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From Avalanche Injection
	
   
	Two men watched the howitzer-sized exhaust port blast its 
mushroom fireball into the cold morning air.  They wore core-lock 
night desert camouflage, and stood in a foxhole, the fire blast 
washing their night-goggles with oil slick pools of swirling 
orange neon.  The exhaust port hid a two-million-pound thrust 
underground rocket motor which cranked an MHD under the parched 
clay soil.  The MHD was a turbine generator, like ones in dams, 
and corporate power plants, but instead of turning a few measly 
hundred or thousand RPM's by water power or thermal convection, 
this turbine was cranking at a cool half million revs, thanks to 
the rocket motor.  It charged a bank of laser capacitors, also 
buried, which now held enough power to slam an engine block 
through the great wall of China.
	The smaller of the two men watching was of medium build, 
muscular, with short black hair, a prominent aquiline nose, and 
dark eyes.  A scar ran down his chin, starting beside the corner 
of his mouth, descending in a smooth arc for two inches.  He held 
a Sony-Encom console bar in his left hand and a fifty-seven 
caliber cratering hand cannon, no brand, he made it himself, in 
his right.
	His companion was large, with leonine features, a thick mane 
of hair falling to a point in the small of his back, sharpened 
canines extending an inch over his lower lip, and eyes which 
showed a faint glint of red, way back behind his pupils at the 
center of his skull, if you caught the angle just right.  He was 
big, all muscle, thanks to Ivan’s Gene Cuisine.  He looked like 
he could rip a hunk out of a neutron bomb with his teeth and chew 
on it, then smile at you.
	Slater turned to Redeye, his lips pressed into a thin line 
below the swirling iridescence of the flame reflection washed 
goggles.  "That's power," he said.
	"Not power, just energy," the big man replied.
	"Semantics."  Slater glanced down at the control stick.  Its 
shielded display was a flowing ribbon of blood red pulse data.  
Slater thought it looked like a micro-compressed view of the 
taillights streaming away from Crater City Kansas, after twenty-
five megatons of real power taught the good old U.S. of A. not to 
fuck with nuclear terrorists.
	"Almost time," Slater said.  "You ready?"
	"Let it rip."
	Slater slid the hand cannon into its shoulder holster, 
pressed a small indentation on the Encom, and the two men dropped 
down below the lip of their foxhole.  The Encom was a Data 
Command Unit, a DCU, ranked high on the list of info handlers.  
It was just below an ICU, Information Control Unit, but only the 
Domestic Information Security Control agency had access to those, 
unless you knew someone.
Slater nudged the Encom, and concealed doors in the ground a 
hundred meters away slid apart like oiled glass, and two chain-
bonded steel poles on a girdered carbon sub-frame lifted up, 
angling into the dark sky.
	"There it is," Redeye said, pointing up at one of the 
pinpoints of light hanging in the soot-choked early morning air.
	"Tracking's got it," Slater replied, watching the Encom.  
The pulsing lights went solid.  Thin lines converged into a thick 
wavering stripe.
	"Out with a bang, not a whimper," Redeye said.  A smile 
curled his lower lip around his fangs.
	Slater nodded as he unlocked the fail-safe.  At the bottom 
of the rails, ten meters underground, a tungsten-epoxy cube 
rested in front of a bar of pure gold spanning the girdered 
poles.  The cube was an indestructible bullet of potential.  
Potential, like plutonium wrapped in lead under a neutron 
generator.
Seventy miles up a tiny dot of light tried to hide among the 
mottled backdrop of stars, but couldn't fool the image-array 
targeting software that could pick out which one of an 
infantryman's nostrils to put a 7.62mm slug through from a mile 
away.  The tracking software found the dot that wasn't a star, 
the dot that was really the world’s largest corporate computer 
satellite ever launched into space...
Space was safe.  It was pure.  Mainly it was inaccessible.  
No possibility of clandestine access or data tampering.  
