Pennsylvania Omnibus (13 page)

Jed held up the gold coin, but didn’t say a word.  He felt
like Donavan’s blood was on the face of the precious metal, accusing him.

“Good deal.  So Jed will have to do some acting.  He
should be the only person on the bus, and if he is, then that fact alone will
indicate to the gangs that he’s valuable.  Nothing else has been moving during
the offensive.  If the gangs get to him first—and that’s our preferred
outcome—he’s in good shape.  They’ll be glad to get the gold, and they’ll
probably protect and hide Jed until we can form up and get to him.  If it’s the
salvagers that get to him—”

“—they’ll want to sell him to the highest bidder,” Ducky
said.

“Yes.  But they won’t know we’re on the way, or that he’s
with us.  Salvagers are unpredictable and mercenary, but we’re hoping that they
think that Transport is their only problem, so maybe won’t be in quite as much
of a rush.  If Jed can get them talking and delay them, maybe we can get to him
before they’re all through the hills and gone.” 

“But what if Transport gets to him first?” Jeff Wainwright
asked. “This is a three-way race, after all.”

“Then we’ll have a fight on our hands,” Pook answered
soberly.  “Jed, you’ll have to really sell this thing,” he added.

“What does that mean?” Jed said, as he pushed the coin
deep into the pocket of his broadfall pants.

“That means you’ll have to do a little bit of acting. 
You’ll have to be confident and assertive, and the longer you can stall and
delay whoever it is that’s gotten to you first—especially if it’s the
salvagers—the better the chances are that we’ll be able to get to you and
secure your freedom.”

Jed nodded his head.  He still wasn’t sure exactly what
was expected from him, but he felt like he didn’t have any other options other
than to play it the way Pook had designed it.

“There’ll be a race to get to you, Jed, once the airbus is
electronically forced down in the rural zone.  Worst case scenario, salvagers
get you.  If that happens, delay, delay, delay.  Got it?”

“I think so.  Why won’t Transport just recall the airbus
and fly it back over the bridge?” Jed asked. “Why force it down in what you
call ‘ungovernable’ territory?”

“They used to do that,” Pook said, but years ago the
unaffiliated gangs and salvagers found ways to launch homemade sticky bombs
that would adhere to the exterior of the buses.  They’d rig the bombs with
timing devices, and Transport would fly the buses right into the Transport
station and then the bombs would go off.  So they don’t do that anymore.  Now,
if they know they have a high-value target on an airbus, they just bring the
bus down and send a team to go and search the bus while it’s still outside the
City.  It minimizes the terrorists’ ability to attack Transport facilities.

“The problem now is that the salvagers and the gangs are
so highly organized, they can often get to the buses and extract whatever’s
valuable before Transport can get to them.  Transport hasn’t come up with
another protocol yet, so for now it’s really just a race to any bus that’s
forced down.

“So you’ll need to sell what it is you’re doing, Jed.  By
that I mean that you need to be who you really are—a harmless young Amish boy
trying to get home.”

“Amish
man
,” Dawn said.  “He’s not a
boy
,
Pook, or a
kid
.  Why don’t we start treating him with the respect he
deserves?”

Jerry nodded his head at Dawn approvingly.

“Whatever you say, cousin,” Pook said dismissively.  “Jed,
you’ll need to tell whoever gets to you first that you need them to take you to
the Amish Zone, and take your time telling them about the gold coin.  Depending
on who captures you, you might find them to be tremendously helpful—”

“—or tremendously unhelpful,” Dawn interjected.

“Yeah,” Ducky said, “they might cut you up and cook you in
their stew.”

This made the rest of the team laugh, but Pook cut the
joking short with a wave of his hand.

“We’re all going to have to improvise and adapt.  The rest
of us are going to be crossing the river the old-fashioned way.”  Pook saw
Jed’s confused look and explained.  “That means we’ll be swimming over, Jed. 
That’s the easiest way for anyone who is un-chipped to get into or out of the
City on the western side.  Transport believes they have the river sealed, but
that has never been true.  Now, just because I say it’s the easiest way, don’t
take that to mean that it’s easy.  It isn’t.  We’ve got our points of ingress
and egress, but we’ve got to be careful.”

