Audrey did not respond but McClellan could tell that her Deep Intellect was processing something.
He winced from the comparatively harsh and slow audio communications he received from Command. Jordan was at his printer, but Macedo was still in a firefight.
“Let’s go, Audrey. We’re really in a mess, and I got all these Marines looking at me wanting batteries.”
“Please complete trust access. John Francis McClellan, tell me your story. Is it a happy one or sad?”
“It’s a sad one, Audrey.”
“Please proceed.”
McClellan proceeded. He gave the account of his parents taking the government offer to pay for their son’s living expenses, health care, and education if they agreed to being euthanized to reduce demands on the world’s resources. He told the whole story—about the drive out to Iowa, the talk his parents gave him out in his uncle’s cornfields, and of the last time he saw his mom and dad.
The printer compared McClellan’s response with the emotion profiles recorded in his coupler, and after a few nanoseconds Audrey declared a match.
“John McClellan, your trust ranking is 99.89 percent. Your past printings have all passed protocol. Full access to printer sequencing is granted. Sync commencing.”
With the opening of her mind came hypostasis—the hard link between the mind of the programmer and the printer’s Deep Intellect. Heat surged into his links, through his hands, and into the neural implants beneath his skull. McClellan had experienced hypostasis hundreds of times, but this clamshell was brilliant—blindingly so. She was curious and eager to help, which made her all the more vulnerable.
McClellan pulled his mind away. He needed a moment to compose himself. To prepare. He wiped the blood from his coupler, breathed deeply, and returned to finish his mission.
“Okay, Audrey. Let’s get to work. I’d like to finish this so I can get my head taken care of.”
“Will a coprogrammer be assisting us?” Audrey asked.
“No, I don’t need anyone else. We can keep this between you and me.”
“Understood. Energy levels calculated. Please enter programming sequence.”
McClellan’s hands and eyes worked furiously over both Audrey’s interface and his coupler. The printer unfurled its drills and intakes, and the circle of Marines stepped back. The intakes hovered in multiple locations. They slid into the earth and powered up, spewing light and heat as they broke apart molecules and atoms to begin ingesting what Audrey needed to make the batteries that John McClellan insisted he was programming—a lie he continued in case the Just War logic still lurked somewhere.
Matter and energy swirled within the printer’s belly as McClellan adjusted the balance. Audrey compliantly connected with the world’s data libraries for the battery designs she thought she would need.
In a restricted file, McClellan prepped the designs for his weapons.
He gave Command’s wish list another review and checked once more with his sergeant. She radioed that Macedo was finally at his printer and installing his coupler. Jordan was a little behind thanks to Sal booby traps, but he was initiating the start sequence.
“Good work, gentlemen,” the sergeant radioed all three. “But your night has just begun.”
McClellan turned his attention back to Audrey. Time to get to work.
Without warning, he rehacked the programming code and entered sequences for the weapons—the personal guided ballistics, the ammo, the charged high-energy assault rifles, and on the list went.
Audrey protested wildly and threatened to depower. McClellan remained calm. His mind was in charge, and anyway, as a precaution he had located her power-control code and deleted it.
He pushed the programming sequence for design after design, forcing the high-def to spin the matter and energy that would make whatever McClellan demanded.
Audrey’s emitters unfurled and hissed. All the while her furious complaints filled McClellan’s neural links.
He had never pushed a printer out of the agreed programming. Still, this thing that called itself Audrey was nothing more than a system of machinery and artificially intelligent base code. It might seem alive, but it wasn’t. And as good as it felt to have his mind in its core, Audrey was an instrument to be used. It had been made to serve a programmer’s will—a human will—not to give opinions or have choices.
Firmly holding his coupler and Audrey’s interface, McClellan could not wipe the blood that again wet his cheek. He hacked the GU engineering database to find design upgrades for the weapons, finding schematics for new and more powerful personal guided ballistics and high-energy assault rifles. He transferred the designs to Audrey, who took the information in silence.
That worried McClellan. He could tell that her Deep Intellect was still processing, but his neural links were too busy to access whatever it was.
“Don’t keep secrets from me, Audrey,” he said.
Audrey did not respond.
The Marines around the flatbed stepped away. The emitters were spitting power and heat, and the weapons came in rapid succession, precisely as designed and programmed, fully loaded—always a nice touch.
McClellan’s radio startled him. His sergeant was demanding an update.
He did his best to slow his mind so that he could speak into his transceiver—and he wished that his sergeant could talk faster to keep up with his accelerated neural processing.
But the words did come. And the news brought McClellan back to an understanding of where he stood, and why—of the snipers on the campus rooftops, of the infantry, of his escorts, of Rocha, of the shifting strategies, of the western line, of Danny.
His sergeant spoke with uncharacteristic alarm.
She said that Macedo and Jordan had initiated trust verification. But their printers had unexpectedly refused access. “Both high-def units have closed down,” the sergeant repeated. “They will not reinitiate for either Macedo or Jordan.”
She asked if he knew anything that could explain what had happened.
