Profiteer

Tetsami had to drop to the code to bypass some safety programs, all of which were frighteningly easy to override. It only took a little prodding to get the arm on the northeast crane to allow itself to go a complete 360.

 

She slipped into the control system of the crane while spinning off a few improv hyperprograms linking her multiple views of two of the snipers to the on-line engineering programs.

 

The crane was lifting a two-ton girder and rotating north as she fed the vectors and speeds to the engineering program.

 

The engineering program did as she asked and ran up a velocity profile and overlaid a schematic on her view out the crane’s camera. Tetsami smiled again. The crane itself didn’t reach, but since she’d killed the safety protocols, the engineering program had used its new freedom to get the girder where she wanted. It was easy now that she didn’t require the girder’s velocity to be zero at the end of its track.

 

She gave the program the okay to take over the placement of the girder.

 

The crane arm backed up a few degrees and began a rotation north, accelerating near the failure point of the mechanism. The end of the cable shot to the end of the crane arm, and the girder swung out over the road like a stick on a string. At a very specific point, the winches holding the cables let go and the girder was in free fall.

 

The sniper on the roof of the octagonal sky-rise must not have been watching above him. At almost the last minute he looked up, and the left half of the girder took him off at the knees.

 

The sniper was mulched by the two-ton bar of steel. The girder kept rolling, tearing up the roof, smashing antennas, landing lights, a few aircars, and the entrance to an elevator.

 

By then Tetsami had the northwest crane on-line, and that girder was already slicing through the corner of the twentieth story of the trapezoidal high-rise. This girder didn’t have to go into free fall to do its job, and it stabbed through the corner of the building like a pin through a folded flap of skin.

 

Tetsami was lucky. She saw the sniper as he was thrown through the side of the building and tumbled toward the ground. She wouldn’t have to swing the crane again.

 

Blondie began to scream.

 

It was a hideous slow-motion bellow that Tetsami first thought belonged to the carnage she was wreaking. Her nose, now stranded in realtime, told her otherwise. There was the smell of burning synthetics, overloaded circuitry, and burning flesh.

 

Sniper three wasn’t a dope. He’d seen his friends get wasted and was trying to frag the control trailer. She was smelling a near miss. In a moment or two the geek was going to waste her.

 

So much for tactical genius. You should have wasted him first.

 

Tetsami got a fix on a camera with a view of the goof. He was in full armor, sort of half leaning and half clamped on the edge of floor ten. He was pointing his carbine down—toward her no doubt. As she watched, there was the stroboscopic flare from below—Zanzibar and the plasma rifle.

 

She expected to be blinded, but the cameras on the robot she was looking through adjusted to the light level without so much as a twitch. She looked for the ID of the robot. It was a plasma welder.

 

She took control of the thing and realized that she couldn’t move it any nearer to the sniper without alerting him. The specs on this beast had it going no more than a klick an hour, max, and it was as big as he was with sinister looking manipulators and jets everywhere. With the plasma tanks on it, it looked like a bomb....

 

Hell, it is a bomb.

 

Her connection fuzzed, and the trailer filled with the smell of another near miss. She didn’t allow it to screw up her programming. The safety locks on the welder were a little tougher than the safety locks on the cranes, but she broke it in three seconds.

 

Even as her control died, she shot the improv program to the core of the welding robot.

 

Three simple commands: Close the welding aperture to zero, power up the plasma generators to max, and—after waiting a second—lose the magnetic containment.

 

The trailer rocked again, in the wake of a giant explosion. Tetsami jacked out the cable and fell into the real world. Blondie quivered in the corner. No laser sliced the trailer.

 

Her shot had been right on target.

 

<>

 

* * * *

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

 

Foreign Relations

 

 

“The difference between us and the alien is the belief that we know ourselves that much better. The similarity lies in the fact that we are ignorant of both.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

 

“The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.”

—Muhammad

(570-632)