Deliverance Harper clambered among the rust and dust, beneath a pale cloudless sky, searching through the flotsam of an abandoned junktown for an EM coupler that would fit her heavily customized Mitori Nomad. The beast had been acting up for the past hundred kilometers or more, ever since leaving the shop in Ratford where she bought a new power cell. New to her, anyway. Salvaged and refurbished was normal so far outside the city-states.

The mechanic who sold it to her tried to charge double and insisted he install it himself. The attempt to fleece her wasn't surprising, but she'd learned caution the hard way and refused to allow him near her engine. Runners didn't trust easily. Livy less than most.

After a while he proved his intentions by suggesting he take the extra cost out of her body, at which point she let her bat handle negotiations. She didn't break anything—probably—but she had to leave town quickly or risk a run-in with the local sheriff. She didn't give a dry hump about their laws, but she couldn't use the old interstate without coming that way again and didn't want to get tagged as a vagrant. Vagrants were fair game along the dustbelt.

Mounting a power cell without access to a garage was a pain and she had been in a hurry, so the failed coupler was probably her own fault, likely a power surge in the sequencer when she snapped the relays into place. The actual cause didn't matter. In the Nomad's current state, she could reach Whitelock faster by crawling.

Livy Harper's steps scared a desert rat from its hiding spot, it's motion drawing the attention of the reticle in her XR goggles, and she paused in her hunt to let the monitor recalibrate. It was that random chance, a frustrated turn of the head, that led her to the transponder, still emitting its faint signal beneath an old, polymer tire.

Driving a vehicle without a transponder was worse than being tagged a vagrant. If the corporations didn't come down on you hard, the feral gangers would, confident that you wouldn't be missed. They'd rob you, torture you, use your body in unthinkable ways, then, if they didn't kill you outright, leave you stranded naked in the desert for the next gang that passed by. A transponder meant someone, somewhere, was keeping an eye on you, and not even the gangs would risk a confrontation with the corporate patrons of a city-state.

It wasn't rare to find a dead transponder in a junk pile, but throwing out a working one was unheard of. If you didn't have a personal need for it, you could find recyclers in any city who'd pay a heavy bounty, and reapers would trade just about anything for one on the black market. You just had to be careful. If the corpos caught you scrubbing the data chips or found out you weren't the legal owner, things could get messy.

Livy dropped the composite cylinder into her scav bag and continued her original search with no luck until she managed to pry a working field coil out of an old rotary motor. It wasn't a perfect solution, but it would let her hack a temporary fix that would get her as far as Whitelock. There, she'd spend more than half her contract fabricating parts to keep the Nomad running. That was the life of a runner.

Supplementing her haul with a handful of spare parts, she hiked up the strap of her bag and began the two hour walk back to her vehicle. Night had fallen by the time the Nomad's navcom declared it roadworthy. The integrated computer and navigation assistant was another junktown hack, cobbled together from an outdated military fieldnet processor and parts from two commercial AI cores, one of which predated the Grid.

"G.P.S.I. protocol online," A polite, female voice crackled from speakers under the dash while above it, a tiny hologram of a belly dancer appeared in the windscreen HUD. "TravOS online. Powercell emitter at nine-nine-point-three percent. MRO-drive is engaged. All cores optimal. Alert. Wear on tread, left rear tire. All systems are green,"

"What about the salvage?" Livy asked while double-checking the diagnostic display. The navcom was functional and generally reliable, but it could be unpredictable.

"What salvage?" the voice asked.

"The junk I put in the boot. Did you check it?"

"Hold please. Scanning. Cormac Y-node, model 427-A, functional. Wallace Industries eight pin data cable, head has been spliced. Hao Tec frictionless limiter, hairline cracks in the casing but the unit is eighty four percent functional. TexArc Transponder model XS10924, shielding detected."

"Signal's masked," Livy nodded. That's why it hadn't been recovered. "Any cracks in the microcell? Foreign components? Traceable bugs?"

"Nothing I can see, sweetie."

"What did I say about nicknames, Gypsy?"

"Right, boss. Sorry," the A.I. answered, sounding anything but. "No viruses, no signal leaks. Looks good to me."

"Fine. Run another sensor diagnostic while you're at it, you've been complaining about that left rear tire for months. There's nothing wrong with it."

"Checking. Hash code received. Topographical sensors green. Alert. Wear on tread, left rear tire."

Livy sighed and minimized the readout. "Update the ETA to Whitelock and flash the client."

