Where Legal Eagles Dare: An Opco Boone Adventure

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As a blood-red sun dipped to the rim of the world, they watched the procession thunder across the desert, a mile below. An eighteen-wheeler Double-O battle-truck, flanked by a pair of COO picket-class gunships, hurtled along a dirt track that snaked away for ten flat miles through desiccated scrubland to the Settlement.

They were closing in.

The three watchers stood on an arête, 4,000 metres above the plain. The tallest of them was shrouded in a billowing canopy. The outriders either side of him straddled idling dirt bikes.

They took it all in. They scanned the Settlement. Aside from a curlicue of smoke drifting up from the central boilerplate processing complex, all was quiet. The seven gaunt baffle-towers that ringed the citadel remained dark.

But for how much longer?

The watchers exchanged glances. They knew.

Presently, the baffle-towers coordinated and flashed nine pulses of light into the gloaming.

The tall one pointed and said, “That’s it. That’s the signal. It is time.”

The towers fell dark again.

“Are you sure, Opco?” said the left-hand rider.

“Yes, Algy, I’m sure: S. O. S.”

The right-hand rider spoke: “But, boss, that was dash-dash-dash—dot-dot-dot—dash-dash-dash.”

“Right, George.”

“But that says, O. S. O.”

“Oh. Right. Odd. Must be a typo.”

“Wait! Look!” cried Algy. “There’s more!”

The towers were re-energising. They beamed out some more: this time a longer string. Dot-dot-dash-dot—dash—dot-dash—dash-dash-dash—dash-dot-dot.

George rifled through her code book. Her brow furrowed.

“What is it, G?”

“It’s — um — well this is odd. It says F. T. A. O. D.”

Algy quailed. “What can it mean? It’s gibberish, Commander!”

But Boone knew it was not gibberish. It was a sign that conditions in the Settlement were worse even than he had feared. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” he muttered. “We’ll be here all day. You two had better get on with it.”

The two outriders kicked over their motors, gunned their engines and cleared the peak: one went left, one right. They scrambled down the scree.

Still on the ridge, Eagle Squadron Commander Opco Boone, LL.B, stepped towards the cliff-edge.

***

Senior Operations Officer Heinrich Kurzweil fixed his gimlet eye on the horizon. The rig was handling real nice. Sweet ride, he thought. But with seventy tons of state-of-the-art ultra-modernist mano-tech under the hood, you’d expect that. This baby practically drove itself.

Kurzweil was tense; on high alert — but calm. He blinked to bring up the MIS feed in his head-up display. It swept a sixty-five degree field, left and right. The RAG indicators read green across the board: optimal — just a couple of minor blips, 300 yards out, at 40 degrees from true.

Kurzweil picked up the intercom. “You seein’ these, Bugsy?”

The gunship pilot clicked in on the secure channel. “On the MIS? The bogeys? Yeah, boss, I’m seein’ ’em,” Bugsy was Brooklyn-tough. Kurzweil dug his earthy attitude. “Just a couple of doc jocks, out of their pens, I think. All cool.”

Kurzweil screwed in the ESPER scope and brought up a video feed. Sure enough: two negotiators lumbering awkwardly around an execution memo. Youngsters; must have broken a fence somehow and got out. No real threat at this distance, but untidy. The IA goons would have a field day if they found them — but all same, uncalled for.

“Want me to clear ’em out, Kurzweil?”

Kurzweil shrugged. “We’re all good, aren’t we, Bugsy?”

“Well, according to policy 230823.913 revision nine, they count as hostiles. I say we wax ’em. It’s no trouble, boss-man. Seriously.” Bugsy loved to throw the book. He had a wild streak — hell, most uniform bulls in legal ops did: the chief double-oh encouraged it. But this was no reluctant policy compliance matter for Operating Officer Cadet Walter N. Buggs, M.B.A. (Insead). This was job satisfaction. “C’mon: It’s in the service catalog, Kurtzy.” Bugsy was pleading now.

“Ahh, hang it, Bugs. Why the hell not? Go on: light ’em up.”

Bugsy’s ack-ack let rip — the GMSLA guy went up like a Roman candle.

