Love.exe: Surviving Chapter 45: Water Currents

Chapter 45: Water Currents

The truck was no longer in the current he had entered the zone through, which was not something he had discovered by intuition so much as by an orca volunteering the information at no extra cost.

He steered out of the displacement while the impact was still working its way through the chassis, tracking his new position from the way water slid past the windows.

The current he had been shoved into was slower. The water moved differently there, and the truck had to push harder to keep going. The orca had thrown him two lanes to the left, and the fastest current now sat two lanes to his right.

The orca itself had kept going along whatever direction it had chosen and was already out of sight.

He noticed that, and found it interesting in the way one finds a knife interesting.

The orca had a mind of its own. It had not doubled back. That made it an obstacle with habits, and anything with habits could eventually be used, which was more useful than simply being avoided forever.

The water zone sharpened into proper view now that nothing large was ramming him.

Everything was submerged. There was no surface above, and the light had that annoying glow the desert had already perfected, which he preferred to treat as a corporate choice rather than a question for physics.

Visibility was better than expected. The water was clear, the depth of field decent, and the water currents could be tracked from inside it.

He could follow the currents by the water streaming past the windows. The fastest lanes on the right were visibly racing. The left lanes lagged behind.

Between each current, transition bands shivered with turbulence where water at different speeds fought over the same space. It looked like a road system that had learned to exist without asphalt and resented the comparison anyway.

Other trucks were already ahead of him in different currents and at different depths, their situation giving him the sort of information that counts as enough when time is short.

Nyx’s truck was at the front of the field. The round outline and pale coloring were distinct even from here, and here was still a long way off.

She was in the fastest lane. She had been there long enough that the main pack was not close to her.

He was not in the fastest lane.

He looked at the transition zone to his right and started moving.

The instant he crossed into the boundary between currents, resistance gathered around the truck.

Turbulence caught the front end and slowed the entry. This was the dangerous part, the part where another truck could shove him back before the faster current claimed him.

One truck in the lane he was entering watched that movement and cut left toward him, using the water resistance to try to pin him back into slower current before he could force his way out.

[ Brace ]

The truck stabilized. The reinforcement took the impact instead of passing it into the steering.

The truck that had cut left got its own rebound thrown back at it and drifted wider than it intended.

He finished the transition, and the faster current took him.

He stayed in the new lane for ten seconds and watched the field.

Then a shark crossed his path.

It came from below and to the right, moving at a speed no current in this zone could have created. Narrow, murderous, built for this environment in a way the trucks around it were not.

It crossed close enough in front of him that the pressure wake along its body shoved his front end forward-right, nudging him toward the transition zone between his current and the fastest one.

"Hm," he said.

His fingers adjusted slightly on the wheel.

He could have steered the displacement. Instead he added throttle and let the wake carry him through the last two meters of the distance.

Sometimes luck arrived wearing an animal’s shape.

The momentum it gave him made the crossing cleaner than he could have managed alone. The fastest current caught the front wheels, then the rest of the truck.

The difference between his speed before and now was obvious.

He was in the fastest current.

Ahead of him in the same lane, a truck was charging an ability.

The indicator was subtle if you did not know what to watch for, which was to say not subtle at all once you did. The vehicle leaned forward slightly. The front intake began to glow in the flat white he had seen enough times in this race to recognize before it finished becoming visible.

[ Ram ]

He was starting to wonder how many people were obsessed with this ability.

There was no room at this distance, in this lane, to avoid it.

[ EMP Pulse ]

The discharge pushed forward and sideways through the zone into the fastest lane, reaching the truck at close range before the ability finished gearing up.

Ram was cut off mid-charge. The truck coasted onward on momentum alone, the ability gone before it could fire.

Three seconds.

Three seconds was enough to get Proxy past it.

Nyx’s truck was still ahead of him by a margin that was no longer imaginary, but not yet comfortable either.

Close enough now that he could make out the specific proportions of it, including the oversized headlights he had seen on the garage.

They were visible now in a way they had not been before.

He decided not to comment further on the matter.

Then, of course, a tentacle rose from below.

From beneath the bottom of the race field, which meant the ocean, sea or whatever body of water they were in had more depth than it had bothered to advertise.

The first thing he saw was its width, wider than two trucks side by side. Its surface was dark and textured in a way that reminded him of a mythological being.

It rose through the slowest current and kept rising.

It crossed the middle current bands, each one peeling away from it in visible turbulence.

By the time the tip reached above the fastest lane, it was still moving upward.

That was a discouraging detail, because it implied that the thing was not done arriving.

The trucks in the field all reached the same conclusion at roughly the same moment.

Proxy looked at the tentacle.

He looked at the part of it that still had not surfaced.

He noted, with the flat register he had been using since the first worm, that this was a slightly more troublesome problem than the orca had been.

He did not yet have a better response than that.