Chapter 846: Names of the Fallen

Chapter 846: Names of the Fallen

Crashrider jinked out of the way of a pair of massive semi trucks that changed lanes, their routing packets suddenly updating in the blaring of horns and the flashing of turn signals. The bike, a Harvey Davidson Skorpion with the Salvation upgrades, smoothly shifted out of the way of the semis, the stereo still blaring loud enough to echo in the huge tunnel.

He moved in between two of the massive cargo transports as they passed a security checkpoint, the software mistaking him for part of the huge data transfer. As both vehicles too offramps he shot forward.

Maggie's Love Line dropped from twelve lanes to eight.

Nobody knew what was inside. Even the people running full eVR didn't traverse the line. It was a high speed data line, nothing more than raw one way data moving in massive bulk through a superluminal data pipeline where information moved almost instantly across thousands of light years. Not the two thousand to fifty thousand times the speed of light of Terran superluminal travel.

No, Crashrider's consciousness was moving through Maggie's Love Line, where data transferred at millions of time the speed of light. Riding the signal between two paired particles vibrating at a billion times a second.

His deck was loaded with utility and combat programs, normally selected carefully for the mission he had been hired for or what his gut told him he might need. His biological culture grown wetware had programs loaded in.

Just a handful of combat programs as well as bioware that acted as the interpretation hardware out of a deck. It was slower than his Fairlight Excaliber-XII cyberdeck, which had been modified to the point where only parts of the case were still OEM and off the shelf, but it was in his brain, it was part of him, grown into his neural tissue. Modified Terran Confederate Armed Services Electronic Warfare Control Array Neural Cluster, sure, but Crashrider didn't know of a single runner that was sporting that bit of bioware from the bioware bandwagon.

All he had was what was loaded into his bioware and some of his cyberware that was hardwired to run at cyberspace speeds.

Still, he had his weapons, he had his control and interpretation programs and wetware, he had enough shielding that it manifested in cyberspace as body armor.

But nothing else. No stealth, no spoof, no sleaze, nothing like that.

His head had a weird tickle in it, a little bit back from between his eyes, above his sinus cavity, but he ignored it as he revved the engine, threw the front tire into the air, and roared through a security checkpoint that he knew he had no chance of spoofing at that speed.

But it was the Last Run, and he was in the zone. A floating chrome orchid.

The lights went red, alarms howling, but it was lost in the din of the Maggie's Love Line traffic.

His left arm was tingling, so he drew his Predator II, an old reliable workhorse that was a relic but still fit in his hand like it was molded for it, and leaned forward on his bike to reduce wind resistance even further. The pain rippled up his back but he ignored it.

He knew he had suffered biofeedback damage to his meat body, but that wasn't his problem.

He had faith that Da'armo'o's doctors and clinicians would keep him alive for as long as he needed.

The IV drip and friends watching his brain waves on limited monitors was in the past, back in the bare, undecorated Unified Population Control apartments.

For a second he could remember them. The apartments he grew up in. The apartments that he'd lived in. Four walls, what few appliances he needed just extending from the walls, as long as the family/person on the other side wasn't using it. The memory fragment was of one of his chummers, Mad Magic Mike (Crash never remembered their old names), holding open the door of the abandoned and slated for demolition hab block so that the group could scurry inside.

The money was spent on food, a little better clothing, and the tools/parts needed to hijack public utilities. They'd been dirt poor, broke as fuck, but still fighting in the war against the PAWMs.

The memory shattered as his bioware loaded mirrorbox program activated and pulled the invoked memory stimulation program into multiple fragments, each attacking a fake version of Crash's brain.

Crash revved the engine again, keeping the front wheel off the ground, as he sped between two big black semi trucks.

A glance behind him showed two figures, all black anodized chrome, racing after him on their own bikes.

No flashing lights, no rotating holograms proclaiming them to be security.

Skull faced helmets whose jaws were all sharp teeth, the eye sockets filled with a dark crimson glow. Their motorcycles looked like a bound and tortured female Mad Lemur who held the front wheel in her hands and the back wheel between her drawn forward knees.

Black ICE.

Crash glanced down at his pistol, saw it was still loaded with packet header switchers and browser hijackers. He rotated his wrist quickly twice.

SQL injection with polyarithmatic fractured xyz-curve algorithmic iFrame requestors.

Frame breaker rounds.

He kept the pistol close, driving with one hand, keeping an eye in the rearview mirror to see how close they were.

Exits whipped by. Onramps vanished as vehicles merged into the dataflow.

Crash maneuvered deftly between the vehicles, keeping a watch on the oncoming Black ICE as well as the traffic.

Chrome.

Orchid.

Floating.

"His blood pressure keeps spiking and he has abnormal neural activity that is causing cerebral tissue damage," the lab coat wearing clinician said, staring at the Lanaktallan in front of her. "He needs disconnected. Even with the risks of dump-shock, he's taking severe wounds."