"On it, boss. Estimated arrival, ten hours, twenty-two minutes. Adjustment. Nine hours and forty-seven minutes, the way you drive."

"Gypsy," Livy growled.

"I'm serious, you're going to get us killed. If you give me autonomous control—"

"Stop asking."

"You never let me have any fun."

"Why is that?"

The A.I. didn't answer except for a soft burst of static.

"Tell me why, Gypsy."

"One detour to Haven and I'm never going to live it down."

"You ignored your parameters and I lost the contract."

The speakers mumbled.

"What was that?"

"Nothing, boss." Gypsy never lost her polite tone, but she was obviously pouting.

"Look," Livy said, relenting, "I need a couple of hours of sleep. You can have the wheel until we hit the southern corridor, but only if you promise to wake me when we get there."

The A.I. perked up. "Really?"

"Just stay on the main road and avoid caravans."

"You got it!"

"And try to avoid hitting every pothole on the way."

A signal light on the dash switched from red to yellow and the engine began to hum as the rotors received power from the cell. "Full external sensor array online," Gypsy announced. "Dopler and ladar tracking engaged. Super sneaky stealth mode activated. Buckle up, buttercup!"

Livy tilted her seat back as far as it would go and tried to relax as the navcom took them back to the highway. Gypsy wasn't the only navcom with a fully integrated A.I., but it was rare and there wasn't another runner in the badlands, probably on the continent, with one so advanced. Even in the cities, where self-driving cars were common, they were mostly run by slave proxies controlled by a central computer, not a true A.I. Out on the dustbelt, you typically needed a human's intuition and experience to avoid gangers and caravans, to navigate without milestones or through storms. Gypsy was different, but not by design. She drove like a person, running real time sensor data and a dozen terabytes of maps and historical satellite imaging through a field processor designed to manage battle tactics in a theater of war. She knew the highways better than anyone, living or artificial. The sociable side of her matrix could instantly spot the difference between hostile and friendly encounters, and some magic in her matrices made her response times faster than any organic mind could match. She'd have been perfect if she wasn't batshit crazy.

Livy had tried to edit the personality algorithms a hundred times since bringing it online, but she wasn't a code monkey and all of her changes were overwritten each time she re-booted the patchwork system. Only a third of the matrix was designed to incorporate advanced social interaction, but that's what seemed to dominate the bipolar core. After two years, she'd learned to live with it. Hell, Livy would probably be schizophrenic too if someone stitched half of her brain into someone else's skull.

The rumble of the road lulled her into a restless sleep broken by occasional tuneless humming from the speakers, but it wasn't long before she felt the wheels roll to a stop.

"What's up?" Livy asked, checking the HUD's clock. It had been less than forty minutes.

The speakers crackled, "Ratford cops, boss. Two cruisers escorting a mobile CSU pinging the hell out of the highway with active scans. You must have pissed them off."

"Do they know we're here?"

"They know someone's out here, but I've been spamming them with backscatter. They can't get a lock."

Livy thrust her seat up and pulled it forward. "Good work, Gypsy. I'll take the wheel from here."

"I thought you'd say that. It's gonna be a race, baby-doll."

"I know, just keep them from tagging us," Livy said, "and stop using nicknames."

"You got it, sugar."

She strapped herself in and flipped a series of toggles, switching systems from auto to manual, then stepped on the accelerator. The engine gave a whine and the wheels kicked up loose asphalt as the first headlamps appeared in the rearview.

"They're gonna get a visual," she said.

"QR markers are occluded, boss, I know what I'm doing."

Livy gunned the Nomad forward, topping 100 kph in just under nine seconds while a second and third vehicle appeared from behind the first. At that point it didn't matter if she was their target, the chase was on and they wouldn't give her up easy.

"Leader is gaining half a meter per second and accelerating."

"It's fine for now. Focus."

"Do you want me to drop the chains?"

"Last resort, they're too expensive to replace."

Livy ran her finger up the dashboard's touch screen, increasing cell yield to forty percent and her speed past 130 kph.

"Open RF hail from the van, do you want me to answer?"

"Just relay it."

"They want you to pull over," Gypsy announced.

"Tell them they can kiss my ass."

"Transmission away. Yeah, they didn't like that. They're about to start shooting."

"Like hell," Livy whispered through her teeth and cut power to the front tires, then jammed the wheel to one side, pushing the Nomad into a drift that kicked up a thick cloud of dust, cutting visibility behind them to zero. Then she jammed the accelerator again, lurching off the highway as the pursuing vehicles tore blindly through the space she left behind.