Bugsy whooped. “SOX attest that my little paisan! Ha-ha!”

Bugsy blammed out a second: a lame-ass two-way confi flare. It was a weak round — not usually fatal at such a distance but enough to pacify a lightweight aggressor. But Bugsy was a true shot. He caught the futures guy square on an ops schedule. He squealed. He turned tight circles. His escalation circuits crackled, popped and smoked out. The jockster conked out and crashed, face-down in the sand, little green flames licking around his annex.

“Yee-hah!” Bugsy’s turret retracted.

Kurzweil re-blinked up the MIS readout in his head-up display for SME activity. Beautiful: flatline.

“That’ll do, Bugsy, you mad bastard,” Kurzweil chuckled. “Confirmed kills. Chalk up the KPIs and let’s get those portfolios reassigned to Bucharest, toot-sweet.”

“On it, boss.”

Bugsy called them into to C double-oh on the encrypted two-way com-link. He rocked the sing-song ham radio chit-chat idiom: “Capcom, this is KPI-Delta-One-Niner filing our hourly stakeholder check-in, do you copy, over?”

Cadet Maxine Blitzer staffed the mic at the double-oh HQ. She was a regular scone-doer, so they kept her away from active engagement. The Capsule Command role suited her well. “KPI-Delta-One-Niner, this is Capcom: we read you loud and clear, Bugsy-boy. Go ahead, over.”

A static burst shook the set. Bugsy punched in. “Capcom, this is KPI-Delta-One-Niner: top of the morning to you, Blitzy. We are reporting the coast is clear. Repeat: The coast is clear.”

“Ten-four, Bugsy. You seeing any action?”

“Roger that, Blitz. We just cleared out a couple of junior jockers— stats to follow. We are fully operationalised and all systems go. We are requesting clearance to deploy Operation Playbook.”

“Stand by, KPI-Delta-One-Niner.” There was a pause while Blitzer ran a launch status check.

“KPI-Delta-One-Niner, you are confirmed go for Operation Playbook,” Blitzer’s tone turned familiar. “Rock that house, Kurzweil, you crazy sumbitch. Capcom — out.”

Kurzweil punched in. “That’s an A.O.K., Blitzer, my man. We are gunning in for final approach. We’ll be home by five: put those beers on ice. This KPI-Delta-One-Niner — over and out.”

Kurzweil checked the clock. They were making good time. The payload was primed. Speed was steady. There would be dogfights later; let’s keep the gang loose for now.

“O.K., Bugsy. Stand down and accelerate. Let’s get this show on the road.”

Kurzweil stomped on metal.

Bugsy gunned the wagon.

The semi’s foghorn screamed.

The convoy kicked up a desert plume.

The hounds of hell descended on the fortified town all legal eagles called the Settlement.

***

The Eagle Squad leader stood high on the mountain promontory, seven klicks west and 4,000 metres up, Boone shook his head in disbelief at the rising plume on the desert floor. These guys were so brazen. He didn’t need his telegraphic scope to watch: These morons were clear as day. Their MIS signature lit up half the goddamn sky. Well, it makes targeting a cinch.

Boone barked into his wrist-com. “All right, Chip, I’m going in.”

Static crackled.

The GC came on the line. Her voice was nasal and pinched: more uptight even than usual. “Now listen here, Boone. No funny stuff, this time. I mean it. We have to play this by the book. Do you hear?”

Boone growled. “Playing it by the book is the goddamn problem, Chipper, and you know it.”

“Jesus, Boone. When will you learn? This storm is coming, whether we like it or not. It’s coming. We just have to deal with it. We can get through this. But we have to be aligned.”

Boone looked up from the wrist-com. He regarded the great expanse beneath him, yawning away to the horizon. He survveyed the Settlement. For a moment, he smiled at the brilliantine recollections of his life in that wonderful place. He drank in the beauty. These were his kin. His people. His life. His home. These were his tranquil traditions. The ancient solemnity. The august institutions. The whole gamut of precedent. Imponderable. Indispensable. All of it was his. And they were surrendering. They were lying down and taking it. As these death machines advanced, he saw their collective futures dangling above the abyss, hanging by a single golden thread. He knew it: he was that golden thread.

