Nightside City

If I wanted the night, I'd have to go to it; it wouldn't come to me.

It was pretty clear that nobody was going to come and get me, either; I'd have to get back to the nightside on my own. Nobody kept track of me. Nobody would notice I was missing until it was too late. My only family on the planet was my brother 'Chan-he called maybe once every four or five weeks, and his last call had been a week ago. I still had a few friends, but if they noticed at all, they wouldn't worry if I didn't answer calls or show up at Lui's for a few days; I'd done that before, when I was working or busy or just depressed.

I wondered whether anybody might miss the cab and come looking for it, but then I dismissed the idea. I'd already noticed, before I passed out, that it looked like an independent, and a glance at the hardcopy license and ownership statement next to the passenger readout screen confirmed that. This cab had been as much a loner as I was, bought free from Q.Q.T. over a year ago.

I looked up from the statement to that open access panel and all the obviously dead inboard systems, and I shuddered at the thought that I might have to get out and walk in the sunlight.

That wasn't certain yet, though. I leaned forward and poked around a little.

The motherboard was snapped in two, and the central processor, the brain, was crushed; the cab itself was dead, beyond any possible doubt. I prodded a few other systems. None of them were working, but most of them looked intact, and after all, the poor lobotomized thing had probably flown here under its own power. If Orchid and Rigmus-I figured Bobo had to be Bobo Rigmus, of course-had been able to make the corpse fly, I thought maybe I could, too. There had to be a patched-in slave program somewhere that had worked the drives.

I couldn't get any current anywhere, though. Something had cut the power feed. At first I didn't think that was necessarily irreparable.

Then I got past the firewall and got a look at the main power plant.

They'd put some sort of timed charge on it, I guess. However they'd arranged it, one whole side was blown out.

Fortunately for me, it was a side that faced away from the passenger compartment; otherwise I'd have been dead, which was probably what they had intended. They probably expected the whole thing to blow, which would leave me as just a little more radioactive debris. Instead, I was alive, but I'd probably caught a good dose of radiation all the same, and that side of the cab had probably left a streak of hot dust for a dozen kilometers before the poor thing hit ground.

The power plant was just scrap now, which meant that the cab obviously wasn't going anywhere, but I'd survived. I'd bought myself a slow death instead of a quick one.

Or had I?

I was having trouble taking it all in-everything was so alien that I couldn't just accept it as it appeared and go on from there. I had to think it through.

Just what had happened?

Obviously, Paulie Orchid and Bobo Rigmus had taken me and stuck me in a sabotaged cab and sent me out onto the dayside to die. But why?

I could make a pretty good guess. If I had turned up dead in the city, inquiries would have been made. My ITEOD records would have been pulled, and although they weren't as complete and up-to-date as I might have liked, they'd show that Sayuri Nakada and the Ipsy were up to something, and that I had been investigating that.

Somebody would be able to put the clues together, and the whole scheme would have been crashed.

But if I just disappeared, none of that would happen. At least, not for some time, not until somebody realized how long I had been gone. It could take weeks, maybe longer. And when it did show up, nobody would be sure I was dead; my ITEOD records would remain sealed until somebody got a court order. And nobody was likely to bother with that.

Nobody was going to find me there on the dayside. My body would just dry up and weather away.

And if they did find me, me and the cab, there would be no hard evidence that it was murder, that it hadn't been a bizarre and inexplicable accident or a particularly weird suicide.

It was a pretty damn good way of disposing of me, really. It got around the ITEOD files nicely. I had to admit that. I wondered who had thought of it. I'd have picked Doc Lee if I had to guess.

But why? Clever or not, why did they bother? Why was I so great a threat that they were ready to go to all this trouble to kill me secretly, rather that just telling me what was going on?

I didn't know, and there in the cab I didn't see any way of finding out. All I knew was that they had sent me out here to die.

But I had no intention of dying. Aside from all the usual reasons-and I'd say my survival instinct is as strong as anybody's-I didn't want to give them the satisfaction. I sure as hell wasn't going to give up without a fight. I tapped my wrist and said, "I need a cab, or an ambulance or patrol car; this is an emergency."

My voice was a croak. The gag had soaked up all the moisture in my mouth, and the dry air in the cab was making it hard to recover.

My transceiver did nothing. No beep. If it had heard my command and tried to obey, it hadn't been able to get an acknowledgment from anyone.

I swallowed, got my mouth working a little better, and tried again.

"I said, cab, please!" This time it came out clear and angry.

The transceiver buzzed, an ugly, negative sound. It had tried. It hadn't gotten through. Nobody was in range.

I was hot, I realized, hot and tired-my little doze on the way east hadn't really left me well rested. I was scared bad, too. My wrist was shaking as I looked at the skin covering the transceiver, and sweat shone in a thin film.

And I hadn't done anything yet, hadn't gone anywhere. I'd only been awake for a few minutes.

I looked up, then wished I hadn't; that blue-white sky was one huge glare.

I looked down again and around at what I could see.

There was nothing else in the cab I could use. The transmitters might not be smashed like the motherboard and the power plant, but I had no juice for them; I didn't have any way to rig an adapter for my body current, and that probably wouldn't have been enough anyway. It apparently wasn't enough for my wrist transceiver.

Hell, I was probably below the broadcast horizon for the city anyway. I'd have a better chance of contacting ships in space. Except that most ships don't come over the dayside anywhere below high orbit, and they wouldn't be listening on ground-use frequencies.

I was stranded. Barring miracles, my only way out was to walk back to the nightside.

I wasn't too picky about just where on the nightside. Anywhere would do; most of the nightside is at least borderline habitable, and the bad spots are mostly pretty far back from the terminator. I didn't think I'd be lucky enough to hit Nightside City right off, but if I reached the twilight zone and then turned and kept walking along the terminator, I thought I ought to hit either the city or a working mine camp, and miners could get me to the city.

First, though, I had to get to the terminator, and I had no idea how far that might be. The sun didn't seem very high in the sky, and the shadows were long-but Epimetheus is a good-sized planet, as I've said before. Great-circle circumference is 28,500 kilometers, more or less.

With Nightside City on the terminator, that put it roughly seven thousand kilometers from the noon pole. I wasn't that far, obviously, but looking in the general direction of the sun-I couldn't look right at it, of course-I could easily have been one or two thousand kilometers east of the terminator.

That's one hell of a long walk.

But what choice did I have?

Waiting wasn't going to do me any good, either. A journey of a thousand kilometers begins with a single step, right? It was time to stop dawdling and take that first step.