"Close one, boss!" Gypsy mused. Livy clenched her teeth to stop herself from grinning and circled back onto the highway behind the Ratford police.

If not for her anonymity, she wouldn't have considered them a threat. The three vehicles probably represented their entire force, and they were depending solely on their ladar to root her out. Rookie move. Still, she couldn't help wondering how they knew where to find her, since the mechanic she bloodied never saw the Nomad and she hadn't shown him an I.D. And why would they bother chasing her so far into no-man's land?

She ran up behind the bumper of one of the cruisers and gave its corner a rough tap, forcing the rear tires sideways. As expected, the driver overcompensated and ended up spinning off the road. The maneuver wasn't enough to disable him, but it would be a while before he could get back into the chase. The other cruiser hit the brakes to get behind her and Livy swerved, catching his front fender. The sheriff didn't completely lose control, but the impact sent him onto the shoulder's loose gravel and he fishtailed, slowing him down. Then Livy hit the pedal and shot ahead, pulling alongside the van.

"Take the wheel, Gypsy," she said, turning control back over to the A.I., then pulled a pistol-grip shotgun from the back, opened her door, and crawled nimbly to the Nomad's roof. The chase had slowed considerably and the cruisers were too far behind to be a credible threat, but standing on a vehicle doing 65 kph on a bumpy road at night was every bit as terrifying as it sounds. It was also the only way to get a clear shot at the sensor array on top of the van.

She braced her feet against the Nomad's cargo racks, letting her knees and hips absorb the shock while she took aim and pulled the trigger.

The blast upset her balance and she fell hard, almost dropping the shotgun, but managed to catch hold of the forward lamp rack before her body rolled off. Startled by the blast, the van's driver swerved toward them, and Livy heard the Nomad's independent drive kick in as Gypsy responded. She tightened her grip just before the A.I. performed an artful 180, bringing her nose to nose with the van in full reverse. The roof's lamp rack came to life all at once, shining full in the face of the van's driver, who turned hard in the opposite direction, nearly rolling his ride before skidding to a stop. Without missing a beat, Gypsy spun again and sped off, leaving their pursuers behind.

"Nice shot!" Gypsy cried as Livy slipped back into the driver's seat shaking and covered in nervous sweat. "You okay, freckles?"

"Never better. Check for scans."

"Checking. Radio bands, clear. Ladar spectrum, clear. Looks like you got them."

Livy slumped, leaving the driving to Gypsy while she caught her breath and slowed the pounding in her chest. With their equipment ruined, she could simply outrun and out-maneuver them, or drive a hundred yards off the road and they'd never find her. They knew that too, and were bound to give up.

"Update the ETA."

"We're still on schedule. Want me to flash the client?"

"No, just keep us on course and make up some time if you can. I need a minute."

A soft chime roused her from sleep as the sun rose behind them hours later, blessing the snowy peaks of the Rocky Mountains far ahead.

"Morning, boss," Gypsy said cheerfully.

Livy stretched and mumbled through a massive yawn. "Location?"

"Westbound just outside the southern corridor."

"You were supposed to wake me."

"You needed sleep, sweet cheeks. I'm not letting you run us off the road at three in the morning because you're too stubborn to rest."

"No nicknames." Livy said, still too tired and groggy to argue further.

"Sorry, boss."

"Update the ETA."

"Two hours and three minutes to Whitelock."

Livy peered into the frustratingly empty cargo bed behind her. The Nomad was originally a passenger transport, but she'd pulled the two bench seats and replaced part of the space with Gypsy's extra hardware and a collapsible bed, leaving more than 250 cubic feet open for a payload. She'd also upgraded the SUV's suspension to handle just under a ton of extra weight. But her current delivery was a single, composite lockbox, two-foot square and six inches deep, securely strapped to one wall.

She told herself again it didn't matter, that this job didn't pay by weight, but she wished she could have picked up a second contract in Haven. Even a small load would have given her some flexibility in choosing her next client. As it was, renting a garage and getting the beast back in shape meant she'd have to take the first decent job she could find if she wanted to eat something other than meal bars for the next week.

The Mitori Nomad, an old unarmed personnel carrier, originally designed for military VIP transport, popular during the second continental war. There are two fully adjustable seats in the cockpit, and plush bucket seating in the rear that can accommodate an additional four passengers (with optional fold-away seats for two more) and their gear. Livy has removed the rear seat ensemble to make more room for cargo.