Information was a company’s most valuable asset.  It made sense 
to protect it.  Sounded good.  It should work like that.  Not 
everyone has a surface-to-space rail gun in their backyard.
As the satellite computer complex passed overhead, its 
delicate internal systems guarded from cosmic rays and meteors by 
Radpax(tm) shielding and a solar charged auto-targeting laser, 
the chain-code mapped image was processed with recursive 
precision until it hit the optimal location for scenario 
execution.  When it did, Slater and Redeye's bank of rocket 
charged capacitors unloaded like a super-nova, pumping energy 
into the rails with the intensity of a Samurai cutting down a 
Shakya with a molecular katana.  The bar of pure gold instantly 
became a blast of screaming plasma.
	A shockwave of thunder ripped through the desert air as the 
plasma ball shot up the rails, a screaming mongoose hurling the 
epoxy cube toward space at four miles per second, twenty-two 
point seven times the speed of sound.  The solar battery that 
powered the auto-targeting laser on the satellite was dead trying 
to blast apart the epoxy cube by the time the bullet reached the 
satellite's casing and ripped through the Radpax like a sabot 
round through tinfoil.  The bullet left a bright orange tail for 
a moment, pointing back at the men in the foxhole, an accusing 
finger.  That was okay.  Slater and Redeye had anticipated that.  
They were good at anticipating things.
     "Let's roll," Slater said.
     Slater and Redeye climbed out of the foxhole, smoke rising 
from the pit behind them.  The dirt around the rail gun was 
burned black in a ten meter ring.  The two men jogged down the 
road to their waiting semi, a black and tan Road Avenger with 
dull, brushed metal armor plates along the sides that gave the 
truck the look of a corporate troop transport.  Fake markings 
identified it as a Ninth Corps Amalgamated Securities semi.  
Boring, for hauling dull ground-pounders.  No one would suspect 
the rig had the electronic countermeasure capabilities of Norad.
	Flash, Slater and Redeye’s only business associate, had 
rounded up a cryptech and somehow convinced her to make a sortie 
into Norad's main datacore.  He'd burned his ICU on it, left his 
holocore interface plate looking like brick-smashed safetyglass, 
but he’d come back, bleary-eyed, and delivered some of the best 
code bundles Slater had ever seen.
Slater used to spend a lot more time online, until the 
programming began to require too much finesse.  It used to 
frustrate him until he realized he could just brute force it for 
most things he wanted with hardware.  That's why half the semi 
was filled with electronics, giving their rig the equivalent 
computing horsepower of a hydrazine injected dragster.
	Redeye didn't much think about computers, except as a 
commodity to be used in trade.  CPU cycles equaled money.  Redeye 
preferred dealing with things he could grab, and beat the shit 
out of if necessary.  He used to think about other things, before 
the corporate wars of 2021, before The Final Battle.  That was 
before to his genetic bulk-up and IR sight mods.  That was back 
when Slater and Redeye used to run the code track, and get vac'd 
on Juice and Hydro.  But The Final Battle had scared Redeye.  
After The Final Battle, Redeye decided he never wanted to be 
scared again.
	"Anything yet?" Redeye asked as he drove the big rig 
carefully through the marked path between the sonic mines that  
protected their position.
     "Nope.  Give'em a few minutes to decide on their 
retaliation," Slater said, checking the Infex on the dashboard.  
"They have to figure out whether they're going to just blow the 
shit out of us, or wipe out every bit of life on the face of the 
planet in a five mile radius."
	"Five.  I thought you said half a mile."
	"Not if they saturate."  Slater glanced at Redeye, who 
wasn't smiling.  "Relax.  They won't do it.  Not here, not now."
	Redeye nodded, his muscles bulging under his camo T-shirt.  
He floored the semi and the rig surged forward, pulling out of 
the mine field and onto the clay-packed desert road ahead.
