Authors: Alan Dean Foster
“Who thought this one up?”
“I did,” said Chuy. “Got the idea off a vit. Hasn’t failed so far. It’s a redundancy, in case anyone at central security happened
to have noticed us pulling in and gave a damn. This way it’ll look like a couple of cleanies using the safe confines
of the lot to sleep off a binge. Come on, and stay low. Not everything in here’s auto. They have regular patrols, too.”
As the camera swung back again, patient and ignorant, we scrambled toward the yard.
Hundreds of induction container cars rested on surface tracks, a labyrinth of composite stelacrete, plastic, composite fibers,
and metal. Chuy and the others seemed to know pretty much where they were going, though they stopped once to confer. I just
tried to keep up and out of the way, watching and learning. At the north end of the yard the network converged into the heavy-use
lines that ran toward the Strip. All around us was the constant hum of cars moving, disengaging, assembling into trains or
breaking away, the sounds of maglev rails being switched on and off, clicks and buzzes, and pungent above it all the sweet
jumbled stink of lubrication and ozone. I felt as if I’d stepped over a gap and fallen into a machine, wayward as a free electron.
We stopped outside a wall of six connected cars pointed north. Chuy kept watch while Huong and Kilbee plugged a battered notex
into the access slot on the loading door and sped through combinations at twenty a second. I tried to look alert.
“How you know which car to pick?”
“Got to be one headed north. That’s the easy part. The rest is experience, practice. Also, I got contacts. Tricky business.”
I was shuffling nervously back and forth and he indicated my feet. “Watch your step.”
I knew what he was referring to. The center rail, where the exposed conducting magnets ran the length of the track, was fully
charged. If I stumbled into it, made the slightest contact with it while it was pos, I’d be a long pig taco faster than tequila
evaporates downtown on a national holiday.
The container cars sat on their track, vibrating infinitesimally as they awaited orders to move. The damn door finally clicked
open. Chuy rose up and stepped back. “Move it, hombers!”
Huong and Kilbee disappeared within. Moments later they
were tossing out long, flat rectangular boxes no thicker than slats. They were made of opaque molycite, carefully labeled.
I didn’t waste time trying to read them. When Chuy and I each had one the intruding pair descended and we started running,
fast and low, back to the lot.
Once there we waited, timing our rush to the Sodan. When Chuy gave the word we moved, into the coupe, deflating the balloon
drunks and replacing them with our own selves. Huong drove sedately out of the lot.
At the city lot we abandoned the stolen coupe for Chuy’s beat-up Mord. Only when we were back on a main street in town did
the boys start whooping and hollering, exchanging raps and cries.
“Let’s see what we got,” said Chuy. He took a prier from a slim toolbox stored under the front seat and started working on
the molycite carton. The lid slid off smoothly and we saw that it was full of densely packed NISC optical leads. As were the
other three slats. The last one we cracked contained doublet Mahatmas, gold-sealed and ready to install, each worth sixty
Namerican dollars apiece wholesale underground according to Huong. There were fifty leads in the slat.
“What do you think, ‘Stebo?” Chuy was beaming. “Not bad for a couple hours running around in the dark, eh? Better than snorting
desdu, and safer.”
“You did okay, buffo,” said Kilbee grudgingly.
“Thanks. Then stop calling me buffo, okay?”
For the second time that night a big hand reached back over the seat.
It went like that week after week. We were doing pretty damn good. One night in July, when it was too hot even for the spy
vit to move very fast, we skragged a whole box of custom-augmented lumin plates. Twenty-five of ‘em, a thousand dollars a
plate. Huong got so boned we had to pass him around three different moray holes just to get him hosed down.
But we each could’ve packed out a box. It bothered me. I thought I knew what the problem was, but I waited ‘til I was
sure before pushing it on Chuy. I was doing a lot of thinking since I’d been accepted into the troop, and I wanted to be positive.
“Yeah, we coulda taken four boxes,” he told me over a couple of self-chilling Cabos at his place. It was out on the Point,
in an expensive neighborhood, but not too flamboyant, if you know what I mean. Not right on the Pacif, but you could see it
from his rooftop. Chuy himself, he never used the sundeck. That was for crazy anglos who wanted to get as dark as the people
they were always railing against.
“Then why didn’t we?” I asked him. Looking out the second-floor window I could see Huong and Kilbee down in the compact high-walled
garden-yard, sitting under the misters with a couple of girls they’d picked up outside the International School of Management.
