Itty Bitty Bigger World: Splashdown

As the borrowed? stolen? requisitioned? San Francisco Police Department flyer raced back into the capsule system and I tightened the restraint straps, I had just enough time to take a deep breath and feel the beginnngs of a piercing headache.

Then Amy slammed the controls to full power and the seat smacked me in the back. The flyer leapt down the track, then briefly airborne past some buildings, then back into another track way.

She was using _manual control_ in the _capsule system_. While technically possible, the speeds involved rivaled human reaction times.

I could either look at the view out the "windows" (actually full surface displays) and promptly lose my lunch, or I could look at Amy.

So I looked at her and saw that her tan uniform looked like it had been shredded. She had newly acquired cuts and bruises and slashes on most of her exposed skin, a few of which still looked drippy.

I did not want to distract her, so I did not ask what she had tangled with. But one can be forgiven for thinking that it might have been a grizzly bear.

She took a breath and "huffed" it out explosively. I tensed as we flew into open sky again and suddenly my stomach tried to crawl screaming into my feet.

We were headed straight up, or as close to it as the flyer's aerodynamics permitted.

Amy then cut all power and we were as suddenly falling. She caught us on the wings, changed their angle of attack dynamically, and glided us ina roughly northeast direction, towards San Francisco Bay.

I used my ware to check one of many mirrors for Threat Trackers. Our predicament was getting a lot of hits. A sample of headers:

TT - Orbital Lasers - San Francisco - out of control?
TT - Corruption - San Francisco - Police Dept officer murder
TT - San Francisco - System Stability Warning
TT - Biological - Stanford - Neuropathogen - Xpost TT - Orbital - Biopathogen Insertion
TT - Orbital Lasers - LOCKDOWN - Cert Authority Suspended 120 Seconds

I checked the details on that last and repeated it out loud to Amy.

"Got it," she snarled and shoved the engines to full emergency power.

My stomach tried to cut through my backbone as the flyer hurtled forward and down towards the ocean.

"Good thing you can swim."

I flinched. This was going to suck.

We slammed to a stop over the water of the San Francisco Bay and only my harness saved me from colliding with the front of the flyer. It did not save me from four-point bruises. The right door of the flyer opened under the control of Amy's smartware and she barked a series of short commands, each of which I immediately complied with.

"Take off your harness! Cover your nose and mouth with your right hand. Curl up in a ball. FALL!"

With that she turned the entire flyer on its right side and I sure enough fell straight down out of the flyer.

About three seconds later, I cannonballed into the San Francisco Bay from a survivable but unpleasant twenty feet [6 meters] SHUT UP I'M TELLING THE STORY HERE in the air.

Covering my nose and mouth saved me from inhaling salt water.

As I started to unfold from the ball, rough gloved hands grabbed my feet and yanked me straight down. Another set of hands pinioned my arms wide apart. A mask was fitted over my face and I heard through my bones - direct sonic induction from one of the divers in the water- "PURGE AND FIT YOUR MASK!"

I complied by blowing out, putting my hands back to my face, and fastening the straps.

Part of Search and Rescue training is being qualified in SCBA and SCUBA - Self Contained (U)nderwater Breathing Apparatus.

I could now see, sort of, the brilliant light. I started swimming towards it. The divers guided me. One of them felt me up - a cursory search for weapons while I was in no condition to deploy one.

Then they shoved me into a compartment. One diver went in with me. The outer door closed and the airlock started pumping the water out. As soon as the water reached my chest level, the diver ripped the mask from my head and shouted through his mask "HANDS ON THE RAIL! HANDS ON THE RAIL! DO IT NOW! NOW!"

I grabbed the rail, one of several convenient hand-holds on the perimeter of the airlock, and was frisked much more expertly, quickly and brutally, with absolutely no part of my body missed. In the vernacular of my youth, second base.

Then the inner airlock door open and the diver pushed me through it, sprawling to the rubber-coated metal deck. Before I could react, two -- crew? -- in fatigues expertly zip-tied my hands behind my back; then my ankles together. A third pointed something at my head and pulled a trigger.

My smartware crashed. The inputs into my optic nerve disappeared, my link to the Net (already receive-only once I'd hit the water) disappeared completely, and my already fierce headache intensified.

Then a bag went over my head and they dragged me -- quickly but less brutally -- down a corridor, through two water-tight hatches (one of which dogged after me) and to a patch of dry deck.

The bag was lifted and a man in a white shirt and black uniform trousers with a badge on his brim cap regarded me, unfavorably.

