by J D Cortese
That the robots weren't even bothering to engage their invisibility shields gave Agdinar goose bumps. The Towers were so certain the city was empty, and nobody would ever know what had happened there, that those visible robots were effectively invisible.
Still, the robots were there, and so there was hope. The Towers might have thought a disruption of their plan was possible.
“Agdinar,” Sarinda said, “where should we go?”
“I don't know where the bomb is. We need to start searching.”
“With those things there? How?”
There were so many possibilities that Tysa's question lacked an answer.
He checked with his inner viewers. They only returned sights of empty departure lines for the computer-operated trains, and of deserted subways, whose transports would keep coming and going until the end.
“Where would they put a nuke?” Tysa asked.
“I don't know,” he said, and really didn't.
“I guess it doesn't matter,” Sarinda said.
“Why?” Tysa would question everything, like a child.
At times, Agdinar found Tysa’s questions cute, but this wasn't one of those times. “Sarinda is right,” he said. “They can put the bomb anywhere, and it will go off anyway.”
He stopped. There was something weird about that.
A white robot was coming their way, following its programmed round. He could see the golden reflexes of its black eyes, and that meant it was too close. They rushed to hide behind a side counter, where a half-bodied information robot kept smiling above them, to nobody in particular and to no one in reality.
Tysa tugged on Agdinar's arm. “So, why? Why inside a train station?”
Tysa could irritate him, especially when she was right.
Indeed, why in Grand Central?
* * *
They were trapped behind the information counter, modern and thus odd-looking in a century-old building. Agdinar peeked outside by looking through the glass-plastic border. There was a huge countdown clock, shown on a projected screen over the background of a well-preserved wall of selling booths and long-forgotten itineraries. The screen wasn't so different from the ones Agdinar perused every day at his station up in Tower City.
He was getting distracted when Tysa insisted, “Do you have an answer? Why are we here?”
“Yes,” Sarinda said, “we are running out of time.”
Agdinar was one step short of giving up and starting a retreat. “Any ideas, Dhern?” he said.
...I have been thinking while you children argued…. It's true that a sufficiently large atomic explosive could be placed anywhere in the downtown.
“The city's empty,” Tysa said, “so why they don't just put it out there in the streets?”
“I can't...” Agdinar said, and then stopped midway between speaking and thinking. There was something there, but it wasn't clear enough.
...As I was saying, to your minds so you don't babble as much as usual, the bomb could have a radius of action as...
“Dhern,” Agdinar said, loudly. But then he worried and whispered, “Tell me, why Grand Central and not the newer complex at Penn?”
...Good question.
“Good question?” Tysa said, used to mind-listening to Dhern. “We need answers.”
It had to do with a map. Agdinar had seen it. With the excess influx of auto-cars in the ’30s, part of the subway had been shifted and he'd seen the topological mapping—there was something important about it, something relevant.
“They don't want the nuke outside,” he said.
“Why?” Sarinda’s voice was a tad too loud for their safety.
“Rychar,” Agdinar said, more confident now that he would find an answer. “He said that he hated the police—and your father—for what they did in Chinatown. The contamination. Can you imagine what would happen with the fallout of a big atomic bomb?”
He had an idea. Maps kept combining in his mind, very precisely. It wasn't the suit's computer or his viewers; he was doing it himself.
“They don't want to contaminate the city,” Agdinar said, lowering himself as he remembered the robot patrol. “So, they will detonate the nuke underground, blow up the bedrock.”
“Bedrock? What's that?” Tysa asked.
“Most of the downtown,” he said, “especially midtown, has an underground bedrock. It's like a mountain of rock under the city. That's why the skyscrapers can be built so high around here. The Chrysler, the Empire State, and that huge mass of the Tiantang Building; they were all—”
“Spare me the history lesson,” Sarinda said. “Why here?”
“The subways,” he said. “They are built deep into the bedrock.”
“And why not Penn?” Tysa asked but was stopped by Agdinar’s raised hand.
“The old shuttle,” he said, “it connected both subway lines and the big train stations, Penn and Central, and it crosses the midpoint of the city.”
“But what would happen if they’d put the nuke in the...bedrock?” Sarinda asked, still a little loud for their predicament.
The closest white robot twitched. Agdinar saw it from the counter's edge and shivered.
“What would happen,” he said, still checking on the robot, “is a great earthquake. The entire downtown would shake enough to collapse most buildings. And if they...”
The white robot turned, eyes searching.
“An earthquake,” Tysa repeated.
Agdinar grabbed Sarinda's arm. “He's coming,” he said, pointing. “Let's go.”
“Who?” Sarinda said, looking at him. He activated the correct viewer on her visor and in Tysa's system.
They both jumped from their crouched position. They saw how the white robot, two heads higher than any of them, was walking toward the counter with a laser weapon beaming intensely, almost as if it held a small red star.
Even though there was nowhere to go inside the concourse, they started to run away to the lateral entrance for the subway tunnels.
