Timecaster

TWENTY-EIGHT

I didn’t think. I reacted. Taser rounds would put me down, so I needed to get something between me and the gun.

Teague fired three times, each one hitting McGlade as I held him in front of me like a shield. With McGlade held rigid by the electricity, I took three quick steps and shoved him at Teague, toppling them both like hyperbowling pins and then running past.

Once through the door I expected to be greeted by the entire Chicago Peace Department. But the garden was empty, confirming my suspicions that Teague had played a part in setting me up. Why else wouldn’t he have called for backup?

I sprinted through Eden, hauling ass down the clover path, passing up two more naked women, one with blue hair and the other, incongruously, brunette. I’d never really considered the communist lifestyle, but it certainly had several points in its favor.

I reached the street level slightly winded. Teague’s car, like mine, was trashed. But there was a police biofuel scooter parked in front of the parking farm. Bad form on Teague’s part, leaving it in the open. I cut off the handlebars with one sweep of the Nife, then cautiously tucked it away again.

My next course of action was to lose Teague. I had too much stuff I needed to figure out, and I wouldn’t be able to do that with him sticking to my ass like dirty underwear. So I used my DT to find the nearest train.

Tracking a subject on foot with a TEV was time consuming, but relatively simple. You simply kept the lens on the subject and followed him. Tracking while on a vehicle was harder. Teague had tailed me to McGlade’s, but he also could have guessed I’d visit McGlade, since Teague had access to my complete background.

But tracking with a TEV was impossible on heliplanes, and very hard to do on trains. To tune in to the fabric of spacetime, a timecaster had to occupy the same space as the subject, and be moving at the same speed, or else he would overshoot or undershoot him. In the case of trains, unless Teague got on the exact same train I did, the space would be different. The speed might also be slightly different, if only by a few inches per second, which was enough to really mess up a trail. The TEV’s internal program compensated for rotation of the earth and the orbit around the sun because those were constants and were mathematically predictable. But with subjects in vehicles, a timecaster needed to constantly adjust the tuning and his own speed and location as the subject moved through spacetime, making it very hard to focus.

I couldn’t get on passenger trains, not without a chip. So I’d have to hobo a cargo train. I didn’t have appropriate hobo gear, but I figured I could throw something together. How hard could it be?

My DT led me to the nearest hardware store. I picked up a hundred meters of jelly rope, some molecular bond glue, goggles, a square-foot sheet of heat-resistant aluminum, two iron stakes, a metal-shaft hammer, and gecko tape. Then I watched the four cashiers to see who was paying the least amount of attention. I picked a teenager whose lips were moving; he was on a headphone call.

I got into line; he rang up my items; I waved my wrist over the pay bar, then walked briskly away before he realized my chip hadn’t scanned. By the time he said, “Hey!” I was out the door just as it autolocked behind me, sprinting out into the street.

According to uffsee (thanks kindly, Aunt Zelda) the nearest southbound was the Baton Rouge line. Fifty cars, averaging eighty miles per hour, hauling corn. I jogged ten blocks to the track and checked my time. Four minutes until the Hawkeye arrived.

First I pounded the metal stakes into the ground, leaving three inches of each sticking out. I folded the sheet of aluminum in half, slipping it inside my belt. Then I wrapped the jelly rope around my shoulders and chest, bandolier-style. Knots in jelly rope were notoriously slippery, because they stretched, so I used the molly glue to fuse it closed.

The ground began to rumble. Train a-comin’. I wound the gecko tape around my knees and hands, making sure the setae were lined up the right way. Then I attached the handle of the hammer to the other end of the jelly rope, and soaked the entire hammer with glue.

I eyed the train, bracing my feet against the stakes, trying to envision success and push away the catastrophic failure that kept running though my head. I’d talked with hobos before, and they’d said the key was the release. If you went too soon, the jelly rope didn’t maximize its potential energy, and you’d be dragged to a horrible death. If you went too late, you’d hit the train traveling too fast, and splat against it like a bug on a windshield.

I did the equation on my DT after checking the speed of the train with the built-in laser. Factoring in my weight, my surface area, and the length and diameter of the jelly rope, I should dig in for 5.19009 seconds before letting myself go. If I were off by. 6 seconds either way, it wouldn’t end well.