Huong’s lady looked like she was from Finland or something. Her skin was as pale as underwear on washday. The slant was partial
to tall Europeans. Kilbee wasn’t partial at all, so long as they had a waist. Friggin’ equal-op employer.
“Because of the way the yard security’s set up. We’re like mosquites, ‘Stebo. You draw a little blood here, a little there,
your target gets up irritated but not furious. You take too much at one time, you get squashed.” He slugged cold Cabo. “I
seen it happen.
Compadre
of mine, Esquivel Figuerito, borrowed a six-wheel sloader. Slipped into the yard and filled it up with twelve crates of Miashi
and Davidano thrummo components, real class noise-makers, that he took off a container from Surabaya. Skrag weighed about
two hundred kilos, I guess. They busted him before he was halfway to the barrier.”
“How?”
“Mierde,
homber, those induction containers derop around on magnetic fields, right? So the weight of each container is checked and
double-checked and recorded when it’s offloaded from a ship, and the weight goes into the monitoring ‘puters along with the
rest of the stats. Yard Security Central
has a mass-weight record of every container as soon as it comes off the ship from whatever Slantland it calls home. They’re
monitored twenty-four hours a day. A container’s weight suddenly drops, even a little, and it sets off an alarm in Security
that records the amount of weight loss even as it’s identifying the specific container. The yardeyes swarm that container
on foot and speedbikes so fast you don’t have time to sneeze. Nobody gets out.
“That’s why we never skrag more than twenty kilos of anything. It allows us about a ten-kilo margin and we don’t go over one
decagram. Never. That’s why I never been caught since I developed this little game. We take too little to miss. Sometimes
we don’t get much. A couple hundred. You seen it, you been in on it. But it’s a gamble every time. I’d rather mess a guess
and suffer a few sterile nights than end up busted and back in Hermosillo, or worse. Haven’t been lucky. Just been careful.
“Other guys, they get too greedy. We take just a little at a time. Sometimes we don’t get nothing. It’s a tradeoff.”
I nodded. “I been thinking, Chuy.”
“’Bout what, amigo?”
I sipped at my beer. “What if we could get around the weight problem somehow?”
Chuy frowned. “Don’t get no funny ideas, homber. We do it my way or not at all. You want to freelance?”
“No, no. I’m as reticent as you. But what if, like, what if I thought of a way where we could vacuum not a few kilos of compo,
but a lot more. More than two hundred kilos. A whole container. How much could that be worth?”
Chuy belched, then blinked. “A whole car? Man, you crazy.”
“Maybe, but I don’ mind bein’ rich an’ crazy.”
Chuy chuckled. “If my guy can’t make two hundred kilos, a smart like him, how you gonna take a whole car? You’ll set off every
alarm in every induction security station between San Juana and La Paz.”
I did a little B&D on my enthusiasm. I was pretty confident, but still… “By convincing the system that the car isn’t being
skragged.”
Chuy shook his head. “Now just how you gonna do that, homber?”
I sat up straight. Below, rising sounds indicated that Kilbee and Huong were deep in the hearta Mexas. “VR.”
Chuy smiled. “That’d maybe fool the box vits, if you’re good enough. But it doesn’t affect the underlying analytics.”
I leaned forward. “I’m not just talking virtual reality sight-wise. I’m thinkin’ virtual
weight.”
Easing back in his chair, Chuy glanced amusedly out and down to where Kilbee was all over his girl. Kilbee always got all
the best-looking ones. Damn anglo. “What the hell is virtual weight, man?”
“Something I been playing with, thinking about ever since you introed me to our faz night games. See, before I got interested
in splitting finitives, I wanted to be an artist. I can not only make a car look real through VR, I think I can make it feel
real, too, if I can get into the distribution yard main box.”
Chuy was thinking hard, still doubtful. “Even if you can fool the yard box into thinking something’s still there that ain’t
no more, the place’s still gonna be full of yardeyes. You’ve done enough slipos to know we got five, maybe ten minutes at
the most to pull the old in-and-out before some Eye shows and makes us. So maybe you can work this thing and maybe you can’t.
