Free The Sex Sphere by Rudy Rucker

squeak-clang of steel doors, the dull hubbub of the prisoners’ voices, the sliding shuffle of their feet, and the peng-peng-peng of high-heel boots. A woman’s boots, watch them now: peng. Imagine the percussion’s tiny shockwave rippling up that long leg, luscious as a pig’s, active as a spider’s. Peng. Whose leg is this? Dr. Giulia Verdi’s.
    Besides the boots, Giulia is wearing a tan poplin skirt and a thick red sweater. She is leading Beatrice out of the prison. Beatrice is wearing gray pants and a gray straitjacket with the arms crossed tight and padlocked in back. Criminally insane. She walks along in a slow, uncertain daze, led by Giulia’s hand on her shoulder.
    Look at Giulia’s nails, so nice and red against the gray prison cloth. It’s Valentine’s Day, though no one here cares. The head guard accepts Giulia’s signature for a release form, and then the three terrorists drive off in that VW bus.
    Inside the bus everyone is talking at once. English is the common language.
    “What should we do now?” Peter asks Beatrice, helping her out of the straitjacket. He jerks his head at Giulia, driving. “Can we trust her?”
    Beatrice smiles. She is alive again. “Can we trust you, Giulia?”
    “Implicitly. I like very much the actions you have done.”
    “How much time do we have?” Peter asks Giulia. “Until they realize you have defected.”
    Giulia shrugs expressively. “Italian bureaucracy is very…” A quick hand-gesture sketches a maze. “Maybe even a week till they notice. Or maybe two hours. We should leave Mestre. I loaded my suitcases, you see.” Indeed, there is a lot of luggage in the back of the truck.
    Beatrice swings her arms back and forth to get the circulation going, lights a cigarette. “Did you bring the weapons, Peter?”
    “ Ja , boss.”
    They’re driving through a working-class residential neighborhood with all the Old World charm of a pile of concrete blocks. The small apartment buildings are new, with cheap, ungainly shapes. Walls are painted any color, in patches, with Stella cigarette posters stuck up everywhere. There are no sidewalks. Half-dressed children float bits of filth in mud-puddles.
    “Today’s the fourteenth, right?” Beatrice asks.
    “ Si .”
    “Well, some old guy came to see me in jail. He told me that tonight a truck would be hauling six nuclear-reactor fuel assemblies along the autostrada to Brescia.”
    “That’s great,” Peter says excitedly. “That’s fabulous.”
    “We gotta hijack it. Hijack it and take it to Rome. The snoids will let us stash it in that Supercortemaggiore garage.”
    “ Bene ,” says Giulia. “Hijack the truck near Verona and get the autostrada south. I know the area well.” They’ve reached the entrance for the autostrada, the Italian superhighway system. Giulia takes her ticket at the tollbooth and stomps on up to 140 kph.
    Now jump one hundred twenty kilometers west and six hours forward. It’s dark, for one thing. But like a firefly, your disembodied eye lights things up enough to see. It’s those three terrorists, huddled in their van. The van is parked on a gravel back-road, just north of the chain-link fence which seals off the autostrada. A faint smell of wine and salami.
    Beyond the fence there’s a slope, the emergency apron, and then the westbound lanes. Fiats fly past, high-speed streaks of light, first white, then red. Whoooom. Whoooom. Other kinds of cars too, and trucks. Brroooooom. Brroooooom.
    Inside the van they’re as tense and happy as kids on Christmas Eve.
    “OK, Peter,” says Beatrice. “You better go now.”
    Peter climbs out of the van. The door slams tinnily. He’s dressed in black and carrying a machine gun and a walkie-talkie. He goes over to the fence, gives it a sort of shake, and a section the size of a garage door falls to the ground. They snipped it out earlier.
    Peter drags the fencing out of the way, steps through the hole and heads left, walking up the stream of