by C. A. Gray
Dad closed his eyes and whispered, his voice husky, “If you die on the operating table, Liam, I swear…”
“But if I don’t, they’ll send me to Goliath,” I insisted, charging my voice with all the intensity I could muster. “And I can find Brian and bring him home.”
Dad sighed. “Where did you get such optimism. Huh?” He sounded like a very old man.
I thought of Rebecca, and a tiny flicker of a smile crossed my lips as I answered, “If I don’t believe it’s possible, then it won’t be.” Then I added, “Besides, if it’s any consolation, at least you’d know right away if the surgery was successful or not. You wouldn’t have to wonder with me, like we did with Brian all these years. I don’t know how fast they update that database, but probably pretty quickly—”
“At least within twelve hours,” Dad cut in, scrolling with his eyes again. “You’re on there.”
I blinked at this. “I am?” I’d known I would be soon, of course. But when he said it, an image flashed in my mind of the remaining Renegades clustered around a netscreen, reading my name and fate from the database.
As if reading my thoughts, Dad reached into the breast pocket of his suit, having to wriggle a bit in his current position, and pulled out a slip of paper. “Your mother summoned me after the footage of your arrest. Your friends were still there too. They bade me give you this.” He passed it through the bars, and I snatched it eagerly, tilting the paper towards the light in the hallway to read it.
It was short and to the point—encouragement from Mum, and from Val. Rebecca’s message made me shake my head and smile, in spite of everything.
Couldn’t stay away, no matter what you said. You can yell at me later. Rebecca.
No matter what you said, I read again with a pang. I broke her heart, and she came anyway.
As if reading my thoughts, Dad probed, “Who’s Rebecca?”
My eyes dropped again to the note, and her scrawled signature at the bottom. “A girl I worked with in Dublin,” I said at last.
“And you’re in love with her.” It was not a question.
I nodded sadly without looking up again.
“Does she know?”
I sighed. “No. Long story.”
I heard the wheels of an approaching bot echoing through the stone halls. “Mr. Kelly,” it said when it rounded the corner, “Your time is up.” Two more ambulatory bots followed. These must have been early generation humanoid bots, as they were clearly meant to look like human men, but didn’t. Their faces were all wrong, and their movements jerky. I knew they could drag Dad away if necessary, but it was not necessary. He began to stand, but just before his face disappeared from view, he whispered, “I’ll do everything I can.”
After that, one of the guards shut the grate, smothering me in darkness once again. I couldn’t even reread the precious note I held in my hands. But that was all right; I’d memorized it, and would recite it to myself until they dragged me away.
Chapter 13: Liam Kelly Senior
After seeing my son in Exmorton, I took my private hovercraft to San Jose directly, comming Justice Wallenberg in advance that I was on my way to speak with him about a private matter that was very personal to me. As soon as I sent it, I realized I should have phrased it differently—Wallenberg would neither understand nor care about a ‘personal’ matter, nor did he really understand the concept of ‘you owe me, I’m calling in a favor.’
What’s in it for him? I thought as I entered the fortress that was his domain. That’s the question I need to answer.
Wallenberg’s fortress was not a dungeon like Exmorton had been, but there were a lot of similarities: no windows, no decorations, bare lightbulbs, thick stone walls and heavy metal doors. Each room had been outfitted with desks, chairs, and any additional lighting as needed, but that was all. Wallenberg himself looked as utilitarian as his office: a tall, spare man with sallow skin, sunken cheeks, and deep black eyes. I’d seen him several times before, but we’d never had the occasion to deal with one another directly—I’d always either seen him at meetings with the rest of the Silver Six, or else I’d gone through Halpert. I didn’t have time for that now, though.
“To what do I owe the pleasure?” Wallenberg asked when I approached him, his lips puckering as he spoke, as if eating a lemon.
I knew enough about the Silver Six to dispense with small talk. They were not programmed for that.