He was a Great Most High of Maintenance, but also, paradoxically, he was the owner and guiding mind between Magician Hat's Games as well as Magic Grazing Field Games.

He had also hired her and a dozen other doctors and trauma nurses to oversee six beings who kept connected to GalNet.

She had, impossibly enough, seen beings die in real life when they had been killed in GalNet.

The Lanaktallan, Da'armo'o, stared at her.

"No."

She blinked. "What?"

"No."

The Lanaktallan fixed her with a cold gaze.

"They have their missions," he said. He clopped over next to one, a female Hikken wired in. She was bleeding from one ear, one eye open, her pupil fixed and dilated. "They will succeed. They must succeed."

"That one is brain dead!" the nurse said. She pointed at another, who the doctors were working on. "That one suffered massive cardiac arrest! You're allowing these beings to die!"

"Yes."

Da'armo'o turned away.

"Control yourself, doctor," he said. Two of his arms hung limply. The left side of his face was dead. Not numb, just... dead.

"Give them neural accellerators, synapse overclockers," he said softly.

The doctors stared at him.

"NOW!" he snapped, without looking.

The Telkan he had hired years ago to protect him nodded and put his hand on his pistol, half drawing it.

"He said now," was all the Telkan said.

The doctors and nurses scrambled to follow orders.

It was as if someone had jammed twelve different beings of flowing, golden light together. Their wings beat, keeping them aloft, where their eyes stared at the streets below like searchlights. From their lips came commands that made Crash shudder.

His cerebral fluid pressure rose high enough that pink fluid dribbled from his ears and tinged his eye color.

Not that he knew it, speeding around the roundabout, the throttle cranked to the max, his armored knee showering sparks off the roadway even as he triggered security programs that weren't able to deploy until he was two rotations above them.

He could see what he was after.

One of the sec-programs, a BlackICE, cut loose with an SMG, the bullets howling off of the vehicles.

A flash of light from the eyes of the figures above and the sec-program flashed and vanished.

The sheer, raw power of their domain made Crashrider's mouth go dry, but he pushed away the doubts, the fears.

Chrome.

Orchid.

He was Crashrider.

He reached the top loop but instead of turning into the traffic he lifted the front wheel up, keeping the hammer down on the throttle, and charged the barrier, standing up, bending his knees slightly.

The front of the motorcycle hit. The code deformed, warped.

But the error catchers, designed for Alpha Test RPGMMO use, enhanced and upgraded, held and the motorcycle jumped the railing in a shower of sparks.

Everything slowed down.

The three figures in the melded being started to look toward Crashrider as he flew through the open spaces. He could feel the self-adapting code altering.

There was a twinge as the bioware in his neocortex started to overload.

He drew the Caught-Tonya blade with one hand, the Ares Predator II with the other, putting one foot on the seat of the motorcycle.

The cycle reached the top of the arc and shifted to start dropping.

The eyes were moving toward the insignificant errored program approaching.

Crashrider jumped, pushing off, throwing himself forward, through more than emptiness, though space that didn't exist.

For a second he saw it as he crossed the datalines, bridged the two channels.

A burning pulsing object, not a sun, for a sun was only real. This was more than real, beyond real.

It contained all of an entire reality inside of it.

The moment shattered and Crashrider slammed into the middle one, the Caught-Tonya sinking to the hilt. The great creature blinked in shock as the blade began script and command injection.

Without pausing, Crashrider fired the pistol.

The rounds hit under the chins of the great beings.

The program didn't go through a crash and reboot.

It just crashed.

It vanished.

For a second, he saw it again.

More than all of creation in one burning object.

He was falling.

His chest suddenly hurt and he looked down as he fell, expecting to see blood.

Instead, he just saw his armajacket and the bandoleer across his chest.

He closed his eyes as he fell, his arms spread out, his Caught-Tonya in one hand and the pistol in the other.

Da'armo'o heard the alarms wailing. He could see through his one remaining eye that faced backwards that the medics and doctors were shocking Crashrider's chest, trying to bring him back.

He stared at the telltales on the monitor in front of him.

All the telltales were red.

He closed his eyes and breathed a sigh of relief.

------------

General Tik-Tak looked around.

"Do we know how?" he asked.

"The main operating system crashed. It's not rebooting, it's hung up on a loop when it's trying to reboot. It gets to the error checking then hits and unrecoverable error, the timer runs down, it reboots," the Colonel said without looking up. "I've seen this before. You actually need someone at the keyboard."

Tik-Tak breathed a sigh of relief.

"Keep an eye on it. Tell me if an operator starts handling the errors," Tik-Tak said.

He turned away, moving over to the window.

The hypercom wave generator was down.

"We must destroy the village to save the village," he whispered.

-----

"Look, a falling star," the Man said, pointing into the dark sky.

A bright spark was falling from the heavens, a glowing trail behind it.

The Fox nodded. "An omen of good luck," he said.

"Let us go and see where it lands," the Frog said.

The other two nodded, all three of them reaching out to take one another's hands as they moved across the gently waving fields of JPG grass.