Slater watched two miles click off on the odometer, thinking 
about defense drops in the corporate wars and their tracking 
capabilities, before he saw the blips on the Infex.  "Here they 
come."  Two vapor trails shot through the sky.  "H-7 Scramjets," 
Slater said.  "They’ve upgraded."  Slater flipped a switch by the 
Infex and a topo map display flashed into existence above their 
dashboard.  An altitude grid and flight vector stats washed over 
the map.
	"Scramjets," Redeye growled.  "What goes around comes 
around."
	"Yeah.  But they'll think they're flying through the center 
of a neutron bomb when they come back around."  Slater hit the 
ECM switch on the dash.  A message flashed through the display, 
"Norad max jamming activated...".
	"That's not what I meant."
	"I know," Slater replied.
	"Shit, I'm going cross-country," Redeye said, yanking the 
rig's big steering wheel hard over.  The semi bounced as it 
rolled over the shallow shoulder beside the packed clay road and 
headed into the desert, leaving a trail of dust.
	The scramjets came back and picked up on the jamming too 
late.  It was one of the Norad code's features.  The first jet 
tried to veer away when the pilot noticed, but banked too steep, 
trying to skirt the pulsing energy from the jamming wave, and 
broke apart with a metal-tearing shriek as the G-force ripped the 
wings from the jet's fuselage.  The other plane flew straight 
into the center of the wave.  The wired and augmented pilot 
stared at her console as it was overwhelmed like a geiger counter 
at ground zero.  The altimeter went berserk.  The satellite 
guided auto-correction system failed, and the neural-net backup 
stabilizers lost their mind.  The jet rolled, started to spin, 
and finally drilled into the ground at mach-4.  An orange and 
black fireball boiled up from the desert.
	"See," Slater said.
	"That was just recon," Redeye replied.  "Now they'll send 
the real stuff."
	The semi drove on through the dark morning air, red 
firelight from the burning jet’s fuselage playing over the metal 
plated sides of the Road Avenger.  Ten minutes passed before 
Slater started to fidget.  "Okay, what's up."  He began surfing, 
scanning templates.  "Are we missing something?"
	"They're deciding whether to blow the shit out of us, or 
wipe out all life in a five mile radius," Redeye replied.
	The big truck continued to roar through the desert.
	"Looks like they decided," Slater finally said, pointing at 
the display.
	"Jesus Christ!  Look at all of'em," he yelled.
	"What about the jamming.  Is it working at all?  I can't 
outrun all these you know!"
	"It's working.  On some," Slater said.
	“Some?”
	“I know.”
	"So... we ditch?"
	Slater didn't answer.  "I can't tell what they're going for.  
They're not heat-sinkers, not laser, not wire.  If I could only 
tell, I could throw them off."
	"Smart bombs," Redeye replied.  "That's appropriate.  It's 
their revenge."  The crimson glow from the missile traces washed 
over his face and fangs.  He was a huge lion-faced vampire of 
destruction, driving a supercharged semi through a radioactive 
desert with a hundred smart bombs showering down death from 
above.  If Slater didn't know Redeye, and hadn't been part if it 
all himself, he would have been scared comatose at the sight of 
his friend.  As it was, Slater found himself impressed with the 
irony too.  All the smart machines they’d killed.  It was 
appropriate.
	"Impact in less then ten seconds," Slater said.
	"Here we go," Redeye yelled.
	"I'll miss the gear," Slater said.  Redeye nodded.  Slater 
yanked the ejection loop and the semi's cab began to fall apart.  
The cab's side panels began dropping away, spinning off into the 
desert, some getting crushed like a steamroller by the wheels of 
the big truck.  A warning alarm blared, "commit, commit..." over 
the roar of the engine, which was now much louder with the panels 
and hood gone.  Steam began shooting into the cab from cracks 
behind Slater and Redeye's seats.  Their seats dropped down, 
reclined back, sinking below the disintegrating cab compartment.  
