by SL Huang
Less than a minute later, the cell phone I’d pickpocketed from Arthur rang. I tucked it onto my shoulder and went back to driving one-handed. “I’m saving them both,” I said.
Arthur’s voice came over the line, frantic. “Russell, you ain’t—”
“Don’t come after me unless you want to interfere and endanger everyone.”
“Stop! Think here—Denise says he’s too dangerous—says he’s too smart!”
“Oh, yeah?” I said. “Well, so am I.”
I hung up and steered with my elbow as I checked the phone’s texts. As Checker had promised, the location was far to the north, out in the empty desert.
I memorized it and chucked the phone out the window.
Chapter 30
Evening was descending over the desert, the twilight staining the sky purple behind the distant mountains.
Only this morning we’d had a nice, civilized deal with Arkacite. Less than a day ago.
I stopped at the coordinates Agarwal had provided. I’d pulled off a few miles before to untie the sling Arthur had rigged, preferring not to look obviously weak in front of an enemy. Arthur had left his leather jacket in the car; I’d slid it gingerly over my arm—it was about ten sizes too big, but at least it covered the splint and my bloodstained shirt. I also had my P7 and the Mob sniper’s Browning in my belt and a tire iron I’d grabbed from the spare bay in the trunk thrust through a belt loop.
I got out of the car, the soil hard-packed and dusty under my boots, and pulled open the back door. “Come with me, okay?” I said to Liliana, keeping my eyes on the stillness around us. The desert stretched vast and empty to the horizon, marred only by jagged rocks and dry scrub.
Liliana undid her seatbelt and climbed out obediently, the party dress and patent leather shoes entirely incongruous out here in the twilit nowhere.
We waited.
A distant humming buzzed against my ears, and I had my P7 up and aimed before I identified a small UAV zipping toward us. It did a pass a short distance away and then veered off.
Again we waited.
In the distance, a tiny dust cloud kicked up. It grew as it came closer, and eventually resolved into a red ATV with two figures perched inside, the driver a dark and fierce silhouette and the other man listing to the side, almost collapsing. “Take my hand,” I said to Liliana, “and stay behind me.” My arm twinged in pain as she reached up and gripped my useless right hand where it dangled at my side. I still had the gun in my left one.
The ATV stopped about twenty feet away, and the driver jumped out. He went around to the other side and hustled Lau down, hauling him back up by his ripped suit when he stumbled. Lau had his hands tied behind him and a gag pulled tight over his mouth, and half-dried blood painted his temple from a scalp wound. The dressing from where I’d pistol whipped him the other day had partly torn off.
Agarwal kept his hand fisted in the lapel of Lau’s suit jacket and dragged him toward us. They closed the distance about halfway and stopped.
“You’re not Denise,” he said.
“And you’re not Agarwal,” I replied.
His face bent into that too-angular smile. “You can understand why. But how did you know?”
It was brilliant, really—particularly if we’d called the police. Agarwal would have had a fall guy and perfect plausible deniability for everything. Officers, someone built a robot that looks like me! I’m innocent!
“I’m surprised you’re self-aware,” I said. None of the other ’bots had known what they were.
“Oh, I’m not aware at all,” said the robot. He tapped the side of his head. “Different model. One I can speak through in real time, but he’s just a shell. Not nearly the advancement our Liliana is, of course, but very convenient.” He stretched his face in mock suspense. “Am I really Vikash Agarwal, even? Well, it’s true no one else would be smart enough for this. But maybe not. Maybe I’m dead! Tell Denise that; see if it keeps her up at night.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “You were human on the video link.”
His features elongated with surprise, and he squinted at me. “Well, well! Curiouser and curiouser. Denise, what have you been up to?”
“Give me Lau,” I said.
“On the count of three?” asked Agarwal, in the same gleeful tone.
“What’s to keep me from shooting you and taking them both?”
