The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [7]
She hadn’t really planned to let that out just yet, but the flow had built up a momentum of its own. Mike turned to look at her, even though his eyes ought to have been glued to the patch of visibility that the headlights carved out of the road; this far out of town, the streetlights were so sparse that they might as well have been driving in the blackout.
“That’s crazy!” he said. “Why would anyone do something as stupid as that?”
“Why would anyone do something as stupid as bombing Mouseworld?” she countered. “That’s what I call crazy. What kind of terrorist would target a room full of mice?”
“The mice could have been innocent bystanders,” Grundy pointed out. “On the other hand … well, there may be a real plague war on now, but hobbyist terrorism has been a plague of sorts since ’22, and I don’t suppose the talk of curfews and all other containment precautions the commission’s considering will have pleased the flackers, whackers, and code-busters. Must be a big gang, though, to hit three hard targets with such precision—assuming that the blackout really is theirs. Maybe they want to make us believe they’re hobbyist terrorists, although they’re not. Maybe they’re using crazy doodles to obscure their real agenda. Some of these so-called private-security people …” He left the sentence dangling.
“Maybe,” Lisa concurred. “The blackout—”
She broke off when Mike cursed. An old red Nissan had zoomed across his path as he approached the junction of North Road and Ralph Allen’s Drive, even though it was his right of way. He kept his foot on the accelerator regardless. He had switched off the computer’s warning bell, but it took only three seconds for the dashboard screen to bring up a red-lettered message stating that although the primary responsibility for the near miss lay with the other vehicle, the person in charge of the Rover was nevertheless guilty of “contributory negligence.”
Lisa wondered what conditions were like in the town center. The roadside digicams were self-contained and battery-powered, so they hadn’t been disabled by the general blackout, but they weren’t equipped to see in darkness as intense as that which had descended in the wake of the power cut. There were plenty of kids on the new estates west of the campus who might figure that this was the ideal time for joyriding. It might not be just teenagers, either—all the drivers in England tended to take whatever opportunities they found nowadays to exceed the claustrophobic legal restrictions on their speed and movement, no matter what their onboard computers dumped into their black boxes. Mercifully, it was nearly five o’clock in the morning and there wouldn’t be many honest citizens on the roads, except for those driving delivery vans. The vast majority of people tucked up in their beds wouldn’t know when they woke up that there had been a blackout.
Lisa was about to resume her observation about the blackout when Mike’s phone rang. He snatched the handset up and pressed it to his ear. Lisa cocked her own ear as if to listen, although she couldn’t possibly make sense of the slight leakage of sound. She had to wait for him to put the phone down again to receive the news.
“It’s not Miller,” he said tersely. “The body in the corridor, that is. The wafer from the corridor’s best-placed eye shows Ed Burdillon going in after the bombers. They shot him—but they didn’t leave him to burn. He’s been taken to the hospital, but the paramedics reckon he’ll be okay. He’s unlikely to have been a preselected target, given that the perpetrators took the trouble to drag him clear before the bomb went off. Probably just unlucky—wrong place, wrong time. On the other hand …”
Lisa’s stomach had lurched in response to the news that a man she had known for nearly forty years had been hurt, but not as much as it might have done had the man been