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(Page 2 of 11) C.A.I.N. - Chapters 1 - 4 by Jesse Lawson
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His face cringed and he looked out the window but could only see sky. "Can you change the window camera to see whatever is below us?" he said aloud. Next to the window was a small recession - where he would have liked to have a refrigerator - and at the base of it was a soft blue disk, out of which projected a holographic head about the size of his shoe. It began to speak, but the lips weren't coordinated with the words. He blamed poor programming.
WINDOW THREE DOES NOT HAVE A VARIABLE CAMERA. I WILL SWITCH WINDOW THREE TO THE CARRIAGE CAMERA SO THA TYOU CAN SEE BELOW. IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE I CAN HELP YOU WITH TODAY?
The Duke heard the words but just let them go in one ear and out the other. He had other things he wanted going through them than the pre-recorded words of a hologram. Other things like Jamie's voice. Her soft, mother-like voice that could take the worse day you ever had and grow a little daisy right in the middle of it. It was wonderful. He wondered why things worked out the way they did. Why people meet wonderful people at the worst possible times, and why people marry horrible witches and end up getting a divorce. It's like a game show where you always lose - you lose your house, you lose your streetrunner, and you crash your starship. Where was Jamie seven years ago?
Window three finally changed views, and he saw that the train was going over a water treatment plant. He asked the translucent blue head, "How long until we reach Los Angeles?" It's lips started moving before it actually spoke. Off again.
WE ARE ARRIVING IN LOS ANGELES INTERNATIONAL SPACEPORT (LAX-SP) ON-TIME AT 3:49PM.
There was a thin plasma display of the current global times marquee that ran across the top of the cab. He waited for the one that said Los Angeles; 3:44PM. Couple more minutes. The train ride from Fort Worth - which must have had it real bad because there was no sign of a Fort at all, just piles of rubble and maybe two or three street lights still standing (why a Fort used street lights he did not know; Maybe the Fort was inside a city?) - had been almost ten hours, and he needed to get up and stretch his legs somewhere other than the inside of a compact magnerail.
He wasn't entirely ignorant of electronics, just the technical stuff Jamie would talk about went over his head sometimes. On his wrist he did have a SatTracker, but it was off most of the time. The last time he used it was when he was on the Flying Dutchman - a ship he took with him as a departing gift when he decided to leave the Marine Corps. Unfortunately, the alpha-class cruiser had some technical problems with it, and not being able to fix it led him to crashing it into an abandoned asteroid mine that orbited Jupiter. It wasn't the SatTracker's fault, it was the positioning satellites it uses to triangulate your position. They were all broadcasting false data. The SatTracker used to belong to a dead soldier - a Corporal, he remembered - who challenged a robot before entering a small base that a couple of survivors from a battalion that had been ambushed by ion runners had set up.
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