The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [142]
I floor the accelerator pedal to open up some distance behind us, which is, of course, the cue for the engine to die. There’s an embarrassed beep from the dashboard. I mash my thumb on the START button, but nothing happens, and I realize that the blinking red light on the dash has turned solid. There’s a little LCD display for status messages and as I stare at it in disbelief a message scrolls across:
MANDATORY SERVICE INTERVAL REACHED. RETURN TO MAIN DEALER FOR ENGINE MANAGEMENT RESET.
Behind me, there’s a sinking frigate, while ahead of me, the Explorer has begun to make way. I start swearing: not my usual “shit-fuckpisscuntbugger” litany, but really rude words. Ramona sinks her fingers into my left arm. “This can’t be happening!” she says, and I feel a wash of despair rising off her.
“It’s not. Brace yourself.”
I flip open the lid on top of the gear-stick and punch the eject button. And the car ejects.
THE CAR. EJECTS. THREE WORDS THAT DON’T BELONG in the same sentence, or at any rate in a sentence that’s anywhere within a couple hundred meters of sanity street. In real life, cars do not come with ejector seats, for good reason. An ejector seat is basically a seat with a bomb under it. The traditional way they’re used is, you pull the black-and-yellow-striped handle, say good-bye to the airplane, and say hello to six weeks in traction, recovering in hospital—if you’re lucky. The survival statistics make Russian roulette look safe. Very recent models buck the trend—they’ve got computers and gyroscopes and rocket motors to stabilize and steer them in flight, they’ve probably even got cup holders and cigarette lighters—but the basic point is, when you pull that handle, Elvis has left the cockpit, pulling fifteen gees and angling fifteen degrees astern.
Now, the ejector system Pinky and Brains have bolted to the engine block of this car is not the kind you get in a fifth-generation jet fighter. Instead, its closest relative is the insane gadget they use to eject from a helicopter in flight. Helicopters are nicknamed “choppers” for a reason. In order to avoid delivering a pilot-sized stack of salami slices, helicopter ejection systems come with a mechanism for getting those annoying rotor blades out of the way first. They started out by attaching explosive bolts to the rotor hub, but for entirely understandable reasons this proved unpopular with the flight crew. Then they got smart.
Your basic helicopter ejector system is a tube like a recoilless antitank missile launcher, pointing straight up, and bolted to the pilot’s seat. There’s a rocket in it, attached to the seat by a steel cable. The rocket goes up, the cable slices through the rotor blades on the way, and only then does it yank the seat out of the helicopter, which by this time is approximately as airworthy as a grand piano.
What this means to me:
There’s a very loud noise in my ear, not unlike a cat sneezing, if the cat is the size of the Great Sphinx of Giza and it’s just inhaled three tons of snuff. About a quarter of a second later there’s a bang, almost as loud as the scuttling charge that broke the Mabuse, and an elephant sits down on my lap. My vision blurs and my neck pops, and I try to blink. A second later, the elephant gets up and wanders off. When I can see again—or breathe—the view has changed: the horizon is in the wrong place, swinging around wildly below us like a fairground ride gone wrong. My stomach flip-flops—Look ma, no gravity!—and I hear a faint moan from the passenger seat. Then there’s a solid jerk and a baby hippopotamus tries me for a sofa before giving up on it as a bad deal—that’s the parachute opening.
And we’re into injury time.
Most of the time when someone uses an ejector seat, the pilot sitting