He waggled his artificial eyebrows at me. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”
So he had a contingency, as I’d expected. The desert held no cover for snipers, robotic or otherwise, but the ATV might hold a bomb—or a chemical weapon, something that would kill people but not destroy the ’bots. He wanted Liliana intact, after all. Agarwal wasn’t a chemist, though; he was a roboticist…I thought of the UAV. “Death from the skies?”
Agarwal touched the side of his nose and pointed at me. “Our little secret.”
Some sort of targeted missiles, I thought. Something precise and deadly that he’d programmed himself.
I squatted down to be at eye level with Liliana, and pitched my voice low enough that a human wouldn’t be able to hear it. The Agarwal ’bot might, but it didn’t matter. “Liliana, I need you to go with that man right now. Okay?”
“I don’t want to,” said Liliana, her eyes wide. “He scares me.”
“I know, honey,” I said. “Will you trust me?”
“You saved me,” she said, the words like a punch to the gut. “I trust you.”
I stood up and would have given her a gentle push with my right hand, except it wasn’t working well enough. “Go ahead.”
She took a hesitant step forward.
Agarwal shoved Lau in the back, and he fell into a stumble. He shuffled toward me, casting a horrified glance at Liliana as he passed her, an expression that changed to a mixture of revulsion and relief as he reached me. His face was crusted with dried sweat and blood and dirt behind the gag, and swollen pinkishness rimmed his wild eyes.
I slid the P7 back in my belt and pulled out a knife to slice the zipties around his hands. “Stay close to me,” I said, redrawing the gun.
Lau jerked back, clawing at the gag, horror and hatred contorting his features as the realization hit him that I was about to risk his life for a very expensive toy. Agarwal’s doppelgänger had a hand around Liliana’s shoulders as he led her toward the ATV; she looked back at me, her eyes so wide and scared I could see the whites all the way around, and I lifted the P7 and shot the Agarwal robot through the back of the head.
Liliana tore back toward me at four point two three meters per second, Lau grabbed at me hysterically, screeching in my ear, and four missiles the size of my fist shrieked out of the sky directly at Lau and me.
I dropped the gun and drew the tire iron, mathematics exploding through my senses. As the tiny devices whistled down, I jumped and kicked off Lau like he was a wall—he collapsed coughing to the ground below me, where I could cover him nicely—and I pivoted in the air, bringing around the tire iron like a baseball bat. I whipped it in rapid arcs, the impacts vibrating solidly down the metal as I made contact: one, two, three, four.
My boots smacked the dust as I landed on the ground again to stand over Liliana and Lau.
One of the missiles slammed into the desert fifteen feet away and stilled. The other three tumbled away from me and then turned in mid-air, homing back in. The numbers for their recovery distance, the speed they needed to keep lift, the necessary altitude for them to correct all slammed into place in my head—slow them enough and they’d fall out of the sky, get them low enough and they’d bury themselves in the desert before they could reacquire their targets.
I pivoted, raising the tire iron. And swung.
Bam. A second missile hit the dust. Bam. The last two missiles impacted each other in mid-air, a perfect transfer of momentum; they floated weightless and still for a graceful instant before they fell to the earth.
“Well, well, well done!”
Agarwal’s robot twin had g
otten back up and was clapping slowly, the deranged smile still on his face as though stuck. One of his eyes was gone, bits of metal jagged through the synthetic flesh.
Shit. Unlike Sloan, this ’bot hadn’t had his brain in his head. Apparently.
“I can do this all day,” I called. “I can do this until you run out of missiles.” Best to move, though—the car or the ATV? The ATV would allow me to keep protecting us while we drove…
“Why, this is brilliant!” cried Agarwal, like a child on Christmas morning. “Denise! You built a better model! How delightful!”
I didn’t know what he was talking about for one long, long moment. And then it hit me.
He thought I was a robot.
Holy fuck.
“This is truly remarkable. How did you get the hardware to respond so precisely? The lag in the interface—it’s gone, I can see it. Simply wonderful! I must see what it can do!”
He snapped his fingers.
