Runaway World

The Chase Begins

     Trundling across the frozen surface of the Earth at around twenty kilometres an hour, the Birch family's hab-rover came across the tracks left by Reginald Fox's rover just under thirty minutes later.

     The rover was equipped with cameras that fed what they saw directly to the sophisticated autopilot that had software designed to search for and recognise the scratches in the ice left by two metre high, steel cleated wheels. Most traffic on the surface went along well established trails that had been found to be safe. They weren't straight, though, but wound their way between possible and actual hazards and the people who had designed this latest generation of rovers, a decade before, had worried that an injured pilot, perhaps only semi-conscious and desperate to get himself or a family member to safety, might wander from the safe path and come to grief. The most used roads had transponders along them that the rovers could follow, and the exact route was programmed into their autopilots anyway so that travellers following the older, well established routes had almost no chance of getting lost, but newer roads were still nothing more but scratches in the ice. The rover's designers had therefore decided that the rover's on board AI should be able to follow a set of wheel tracks so that it could bring its human passengers home all by itself, should it ever be necessary to do so.

     Andrew had activated the rover's tracking systems, therefore, although he remained in the cockpit to watch the terrain they were crossing with his own eyes, just in case the autopilot missed the signs. His fears were groundless, though. They were climbing the side of a high ridge when the autopilot beeped, snapping Andrew out of the light trance he'd begun to fall into. He jerked back to full consciousness and told the rover to stop and back up a few metres. Then he stared out through the cockpit windows at the icy ground ahead.

     There it was, just a few metres in front of them. A pattern of scratches in the pristine nitrogen ice telling that a hab-rover had passed this way, crossing their path, sometime since the atmosphere had finished freezing out. There was no way of knowing how long ago, of course. It could have been twenty years ago, when the first vehicles had tentatively emerged from the underground city to see what had become of their planet, or it could have been just moments before.

     There was movement behind him and Andrew turned to see his whole family crowded in the doorway behind him. "Have we found it?" asked James.

     "Looks like it," Andrew replied. "Well, here we go, I suppose." He turned the rover to follow the tracks east, towards the mountains.

      Susan came fully into the small room and sat in the co-pilot's chair where she stared ahead, as if she could see the lights of Reginald Fox's rover reflected from the ice further ahead. "How far ahead of us is he?" she asked.

     "Phil said about five hours," Andrew replied. "Say about a hundred klicks."

     "But he's picking his way carefully across unfamiliar terrain while we can make faster time across ground that he's already tested for us. We'll be catching him up."

     "Even if we are, we're not going to gain that much ground any time soon."

     "What if he's stopped and laid an ambush for us?"

     Andrew laughed. "You mean, crouched down behind a boulder, aiming a sniper rifle at us?" He sobered quickly when he saw his wife's eyes widen with hurt and anger. "I'm sorry," he said, "but he has nothing to ambush us with. We don't carry weapons or explosives. We've got sharp knives and that's about it. No, he's going to be running, to keep ahead of us until he gets to wherever he's going. He's not going to hang around and let us catch him up."

     "You don't know what he's going to do," his wife pointed out. "These rovers come equipped with all kinds of equipment. Who knows what he could rig up if he really wanted to?"