Pook turned to face Jerry.  “Jerry, you’ve never done this
river crossing before.  Don’t go improvising.  You need to listen closely and
do
exactly
what we tell you to do, or you’ll mess this up for all of
us.”

Jerry narrowed his eyes coldly at Pook, but he nodded.

 Pook went on. “We’ll all form up once we’re in the rural
zone and try to locate the airbus before Transport can get there.”

“How’re we going to locate the bus?” Dawn asked.

“The same way that Transport will find it: by tracking the
locating beacon on the bus.  We’re always stealing their technology, and we’ve
developed a pretty good system of tracking Transport… almost as good as their
system of tracking us.”

“But he could be ten miles past the bridge when Transport
brings him down.”

“Right.  We’ll have to hustle.”

The conversation went on like this for several more
minutes, but Jed noticed that Dawn was growing increasingly agitated.  He
wasn’t surprised, then, when she pushed out her chair and, interrupting the
briefing, stood up and addressed Pook directly.

“I am not comfortable with this plan.  I was given strict
instructions from the SOMA that I was never to lose operational control of the
subject.  This plan requires me to relinquish control of Jed to Hugh Conrad. 
No offense, Hugh, but that isn’t in my brief.”

Hugh shrugged as if no offense was taken.

“I understand your concerns, Dawn, and they are duly
noted, but there is no way we can get you on that bus,” Pook replied.  “You
have no tracking chip, and we don’t have time or, really, the ability to
achieve that kind of hack in the time that we have.  The forged transport
papers may get you into the AZ once you arrive there, but we both know they’re
worthless as far as getting you on that airbus.”

“I’m not saying we get me on the airbus.  I’m saying that
we get Jed into the rural zone the same way I’m getting into the rural zone…
via the river.”

“No way, Dawn,” Ducky said.  He slapped his hand down on
the table, as if this was where he would definitely take a stand. “It’s hard
enough getting trained soldiers across that river safely, much less a farmer
boy—er, farmer
man
.  The current is so strong, and there are all kinds
of sensors, even under the water.  Getting Jerry across is going to be tough
enough, and he seems to have had a little training.  There is virtually a zero
percent probability of Jed making it across that river without bringing all of
Transport down on our heads.”

“I’ll take full responsibility for him,” Dawn said.

“No you won’t, Dawn,” Pook said.  “I understand that you
have your orders, but your orders—even if they come from SOMA—are based on the
overriding principle of operational security.  If your orders guarantee
failure, then they must be altered to allow for success.”

“I formally protest this decision, Pook.”

As Dawn sat down, her hand found Jed’s under the table and
she clasped it tightly and held on to it.  Jed felt his face flush, and for
some reason he looked over at Billy, but Billy couldn’t see that Dawn was
holding his hand.  Jed felt Dawn exhale deeply, and he gave her hand a slight
squeeze.  Dawn squeezed back, and Jed saw her force a smile, as if she’d
accepted the fact that her petition had failed.  Jed didn’t know how he felt
about Dawn holding his hand, but he was convinced that she did have his best
interests in mind.

“Protest noted,” Pook said, “but overruled.  Now, let’s
get to work.”

The airbus lifted silently from
the Transport bay until it reached twenty feet of altitude, and it was at this
height that it crossed over the bridge that spanned the rushing green-blue
waters of the river.  The bridge itself was an ancient relic of a bygone time,
and strictly speaking it hadn’t been necessary ever since private transport had
been abolished, but the stone and steel span marked the “safe portal” or air
gate, by which the airbuses could officially enter or exit the city.  If the
Transport vehicle was too high, or if it tried to cross the river anywhere
other than at the bridge, the City’s air defenses would be engaged to bring
down the wayward aircraft.

After crossing the bridge, the airbus climbed smoothly to
one hundred feet of altitude as it automatically directed itself in its
pre-programmed route toward the Amish Zone.  The buses could fly lower when
leaving the City than they could when approaching it.  No one had ever bombed
or rigged an airbus to blow as it was leaving the City.