And suddenly sixteen missiles were tearing out of the sky. Then thirty-two.
Jesus—
There was no more time to think. I whirled around Lau and Liliana, a spinning cage of iron. Bam, bam, bam. One of the missiles exploded as it came in close, trying to tag me in the blast radius, but I was right about that radius being small, and it barely singed me. I added the danger zone to my calculations.
Holy shit, how were there so many—
Agarwal whooped. “This is wonderful! It looks damaged, though. What have you been up to, Denise? Are you listening through it right now? Talk to me!”
“Fuck you!” I shouted.
“Spicy! Who’s been using such language around you?”
I didn’t have time for a retort; my hand was slipping on the tire iron. What if I missed one, just one? My brain kept effortless track of how many were left in the air. Twenty. Nineteen. Seventeen…Despite my big words to Agarwal, I was, unbelievably, getting tired, and my whole right side was on fire, but he could only have so many of these; they had to be expensive to make—
Fifteen. Fourteen. No new wave of missiles; the rest of the sky was silent. He’d wanted to see what I could do—he’d been excited about it, greedy—had he sent every last weapon he had against me already?
Thirteen. Twelve.
I started telling myself we might make it.
Another one of the missiles exploded, not close enough, but almost, singeing Lau’s hair where he crouched on the ground. He screamed and lurched to his feet.
“Get back down!” I yelled. I didn’t have another hand to grab him—
Eleven.
Another one went off, so close to us that Lau shrieked as the heat flared against his face. Irrational panic contorted his features, and he broke toward the car.
I shouted, but he didn’t hear me, or wouldn’t—I wheeled to dash after him, to tackle him if I had to—
Liliana was on the other side of me, but she was screaming and crying too, and as I turned away she reached up in terror and grabbed my hand.
My right arm jerked in its socket, and the world exploded in pain, fireworks going off behind my eyes, my equilibrium deserting me for a precious quarter second. I managed to tear myself out of Liliana’s grasp and reorient just as four guided personal missiles streaked through my vision in slow motion and slammed into Lau.
He tried to scream. The explosion was too fast.
As he went down, the remaining missiles crashed into the car, going off as they hit. I thought at first that they had missed, that they’d been too close to the vehicle to re-home themselves on me—I thought Agarwal had miscalculated—
But he hadn’t. I only thought he had because it took five missiles before the secondary explosion went off.
The back of the car went up in a fireball usually confined to movies. The shockwave slammed into me, and the world and sky flipped places.
The sky.
The sky…
The sky was a very pretty purple. The first stars pricked through the dusk, far above me.
Pretty.
Something was burning next to me, stinging my nostrils, making my eyes water. I wanted to get away from it. It was making it hard to breathe, the smoke harsh and acrid against my lungs. Move, I thought, I should move. Moving felt like an abstract fancy right now.
My vision tilted, the stars above blurring into streaks of light, and the rest of my senses fuzzed in and out, my surroundings smearing and bleeding into each other.
A gangly man with metal edges where his right eye should have been limped into view above me. He wasn’t moving very well. It didn’t matter, because I couldn’t move at all.
In the man’s right hand he held a gun. My gun. Where had he gotten that? In the desert, I thought. I’d dropped it. Why had I dropped it?
Agarwal’s robot stared down at me with his one good eye and pointed the gun at my head.
Then he laughed and pitched it into the dirt. “I can’t do it. I can’t destroy it. This is too good. Wreak some havoc with it, Denise. My gift to you.” He saluted and shuffled backward out of my field of view, then returned, his silhouette backlit by the deepening twilight. “So good, Denise. I mean it. If you ever want to join me, you know where to find me.”
Chapter 31
Sense returned slowly.
Full night had swallowed the desert by the time I managed to hitch myself up on my left elbow and look around. The world wheeled again as I shifted, and all my muscles seized. My throat slammed shut and I stopped breathing and almost threw up. Or passed out. I wasn’t sure.