“There is too much at stake, Chip”.

“Nonsense. We’ve charged up the ineffability shields. We’ve flooded the prolixity ditches. We’re confident they’ll hold.”

“You think so?”

“They will if we hang together, Boone.” The General Counsel’s tone softened. “We need you back here, Opco.”

Boone exhaled. Could she not see what was coming? From up here, as this convoy of wreckers drilled relentlessly across the badlands at the settlement, like some crazed Taliban, propelled by demented organisational theory, it was crystal clear: unless they did something, The Settlement was doomed. This was a mobile apocalypse, on a direct vector for the heart of the settlement, thundering across the desert. It would destroy the civilisation — everything it stood for — down to every last goddamn brick.

Did Chip just expect him to stand there while the double-ohs ran over them?

“Not while there’s breath in me,” Boone said.

***

Kurzweil flipped through the payload. He primed the risk taxonomy. He unclipped the spend ratio metrics. He flooded the Gantt generator. The HUD registered the Settlement’s outer perimeter defence systems, a thousand metres yonder. Convolution fields were arcing and humming, muffling the signals across the frequency spectrum.

Shit was about to get real.

***

Boone could see the bikes had hit the valley floor. The anemometer on his suit spun crazy: the wind was getting up. Perfect conditions.

The wrist-com crackled. “Boone? Boone! Do you read me?”

Boone looked down and cursed: he’d left the com-link channel open.

“Boone! Respond as a priority!”

Boone waited a few seconds more. The convoy raced onwards. “Yeah, Chip?”

“Oh! Thank Christ you’re still there, Boone — I thought we’d lost you. Now, listen —”

“Chip, you’re breaking up.”

“What?”

At that moment, the Chipster grokked it.

“Oh, no. No. No. Don’t do this to me Boone —”

“I do not copy that, Ma’am. You are breaking up. I repeat, I am going in.”

“BOONE!”

“This is Eagle Squadron Leader Opco Boone, switching to silent running and signing out. All comms will now go dark. I will report again at 2100 hours.”

“GODDAMN IT B—”

Boone stood on the cliff edge. As he snapped it down, the sun caught his visor for an instant and flashed a beam down into the valley. If Operating Officer Kurzweil caught the sparkle through his windscreen, ten klicks away, it didn't register in the progress of that train of destruction.

The time had come. Boone inched to the cliff-edge. A brisk thermal whistled up the couloir. He flipped off the safety catch on his wingsuit, caught the buffet, and dived.***

Kurzweil switched the rig to auto and started to tool up. The rig steered itself.

Kurzweil took a moment to take in the grandeur of the desert. The windscreen gave a rich panorama. The mountains swept up to a vertical, levelling off to a table four thousand metres above the valley floor. They rose like — like — well, like Olympus, above the Serengeti.

High up on the gipfel the setting sun picked out a halo of eagles circling the summit. Suddenly, one wing-morphed and dropped. Kurzweil double-took: that is one absolute unit of a hunting bird — must be a monstrous condor of some kind. At this remove, the majestic predator seemed to drift so serenely down from the crest, but Kurzweil knew it was dropping like a bullet towards some hapless creature on the valley floor.

Wonder who.

“Poor bastard,” Kurzweil murmured, slipping into a Kevlar responsibility diffusion sheaf. He wondered whereabouts on the plain the unfortunate animal was. He buckled up his data visualisers.

Anything bigger than a rabbit should show up on the dash. It was ESPER-equipped. It had infinite zoom. Kurzweil checked the HUD: the RAG system still flat-lined.

He checked the LIDAR feed. Zilch.

He ESPER-zoomed. Nix.

He flipped to heat-sensor mode and cranked that up to max res. Zipster.

“Huh,” he said to himself. “Big bird going to be bad disappointed.” He yanked on his battle-gloves, latex-snapped his wrists and slid back into the cockpit. Hello nursey. Over the CB, Bugsy was rocking out to Billy Joel.

***

Boone tilted down and tweaked the airflow over the leading edge. He trimmed his pitch. The roll and yaw were good. He maxed the gaze heuristic and kept the angle of approach constant. He targeted a drop-zone above and just ahead of the rig.

