Working Title: GAV

I opened my eyes and saw the sky. Big Dipper. Northern Hemisphere, Earth. I closed my eyes and slept again.

I opened my eyes and saw the sky, the Big Dipper had moved, and something was obstructing its handle. My sense of smell was working, it seemed, and I smelled the unmistakable smell of burning tire rubber. Was it the black smoke of a tire fire very close by that obstructed the handle of the dipper? Before I could answer the question, again I slept.

And again I woke to a sky with fewer stars, a lighter backdrop and the foul black oily smoke climbing to the cloudless dawn. A tire was on fire somewhere, and I needed to find out where.

But I couldn’t move.

And it was almost dawn, I had to get inside. Dawn was death.

My sense of sound seemed resurrected, and I was no longer in silence. I smelled gasoline and burning rubber. Ominously, I heard a dripping sound close by. Gasoline, fire and a dripping sound by my left ear were not combining to make me complacent. But I was more worried by the impending dawn.

I tried to move, and it was the wrong thing to do. Again I was in silence, the smells receded, the dawning sun went away, and I slipped into numbness, then darkness, then nowhere.

I spent an eternity wherever the diety sends people whose life status is undecided. The diety eventually decided I was still alive, and the sky, now purpling nicely to my left, reappeared.

Drip, drip, drip.

The sound of flames.

The slight feeling of the rush of air toward a bonfire.

Accompanied by terror.

Ok, I couldn’t move, I couldn’t see much, my eyes being pointed up and the platform thay were set in being uncomfortably immobile. I could smell, I could hear, I could see. I could not touch. And the sky was brightening percievably.

Basically, I was fucked.

To make matters worse, my senses of touch and kinesthetics came back at a sprint. I was lying on something cold, and something oily was dripping onto my forehead and running down my hair and onto the ground. At the very extremes of my peripheral vision stalks of grass protruded. At the absolute top of my field of vision, was a familiar yellow. A piece of my car. On the kinesthetic scene, my body was arranged strangely, with my left leg under me and bent from the hip at an impossible angle. Dislocated, perhaps broken. Two of my fingers on my left hand were incredibly painful and felt also dislocated.

The sound of flame was gone, for which I muttered a small thanks to whatever wind, water or lack of fuel put it out. I was willing to bet that the stuff dripping onto my forehead was the gasoline I had been smelling, and I did not really enjoy the thought of immolation, altho that might have been preferable to the fate I would suffer if the sun rose and I was still here, wherever here was.

Finally I managed to move my neck.

My car was upside-down, smashed horribly, like somebody had spent a while smashing it with a baseball bat the size of the jolly green giant.

But I could reach the trunk without moving much, and if I had had the bad sense to leave it unlocked, I could get what was in it.

There were three holes in the trunk, all entry holes. Two neat 44 or 45 calibre, and one shotgun slug, ragged, irregular, and big enough to stop an elephant.

I was in some sort of marshy area, covered with mud and sawgrass and the background oder of decay.

Thanks god for droughts, or I would have been under three feet of muck. I craned left, and saw the smoking remnants of one of my tires, next to a thoroughly immolated red mustang with a burned corpse still holding the wheel. The road was just beyond it.

I reached up, and grabbed the handle of the trunk, and it opened immediately, which was good, because if it had given me the usual shit my old cars usually dish out, I would never have made it. The heavy waterproofed green canvas tarp fell out.

I will not describe what the next ten minutes felt like, I flatly refuse to relive it even for the benefit of a good story. I got the tarp out, rolled myself and the tarp another forty feet from the road, (covering it with mud in the process) wrapped myself in it, pointed the open edge away from the road, left it open so I would not suffocate, and hoped like hell that the muddied tarp looked like a rock or another natural feature of the endless bog, and passed out again.

The road ran east-west, and my tarp was pointed north, and it was near midwinter here. No direct sunlight was there to wake me. I would not die of exposure. I checked myself as thoroughly as I could, and I satisfied myself that I would not bleed to death. My leg was out of joint at the hip, but only mildly, it would heal if treated. But that would have to wait for another day. There was pain just about everywhere, but none of it seemed life threatening. All the bases I could think of were covered, I could relax.

I have no idea how long I slept. Long enough to get hungry, thirsty, and in great need to empty my bladder.

When I woke, they were there, looking over the vehicles. They had two GAV’s, a Helicopter, two ground cruisers, a veritable cop convention. The GAV’s worried me. The GAV’s had to be federal, the local cops wouldn’t have them.

Ant that meant that they knew who I was, and THAT meant I was in really deep shit. They hadn’t spotted me, and I didn’t know why.