Hugh Conrad, in his official position as a Transport
Agent, had seen Jed onto the bus, and then had ordered his underlings in the
terminal to see that Jed’s airbus left promptly and without hindrance on its
journey.  Thankfully for Jed, and thanks to Officer Rheems and Jeff Wainwright,
the computers just happened to be temporarily blinded to the fact that a wanted
fugitive would be using Transport property to escape the City.

Looking out the rear window, Jed saw the bridge grow
smaller behind him, and watched the ground slip farther away as the craft made
its way into the fifty miles of rural zone that separated the Amish Zone from
the City.  All the while, the rest of the team, including Conrad and Rheems,
had separated into units and were attempting to make their way out of the city
using more traditional means of escape.

Jed didn’t know with any certainty when, or if, Transport
would learn of the security breach and bring the airbus to a halt on the
ground, but he’d been assured by Pook that this was almost certain to happen at
some point during the trip.  He was nervous and a little frightened, just as
he’d been when he’d first left Columbia in Old Pennsylvania back on Earth and
headed to the Transport spaceport out in the desert of West Texas.  That is, if
he’d ever been to Texas at all…

“You guys were never in West Texas.”

That’s what Dawn had said to him and Jerry as the three of
them were fleeing the Transport station.

Jed now felt like he needed to question every experience
he’d had since his journey first began.  None of it made sense.

And then there was the coffee-can window—and that was the
kicker of it all.  That was the one piece of evidence that inexorably brought
home the idea that he could not trust his senses, and that nothing was at all
as it appeared.  That window was the only thing
real
that Jed could
identify.  Everything else could be a trick. 

Jed looked out the windows of the airbus, and watched as
the early morning light illuminated the deep green of the countryside.  Despite
all of the weirdness he’d been through, these undulating hills and abundantly
verdant swells of earth made him feel that he could easily be back in
Pennsylvania—the old Pennsylvania, back on Earth.  This place was different in
many ways—it was wilder, and the old farms here were grown over with weeds, and
trees, and brush—but the geography looked a lot like home.

The bus passed over a small town—or what used to be a
small town, but now was just a bombed-out remnant of a town.  Jed saw the piles
of brick, and the burned-out businesses and homes, and he had to shake his
head.  Wherever this was, whether this was New Pennsylvania, or Mars, or the
far side of the moon, it was clear that the wars the English insisted on
fighting had followed them here from Earth.

“You guys were never in West Texas.”

She might as well have said, “You can’t trust
anything.”

For the first time in his journey, Jed was alone with his
thoughts.  All of the scenes from his long trek were now flashing before his
eyes.  He saw Conrad and Rheems arresting him, and the fear returned and he
felt his heart race.  He saw himself hiding the gold coin in his pod, and he
saw himself waking up and racing with Dawn toward…

What?

Now, in his mind, he was back at the chop shop.  Dawn and
Jerry were going under the knife, and Donavan—smiling Donavan—was offering to
run back to the Transport station to get the coin; to risk his own life for the
lives of strangers.  Or did he just do it for money?  Then there was the ride
to the grocery, to the antique shop.  And then there was death.  Omnipresent
death.  Surreal and immediate.

What should a man believe?

If West Texas wasn’t real, was any of it real?

The window frame back in the antique store. 
That
was real.  Jed had no doubt at all in his mind that the window frame was
reality.  He could close his eyes right now and he was back on the farm, and he
was fourteen again, and he was stomping and pounding that coffee can flat with
his worn-out Amish boots and then cutting and shaping it so that it would fit
perfectly in the space where the old broken pane had been carefully removed.

Yes.  The window frame was real.  That, at least, was
something on which Jed could anchor his thoughts.  Somewhere out there… or back
there… somewhere in the universe, he still had family.

And that led him to think about Amos.  Jed had told Dawn
that Amos was wiser than his years.  That was true. 
If Amos were here
,
Jed thought,
I think the two of us could sort this out.
  He loved his
younger brother so much, and he hoped with all of the hope that was within him
that Amos was still on his way here.  Wherever—or whenever—this
here
was.  Amos
was
that window on the couch in the shop.  He was real, and
he was out there too. 
Maybe somewhere between here and Earth.