“I’ve come on behalf of my son, Liam Kelly Junior,” I said.
“Yes, he is in Exmorton after trespassing at General Specs. His trial and sentencing shall take place this afternoon.”
I swallowed hard, trying to match Wallenberg’s even tone. “I understand that prisoners in Exmorton are generally executed, despite the shortage of human test subjects. This seems wasteful to me.”
“I agree,” Wallenberg frowned. “But Halpert maintains that the risk posed by some prisoners is too high to potentially allow their continued survival, and it is better to dispense with them altogether. Yet, as you say, there are many projects that still require test subjects, and too few prisoners to meet this demand. And of course we cannot consign innocent citizens to those projects.”
“Did Halpert specifically say that Liam was high-risk?”
“Halpert considers the Renegades in general to be a threat to the peace, particularly since the release of their recent propaganda videos,” said Wallenberg. “Your son is one of the Renegade leaders.”
I thought fast. “If he is sent into space, he would no longer pose a threat, just as surely as if he were killed. If he is executed, his popularity may actually rise among the people as a sort of martyr. Plus, it would be a shame to waste a human as intelligent as Liam. Why not change his status to test subject, and alter him for Lunar Station Goliath, for instance?”
“No,” said Wallenberg flatly. “That surgery has been perfected already. The last fifty recruits have survived the surgery and are currently living on Goliath in good health. But,” he added thoughtfully, “surely Halpert would not object to converting Kelly Junior’s status to test subject for the immortality experiment.”
I felt my heart turn to stone. I knew of a few possible methods of achieving immortality, and didn’t like any of them. “Which… surgery would that be?”
“Mitochondrial degeneration remains the prevailing theory of aging and atrophy to date. Therefore, nanobots will replace human mitochondria with synthetic mitochondria.”
The same ones you have, I thought but did not say. The whole world now knew what the Silver Six were, including Wallenberg, ever since the Renegades’ release of that animated film that went viral a few days ago. I still had yet to acknowledge this in their presence, and now would not be the time.
“How… successful… is that surgery? Generally speaking?” I asked, willing my face to remain impassive.
“The surgery is still in its early stages, which is why we need new, young, and otherwise healthy test subjects,” said Wallenberg. “The surgery will take place at the cellular level, and involves replacement in every cell of the body. The nanobots are fast, as you know, but a surgery of this magnitude takes about forty-eight hours. The biggest problem is still immune system rejection.”
“What is the survival rate?” I made myself ask.
“At this time it is about twenty percent.”
Twenty percent. So there’s an eighty percent chance Liam will die on the table.
But, he’s right—as long as it’s more than a zero percent chance, it will still improve his odds.
“I will change your son’s status right now. Will that be all?”
“Yes, sir,” I managed. It was all I could do to put one foot in front of the other as his little assistant bot escorted me out of Wallenberg’s office.
I reached the parking garage where I’d left my hovercraft, and took the elevator to the top where the landing pad was.
“Back to General Specs,” I told the pilot bot once
I’d climbed aboard and the door eased shut. I’d given Cathy my A.E. chip LP address, and I knew she was watching to see when she could call. Right on queue, as soon as the hovercraft swept up into the air and away from the cameras atop the parking garage, Cathy’s holograph call came through. I answered.
“Liam Kelly Senior, what kind of a fool do you take me for?” she railed, her eyes wild. “I received your attorney’s ludicrous proposal. I thought I made it very clear to you that I would not accept a penny less than an additional twenty million!”
“You’ve got to be kidding me!” I matched her tone, snarling right back. “Look, I’m open to negotiations, but that’s outrageous—!”
“If you have a reasonable counter-proposal, I expect you at my house no later than three this afternoon. Otherwise, I’m drawing up the papers!” She hung up on him.