Chip was still babbling in the com-link. Dammit. He cursed his own error: he left the link back to GCHQ open when he jumped. It was too late to do anything about that: at one-seventy knots he could hardly flip it to silent now: any arm-shift would bugger his trajectory and put him into an aerodynamic stall or some kind of flat spin. He had to let the GC run. But she wouldn’t let it go. The old girl was really busting his balls.

Boone was zooming. The ambient buffeting was off the charts. The suit was shaking like a bastard. The GC was yakking like a rabbit. Boone kept the rig bottom left in the viewfinder. “Steady ... steady ...”

The suit’s digital voice assistant kicked in his earpiece. The DVA was a gas: it had a west-country drawl. Boone spent hours customising it. He called it Denning. “GROUNDSPEED READOUT: 195 KNOTS ACROSS THE GROUND.”

Boone bulleted onwards. The rig grew. Two thousand metres and closing. The shaking was immense.

Chip kept up the disciplinary-threat babble.

“Denning, give me a range to target.”

The DVA counted down range, altitude and ground-speed: vital intel.

Boone hit two hundred. He bulleted onwards.

Chip yapped out parking ticket duty warnings.

Denning intoned downrange coordinates.

Boone made two-twenty across the ground. He bulleted onwards. The rig loomed real close now.

Chip ran out of sanctimonious material and went quiet. Boone caught the tail end of Denning’s read out. “ ... impact drop-zone target: T-minus four seconds.”

“Okay double-oh douches — let’s be having you.” Boone yanked the ripcord. The brake-chute bloomed. Boone jerked back and up. He flipped a backwards 540°. He quick-released the canvas straps and dropped the last fifteen feet through empty space. He cracked a three-point knee-down hero land on the cabin roof.

***

“What the hell was that?”

Kurzweil froze. He blinked up the head-up display. Clear.

“Bugsy! We got action!”

Kurzweil heard only half of Buggs’ reply “Holy hand-grenades what is tha —”. But he saw it play out: a stunt rider on a dirtbike dropped from a low ridge from nowhere. The rider carried a shoulder-loaded esotericising mortar. At that range the low tensile syntactical armour on Buggsy’s cruiser stood no chance. The rider let off a round. It blew Buggsy ten feet in the air.

***

Kurzweil had barely a second to register when Opco Boone burst, boots-first, through the shotgun-side window on the semi.

“Greetings, Earthling,” said Boone, sparking up a couple of short-fuse triple-negs and tossing them into Kurzweil’s lap. “Now I’m not saying this isn’t without doubt,” he growled, “but don’t be disappointed if I tell you this mission can’t go on”.

Kurzweil slumped forward. Boone donkey-kicked the driver’s-side door open and hoofed him out of it.

“Aieeeeeeeeee!”

Boone pulled himself into the cockpit, honked the foghorn and hauled the wheel hard right. “Let’s take you make home to your daddy.”

The great rig began slowly to bear around towards the Operations HQ, slewing sand out over the upturned COO gunship as it went.

Algy’s dirt-bike punched through that curtain of flying sand, over the gunship’s lazily spinning wheels, and landed clean. Algernon whooped. “Let’s blow this joint, Boonester.”

Boone snarled into his wrist-com, “We’re not home yet, Algy. Any sign of George?”

Algernon gunned his Kawasaki. “She’s tangling with the other cruiser, boss. Her eso failed. Sticky bogey, I guess.”

Boone scanned the trailer behind his cabin: a wall of green LEDs. The KPIs were already primed.

The detonation timer on the dash ticked down: 5:30 and counting.

Boone wrestled with the wheel. The rig groaned and screamed under the colossal Gs as it re-vectored to the north. Come on, you brute, come on.

The rig leveled up. The Gs eased off. Five clicks yonder, Boone could see operations outpost in the crosshairs, shimmering in the hot desert air. Your chickens are coming home to roost, my operational friends. He stomped on the metal. The monstrous diesel turbines screamed. The rig thundered forward.

The timer ticked past 5:00.

