Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [106]
As they pulled away the other agent sprinted across their path. Kohn swerved to run him down, but missed. The last thing he saw in the rear-view before going down the exit ramp was the Cadillac transfigured, shining in a beam that matched its colour and stabbed straight down from the sky.
Janis looked at her hands. They were shaking, and no effort on her part could make them stop. Of course not, she thought, annoyed with herself, and looked out at the vehicles ahead. Outlined with almost diagrammatic sharpness by the glades, their colours a spectrum-shifted stab in the dark, the cars and trucks and tankers paced and cruised and fell back and overtook. Slow relative to each other, cruelly fast from the roadside view, the pedestrian perspective. Or the equestrian. The thought raised a smirk.
She turned to Kohn. He was mouthing into the mike that angled in front of his lips. He saw her looking and stopped.
‘Just arguing with the gun,’ he said. ‘I think it’s become a pacifist.’
He looked so serious that Janis laughed.
‘I’ve gone back over everything in my mind,’ Kohn went on, ‘and it seems to me that I aimed at the head and not the leg of that rider who was coming up on you. The gun says it went for the larger moving target. The woman who attacked me – I was just going to blast her, but the gun flashed at the time that there was no time to fire. So I had to break her collarbone instead.’
‘It didn’t interfere when you shot that MIB to finish him off. But…you didn’t finish him off!’
‘No, that was gen,’ Kohn said. ‘Five lead rounds went into him.’ He laughed, not turning from the road. ‘It’s like I said. They ain’t human – at least, not all the way through.’
‘You could have tested that theory on his head. Or was that the gun again, staying your hand?’
Kohn grimaced. ‘No. It’s just – it’s all right to shoot somebody if they’re down but might still be a threat, but otherwise, no. Something like that. I should have killed him, you know. That green you brought down – very well done, by the way – you can’t finish off someone like that. Just a grunt like us, basically. Disarm and leave if you can’t take prisoner or help. Stasis is different. They’re not under the Convention – secret police are like spies in wartime as far as I’m concerned: anyone has a perfect right to shoot them down like dogs.’
‘So why didn’t you, damn it?’ She was surprised at how angry she felt.
After a moment Kohn sighed and said, ‘Just a bad mercenary habit.’
There was no indication of pursuit, but they decided they’d better enter ANR territory by a less direct route than Kohn had originally planned. They swung east and came into Edinburgh from the south. They turned left at the North British Hotel on to Pretender Street, then right and up Stuart Street, across Charles Edward Street and down the long hill towards the Firth of Forth. (The city council had changed dozens of street-names in a fit of pique at the Restoration, and no one had since dared to change them back.) At Granton Harbour Kohn drove the truck carefully out along the long stone pier to a wooden jetty at the end. The harbour was full of small sailing-boats. Rigging chimed against masts. Away to the west they could see against the sky-glow of towns the twisted remnants of the Forth Bridge, like a shy child’s fingers over its eyes.
‘Looks like the road stops here,’ Janis pointed out.
‘We just have to wait.’
‘You’ve done this before!’
‘Yes, but not here.’
After about an hour – Janis