I unclenched myself. Breathed. Pain—some internal injuries. Lungs damaged from the smoke.
Concussion. Bad one.
I didn’t even try to think about my right arm.
The car fire had burned itself out. Liliana was gone. Agarwal must have taken her. The ATV was gone, too. I had no idea whether Liliana had been injured by the explosion—I hadn’t seen.
A distorted shape lay about ten feet away from me. It was too dark to see what condition Lau’s body had ended up in.
I was glad I couldn’t see, and felt like a coward for it.
A sound crunched across the desert—wheels, with headlights swooping through the empty darkness. I pushed myself to sit up all the way, and managed it on the third try. Standing seemed like too much to ask, but at least sitting freed up my left hand. I slid it around the back of my waist where I still had the Mob sniper’s sleek little Browning stowed, now with a matching Browning-shaped bruise in the flesh of my back. I eased it out gingerly.
The headlights stopped. “Russell?” called a voice.
The adrenaline poured out of me so fast that I didn’t realize I had fallen down again until my head smacked against the dirt and I had a face full of stars. “Here,” I said weakly.
Footsteps crunched on the gravel and debris, and a penlight sliced through the darkness. It crossed my eyes and I squinted away.
“Russell—oh, God. Russell.” Arthur was next to me, crouching down, hands reaching out. “Where you injured?”
“Everywhere,” I said.
“I can call—a doctor, or—Russell, maybe you need an ambulance—”
“No,” I said. “I’m okay. Just help me up.”
“I ain’t think you should—”
“Arthur,” I said, and something in my tone shut him up. He came around to my left side, and I hitched myself up onto my elbow again as he eased an arm around my back. Half-collapsing into Arthur, I managed to get to my feet, though I was pretty sure my legs were going to liquefy under me at any second.
“Easy,” murmured Arthur, the way one might soothe a startled calf. “Easy…”
He helped me to the car. Helped me in. Another rental, I noticed.
“Sorry about your car,” I said.
“It’s okay. I got the insurance.”
“The police will want to know—”
“Someone involved in this mess keeps stealing my cars,” he said casually. “Not implausible. I am a PI investigating the androi
d situation, after all. I’ll take care of it.” He made sure I was inside and shut the passenger door gently, leaning on the open window. “Lau?” His voice had gone grave.
“He’s dead.” I stared straight ahead, through the windshield, the stars a vast diamond-crusted panoply over the desert.
Because Arthur was Arthur, he went to check. Then he came back and got in, starting the engine without comment.
“I fucked up,” I said.
“I know,” said Arthur, driving us quietly away from the scene.
“Lau’s dead because of me.”
“Yeah,” said Arthur softly. “Maybe.”
I would have preferred it if he’d yelled. Said “I told you so.” Left me injured in the desert.
“Agarwal got Liliana,” I said.
“I figured.”
The car bumped over the rocky terrain, the desert scrub scraping against the sides like bad chalk on a blackboard. Arthur reached the road and eased onto it, picking up speed.
“How did you know to come?” I asked.
“Was going to anyway,” he said. “But Vikash called Denise.” He cleared his throat. “He was…complimentary. Told her to come pick up her tech, in case she ain’t had eyes already.” His voice was very neutral. “Real courteous, he was. She played it, fortunately.”
Courteous. Of course he was. Rayal was one of the few people in the world Agarwal had any respect for. One of the few human beings he saw as on his level.
My mind replayed the ’bot’s demented smile as he’d held the gun in my face and then discarded it. He’d had less compunction about killing human beings than he’d had about destroying what he thought was his fellow scientist’s technology. I wondered briefly why he hadn’t taken me to dissect along with Liliana…but no, I thought, that would be stealing. He regarded Liliana as his own work, at least in large part, but plagiarizing Denise’s personal advancements was apparently a bridge too far.
Arrogance, I thought. I should be able to use that against him.
Against him? He already won.
Agarwal was smart. I had no doubt that if he didn’t want us to find him again, he was long gone. Along with Liliana.