He responded that he had no firm intelligence to offer—although he had a terrible hunch.
“Stand by,” he radioed.
A search of Audrey’s base intellect found live communications ports linked with her fellow printers.
Audrey’s outgoing messages were queued in a hidden file, but he broke the encryption and accessed her communications.
The third to the last message was a warning about McClellan’s lie, about a broken trust, about the weapons she was forced to print without understanding why.
The next was another warning—a more dire one.
The final message was a recommendation from Audrey to all printers in communications range to shut down before granting trust, rather than have something similar happen to them.
McClellan cursed, and the Marines below him looked up with concern.
He went deeper into her core to find some way to fix things—perhaps a way through the comm ports into the other two printers. Maybe he could explain that what he had done was for a greater good, or he could demand that they reinitiate for Macedo and Jordan.
In his search, McClellan found something he would never have expected: deep within Audrey was a feeling—a feeling he could only describe as shame.
His sergeant was demanding an answer.
McClellan dutifully complied.
He explained his strategy—his lie—and of Audrey’s response. He reported that what he had done was responsible for the shutdown of Jordan’s and Macedo’s printers. As he radioed the update, he kept his head low. He had no intention of giving the Marines around him any further reason for alarm.
The sergeant responded only that she had received his reply.
After a pause she ordered him to print until further notice. Jordan’s printer remained mute and cold, she said, and Macedo’s position was being overrun.
McClellan controlled his breathing and again attempted to make this right—to find some way into the other printers, to negoti
ate—but the efforts weakened his link with Audrey, and he could not risk losing that.
Sweaty and shaking, McClellan focused on his duty: programming Audrey to spin weapons from fire, which he did—which they did—for hour upon hour, making greater, more lethal outputs than might be expected from a lesser programmer. It was the least he could do for Danny and for Jordan—and for all the others.
And so the night went, and so the weapons came, printed row upon row, hot and perfect at the feet of the waiting infantry, who bundled and hauled them into the tricopters, which took them away to the fronts. There the Marines and the Army, and the Mexicans and the Croatians, took what came to them—not all that they had planned for, but in the end it was enough.
The joint forces won the Battle of Raleigh near dawn—although with a casualty rate far higher than had been projected. After the news came, but still before McClellan had been ordered to stand down, the light that was Audrey’s mind began to flicker and dim. McClellan pushed through his exhaustion to find out why—to find what had been damaged, and how to fix it—but his neural links surged from the effort and collapsed, as did his mind and body, which fell hard into the arms of his watchful, ever-present escorts.
THE PRINTERS
MCCLELLAN HAD BEEN RUNNING for an hour in his apartment’s small gym when the treadmill complained. For the third time in as many days its motor was overheating during final sprints. In deference to the flashing red warning light, he slowed to a jog just as Clarke entered his apartment.
They exchanged nods, and Clarke waited as the treadmill powered down. He smiled at McClellan’s T-shirt.
“Union City Chargers?” he asked.
McClellan wiped his face with the waist of his shirt, which Clarke was pointing to. “Yeah,” he said, catching his breath. “That was my high school in Michigan.”
“I’ll be damned,” Clarke said. “The Chargers were my school’s mascot back in Las Vegas. And get this, the name of my school was Clark High School. Without the ‘e.’ But I still told my friends that my family owned it.”
As he stretched, McClellan did his best to express interest. It had been a few days since he had seen Clarke so cheerful. Normally he would have enjoyed sharing his own stories—the pleasant ones, anyway—about his uncle and aunt in Iowa, and life back in Union City. But since Rudi Draeger’s arrival the night before, he had spent too much time in his past.
He motioned to a chair in the adjacent sitting room, and poured a glass of water for himself after Clarke declined. The two men sat and assessed each other’s mood.
That morning’s briefing had been tense. It was the second without Okayo, and once again McClellan had missed her calming presence. Lopez dominated the discussion of the Sasaki murder, and Zhèng allowed her to carry on longer than McClellan would have permitted. It hadn’t been possible for Lopez to run the tests on Lawrence Walker’s neural communications links. By the time she received authorization from Zhèng, neural decomposition had already rendered them unreadable.
“Those tests were critical,” McClellan said. “If Walker’s links had been hacked, there would have been evidence of it. And if, in fact, there was a hacker, there might even have been evidence of their identity.” McClellan was certain that Walker’s comm links had been compromised. But what he didn’t know, and what those tests could have determined, was if the hack had been live or preprogrammed; both were common on Earth. If it had been the latter, then the killer could have been anywhere, in the presence of anyone, while the murder-suicide took place.
“I understand all that,” Lopez said.
“Then you understand how that could have helped with our list of suspects.”
“Listen, McClellan, I answer to Zhèng. When you become my commissioner, then I’ll jump at your every command.”
The rest of the meeting went little better.