"Major Anderson. I am Captain Charles Murphy, CSS Alameda, and it is my duty to place you under arrest for the murder of a peace officer. The Cairo Protocol is in effect and you must remain silent."

Major... Anderson? Major? Oh, right. Only one Captain on a ship.

I looked at the badge on the cap. A pair of crossed horns.

That explained everything. I was on a fire boat.

CalFire had needed a capable rescue platform. The US Navy had needed to get rid of a bunch of nuclear ballistic missile submarines, on a fire sale basis. The less reliable nuclear reactors had of course been swapped out for fusion during the '30s. Then add a bunch of pumps and some extra airlocks.

But I could explain _nothing_. I was under arrest for an atrocious crime and had no right to speak on my own behalf. If I so much as opened my mouth and drew a breath to speak, I would be stunned.

"Get those restraints off him! Now!"

"Major! I must protest!" the Captain exclaimed as a naked Amy Tsai took a cutter from a diver's belt and snipped my arm restraints, then my leg restraints.

"Arrest rescinded! My date of rank is May 7, 2046 and I assume full responsibility!" she screeched.

I took a deep breath and said something that I thought was worth the risk of getting stunned for.

"Thank you, Major Tsai."

I didn't get stunned. I did stand up and carefully stretch.

"Self defense confers immunity to a charge of felonious homicide in all Cairo Protocol jurisdictions," I observed mildly and carefully. I still didn't want to say anything that might tend towards guilt or innocence on that matter. Speaking in third person hypothetical was legally much safer.

"Captain, could you do my colleague and I the courtesy of replacing our uniforms?"

Captain Murphy snapped an order. One of the divers seemed to be holding me at gunpoint. I decided not to bring this to anyone's attention just yet.

"Tactical display," Amy said, and the chamber lit with a display of the San Francisco Bay Area. We were a fuzzed icon somewhere between Alcatraz and Angel Island. A nearby crash icon with zero occupants showed where the SFPD flyer had ended up.

There were three disaster icons, each indicating an orbital laser strike _on_ the city of San Francisco. Think instant six block structure fire.

"We've got the laser situation temporarily under control. The infoplague has been cauterized. Someone ROM-chipped an entire generation of building robotics about a decade ago and compromised the vulnerability for use _today_. Patches are already going out. Several senior officials have reported attempts at corrupting them. Two have gone down with biopathogen symptoms and local quarantines successfully imposed.

"What we don't have is a good lead on the person Alan and I have been referring to as the Mastermind. He's lost a lot of capability today and doesn't have that much to show for it, and he's royally pissed just about everyone off. But we still don't know who he is."

Amy stared through a bulkhead. I guess that she was accessing Threat Trackers for the latest update.

Then she stared at me, through my head.

"Damn it. Re-enable his ware."

The Captain spread his hands helplessly. "We can't. EMP charge."

Good thing I don't have a stroke history. Crashing someone's ware from outside was justifiable - barely - in handling a dangerous fugitive. But someone who was using neural implants for actual health reasons could have a really bad day as a result.

It seemed imprudent to visit a hospital to have ware re-installed, especially while someone was spending billions of credits to try to make me dead, either on purpose or by accident.

So I was going to have to deal with the world as it came, without the advantages of modern technology.

That would be a crippling blow for many people. But not for me.

"Captain, may I also borrow a pair of smart goggles and a standard field sensor pack?"

The Captain snapped his fingers. Just like that, those two items - absolutely standard tools - were added to the tan clothing being handed to Amy and myself.

We dressed rapidly. I looked forward to a time when we could dress in front of each other without the rush.

I put on the goggles, clipped the sensor pack to my belt, taped an external sensor bud to my throat and started subvocalizing commands.

Back in the game. The 360 view returned, the "disconnect" Net status icon appeared in a corner of my goggles, and a brief string of commands cross-loaded the EMP-proof recordings from my optic nerve into the sensor pack, and from there copied into the secure storage of the fireboat.

I selected a snippet, clicked "Play" and treated the Captain, the several crew present and Amy to a replay of my street encounter with SFPD.

Amy nodded once. This sign of approval meant more to me than an awards presentation.

"Now that issue has been resolved, here is the mission. We keep Alan Anderson alive, unharmed and out of the way until the Mastermind has been located and neutralized. Captain, please close off all external communications. You and I will immediately audit all communications in the last eight hours to make sure that no one on this craft has been compromised ..."

The diver was still pointing his weapon at me.

His finger started to tighten.