Did I say thank god for droughts? Let me rephrase: thank god for water. I was buried in the mud perhaps seven inches, and murky water circulated between the layers of the tarp. I could barely see around the edge, and I dared not move. The water was covering my infrared signature. The GAV’s couldn’t see me, the chopper was a local and probably didn’t carry IR spotting gear anyway, and the ground cruisers didn’t have dogs. It looked like if I stayed where I was, I would soon be o.k. When the GAV’s left, I could move.

I tried to stay awake, but couldn’t. The pain was overwhelming me, and the exhaustion was overcoming me too. I slept.

The beeping of the tow trucks woke me the next time. It was dark again, and the chopper was gone. The ground cruisers were still there, but the GAV’s were out of sight. Which didn’t mean anything, as they couldn’t be seen or heard if their pilots so chose.

Time was running out, and soon I would die of thirst, pain, annoyance and cops.

I had to assume the GAVs were gone and risk moving, or I had no good choices at all. The GAV’s were probably still there, but if I stayed hidden I was a dead man, and passively, which I wasn’t too keen on.

I stared into the night sky for a time, hoping to see the stars fade and return in a straight line, that would tell me if the GAVs were circling overhead. I saw nothing like that. I crawled into the mud from the protection of my tarp, and surveyed the scene. Two tow trucks were hauling the wreckage onto the road, to a circle of waiting cops. The doors to my vehicle were mangled, but closed, the front window was broken (which was obviously how I had gotten out) but the glass had not been moved away and was still jagged. They had not yet searched the car. I had thought they must have done that while I was out of it, rolled in the muddy tarp.

That was bad. Very bad. Depending on how bright the cops were, and what equipment they were carrying, and wether or not they would search the vehicles before hauling them off, this was going to be a very busy area in a few minutes. My freedom depended, in large measure, depended on how long it took them to realize that my duffel bag contained around 36 ounces of refined plutonium in 10 separate lead-lined containers, stuffed in graphite-empregnated sacks. Half of me hoped they were idiots and wouldn’t recognize it, but that would entail a far greater risk, that they would empty out all the sacks, open all the containers and gather all the contents together in one pile. They would, of course, all die. I did not know enough about the stuff at all to know wether that much, gathered together, would go poof. Bright light, big radioactive glass parking lot. That would, of course, kill me, too, which definitely wasn’t part of the plan.

They couldn’t be THAT stupid. But, regardless, I had to get out of there.

I had some use of my leg, and the pain was outrageous and I could barely keep from screaming, but I managed to crawl in a large circle around the commotion of the trucks and the cops and the wreckage, to the road.

I was twelve miles from the nearest place I could reasonably expect to find any help at all. I had no idea what time it was. The only possible means of transport was a cop car, and since I would much rather be a driver than a restrained passenger, I was going to have to steal one.

I thought about it for longer than I should have, sitting by the side of the road, looking at the cop cars. I hated making decisions that could turn out to be irrevocable, but I had no good choices.

These were not city cops, they were country cops. Some of the vehicles were still running. There were five on my side of the tow trucks, and there were maybe 7 on the other side. They were all empty except the Shift Commander’s ATV, and he was doing paperwork. It wasn’t even challenging to get into one, close the door gently, turn off the heaqdlights and back away. They were not going to make it hard on me at all, and they wouldn’t even notice until they cleared the road to make way for the tow trucks to cart the wreckage off.

I turned on the cop netwave and listened to the traffic as I fled toward Dade.

Dade, and the Underground. Dade, and the Spaceport. Dade and Death.

I clocked them. It took them 11 miles to notice that their car was missing, and another 3 seconds to get a GAV dispatched. But the GAV would be lots of trouble, Central Operational Patrol sent a GAV with a Raven in it.

So the only question now was could I get to Dade, and the protection of my own Raven (Ravens NEVER fought each other), or into a crowd big enough that a Raven would be useless, before the Raven in the GAV got to me. GAVs could go perhaps three hundred miles an hour in an atmosphere, so it could be to me in a matter of minutes, but probably wouldn’t. they took a while to get going.

Dade was one mile away.

Into the teeth of the dragon. The most unsafe place on earth, and also the safest. It just depended on who I ran into first.

My hip really hurt.

I reached Dade, and the house I needed to get to, about twenty seconds before they announced the plutonium find over the Netwave.

By the time things got hot on the Dade Road, I was trying to figure out how to explain to my friends how I had lost the most valuable cargo I had ever been entrusted with. But my Raven was there, and I was safe. They had some good painkillers too, and one of my friends was a physical doctor.

I abandoned the cop car two blocks away and limped in.