Another two robots turned in their spots, just as the first one fired its weapon.
Chapter 53
The weapon would have hit Agdinar on his mid-back, but his suit activated an energy barrier. The impact of the blast nevertheless pushed him forward and in the air over Sarinda. The emergency system enveloped them with a green bubble, so complete as to trap their legs, and they stumbled and rolled together with the ball of light.
There was a second discharge of the robot's burst laser. An explosion of orange fire surrounded Agdinar and Sarinda—heat and light without a taste of the dark smoke it had produced. The shield fluctuated, and the heat slapped Agdinar’s face with a whisk of flame.
The barrier couldn’t take many more shots like that.
The other white robots had been sorting out how to continue their primary mission of patrolling while taking care of the impromptu invaders. Two of them started to walk toward the corner where the green energy marble had turned into a prison for the two friends. Tysa was ahead of them, crouching at the subway’s station entrance.
“Tysa,” yelled Agdinar. “Come out and point your hands to the robots.”
“Are you crazy? You, guys, roll over here with that thing.”
The robot closest to the bubble was monitoring the intruders' moves, and it had started to recharge its main and auxiliary weapons. It seemed to be in no hurry to fire again.
“Tysa,” Agdinar shouted again, “you need to do it. Step out and point your hands—I will control the discharge from here.” Agdinar wasn't completely sure he could do it across the energy barrier. It might all come to nothing, only failure and the sacrifice of two lives he could have saved.
Tysa stepped onto the main floor, hands shaking visibly. She pointed her hands just half-way to shoulder height.
“Higher,” he said. “To their bodies.”
“Tysa,” Sarinda shouted from behind Agdinar. “Please do it. Don't be afraid.”
Agdinar didn't tell Sarinda what he was plannin
g to do—there was no more time for arguing—and turned off their shield to gain control of Tysa’s weapon as she pointed it at the robot.
It all happened in an instant.
The neighboring robot raised his main weapon.
Tysa's hands shone as if they had become incandescent.
The white robot's weapon reddened, preparing to fire.
Blasts of impossibly blue light surged from Tysa's hands and moved like two waves circling a coastline. The lights unnaturally turned back on their path—controlled by Agdinar’s suit—and headed straight to the approaching robots.
Tysa shook at the sight of the robots becoming a cloud of white powder.
The robot with the ready weapon suddenly took a knee on the floor, as if experiencing a bout of pain.
Agdinar stood, walked to the distracted robot, and just two steps away from its body fired his hand weapon straight to the head. The explosion was anything but mild, and the blooming flames brought him a whiff of his own hair that had been singed.
And then they were running. Agdinar took Tysa's hanging hand and dragged her with them.
The robot they'd left behind finally combusted into a wall of fire, smoke swirling in all directions and climbing to the ceiling of the immense concourse.
The nightly stars on Grand Central's ceiling disappeared into the gray clouds.
* * *
Sarinda knew the underground better than Tysa, and she quickly took them in the direction of the old S line. Agdinar followed them; he wouldn't have tried to move alone through the labyrinth of subway connections. His memories of the place were vague, as his past as a Watcher seemed to get more distant with each passing hour.
They all kept looking back from time to time. The hallways were now empty walkways, and there was a chance one of those large robots would jump at them as they swerved between the corridors.
Someone had left a guitar and a case with coins on the corner of the next hallway they took. It was such a classic New York sight that they paused. There was something foreboding about the strewn clothes and the instrument, a shrine that, in its abandonment, represented the city they could lose forever.
The shuttle was, of course, as deserted as everything else. Its doors and windows were open, and the lights on; it seemed to be a hundred years old compared with the trains in the Red and Green lines. Without a human conductor, it wasn't clear how they were going to operate that museum piece.
“We can't drive this,” Sarinda said.
“We must,” he answered. “There's no choice.”
“Are you sure that the nuke is in the shuttle's tunnel?”
The answer to Tysa should have been no, but it was replaced by silence. Like everything else for them on that night, their future was an indecipherable mixture of fate and hope.
...I can drive.
Dhern’s interruption startled the group. They all looked around, unsteady.
“Can you do it?” Agdinar said.
...I can try, and might manage to do it, which is a lot more than you can say.
They entered the first subway wagon without a word.
Dhern crossed the gap between the three of them—a blurred silhouette with a yellow hat—and he drifted into the front cabin like the ghost he was. Before anyone could say anything, the train shook, jerked, and started forward, taking a couple of seconds to turn its headlights on and project some circles into the black tunnel.
They looked at each other; their inner viewers could have told them how much time was left, but they hadn’t activated them.
It was either get to the bomb in time, or just the nothingness.
“Do you know how far into the tunnel we should go?” Sarinda said, taking Agdinar's hand.
Agdinar heard the weight of her contained fear. “No,” he said.
“Look, it's there,” Tysa hollered. “Can we stop?”