I felt the corners of my mouth turn upward in a tiny, involuntary smile. Cathy was a wily woman—that was one of the things I’d admired about her most, actually, when we’d first met nearly thirty years ago. Quite frankly, she had deserved every penny of the alimony she’d already gotten—for all the free labor she’d donated to General Specs when we were just a startup and I was getting it off the ground. She might not have a technical background, but she’d had a head for business that I couldn’t have hoped to match in those early days. She’d given me hope when I had none.
Man, I’d loved that woman.
“To Cathy Kelly’s London estate,” I called to the pilot bot.
As overwhelmed as I felt, I was glad of this one thing: Cathy and I were a team again. Against all odds, once again, it was us against the world that we’d helped to create.
Chapter 14: Francis
“Damn!” I pounded the table, and Larissa, beside me, jumped. “Damn, damn!” Then, a few minutes later, “Damn, damn, damn!”
“Can you use other words to explain your frustration, please?” Larissa fretted. “I don’t know how to help you.”
“Liam Senior’s A.E. footage from Exmorton. It’s useless! Look at this!” I played it for her, and she watched, frowning with that little wrinkle between her brows she always got when she frowned. The footage showed the tycoon walking through the dank halls of a stone fortress behind a silver but otherwise humanoid bot, so dim that we could barely see what we were looking at. There were a few offshoot hallways, but he didn’t follow any of them, so we had no idea where they led. He just took a straight shot directly from the entrance to Liam’s cell.
“Keep going!” Larissa protested when I froze the video as soon as Liam’s face appeared through the bars. “Don’t you want to hear what they said?”
“It doesn’t matter, the point of the video was to give us an idea of the layout of Exmorton,” I grumbled, “and we now know where he’s being held, but we know nothing else about the compound. Senior’s supposed to be a smart guy! Didn’t he realize we needed him to explore it for us if we were going to map it?”
“I doubt he had any choice. Look at his escorts.”
“We can’t do anything with this,” I huffed, ignoring her comment and running a hand through my long hair. I hadn’t bothered to pull it into a ponytail that morning for once, and it hung loose about my shoulders. Contrary to general opinion, I was normally rather meticulous about my appearance. “I can send Rebecca in to say ‘hello’ before they kill him, but that’s about it!”
Larissa bit her lip and slid her netscreen over to me. “Well, I don’t know if it will help, but I found a blueprint?”
I peered at what she showed me, blinking slowly. It couldn’t be. I’d looked everywhere for that. It didn’t bloody exist. “How—?” I gaped. “Where—?”
“I hacked in to the original internal documents of the contractors that built Exmorton thirty years ago.” She shrugged and gave me an impish grin, tucking her reddish hair severely behind her ears. It made them stick out much too far and it was, frankly, adorable. I scowled at her.
“You could have said something.”
“It never occurred to me that you wouldn’t have already known about it. You always say that you can find ‘all the information,’ so I just assumed—”
“Fine. Whatever. Let me see it.” Without waiting for an invitation, I scooted her netscreen toward me, memorizing every twist and turn, every blind-ended hallway, and most importantly—every entrance and exist.
“So this is the main entrance for visitors, or workers,” Larissa pointed at one of them.
“Yes, obviously, and here are two others,” I pointed on opposite poles of the structure. “But there are three separate checkpoints for every one of them, complete with retinal scanners and thumbprint IDs. We could hack in and print an artificial thumbprint for Cordeaux, but to confuse a retinal scanner, I’d have to access and watch hours of footage on the security cameras, find a bot she could impersonate, take a loop of that bot’s retinal scan and sync it to the exact moment she walks through security. I can do all of that, but not in the next twelve hours before they execute Liam! And we still don’t even know how we’d actually get a key to get him out!”
“They run on electricity,” Larissa pointed out. “So what if we shut off their power?”
“That will only announce that there’s a problem, and they’ll put the whole place on lockdown,” I muttered.
“Well, it’s not exactly wide open now…”
I didn’t bother to answer her, my fingers flying over the keyboard. I went back to the database to see if there might be any additional information on Liam’s listing that might tell me anything else I might have missed. I found the location code next to Liam’s name, but it was a different code than before. I frowned, and clicked it.
