FREE STORIES 2012(102)

He still had to fry the locks, and when he got in he fried the transponder, too, but carefully, making sure the rest of the link still worked. There was a reason for this.

He’d noticed certain marks in the Holy Bible book, and he thought he might be able to use them to figure out where Jane and Carl Alterman had gone. But there was another chance. Peace Keepers communicated via links. One of the things that Xander often did, and that Jarl had learned to do by watching it, was alter links so they got the Peace Keepers communication wave.

Jarl would try to figure the codes and find the Altermans, but if the Peace Keepers found them first, Jarl wanted to know.

He set the link to scan Peace Keepers’ communications, then piloted the flyer out of the parking lot, first on a low flying pattern, so that if the owner looked out the window, he or she wouldn’t see his own flyer going by.

When he was a good distance from the building, he gained altitude, merging with and feigning tower control, so that it would look to anyone outside as though he’d turned direction of his vehicle to the local traffic stream.

The Peace Keepers’ bandwidth kept quiet save for a report of a flyer collision, and reports of catching a local thief.

Then suddenly, just as Jarl headed down to the shelter of a nearby wood, to try to park and figure out the code in the Holy Bible book, it crackled to life in an exciting way.

“. . . Have the smugglers surrounded. I repeat, have the smugglers surrounded. Need backup with all possible urgency.”

There could be other smugglers in the area. Given the vast amount of goods that were forbidden to trade or buy—mostly for the public’s own good—there certainly were. But Jarl felt his hair rising at the back of his neck and, almost instinctively, programmed in the coordinates the Peace Keepers called out.

It wasn’t so far. Less than twenty miles. From the air he could see them. A dark blue flyer—did they have color altering abilities?—backed up against a cliff face and surrounded by orange flyers in a semi-circle.

Jane and Carl stood, in poses that indicated they had weapons trained on the police. Behind them, three mu— three people were crouched, next to the flyer. By the light of sunset, which gilded the Peace Keepers flyers to a color that did justice to the popular nickname of Pumpkins, it looked like a hopeless situation.

But his situation had been hopeless on the night they’d rescued him.

Jarl flew wide of the gathering, and up behind where the cliff was. By the time he found a treed area in which to hide his stolen flyer, it was full dark. He trotted back to the top of the cliff, overlooking the Peace Keepers and the Altermans. The Altermans had very powerful beams tracked on them, so they stood in relief, illuminated, like statues. He’d like, Jarl realized, to make a statue of them like that, defending the defenseless.

It was the first time he saw Jane clearly. She was young, younger than her husband—was he her husband?—blond, and very pretty. But on her face, as on her husband’s, there were the marks of strain, and a certain resigned expression as though, at heart, they didn’t expect to escape with their lives. They were holding hands, Jarl noted, with the hands free from the burners.

The Peace Keepers were blaring something about surrendering and submitting themselves to the law. The law, Jarl thought, allowed some people to be created to be used—for their bodies or their minds, but to be used for others’ benefit without ever having a hope at freedom. The law, he thought, needed correction.

He laid flat on his belly and started firing both burners at the lights that lit up the scene: the bright floods on top of the orange flyers, but also the flyers’ headlights. As soon as he started firing, he started getting return fire. He heard Jane scream, “Keep down,” but he was fairly sure she was speaking to her charges, not him.

After a few moments, the scene was dark, except for flashlights held by individual Peace Keepers, and the beam of those could not possibly illuminate well enough to let them see what he was about to do. And what he was about to do was first set up rocks, precariously balanced on an incline on the right side of the gathering. There were paths of sorts down, on the right and the left, where the cliff effaced downwards towards the surrounding landscape. Jarl set the rocks up so that with a very little touch they would cascade down the right side path, and made sure they were large enough rocks to make quite a lot of noise falling.

Then he turned to the left side path, tripping and grabbing onto bushes to keep himself from sliding all the way down and yet managing to be almost completely silent. It brought him behind the nearest orange flyer. The Altermans were on the other side, and he must get to them.