Free The Scarab by Scott Rhine Page A

trees bordering the sidewalk just to confuse his tracking
systems. I managed to miss the simulated “little old ladies” that frantically
pushed perambulators out of my way.
    I cranked it up to sixty km/h
before realizing I couldn’t spin yet. Besides the cameras still watching from
the overhead blimp, in this soft ground, I’d slow to almost nothing. The
engines didn’t have any power to spare yet.
    “Navigator to pilot, the hunter has
just entered the woods. Some of the other heavies are following in his tread marks
just to be lazy. Omigod, the lake. You’re going to hit the lake.”
    Normally hitting water doesn’t hurt
a Ground-Effect vehicle. They’re a little like a pure hovercraft that way.
Unfortunately, man-made lakes tend to descend at a steep angle, and Ghedra
would sink nose-down into the sludge before leveling out. It would take no
effort for Elmer to blow me away from the back-side with the whole world
watching. One side of the lake had a waterfall, but I couldn’t remember which
one.
    “Where’s the bridge?” I shouted.
    “Right!”
    I turned hard, just missing a glass
restaurant and more sparrows than you could shake a stick at. If I turned too
sharply in non-spin mode, I could easily flip myself over. I could hear my lift
compensators complaining loudly under stresses they were never designed take.
It’s not the speed they minded, just the sudden changes. Just after I crossed
the tiny bridge, Elmer was a little low on his aim and blew it out of
existence. I was so elated that he’d bought me some extra time that I almost
impaled myself on the high, wrought-iron fencing on the opposite side. A blur
of green flashed by on my screen as I banked through a wooden information
stand. Three networks listened to the crunch in stereophonic enhancement. I
bounced in the sand horseshoe pits, sliding across the wide sidewalk into the
street. “Warning, you have sustained damage,” said the collision subsystem.
Annoyed, I hit the MORE button. “Main grid has been damaged, maximum speed
reduced by 10 percent until repairs can be effected.” The second message came
from the referee expert system. No one else could tell precisely how hurt I was
because my qualifying times were so much lower than my true cruising speed. I
watched my heat gauge climb as the main grid did far more work than ever
intended.
    A third message lit up the screen. “Twenty
second penalty to realign the grids and change facing.” What was worse, I
spilled my peanuts all over the control chair, and couldn’t take the time to
clean them off at this moment.
    “Give me some good news, navigator.
Please.”
    My reflexes were off tonight. In
the local games, I could have taken that turn easily. It must have been the
booze with dinner, but I wasn’t even legally drunk yet. Hell, I’d played night
games totally hammered before and not missed a beat. Something didn’t feel
right.
    “Without the bridge, the big tanks,
including Trans-Siberian will have to go around the long way. You’ve bought
yourself another half a minute or so. Get moving.”
    Because so many people were on the
wrong side, I gunned it down the center of the road as a compromise. I took out
a pedestrian crossing box as I streaked past the Hard Rock Cafe. On the
broadcast band, I said “Hey Doc, you missed!” and made a big kissing noise, ala
Bugs Bunny. Within minutes, the nickname “Fudd Motorcars” was stuck on TSM.
    I was cruising back at normal city
speeds and had MTV cranked when I almost got my socks seared. A pulse cannon,
already charged, wheeled around a corner two blocks away. This was another TSM
model, middleweight. Evidently, he took off the safety at the same time his big
brother did. This gun wouldn’t kill me, but he sure could keep me pinned till
the rest of his team arrived. I took an extra loop around the traffic circle,
breaking away a block early, down an alley. He tried to follow me, but the
stress was too much for the flimsy frame. His