NOT … WHILE … I … BREATHE. — A bloodied fist grabbed the running board. Kurzweil hung on for his life, for his cause, for his honour. At first, it was all he could do, just to keep his hold and stop being swept beneath the monstrous wheels as they pounded the dirt, inches from his ear. He clenched his buttocks as the roadway grated and pummelled him all over.

Slowly, he hauled himself back into the game. He got a second hold. He fist-jammed in the wheel-arch. He executed a switch-grip, squirrel-jumped onto the grille, dragged himself up onto the hood, heel-hooked and got a firm boot-hold on the chassis. He clambered up. He clung like a limpet. He edged around the towards cabin door. NOT … WHILE … I … BREATHE.

The timer ticked past 4:45.

The cabin CB pinged — static squelch. Capcom was rattled. “Hey, Kurzweil, do you read? We see your vector heading north. Please account for your deviation. What’s going on? Is everything in order?”

Boone picked up the receiver. “Ah, Capcom, we read you ten-four. All is in order. We are just seeing some interference — regular, totally routine stuff, you know, so — er — we are re-routing to approach from the north-west. All good, over.”

There was a pause before Capcom clicked back in. “Heinrich, is that you?”

“Er, yeah, Capcom, of course it is. Ja, I mean. Ja, hier ist Kurzweil.” Boone winced.

“But you seem to be heading straight at us!”

“It’s, ah, just a transitory vector, Capcom.”

Transitory vector? What the hell does that mean? Your manoeuvre is not in the service catalog, Officer! My line manager say this is a steerco-reportable operational risk event —”

“No, no, Capcom, it’s routine, totally normal. We do this sort of thing all the time. I cleared with Commander, um, Commander Scheisskopf. this morning.”

“Commander who? Who is this? What’s going on?”

Boone re-winced. He clocked Capcom’s caller ID on the monitor. “Hey, er, hey Maxine? Listen: the channel is getting a bit choppy, okay? We’re struggling to maintain secure connection. But rest assured: everything in order. Repeat: everything in order. We got this. Tell, er, what’s-his-name — Scheisskopf — we’re under control. Going dark, over.”

“Heinrich? Heinrich?”

Boone clicked off the receiver. “That was getting boring, anyway” he muttered.

The timer ticked past 4:30.

The rig roared. Clinging to the outside of its grille, Kurzweil snagged a crimp on the aerial mount. He traversed along the running board, edging with his toes, keeping his weight balanced. He ducked his head beneath the overhang, below Boone’s side-window sightline.

The timer ticked past 4:15.

Boone’s com-link crackled. “Heads up Boone: you got company.”

Georgie’s dirt-bike burst into view off a low ridge, exploding through scrubland and she pulled wheelie.

Boone punched the dash “Yo! Georgie! Where you been all my life!”

“Not now, Boone, you got work to do — eyes right.”

Boone looked right, but too late. With a single fluid motion Kurzweil vaulted up, leant through the window, baffed Boone across the jaw, and grabbed the wheel.

Boone spat a jewelled string of blood. A copper taste filled his mouth.

Kurzweil came again, but this time Boone was braced for him. A sharp elbow to the cheek knocked Kurzweil back, cracking his head against the stanchion. He grunted. Boone clamped him, but the Operations man clamped back. He grabbed Boone by the throat: chokehold. Kurzweil had a grip like a vice, but so did Boone: he squeezed back, harder, and shunted up. Mutually assured destruction. Kurzweil gagged. His eyes bulged. His spittle flew. Still, he cracked out a demonic beetroot grin and mouthed, “NOT … WHILE … I … BREATHE … BOONE” and shanked Boone with his Runbook.

The rig veered and fishtailed as they struggled.

The timer ticked past 4:00.

As his air-flow constricted, Boone became light-headed. He scanned the windshield: where on Earth were the dirt-bikes? He reached for his wrist-com, but Kurzweil’s span was too great. Kurzweil rabbit-punched him again and hooked a boot on the door-latch. The door swung wide, with Kurzweil on it. He hauled out Boone out by the throat and dangled him over the road.

Boone couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t speak. His muscles slackened. His peripheral vision blackened. His eyes stopped down to tunnels. Kurzweil doubled down on the throat-clamp. Boone flailed limply, catching nothing but air: the big man’s reach was too great. The door swung back. Kurzweil hauled him in and booted his face. Boone collapsed. Kurzweil grabbed the wheel, hauled it back around and lined up the Settlement.

