by J. N. Chaney
Byron’s voice came through my dataspike. “On the ridge. See? They’re not factory issue.”
Full dropsuits would normally not have been authorized for a terrestrial operation, much less on Earth of all places, but Arbitration Command had made an exception. The woods around Julian Huxley’s remote estate were swarming with proxies, and according to our intel they were not any known model. The unknown is dangerous, so we’d been authorized to take action.
I zoomed in, and sure enough there did seem to be something different about the androids I saw moving along the ridge. They had the same basic shape as normal droids: vaguely human and vaguely insect-like. What was really different, the thing that made it obvious they weren’t factory issue android proxies, was the way they moved.
Androids are clumsy. Not clumsy in the sense that they’re going to trip over their own feet at any moment, but heavy and deliberate. These droids were different, slipping through the trees with a graceful fluidity that was almost beautiful to watch.
I say “almost,” because the elegant movement of these combat androids had the potential to be a problem.
“Yeah. I see it. Do you think they’re custom?”
Byron exhaled. Like most Arbiters, he didn’t really do a lot of speculation. “Could just as easily be prototypes.”
“That’s a scary thought.”
“Why?”
Gabriel would have understood exactly what I was saying here. I shook my head, a subtle gesture that would cause no visible movement on the outside of the massive dropsuit I was wearing. Every time the combat technology available for sale becomes more sophisticated, it represents a problem for Arbiters. We maintain the advantage by having the best tech available, so the people we have to deal with can’t shoot through our armor, hunt us down, or hide from us. When the tech gap narrows, more Arbiters are going to die. It’s a simple equation, even if my new partner couldn’t understand why I would describe it as “scary.”
Byron pointed along the ridge. “They’re on a patrol, but if it follows the line of the ridge they’ll be at our location in about an hour.”
“We could go down the slope now and slip right past them. They’re leaving a huge gap in their lines by coming up here.”
“No, we can’t. They’ll overlook us when they get up here, and when they see us among the trees, they’ll be able to drop whatever they want on us.”
“Those sidearms they’re carrying will never pierce our dropsuits,” I pointed out.
“They aren’t meant to, and they won’t have to. Didn’t you see the scopes? Those aren’t just rifles, Barrett. They’re target markers. They can paint us for artillery fire.”
“Artillery fire?!”
“Yes.” He didn’t seem concerned. "Check the schematics on his house. Huxley has missile batteries as well as mid-range anti-vehicular cannons.”
I brought the schematics up and saw that he was right. Huxley had enough firepower to cause problems for a full infantry regiment, and just maybe enough to stop two Arbiters. My dropsuit could probably handle a proximity blast, but a direct hit by one of his artillery shells would almost certainly kill me. Then there were the cannons, and the added danger from falling trees once the shells started exploding.
No wonder they had authorized these dropsuits. No civilians nearby meant no risk of collateral damage and the bad publicity that went along with it, which would probably have resulted in an order to tie our hands behind our backs and go in light. Without that risk, our lives were suddenly at least a little bit of a priority.
“Well, shit,” I said.
“It’s not a big deal. You just can’t let them get you in their sights. I know you’re not used to that kind of gunfight, but it’s always that way when you’re not wearing armor.”
Not a big deal. In Byron’s world, being targeted by a precision artillery system is not a big deal. All you have to do is get out of the way.
“So what’s the plan?” I asked.
“We engage and destroy. Make contact from as close as possible, so they can’t use their artillery without blowing up their own android proxies.”
As expensive as they must be, would Huxley hesitate? After all, his estate was under attack. Then again, Huxley wasn’t in that much trouble. At least not yet. Our orders were to detain him, but not on criminal charges. He’d been called to appear in front of a Sol Federation Inquiry on the 2/77 Incident and he had ignored the subpoena.
A contempt of court charge is all this really was, although it could potentially lead to much bigger things. If the Inquiry proved he was behind the weapons dealing, the company could even be shut down completely. Not that it was likely any of that would happen, but Huxley didn’t seem to want to take the chance. Not when he could ignore the subpoena and hide out here in the woods with all his killer androids.
Refusing the original summons wasn’t technically illegal, but the subsequent enforcement order had made it a legal issue. Under normal circumstances, this wasn’t something that would require two Arbiters armored up like biped tanks to overcome artillery batteries before bringing the man in for the formal hearing.
When we finally grabbed Huxley, I was going to ask him why he was being such a jackass. It would have been a hell of a lot easier for everyone involved if he had just decided to comply in the first place.
“Can we even get that close to them?” I asked.
“Don’t see why not. I can move pretty quietly in this thing when I have to. Can you?”
Our scramblers were on, preventing the android proxies from scanning for our presence. Unfortunately for us, that also meant that we couldn’t scan for theirs. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of movement on the slopes below us. Had the androids flanked us?
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing down toward the trees below. Just as Byron turned to look, I saw an android aiming his weapon up at us in silence.
Then we heard a whistling.
“Artillery strike!” called Byron. “Break off now!”