The train pushed the old brakes to the limit and, with the windows still down, a sudden smell of burn and iron stung Agdinar's lungs and made him cough.
A precarious construction obstructed the tunnel just ahead of their train, close enough to the front car to distinguish it. It was a haphazard set of tents, irregularly falling over the rails. In the center of the encampment there was a circular black hole.
They had arrived, and at least their doubts about where the bomb had been placed were gone, replaced by the greater uncertainty of being able to do anything about it.
Agdinar did check his clock view.
It was thirty minutes to midnight.
Chapter 54
They started to descend the broad circular shaft, after a brief demonstration by Agdinar of how to use the suit's nano-cords to support themselves in the vacuum.
“I can’t believe they set up the nuke so fast,” said Tysa.
“And deep,” added Sarinda, struggling to generate more rope from her suit.
“Rychar is a persistent man,” Agdinar said. “Be careful with those cords; let them form before grabbing a knot.” He stumbled, as if to demonstrate the problem, and his line swung, almost bouncing him against the black wall.
Agdinar couldn't see much of the shaft as he descended. Sarinda and Tysa were far above him, grunting and complaining as they started to walk down the wall, their bodies almost horizontal. He couldn't talk with them, as there had been growing interference in his communicators—and establishing mind-links was out of the question, as they would use power they might need later.
As they continued descending together, Agdinar’s inner viewers gave out and he was in total silence, moving slowly while hearing the rubbery sounds of their boots and of bodies shuffling the nano-cords to keep steady.
He didn’t know how long it would take them to reach the bottom; however long, it might be too much.
Agdinar touched the floor with his knees, his sense of where the ground was somewhat mistaken. He had the feeling of being in a large space, but the darkness was complete.
While he heard—and only heard—the arrival of his friends, Agdinar tried to talk with Dhern.
Nothing. Only an echoing sound in his mind, as if he were pressing his ear to a seashell.
He didn't have enough power on his suit to connect with his AI friend, with the neural transfer systems being affected, either by a local distortion or the many tons of rock above them. He started to worry that the Towers were purposely countering their attempt at disabling the bomb.
“Agdinar.” The voice of Sarinda echoed twice in the blackness.
“Yes, I'm here.”
“Can we get some lights from the suits?”
“Apparently not,” he said.
They heard a crash—Tysa had stumbled on something after landing.
“Are you all right?” Sarinda said, her concern more vivid against the backdrop of that strange time between life and death.
Agdinar wondered if they'd get to see some light when the bomb exploded, or the darkness would just deepen into something more absolute.
For the first time in his life, even after coming in and out of the partial death of cryo-hibernation many times, Agdinar considered the ultimate nature of ceasing to be. The Watchers had almost never considered a termination of consciousness—there were always options.
It was beyond his comprehension.
He shivered and shook, feeling unsteady. He was under the grip of deep fear, contemplating the threshold of nothingness.
Suddenly, his suit powered up, and its lights highlighted the nearby bodies of Sarinda, closer and standing, and Tysa, who was some steps away and kneeling near a large, coffin-like box.
The suit's light patterns weren't strong enough to reach the wall of what had to be the biggest chamber in the world.
...Agdinar.
“Are you here?” he said, reflexively looking around. His friends also shook, affected by the general mind-comm.
...I am, using the power of your suit.
...There's no time, we need to...it is a larger problem.
“What do y
ou mean?” Agdinar said loudly, making a metallic-sounding echo.
The lights turned on. All of them.
They gasped.
The cavern, or whatever it was, was made barely visible by a hundred point-like lights. They were standing close to the walls, far below a circular opening; the walls were as smooth as a blackened mirror.
“What's that?” Tysa said, her hand extended as if to grab something.
“I can't believe it,” he said.
“Is that the nuke?” Sarinda said, while walking toward Agdinar.
“Yes, it is,” he said.
“It looks like nothing I've ever seen,” she said.
The object was suspended high in the center of the huge room, illuminated by all sides in such an unnatural way that appeared closer than it was. It was smooth and elongated, resembling a drop of elastic fluid; but the strange material that formed it had visual properties unlike any normal matter, something between total transparency and the brightness of metal.
A semitransparent drop of mercury.
Either crystalline solid or elastic fluid, the artifact was a spellbinding sight.
“It's one of ours,” Agdinar said.
“Yours?” Sarinda was close enough to touch his arm.
“This is not a bomb that the Hawks stole or made. It is a space-time-triggered device from my people, the Watchers.”
The object floated above their heads, unassisted. The antigravity was keeping it isolated from the ground.
“But why would your people do this?”
He turned to Sarinda, forcing himself to look away from the hypnotic alien artifact.
“I don't know,” Agdinar said, fully knowing he was lying. It was a small lie, and it had some component of truth, as he didn't understand well enough what they had done. He needed time to think. There might have once been a reason that prompted them to come back in time to study—and prevent—the falling of humanity.