The rig ground back towards the western vector. Kurzweil lined up the cross-hairs. They locked and flashed and beeped: TARGET ACQUIRED. On the cabin floor, Boone groaned. Kurzeil boot-baffed him. As he passed out, Boone’s last coherent thought was, where the hell are you, Algy? Boone slipped into unconsciousness with the hopeless image of his old school chums Georgie and Algy, back at the refectory at St Crustard’s frantically trying to finish their Defence Against Indemnities homework before the bell went.

The counter ticked past 3:45.

Kurzweil clocked the counter. Not good. Precious seconds to lose now. If he was to get all the way into the Settlement, release the payload and then make it out again before it blew, things would have to be perfect from now on. He knew: he would not make it out of that forensic rat-hole on foot. He knew: this could be his Waterloo. I do this for the cause, he thought. For all operations people, everywhere.

Boone moaned and shifted woozily in the foot well. Kurzweil baffed him again.

The counter ticked past 3:42.

Boone collapsed into glamour-glow visions of Georgie and Algernon, holding hands, astride pink unicorns, in a forest of hyper-rainbows, floating joyfully amongst a flock of cute, fluffy green chatbots that were nibbling delicately and licking at their glistening faces. “It’s fine, Opco! Come on over! You will never look back! Everything is — so beautiful!” Operations Officer Kurzweil walked serenely towards him in a silken toga, with a ball of pearlescent light before him. “It is all true, Opco.” Behind him Georgie and Algernon nodded blissfully. “We have solved it. Everything. There is enough management information to satisfy every stakeholder. You don’t need to worry. There’s an app for e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g...”

The last thing Boone remembered was trying to move his arms and his legs, but he could not. His tongue lolled. He dribbled into the carpet in the footwell. Then everything went black.

The counter ticked past 3:41.

An insistent horn sounded behind. Kurzweil checked his wing mirror: relief! The remaining gunship, smoking and shuddering, was accelerating back up beside him. Suddenly, Kurzweil saw a path out of this. He could escape after all! He waved at the gunship, urging it forward.

As it drew level, Kurzweil set about converting the rig into a guided missile. He locked the steering on the acquired target, set the trailer to autopilot, threw the engine into a high gear and jammed a brick on the pedal. The motor screamed.

Boone moaned. Kurzweil re-baffed. Kurzweil cursed the unconscious hulk for even putting him in this position. This is just business, you self-righteous berk. Then, suddenly, on that desert track, barrelling straight into the jaws of certain destruction, Kurzweil knew what he had to do. Yes. This is right. This we should do. He reached over and grabbed the unconscious Eagle Squad Leader by his lapels.

“Let us make your last ride the one they remember you by, Eagle Squadron Leader Opco Boone.”

The counter ticked past 3:45.

The rig was hurtling inexorably towards the settlement. Boone seemed unable to stop it. The damaged gunship was belching black smoke and running on three tyres, but it was back in the game, exchanging potshots with Georgie.

Captain Algernon Farquhar, B.S.C, D.S.O, Acting Deputy Captain of Eagle Squad saw a narrow dirt ramp coming down the line and knew his time was now.

“Cover me, George!” he barked, and ripped hard on his throttle. The Kawasaki surged forward along side the trailer, mounted the ramp and caught big air. As the bike sailed over the trailer, he kicked out of his stirrups, let the handlebars go, and back-flipped — he hit the trailer roof with the regulation Eagle-Squad three-point landing.

The Kawasaki kept flying. It prescribed a flat parabola over the trailer and fell into the path of the oncoming gunship. As the pilot and gunner bailed the gunship exploded on impact.

The counter ticked past 3:30.

Boone was a heavy bastard. Kurzweil hauled him up and into the driver’s seat, but he was flaccid and hard to shift. Eventually Kurzweil flopped him into position and groped around for his seatbelt. He opened one of Boone’s eyes. He was out cold. Good.

The counter ticked past 3:15.

Algy shinned down the access ladder from the trailer roof. To his surprise, the trailer’s main back doors were unsecured. He popped the latch, swung them out and dropped onto the deck.