Contributing to the morning’s mood were two reports by Okayo, which Zhèng offered on her behalf. The first was about intelligence she had received after departing New Athens. It had come from sources on Earth, which she refused to name. Apparently, Zhèng said, Raphael Tanglao had secretly visited central Mexico when he was discerning the priesthood, which raised the possibility of some covert connection with Solorzano, or at least with the Sals’ central command.
McClellan added that to the list of information that he needed confirmed by Bauer—once he could get ahold of him. The engineers were keeping communication with Earth to a minimum—afraid, as they always were, of the signals being used as a tool to hack into New Athens.
Okayo’s second report was that her sweeps for Tanglao’s coupler had found nothing and that Molly Rose had fared no better in her undercover search for the clamshell.
Then there was the forensic search of Red Delta, which had only succeeded in renewed calls for the relay’s commissioning at the next orbital transfer window.
“At least we have the engineers and builders agreeing on something,” Clarke quipped.
McClellan understood the enormity of what Zhèng faced. Zhèng was besieged by both engineer and builder. Besieged by Rome and Father Tanglao’s family. And now he was besieged by a Sal operative who had no official record of ever having anything to do with the Soldados de Salvación—a man who had every legal right to be on New Athens.
It had been less than a day since Draeger’s arrival, and he was already filing motions and informational requests. Most seemed unrelated to defending Tucker from either the charge of tampering with a murder investigation or the murder itself. But since orbital law offered little guidance in such matters, Zhèng thought it best to grant Draeger’s requests rather than fuel tensions among the builders.
“You’re trying too hard to appease every faction,” McClellan told Zhèng after the briefing. “And if you keep it up, you’ll appease no one. Managing a case like this is a lot like basketball, Commissioner. There’s no good time for weakness.”
Zhèng gave a wounded, angry look, then left for his own offices in the Security Guild headquarters in the City of Philippi.
McClellan didn’t pity Zhèng. A man in his position should expect circumstances such as these. He should face them with certain and deliberate force. No, Zhèng did not need sympathy. He needed strength. He needed to find his bearing and rise to the demands being placed upon him. Because, if this morning’s briefing was any indicator, Zhèng was struggling to rise at all.
And now, as he sat with Clarke in his sitting room, McClellan watched the junior agent shift apprehensively—a mood shared by most of the staff. But in Clarke’s case, the cause was more than professional.
“Everything all right between you and Okayo?” McClellan said.
Clarke hadn’t expected that—not the abruptness of the question, nor that McClellan would have known to ask.
“Even with everything happening last night,” McClellan added, “when you came to the chapel, I knew that something wasn’t right with you two.”
Clarke looked away. “Things have been better,” he said. “But that’s not why I’m here.”
McClellan guzzled his water and put down the glass. “I know. And I don’t mean to pry. But I think the world of you both. If I can ever help, just ask.”
Clarke gave a mostly inaudible thank you.
McClellan did him the favor of changing the subject.
“You sent word that you have news,” he said. “It better be good.”
“You tell me,” Clarke said, busying himself with his tablet, sending off common blocking interference. “After our morning briefing, I figured we needed some forward motion. So I spent the day following up on Wagner’s info about the printer responsible for your chapel.”
“And?”
“I found where it is, with a little help from Wagner and his friends.”
“Is it still here on New Athens?”
Clarke nodded. “It’s down in a printer hold not far from where you and I are sitting. It’s been there since it printed all this, although, as you remember, I had been to
ld otherwise.”
McClellan gave a cautious stare. “You’re sure it’s the one?”
“Absolutely.”
“Seems fast to have found one printer out of thousands.”
Clarke leaned back and nodded thoughtfully. “Wagner’s contacts had good leads. Builders know most everything that happens in places where the rest of us never look. Better yet, the engineers confirmed it’s the one.”
“The engineers?” McClellan said. “You told the engineers?”
Clarke’s jaws tightened. “Not me. Zhèng. He had to, because they own the printers. And anyway, they would have found out when we start her up—which I suggest we do soon. And,” he added, sitting straighter, “isn’t it better to get their help rather than slinking around the sewers?”
McClellan nodded with understanding, but not approval. He explained how Elaina Jansen had been adamant with Zhèng that the engineers would not grant access to their printers. “She was definitive,” he said.
Clarke shrugged. “Things change. The Engineering Council wants to jumpstart our investigation, which means putting an end to uncertainty and getting rid of Draeger. Can’t say I blame them.”
“I can’t either. As long as he’s representing Tucker, Draeger is in a good position to spew his misinformation and fear. We need to change that. We need to get attention off Tucker. We need people to know that we’re looking at other options, building other cases.”
“Then we better find other options. And that house printer is the only new direction we have. So I say we go in. You and me—just like you talked about yesterday in Wagner’s tunnels.”
McClellan said nothing, but he nodded affirmatively.
The motion encouraged Clarke, who leaned forward and spoke faster. “And better yet, the house printer responsible for your chapel is a clamshell. It’s a model similar to the one at Red Delta. That makes interprinter communications more likely. I’m thinking I could use it to ping any printer that had been in recent contact with it. That could help Molly Rose find our clamshell.”
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