Free The Scarab by Scott Rhine Page B

bottom made the turn, but his top
kept going straight—separating just like I had predicted.
    Out of the corner of my eye, I
watched the engine heat indicator on my control panel climb toward the red
zone. As I reach the alley, I decided it was now or never, and spun into
stealth mode. The increased air flow and aid from the other two grids lowered
the temperature and took me out of the danger zone almost instantly. I used the
break to wipe off sweat and guzzle down a drink. Once I reached the proper hull
speed and safe engine load, I used the passive cloaking to make my way toward
Piccadilly the back way.
    “It’s working!” she said. “They
think you’re dead or cheating. The broadcast-band radio is going nuts.”
    I was almost there when Mary warned
me. “TSM heavy, incoming. The broadcaster in the blimp spotted you on the
visuals and named the street. Sorry, hon’.”
    I was still okay. They had to use
manual targeting on me because my IR pattern was too weak, and my transponder
would confuse most long-range devices.
    “Radar lock established,” said my
onboard computer.
    I floored it, and hit Piccadilly Circus going full speed. “Blanket ECM engage,” I ordered. I caught just a brief
glimpse of the giant Mecca of neon advertising in Piccadilly traffic circle.
About the time I reached Lily White’s, I saw the gridlock. Over a hundred cars,
and nothing was moving; I was going to crash.
    Not thinking, I hammered the brake.
That didn’t stop me, just popped me several meters into the air. My momentum
kept me moving. As I came down, I could hear the rapid thumping of my vehicle
against the roofs of the ground cars. “Enemy unit is firing.” I accelerated
again, almost broad-siding a double-decker bus.
    I found out later that the bastard
fired five missiles after me. On slow motion replay, one hit the car directly
in front of TSM on ground level. The next hit the fountain, another a silver
tanker, and the last two went into the eight-story building with the Sony ad on
it. I hit the pavement on the other side of the jam going eighty. A few seconds
later, I thought I was clear, on the road out of town when my controls froze
up. Cursing a blue streak, I ripped off my virtual reality head gear. The
console was still locked with no autopsy on the screen. “What killed me?”
    Mary Ann shushed me. “It’s not just
you, dear. They have a situation. The simulator can’t handle the computation in
real-time any more, so it went off-line.”
    “Can’t handle it? It’s on a network
of supercomputers.”
    She was watching all the channels
at once and talking on her headset to somebody. “Whenever a player dies, the
Consortium is obligated to perform what’s left of the 200 odd tests they pay to
undergo during the race. These tests take immense computational resources.
Normally, you wouldn’t notice this, but pretty soon more vehicles died than
they had machines. Imagine it. Each death adds to the load and then increases
the size of the explosion. It’s seems some of the victims were really packing.
Then there was the matter of the building falling. The chain reactions got
pretty complicated after the first few seconds, and eventually the numbers
exceeded game parameters. They had to call in a programmer after the game shut
itself down. It could be a while. Elmer’s own team leader called him a stupid
Fu... before all broadcasts ceased.”
    I held the data gloves in my lap,
sweating. Maybe I wasn’t dead after all. Nothing ever hit me directly! I had
used my biggest ace in the first few minutes of the game, but I was still
alive!
    After ten minutes of agony, and no
response from my workstation, we were contacted by hotel management on the
speaker phone. “There will be a meeting in the press room in thirty minutes.
Further play is suspended till then. A statement will be issued at that time.”
    I had a royal headache.
    Mary Ann strolled up and put her
arm around me. “Congratulations, Mr. Wabbit. I found a hot