“Holy hell,” he said, and whistled.

The trailer’s entire length was packed with server farms of key performance indicators arrays, RAG indicator clusters, TOM monitors and banks of miscellaneous dials, meters, waiver needles, winking LEDs and other monochrome CRT displays that Algy couldn’t begin to comprehend.

Algy got up close to one of the KPI arrays. It was fitted with a crypto-locked switch marked “ARM”. He looked down the row. The banks were all triple-authenticated. Every single switch was armed.

Over the transom, a large digital display carried the detonator count-down.

Algy clicked into his wrist-com, “Georgie, this is bad. There must be 40,000 KPIs here — maybe more. They’re all armed. The counter’s down to three minutes. I couldn’t switch that many off in that time even if they weren’t encrypted. But they’re all blockchain hashed.”

Georgie said, “Copy that, Algy. We have to turn the rig around. There is nothing else for it. And it’s ...”

“Georgie, do you copy?

Georgie snifffed.

What is it, Georgie?

There was another pause. Georgie rallied. “It’s — oh, God damn you, Opco Boone — it’s what the Commander would have wanted, Algy. Do this for Boone. Remember, you have the element of surprise. There’s no time. You can do this, Algy. Oh! LOOK OUT!”

“What?”

The giant rear doors, which had been swaying idly, suddenly swung round behind Algy and slammed shut, plunging him into a greenish dark.

“Well, there goes the sodding element of surprise, then.” Algy reached for his trusty service revolver, holstered on his hip with a couple of clips of term and a snub-nosed mezzanine. It wasn’t there.

“Oh, no,” said Algy to himself.

The counter ticked past 3:00

The truck rolled on. In the cockpit, Kurzweil manhandled Boone’s insensate body, and almost had the meddling Legal Eagle where he needed him now. He wrapped each of his hands round the wheel. They held. Now, for the last touch: Boone’s Eagle Squadron cap, set at that trade-mark, irritating rakish angle. Kurzweil smiled grimly: he would spare no detail. This had to be perfect. He tilted the cap. Just so.

His moment of self-satisfaction was interrupted by a sudden, ear-splitting bang. What the hell was that? It sounded like the rear doors slamming. Surely not! Kurzweil took one last look at Boone, who was still in la-la land, baffed him upside the chops for good measure, and opened the hatch to climb into the back.

The counter ticked past 2:55

Georgie squeaked into his bike-com “Algy! Algy! Do you read me! Algy! Come in, over!”

Algy hissed, “Quiet, G! He’s in here!” Algy flipped off the intercom.

Georgie heard the line go dead and shrieked. “Algy NO!”

The big man entered the trailed, Gantt drawn. He moved quietly and effectively. “Who goes there?”

Algy couldn’t see squat. He fumbled and groped his way to a bank of cathode-ray monitors. He squeezed himself tightly beside them and made himself very small. He scarcely dared to breathe.

The operations enforcer approached the rear of the trailer.

Outside, Georgie gunned his Kawasaki

Kurzweil unlatched the rear door and peered out. Light flooded into the trailer. Kurzweil was dazzled for a moment, then saw Georgie rolling twenty yards back. He levelled his Gantt. Georgie looped a fat slalom on the bike to throw off his aim. Kurzweil matched her cadence. Georgie carved wider. Kurzweil cocked his piece. Georgie fishtailed. Kurzweil fired — missed.

Algy stepped out of the shadow to Kurzweil’s right, cold-cocked him with a five-point cost projection, and said, cool as you like, “business case this.” Kurzweil collapsed to his knees and Algy hoofed him off the back of the truck.

“Got him, Boonie – but are we too late?”

The counter ticked past 2:55

“You know what we need to do,” he said.

Algy nodded. He walked up the trailer, past the counter. There was a “reset” button. He hit it. The countdown adjusted to 10 minutes.

He climbed over the front, where Boone was coming around.

Boone and Algy looked at each other. Boone said, “do you know, I just had the weirdest dream about you.”

“Later, my friend. Let’s take this rig back home where it belongs.”

The big rig drew a wide circle around to the north, set a course for the operations town, and accelerated.