I ran along the ridge, lumbering as only a man in a dropsuit could. When the shells hit, I was only aware of it because the world fell over, with the sky tumbling end over end in a crazy spinning kaleidoscope of sky and trees. I fell a few dozen meters down the hillside, smashing through a tree in the process. When I sat back up, there were shapes moving in front of me. I couldn’t see what they were, but they were rapidly closing in.
The android proxies. I couldn’t aim from where I’d fallen, but I didn’t need to. The gun in my dropsuit was practically artillery in its own right, and more than enough for a squad of androids. I opened fire, and trees between me and the inbound machines became clouds of dust and splinters. I didn’t know how many of the proxies had been closing in on me, but I did know that anything downrange from my gun was now a mangled ruin.
I still had to move, or the next artillery strike would land directly on me. Not far away, I saw rockets streaking across the sky. A section of the ridge burst into flames, and I guessed that Byron was somewhere up there. Maybe he was running, or maybe he was burning alive. I had no time to find out.
I got to my feet, but the effort took too long. By the time I was running, if that’s the right word for it, I heard the whistling sound again. The shells landed just behind me. I could almost see the blast wave as it stripped the leaves from the trees around me. I stumbled and caught myself, landing hard on both knees. Something popped up among the branches then disappeared again, and I realized an android had spotted me. I got back to my feet, fired wildly in all directions, and started running again. This time I was lucky, and the A.I. controlling the artillery misjudged my likely direction of retreat. The shells burst nearby, but the strike wasn’t nearly close enough to be any kind of threat.
I caught another glimpse of movement and aimed ahead of where it was likely to run. I had better luck than their A.I., or maybe all that nonsense about superior human intuition has a grain of truth to it. The android I hit was ripped apart, shredded i
nto burning scrap.
As I stumbled out into a clearing, I saw them closing in on me from every direction all at once. They weren’t far away, but they all seemed to be aiming their weapons without pulling the triggers. They were calling in a strike, regardless of the fact that they were right underneath it.
Byron was wrong. Androids don’t have a self-preservation instinct; they just do whatever you program them to do. When you’re as rich as Julian Huxley, being protected from minor legal irritations is easily worth the sacrifice of any number of expensive androids.
I held the trigger down and ran straight ahead while fanning my weapon from side to side, hoping to break through their encirclement and escape the artillery strike before it hit. As I raced toward freedom, the whistle sounded again. This was it. I was about to take the full force of a direct hit from a home defense cannon. I got ready to die, but I didn’t stop running despite that fact.
And then I somehow burst through the line, pulling two androids with me as they held onto my arms and legs in an effort to hold me in place. The strike landed not far behind me, and the blast wave lifted me off my feet. I was knocked unconscious. It had to have been for only a few seconds, but I was so disoriented when I opened my eyes again I might as well have been asleep all day.
I probably had a concussion, though nothing else seemed especially damaged. I tasted iron in my mouth and felt my sinuses running, sure sign of a nosebleed. I turned and saw something nearby, but it was much too large and unwieldy to be one of the androids. I couldn’t tell what it was at first, then I heard Byron’s voice.
“Lawson’s Gambit. Not bad, Barrett.”
Lawson was an Arbiter who had escaped an ambush by tricking the enemy into firing on their own position. Byron thought I had done it intentionally, and I wasn’t going to correct him. As I stood up, I could feel blood catching in the back of my throat and spat reflexively before I could think better of it. Viscous blood stained my visor.
I unlatched my helmet, a slow and uncomfortable process made more difficult from the pounding in my head. When I finally got it off me, I could clearly see android limbs and heads scattered across the forest floor.
Byron was looking at me, but I couldn’t tell what he was thinking with his helmet still on. Then he pointed behind me. “There’s a stream over there. Rinse it out and we’ll head on up.”
I walked over to the creek and rinsed out my helmet as best I could. The highly advanced technology inside was insulated well enough to protect it from the water, and I soon had it cleaned out and back on again.
Byron pointed up into the trees. “When we go up the hill, remember there could be others. And not just androids. He could have mined the grounds, or there could be booby traps inside the house. These are the kinds of things you can easily overlook, and they can kill you just as easily if you don’t watch out for them.”
I could always count on Byron to tell me things I already knew. Especially if they were depressing or anxiety-inducing. But I had another concern. “Those proxies ambushed us. They crept up without us seeing them and called in a strike.”
“Yes, the patrol on the ridge was just a decoy. It was a clever trick.”
“Don’t you see what this means? Huxley has tech that could be highly dangerous. Androids that can engage Arbiters. That can kill Arbiters.”
“We already knew that.”
He was right, of course. A heavy weapons android had killed Gabriel Anderson and had kept me pinned down for hours in Tower 7. Still, this combination of mobile proxies and static artillery was a potential game changer, and I couldn’t understand why he would not acknowledge that. A large enough force of this type could defeat an Arbiter unit, and it could only be a matter of time before the new combination became widely known and widely used.