It don’t matter un ratass because we ain’t got enough time to make it worthwhile. And even if you did, we can only take what
we can carry. We can’t drive a van into the distribution yard, much less a truck. Esqui tried that and I told you what happen
to him. The Eyes’d be all over us for unauthorized entry in a minute, even before you could start setting up. Best we can
do is get a set of riffy wheels into the employee vehic lot, like you seen.”
“We don’ need ten minutes to skrag a container,” I told him, having thought it all out as best I could before opening
my mouth. “And we don’ need a truck. We’re not gonna vacuum the damn thing. You won’t have to carry nothin’, neither.
“The Eyes and vit cameras don’t track the containers after they’ve been sent on their way and left the yard, and there ain’t
no vits on the mainlines. Only box sensors. No point in tryin’ to follow real-time pictures of containers snappin’ past at
three hundred per, so they just put up representations. Schematics. Virtuals. We can substitute our own damn virtuals, man.
I can do virtuals like you never seen. That’s the easy part. The trick’s insertin’ them into the network, foolin’ the sensors
when you sub the dupe, and givin’ it staying power ‘til we’ve safely skragged our load.”
Chuy pondered some more. Then he chugged the rest of his Cabo, wiped his lips, and smiled that little hard smile of his. “What
you need to try this, miracle man?”
I told him. He repeated the list to himself, though I didn’t know how sophisticated his knowledge was or indeed if any of
it would be familiar to him.
“Zenitrov portable, Komitsu modem, Digibm peripherals. The other stuff I don’t recog. Sounds like you got expensive tastes.”
“I didn’t say it would come cheap. The Zenitrov’s the only portable with enough crunch to handle the VR mass and the graphics.”
I waited.
Chuy watched condensation creep down the sides of his gold beer bottle, blotting the droplets with a fingertip. “You’re talking
a lot of money. What if Huong and Kilbee don’t go along?”
I shrugged, feigning indifference. Inside, I was excited not merely by the possibilities but by the chance to really make
use of the natural talents I’d developed in Rehab.
“Well, Kilbee’s always boasting how he can skrag some real money if he ever needs to. Maybe he’ll make up any shortfall.”
Chuy leaned forward. “But you better know what you doing, amigo, or else start looking for an easy route over the mountains.”
I smiled, but I didn’t feel that way inside. Chuy wasn’t screwing around. Chuy never screwed around where money was concerned.
It took longer to set up the program than to acquire the necessary equipment, even though I’d spent weeks working out a lot
of it in my head. Kilbee grumbled and Huong looked downright skeptical, but Chuy persuaded them. I spent a lot of time in
the basement of Chuy’s constricted, three-story codo, accessing the arcomplex library under an assumed code and designing
the probe.
When I thought I was ready I did some practicing on small stuff and it all seemed to work, but cracking the inventory box
at Nick’s Liquor and Narcotics wasn’t the same as what we were going to try.
There was no need for everyone to go along. In fact, with just Chuy and I we’d be that much less conspicuous. Huong and Kilbee
watched doubtfully as Chuy and I rumbled off beneath a quarter moon in a stolen Solarmax.
Kilbee’s fancy card got us into the employee lot at the distrib yard, like always. I made sure the backpack was secure on
my shoulders. Then we blew up our drunk dolls, slid out of the car, an’ started into the yard, absenting among the clicks
and hums of the hundreds of induction containers.
I kept waiting for Chuy to pick a likely target. It seemed like it took him hours to make a decision, but inside he was as
nervous as always, though not as nervous as me. Finally he stopped me next to a container with simple graphics.
“Don’ look like much to me.”
“Hey,” he whispered in my face, “you leave the picking to me. Now do it, if you’re gonna. If you can.”
I nodded and moved to the front of the container, searching along the edge while Chuy kept a restive, silent watch for roving
Eyes. When I accessed the interlock I broke the seal and found myself looking at a heavy-duty but pretty standard communications
module. I slid the backpack off and took out the Zenitrov, fumbled clumsily with the peripherals while Chuy cursed me, my
ideas, and my mother under his breath,
trying not to nerve me but at the same time uneasy at hangin’ in one place for so long. Containers rumbled and drifted around
us.
I got in pretty fast, if I do say so myself. The distribution yard box was big, lots of volume. What you’d expect for so complicated
an operation. I munched the stats on this particular container right away, because I was plugged into it. That was the easy
part. I floated around inside the box space, orienting myself until I felt comfortable. I knew I didn’t have much time for
sightseeing. Not with Chuy constantly prodding me in the ribs.