A ferrochrome blast plate shot over each of their heads as they 
were dumped with a final lurch onto the frames of dual escape 
bikes.  Their seats locked into place as the last remaining 
pieces of the semi's cab exploded out to the sides.  The engine 
ground into the desert floor just as the tip of the first missile 
closed on the semi's cargo bay.  With a small double thump two 
black and chrome motorcycles arced away across the tan desert in 
a curving Y-split just as the semi erupted in a kamikaze smart 
bomb napalm fireball.
	Slater knew, the missiles must have been air launched.  
Scorps, each with their own independent, shielded AI tracking 
circuit.  New tech, very expensive, and super bad.  They were 
falling all over, dripping, like sweat from a Smash junky.  The 
escape bikes were bare-bones, no tracking, purely last ditch, 
small-chance-to-save-your-ass vehicles.  They gave no warning or 
evasives to dodge the falling bombs.
	The missiles were blowing huge chunks out of the desert 
floor.  Slater debated, speeding up would get him out of the 
target area quicker, but also shorten his reaction time for 
crater swerving.  After a split-second’s hesitation, he gunned 
his bike.  A bomb exploded in front of him.  A huge wall of fire, 
dirt, smoke and ash leapt up directly in his path.  The ceramics 
in the fairing of his bike could take the momentary heat, Slater 
hoped, but hitting the crater dead on, in his quick assessment, 
would be the rough equivalent of cliff-diving his four hundred 
pound motorcycle onto concrete.  He leaned the bike hard over, 
buried his face in the fairing, and gunned the engine even more.  
His rear tire to skidded, just enough to change his trajectory.
The majority of the bomb’s blasts were being deflected up, 
since the missiles were foolishly set for impact detonation, and 
since the desert floor was soft, in the context of high 
explosives.
Slater stayed on the bike, and kept it on the ground through 
the explosion, mostly by luck.  His skidding took him off dead 
center so he hit the rim of the blast crater.  He switched over, 
banking hard into the rim when he hit it, thinking of a spaceship 
taking a close obit on a gravity well, being whipped around by 
the G-force.  Slater flew over the far lip of the crater, 
straightening the front wheel while he was airborne, and hit 
solidly, slowing the bike immediately to gain control.  The paint 
on the fairing peeled away from the heat.  The ceramics glowed 
red.
	The bombs stopped falling.  Slater took a wide, slow, 
circular path back toward the semi, carefully skirting the blast 
craters.  At one point, he caught something out of the corner of 
his eye, turned and saw a girl with long desert-washed hair 
sitting on a rock outcropping waving at him.  He blinked smoke 
from his eyes, and she was gone.
	Redeye was already there when Slater pulled up to the 
jettison trailer.
	"They might not be done," Redeye said.  "Help me hitch 
this."
	"If they're not done, we are."
	"Yeah.  These bikes have the defense capabilities of a 
shopping cart."
	"So, you check it?"  Slater pointed at the thick, scorched 
tube that looked like a huge, long bullet laying on the desert 
floor.  The jettison pod had fired out the back of the semi at 
the same instant the escape bikes had been launched.  Other than 
a few dents and burn marks the tube looked intact.
	"Just the guns," Redeye replied.
	"OK.  Later."  Slater climbed off his motorcycle, walked to 
the front of the tube and knocked the rounded nose cone off.  
From inside the cone he pulled out two telescoping axles, four 
rubber wheels, a chain and a hitch.  In a few minutes they had 
converted the tube to a short, cylindrical trailer and hitched it 
to the back of Redeye's motorcycle.
	"So, you think this one was worth it?" Redeye said climbing 
onto his bike.
	Slater looked around, looked at the crater-pocked desert, 
looked over his shoulder, back to the rail gun, and what was left 
of their camp.  He glanced around until he caught the crashed jet 
planes and their pillars of smoke.  Then he peered up into the 
sky, the inky blackness of space no longer visible with the 
morning sun.  But it had been there.  Outer space.  Finally, he 
nodded.  "Yeah man.  It was worth it."

	Slater and Redeye gunned their motorcycles and headed east.