I gazed up the slope, thinking with petty satisfaction that at least the view from Huxley’s front porch would never be the same again. Trees had been blasted apart all along the valley floor, and the ridge was still burning fitfully. By the time we were done, his property values would probably be half of what they were before.
Small-minded, I know, but the man had just tried to kill me, even if indirectly. Destroying his landscape was a small compensation.
“I’ll take point,” I said, and Byron fell in behind me without another word. Our heavy feet marched up the slope, and I fully expected to run into another pack of androids. Fortunately for us, no second attack ever came. No landmines, no booby traps. I guess if a man can’t feel safe in his own home surrounded by android proxies, a missile battery, and a home defense cannon, then he just can’t feel safe at all.
3
Julian Huxley’s home was unlike anything I’d ever seen before, and I’d been all over the solar system. When I was a kid, I once took a trip to a science museum with a Rube Goldberg exhibit. There was a device to cook eggs that had twelve separate moving parts, and a device to paint a wall that had twenty-seven. I don’t remember who took me to the museum, but I do remember they were irritated by what we saw. They couldn’t see the point in those ridiculous machines, but I found them fascinating.
That was probably the closest thing to what we found when we finally entered Julian Huxley’s estate, except that a Rube Goldberg machine is more complicated than it has to be. The individual machines in Huxley’s house weren’t especially complicated, but those machines did everything whether it needed to be done or not.
The front door was locked, but my skeleton key got us in without any difficulty. Upon entering, the first thing I saw was an android. I almost blasted it, but the thing reached out a hand to me and said, “May I take your coat, sir?”
I still almost blasted it. I couldn’t like the droids, not after everything I’d seen them do. If you program an android to take your coat, it will take your coat. If you program an android to slaughter all humans, it will slaughter all humans. They just can’t be trusted.
“No.”
The android lowered its arm, and I couldn’t shake the impression that it felt resentful about the whole thing. We stepped around it and found ourselves in an open living room with a row of floor to ceiling windows overlooking the forested hills outside. If Huxley was here, he might well have been standing at this window and watching us while we battled his androids in the sea of evergreens.
As it was, I could still see the orange flames flickering among the shattered trees outside. Whole sections of the ridge had been stripped of their greenery, leaving only the blackened stumps behind.
Throughout the house, androids walked or slid or crawled or climbed, tending to household chores or maintaining the AI system that ran the house itself. Some of them looked like metallic snakes, segmented and as shiny as chrome. Some of them scuttled around on multiple legs like crabs or lobsters. Some of them loped along like monkeys or toddled around like creepy dolls.
It felt like art, but I suspected it was really just Huxley’s hobby. Like many entrepreneurs, he had turned his basement project into a massive empire on the strength of his own genius. Now that he could afford to, he seemed to have decided to go back to tinkering. He must have made all those things himself, programming them all to do some useful chore.
As far as I could tell, nothing in the house was purely ornamental. These androids each appeared to have exactly one task. One was polishing the floor, which already glowed with a mirror like sheen. Another walked along searching for dropped items, staring at the floor like it expected to find a ball of paper or a pen there at any moment. One mopped the kitchen floor, creating what seemed to be the slickest surface in human history. One crawled along the wall, opening panels occasionally and making adjustments to whatever was inside.
There was far too much for me to describe it all. It was an army of servants, slaving away on endless tasks that all seemed to have been completed a long time ago. The kitchen floor was far too shiny, and if any items had ever fallen on the floor, they had long since been dealt with. As fascinating as it must be for Huxley to build these
strange little automata, there was something sad about the whole thing.
Along one wall, there was a row of computer monitors displaying a constant stream of information—everything from stock prices to personnel reports, updates on open projects, and even the news of the arrests. The house’s A.I. system seemed to be handling it all without human oversight, and it occurred to me for the first time that Huxley might not even be here.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I asked.
Byron grunted. “Probably not.”
I gave up and started checking the rooms one by one. It took a while, because none of them were truly uninhabited. They were crawling with androids, toiling away at every piece of furniture and surface. In one of the rooms, they had actually worn a hole in a desk. The android in charge of polishing that spot was still working, too—it had its hand in the hole and just kept moving it back and forth, a sight I found strangely unsettling. Huxley had created a monument to futility, and it went on and on with no need for input.
We eventually found the genius in the bedroom, staring up at the ceiling with empty eyes. The man was dead, but that wasn’t immediately obvious. His androids didn’t just keep that place clean, they kept it sterile. With no germs or insects, Huxley was decaying very slowly. His skin was stretched tight across his cheekbones, and his lips were pulled back from his teeth in a leering grimace. He was a mummy, which meant he’d been dead for a long while.
“How long?” I asked.
“Three years or so,” said Byron.
“Three?”
I looked around and thought about all his staff of androids. He had left them working, and because he had never given them the order to stop, they would never stop. When enough time had gone by, they would polish and clean the house to nothing. The walls would collapse, the ceiling would come down on them all, and, if there were any survivors, they’d be out there polishing the rubble.