Pendergast, it said. I blinked, backed out, and clicked it again. Pendergast.
“What’s Pendergast?” Larissa asked, reading over my shoulder.
I stared at the screen, brow creased, and typed furiously. Then I read aloud, “‘Pendergast is a surgical facility for prisoners’—!” My mouth fell open, and I let out a whoop.
“It must have been his father’s doing!” Larissa marveled, “he must have struck some kind of a deal to get them to spare Liam’s life. That means they’re not going to kill him, right?”
“They might kill him on accident, but they won’t execute him on purpose. Not at Pendergast,” I confirmed, grinning in relief at the thatched ceiling. “I’ll bet Old Man Kelly got Liam slated for the same surgery his brother had, so he can go to Goliath and look for him.” Maybe that was even Liam’s plan all along, I added to myself.
“But can we break him out before that happens?” Larissa asked. “Pendergast has to be lower security than Exmorton, right?”
“I don’t know, let me switch gears here,” I murmured, swapping out blueprints. I knew how to get Pendergast blueprints, at least. “Ha!” I crowed, pointing at an entrance once I had it up. “It’s just a high security hospital! This is easy! Well, comparatively anyway. Okay, where’s Liam going to be…” a few more keystrokes, and I told her, “his surgical status and room assignment is TBD, but he’ll be… hmm.” I stopped, as I pulled up the database entry for Brian Kelly and clicked on the surgical status beside his name. It wasn’t the same number as Liam’s.
“What?” Larissa demanded, hovering over my shoulder.
“That can’t be right…” I murmured to myself, pulling up a separate Commune screen and typing to Matt, who shared his screen so that I could search the database directly.
“What?” Larissa demanded again.
I pulled up Liam’s status beside Brian’s, and showed it to her. “They’re not the same number.”
“So what?” she said, “So they’re not getting the same surgery after all. What surgery is Liam getting? That’s what matters.”
“It’s not only that,” I said slowly. “Brian’s was… neurosurgery only? That makes no sense. A neurosurgical procedure wouldn’t have kept him alive on Goliath… unless…”
�
��But it doesn’t matter what Brian’s surgery was. What will Liam’s surgery be?” Larissa insisted.
“I will tell you in… just… a… moment…” I murmured, distracted, as I clicked through to find Brian’s location again. I frowned. “He never went to the moon at all!”
I felt Larissa searching my face, trying to understand. “What do you mean?”
“Giovanni told Liam that Brian went to Goliath, but he must have transposed one of the numbers! Goliath is 364732155832, but Brian went to 364731255832. He transposed the 2 and the 1 in the middle, see?”
“I do see,” Larissa said carefully, “but… isn’t it more important to figure out how to break Liam out of Pendergast right now?”
I grunted, annoyed. I couldn’t explain the prickling suspicion I felt as I researched Brian, or what exactly it was that I suspected—but my hunches generally turned out to be correct. This was important—I knew it was—but I couldn’t explain why.
And, she was correct, as irritating as that was. Brian wasn’t the priority at the moment.
Just then, I saw the blinking alert at the top of my screen indicating a Commune message. It was Rebecca. She wrote, “Francis, Liam Sr went to see the Silver Six. They transferred Liam from Exmorton to Pendergast!”
“I know that already,” I wrote, still annoyed. “Working on it.” Even though I hadn’t been until right then. I pulled up the blueprint of Pendergast once more, beside the database.
“His room hasn’t been assigned yet, so she’ll have to improvise that part,” I said aloud to Larissa. “But it’ll have to be somewhere in this section,” he indicated on his screen, “this is the surgical wing. Aaaand…” he traced his finger over, “nurse’s station is here. Worst case scenario, Cordeaux will have to go here and find out what room he’s in, but hopefully I’ll be able to access that information when the time comes.” I typed all this to Rebecca as I said it.