Free Cyberpunk by Bruce Bethke Page A

you.”
    Suddenly, my voice was a choked sputter. Rayno was being so
    unfair. I mean, how could he expect me to bulletproof us against
    something that dumb ?
    Rayno sighed, and gave me a sad smile. “Face it, Mikey, you porked
    up bigtime. Your ass is dogfood now. Question is, what are you gonna
    do to protect the rest of us?” I was still trying to find an answer for that
    when he drained his caffix cup, sat up straight, and toggled to normal
    voice. “And now, you can do me a big favor and beat it.” He leaned back
    in his seat, looked away, made it clear that the audience was over.
    Just like that. I stood up, fighting for words. Rayno thought he could
    blow me off that easy? I felt the Starfire bulging in its pocket, and
    sudden I started to flush hot and mad. He thought he could just throw me
    away? I’d show him! He wouldn’t be nowhere without me! I was equal ,
    now! Spinning around, I clenched my fists and stomped straight out the
    door.
    They were waiting for me out on the sidewalk. Two older guys with
    grim faces and dark business suits; the short, wide one studying a
    photograph, the big, man-mountain one keeping up a scan of the street. I
    recognized them immediate from a thousand vids: Gestapo. KGB. Brain
    Police.
    “You Mikhail Arthur Harris?” the short one asked. The mountain
    started to move towards me.
    “Who wants to know?” I said. The attempted snarl came out a
    nervous squeak.
    “Are you Mikhail Arthur Harris?” Shorty asked again.
    I faked left, broke right, started running. A third one stepped out of
    the shadows between two buildings and grabbed me. Man-mountain
    lumbered over to help Number 3 hold me while Shorty barked
    something into a walkie-talkie.
    The big ugly green privatecar with the blackfilm windows came
    roaring up in a screech of tires and a cloud of stinky diesel smoke.
    Shorty popped the back door open and dove inside; the other two pushed
    Cyberpunk 1.0 54
    ©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
    my head down and forced me into the car, while a Number 4 came
    jogging up the street from the other direction. Boy, they’d been prepped
    for me. I hardly had my face out of the upholstery before they had the
    plastic cablecuffs zipped tight and the doors slammed shut.
    With another screech of rubber and blast of burning petrol, we were
    off and jouncing down the street. Hard left. A hard right, onto the
    expressway. The engine opened up with a throaty roar. Somewhere
    around the Crosstown ramp I finally fought through the icy terror and
    got my voice back. “Who the Hell are you guys? Where you taking me?
    I got rights! ”
    Shorty, in the jumpseat, turned away from the window and looked at
    me cold and black. His voice was gravelly and murderous slow. “Sure,
    boy, you’ve got rights. Sometimes I lie awake nights and count them,
    just to make myself crazy.”
    I shut up, cringed, tried to slide down in the crack between the seat
    cushions. Five minutes later we whipped off the expressway and into the
    airport. The car ground to a stop in front of a private hangar. Shorty
    jumped out first and started directing things, while Man-mountain and
    Number 3 manhandled me out of the car and stuffed me into a private

Lear with couple sour-faced old guys in dark green uniforms. Man-
    Mountain pinned me in a seat with a forearm across my chest until
    Number 3 had my seatbelt latched. Shorty said something into his
    walkie-talkie and slammed the hatch. The turbines lit up with a rising,
    piercing, nail-in-the-ear whine. We rolled forward for a bit in jerks and
    turns, then stopped.
    Then acceleration like a big hand pushed me back deep into the seat
    foam.
    An hour later, two hours later, I don’t know: Too scared to try
    talking (not that the guys in the green uniforms were answering,
    anyway), flying through the night without a shadow of a word about
    who these guys were or where they were taking me, the noise of the
    engines like crazy dentist’s nanorobots drilling into my ears, I