisters of their decentralized origin. A series of smaller governing offices were temporarily opened throughout the land. And a reunification was planned after the crisis had been stemmed. So, at least in concept, the nation survived.

But all that was meaningless to the SHAPP. Flying solo so far above the ruinscape, its own life was nearly over. Earlier, 216B6 had banked away from its outflight over the California peninsula. It departed the distant rubble of the Great West Coast Quake and left behind the tricky wind patterns flushed upward by the recontoured land.

Obeying the final orders of return and descent geared inside its old-fashioned clockwork brain, a dozen hours from now, the broad-winged glider would begin a prescribed aerodynamic death ritual of gentle, descending corkscrews. Its valuable data would be wrenched free and thrust into the waiting hands of a complex courier network.

Trennt watched from the spartan back seat as his driver ran an adjusting hand over the crackling radio monitor. He then checked his own obsolete, mechanical wristwatch. The hands showed 3:50 glowing in silent, lime urgency on its dim face. Dawn was too near, safe haven too far off. Trennt looked again to the darkened radio, wondering himself what was wrong with the thing. Northern lights were a continual and understandable signal interference these days. But the month-end clear window still had another twenty-four hours before it closed. The night sky was obligingly clear and reception should be good. Yet, it wasn't so. The driver gave his receiver another rap of knuckles, then wrote it off.

"No more friendly voices guiding this ride," he offered soberly. Glancing from radio to horizon, he appraised his rider. "And a hijacker's moon due up, to boot."

But if the wheelman expected any show of nerves from this particular passenger, he'd be sorely disappointed. That part of Trennt had dried up long ago, making him so effective at what he did today.

Trennt was a prized member of the government's twenty-first-century express relay system. His job was assuring the personal transport and delivery of priority communiqués between Midwestern pickup and drop-off points. It was a vocation he handled with total unquestioning professionalism and personal indifference to the cargo he carried.

The work had taken Trennt across great stretches of Midwestern desert and through crowded city ruins. He'd escorted cargo midday to midnight, horseback to hotfoot; through a latter-day Pony Express gauntlet filled with primitive dangers, both backwoods and open highway.

Understandably, a courier's life didn't boast of longevity. The stable's mules mostly did it for the common macho-jock reasons of tech village status and perks. And the cheap thrill of pressing their luck and daring to yank the devil's tail.

Reasonable precautions were afforded their ranks in issues of shirtweight body armor, scrip money, and medicinal goodie packs. But anything more was strictly self-provided. It was a job for the fearless and foolhardy. Or for those like Trennt, who simply needed the penance.

He'd done well, having started in the bowels of Chicago as a black market runner for Fat Manny, the local neighborhood boss. During his two-year apprenticeship, Trennt had proven his mettle regularly, hauling premium canned goods and bootlegged medicines in a car much like this.

Two wounds and no hijacks brought a notoriety that eventually ushered Trennt into the big league transports of "most favored" status. And here he thrived.

Gravy runs were done in daylight and sometimes under escort. But tough, demanding ones like this were what he craved. For unchaperoned travel after dark meant covert goods and rewards worth very big risks to the daring opposition. Any solo car with wheels and gas was priceless in itself, not to mention the black market value of whatever illicit freight it happened to carry.

As expected, competing forces of random bushwhackers and organized crime felt the challenge worthy enough to subsidize their own fleets of midnight cruisers. And they loosed them to roam the old blacktop in search of just such booty.

Tonight Trennt was tired. Having personally escorted this particular cargo pouch the full six hundred miles from its South Dakota origin was his biggest run ever. Thankfully, the base leg from Milwaukee to her atrophied twin sister, Chicago, had been uneventful and chauffeured, and the courier thought to allow himself the luxury of a cigarette.

He studied the driver's ancient, grime-shiny Greenbay Packers windbreaker.

"Okay to light a smoke?"

The man spoke over a shoulder. "Sure. But keep it real low. The auto-dim system on my night specs ain't working right."

"Okay."

Trennt dipped his head and drew a quick hit off the harsh, hothouse tobacco. He knew to keep the smoke cupped. Night drives were done in total darkness and blackout specs a delicate commodity. The quick flare of a nearby match might be enough to burn out an older, ailing pair, the mere glowing tip of a cigarette, enough to damage hard-to-replace circuitry.

Trennt tossed the remaining pack ahead to the car's dashboard in good will. The driver nodded and glanced back amiably.

"Thanks, man. I'll save 'em for later. Coming into some crowded overpasses on the homestretch. Need to keep my eyes open, ya know. How 'bout you? Long trip?"

"The longest," answered Trennt.

"I know it's not smart to ask, but . . ."

Trennt finished the all-too-familiar question, "But what's in the bag?" He glanced at the dark, battered pouch. "Never really sure myself. Coming from NASA's Dakota recovery site, I'd guess some kind of high-altitude data."

"But that's just low-priority stuff, ain't it?" The driver sounded disappointed.

Although he'd wondered, himself, Trennt gave his stock answer. "This must be different."

"Yeah."

Both knew to end the shop talk there.

Trennt took another ragged puff off his smoke and, with a mechanic's appreciation, scouted the car's dim instrument panel. Tach, oil, boost, and amp gauges all rode at contented midrange readings.

He hadn't really seen much of the car's exterior at the Milwaukee relay station, but he'd guess her to be an old '06 Chevy Impala. Stripped of reflective trim and dolled up in high-tech options, ancient sedans like it were the last production-bred heavies reliable enough to meet the challenge.

Whatever family had once tooled to soccer games and shopping malls in this old sled would sure be surprised by it now. Its current occupants rode sandwiched between window glass of impact resistant acrylic sheeting and a body layered with the plastic mesh of armorlite fragproofing.

The interior was gutted and reworked with a low-riding, back-seat cargo sump. The trunk held a self-healing fuel cell and everything was set atop priceless solid core tires—hard as a rock, but never a flat.

The old civilian colors were long gone from this night pony, replaced with the modern wonder of stealth antiradar paint. Equally sophisticated bad guys still might find you up close with their own night specs. But they'd never see you on a green screen. In the midst of total social ruin, science marched proudly on.

Trennt popped a side window and rested an elbow on its edge. A flood of warm air rushed in. Above, distant worlds softly twinkled their lover's light. It might have been any other sultry night in any other year. Only the sluggish drone of a billion fatted locusts, singing lazily after their day's pillage, would forever set it apart.

Trennt remembered happier late night rides of bygone years: coming home from Dena's folks in Los Angeles, kids tucked away in the back seat. Her, asleep and cuddled against him, up front. Bright stars and empty interstate, just like now. He moved a hand toward her image but touched only sterile sheet metal and pop rivets in the darkness.

She had seen the truth, right from the start. No fooling that woman with threats of terrorist missles or warlording anti-Christs. She'd known better than to believe in some grand, flaming extinction for mankind. God worked in subtle and poetic ways, she'd advised. And the medium of His glorious, life-giving sun proved just fine.