Xenocyborg, a combination of alien biology and alien technology, was the proper designation for Ravens. The biological portion resembled a four-foot tall barrel with three arms placed equidistant around it. These appendages served as both arms and legs. At the end of these limbs were 13 protrusions, 6 jointed support fingers and 7 prehensile manipulating tentacles that resembled small elephant trunks. On one end of the barrel was a head with a mouth and two stalked, shiny black orbs referred to as “eyes” even tho they “saw” magnetic fields, and at the other end was a giant, dish-shaped retractible ear. One tentacle of each hand had a very small eye at the end that did work in visible light, but could only see clearly at very short distances. These hand-eyes could, through two variable-shaped lenses each, magnify to 100 times.

The cyborg part was a small metallic dome-shaped protuberance between the arms. We knew it was artificial, but no Raven had ever explained it to human scientists.

The Ravens were toolmakers, spacefarers and telepaths, of a sort. The jet black orbs called eyes actually saw complex magnetic fields, or rather, that is what Raven scientists have told us. In such detail that they can “read minds” by interpreting the brain’s magnetic fields. Sometimes at a significant distance. And somehow, with either biology or technology that they will neither explain nor demonstrate in controlled conditions, they can induce magnetic fields in the minds of others, to communicate. Human scientists say it is not possible, that they must be using a technology they have never even hinted at. To most people, it was just magic.

I have “spoken” with seven Ravens, and I think that might be a human record. I have also been on the Raven’s homeworld, circling a star called ‘Ravenna’ by it’s human discoverer. We call them Ravens from that name.

The feel of contact with each Raven was distinctive and unforgettable. However they communicate, be it magic, magnetic fields, or any other proposed method, it is going on brain to brain, that much is clear from the experience.

I felt Sevrilla’s thoughts on me as soon as I ditched the car. Her range was in the neighborhood of a mile, perhaps a mile and a half, but she was here undercover (As far undercover as a Raven can get, as every other Raven on earth knew exactly where she was all the time) and had reduced her range to remain undetected by any sensative humans.

Her thoughts descended on me like a warm blanket on a cold night, and the pain, all of the pain, went away.

“ ! “ her surprise and distress at my condition blew over me like a strong wind. Once the blast of emotion had receeded, the cold, analytical Sevrilla checked me for life threatening injuries, and realized (or chose to let me know that she realized) that I was empty-handed. She sensed my agitation at having failed, and calmed it, forgiving me. She removed my shame. It was almost a violation of our agreement, but I let it pass. I was in very bad shape, and though she had shut the pain off, she could not heal me. Ringer was there, and he would see to my physical condition.

She prodded at my memory, and I relived the crash, the mud, the tarp, and the drive back. As I remembered the events, she let me feel what she herself was feeling.

She felt my memories as a blast of fear and pain, with very little data. No raven I had ever spoken to before had done that, they simply extracted the information and ignored everything else. Sevrilla took the information in it’s emotional context.

When I remembered seeing the red mustang with the burned corpse still at the wheel, she focussed her attention on it, and the memory became clearer, somehow sharper, as if I were looking at a picture and could zoom in on pieces of it. I felt her feel my horror and revulsion, and I felt her feel pity towards the person who was probably responsible for my current condition and the failure of my mission, and when she did, I did too. In the communal state that is Raven “language”, I also felt her judgement of me harden a little as she understood my lack of compassion.

“He’s dead, I’m alive. I just hope he was’nt an innocent bystander”

Her “voice” was a high, soft voice that had, many years ago, belonged to my sister. Sevrilla had appropriated it from my memory, for those rare occasions when specific information had to be relayed. It was a cross between hearing and remembering, the words seeming to come from deep in the mind, floating slowly up.

“He was not. His name was Henry Sharp. He had a wife, three children and a dog. He drank too much and occasionally became violent, and rented his services to those who need violence committed. He was almost certainly there to kill you.”

“Good” I answered in my mind, and I felt her laugh a little. “As you say, you are alive, and he is not. Well done, Ambassador. He is a very expensive violence-doer, and must be good at it. Walk slowly, or you will injure yourself. I have sent Dr. Ringer to you”

And her touch left me, as sudenly as it had come to me. The pain did not, as I expected, rush back. She had turned it off to enable communication, and had neglected, or decided against, turning it back on. I would have to talk to her about our agreement.

No time had past, or at least not enough for me to have made even one step. The empty cop car was only a few steps behind me, but already, courtesy of Sevrilla, the trauma of the events had receeded. When I saw Ringer and three of his nurses sprinting towards me, and a small hoarde of Jacks, maybe 30 of them, spread out and looking menacing and defensive, I started to feel safe. I collapsed just as Ringer got to me.

It did not occur to me, until much later, to wonder how she had known who was in the red Mustang.