I readied my timer, gripped the rope under the hammer, and began to twirl it.

The ground rumbled harder, and I could hear the train now, a gathering storm of pounding engines and steel wheels.

Of the two ways to screw up, I disliked dragging more. Might be smart to keep the Nife in mind to cut the rope if my head started bouncing off of railroad ties.

But then, smacking hard into the train, bouncing off unconscious, and then being dragged to death was potentially worse than being dragged from the get-go.

Or hitting so hard it shattered my bones, then sticking there on the train for ninety minutes until it reached Chicago, every bump and vibration absolute agony.

I remember Teague playing a video in our office a few months ago called Extreme Hobo Deaths 7. This one guy somehow got his legs cut off, an inch at a time, as he slowly slipped under the wheels. Another one hit upside down and his face was erased, pressing against the rail. He lived, and now spends his days alternating between being fed mush through a tube and screaming for someone to kill him.

This was really a bad idea. WTF was I thinking?

Then the train was upon me, and I thought about Vicki, thought about never seeing her again because I was killed in prison, and I threw the hammer.

It clanged against one of the grain cars, the glue forming an instant mollybond. I braced myself, tensing my feet, leaning slightly back as the jelly rope played out – and that was when I realized I’d forgotten to hit my timer.

Panic spiked my adrenaline even higher. How much time had already passed? Half a second? A full second?

Assume a second and count, dammit!

“One one thousand…”

The jelly rope was uncoiling like a tornado, half of it gone.

“Two one thousand…”

Now the rope had all played out, tugging on my chest lightly as it began to go taut.

“Three one thousand…”

I leaned back as the rope stretched, going from a slight pull to a serious yank, almost pulling me off my feet.

“Four one thousand…”

I leaned back at a forty-degree angle, my heels digging into the dirt, gritting my teeth as I strained against the tremendous force.

“Five one thousand…”

I jumped, springing ten feet into the air, rocketing at the train extremely fast.

Too fast.t.

The potential energy in the elastic had become kinetic energy, hurtling me toward the train much faster than it could speed away. I was within fifty yards of it and accelerating, traveling in an imperceptible arc, pinwheeling my arms in an effort to slow down.

I wondered if the train had its rear cameras on, and if I’d make the cover of Extreme Hobo Deaths 8.

Twenty-five yards to impact and I was still going too fast. When I hit, I’d fragment like a snowball.

Ten yards away, and I began to rapidly slow down. As my speed came closer to matching the speed of the train, it seemed like everything was taking a lot longer to happen. The wind, screaming in my ears and drowning out the roar of the engine, was countering my momentum.

In a fraction of a second I went from worrying about splattering to worrying I wasn’t going to reach the train at all.

I tucked my knees up and my elbows in, streamlining my body, trying to cut down the wind resistance for the last few yards, getting slower and slower until it seemed like both the train and I had come to a complete stop. I reached out, floating gently though the air, and finally touched the side of the grain car, gently as kissing a lover.

I slapped my hands against it, the millions of setae on the gecko tape forming van der Waals adhesion and sticking me to the aluminum. Unlike a mollybond, which combined molecules into solid compounds, the gecko tape induced dipole forces. The result was very sticky and incredibly strong, but easy to remove by peeling the material away from the angle of incidence.

While the scientific principle was simple enough, trying to climb up the side of a train speeding at eighty miles per hour was anything but. The wind and the speed made me feel like I weighed three hundred pounds. Plus the dipole on the gecko tape shifted, making it tricky to break the adhesion. I placed a hand onto the roof of the train, trying to pull myself on top, and felt a sharp tug.

Immediately, I was a flag flapping in the breeze, only one hand still on the train. I turned around, trying to figure out what had a hold of me, and saw my jelly rope stretching off into the distance.

It had snagged a tree.

I breathed a sigh of relief for my misaligned dipole-had I put the tape on correctly, I’d be wrapped around the tree right now.

My relief was short-lived. Van der Waals’s forces would rip my arm from my body before the gecko tape detached from the train. Since it had already pulled taut enough to yank my other three limbs away, I figured I had less than two seconds before I lost the arm.

I frantically reached for my Nife with my bad right hand, missed the sheath, and my palm stuck to my side.

The jelly rope pulled so tight I no longer worried about losing my arm.

That was because I realized it would crush my chest first.