The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [8]
She menaces me with her perfect dentistry again. “If it was me I’d take the ICE train. But your ticket—” she points at it helpfully “—is non-refundable. Now please to face the camera for the biometrics?”
Fifteen minutes later I’m hunched over the steering wheel of a two-seater that looks like something you’d find in your corn flakes packet. The Smart is insanely cute and compact, does about seventy miles to a gallon, and is the ideal second car for nipping about town; but I’m not nipping about town. I’m going flat out at maybe a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour on the autobahn while some joker is shooting at me from behind with a cannon that fires Porsches and Mercedes. Meanwhile, I’m stuck driving something that handles like a turbocharged baby buggy. I’ve got my fog lights on in a vain attempt to deter the other road users from turning me into a hood ornament, but the jet wash every time another executive panzer overtakes me keeps threatening to roll me right over onto my roof. And that’s before you factor in the deranged Serbian truck drivers, driven mad with joy by exposure to a motorway that hasn’t been cluster-bombed and then resurfaced by the lowest bidder.
In between moments of blood-curdling terror I spend my time swearing under my breath. This is all Angleton’s fault. He’s the one who sent me to this stupid joint-liaison committee meeting, so he bears the brunt of it. His hypothetical and distinctly mythological ancestry is followed in descending order by the stupid weather, Mo’s stupid training schedule, and then anything else that I can think of to curse. It keeps the tiny corner of my mind that isn’t focused on my immediate survival occupied—and that’s a very tiny corner, because when you’re sentenced to drive a Smart car on a road where everything else has a speed best described by its mach number, you tend to pay attention.
There’s an unexpected lull in the traffic about two-thirds of the way to Darmstadt, and I make the mistake of breathing a sigh of relief. The respite is short-lived. One moment I’m driving along a seemingly empty road, bouncing from side to side on the Smart’s town-car suspension as the hair-dryer-sized engine howls its guts out beneath my buttocks, and the next instant the dashboard in front of me lights up like a flashbulb.
I twitch spasmodically, jerking my head up so hard I nearly dent the thin plastic roof. Behind me the eyes of Hell are open, two blinding beacons like the landing lights on an off-course 747. Whoever they are, they’re standing on their brakes so hard they must be smoking. There’s a roar, and then a squat, red Audi sports coupé pulls out and squeezes past my flank close enough to touch, its blonde female driver gesticulating angrily at me. At least I think she’s blonde and female. It’s hard to tell because everything is gray, my heart is trying to exit through my rib cage, and I’m frantically wrestling with the steering wheel to keep the roller skate from toppling over. A fraction of a second later she’s gone, pulling back into the slow lane ahead of me to light off her afterburners. I swear I see red sparks shooting out of her two huge exhaust tubes as she vanishes into the distance, taking about ten years of my life with her.
“You stupid fucking bitch!” I yell, thumping the steering wheel until the Smart wobbles alarmingly and, heart in mouth, I tentatively lift off the accelerator and let my speed drift back down to a mere 140 or so. “Stupid fucking Audidriving Barbie girl, brains of a chocolate mousse—”
I spot a road sign saying DARMSTADT 20KM just as something—a low-flying Luftwaffe Starfighter, maybe—makes a strafing run on my left. Ten infinitely long minutes later I arrive at the slip road for Darmstadt sandwiched between two eighteen-wheelers, my buttocks soaking in a puddle of cold sweat and all my hair standing on end.