by C. A. Gray
Nilesh, whom I’d filled in before we left, cut in, “Rebecca’s blackmailing a surgeon to let her in to Pendergast.”
“And then once she finds Liam’s room, we’re going to fly to his window, shatter it, and haul him aboard,” I finished.
Rick’s mouth fell open just a crack, which for him was the equivalent of shouting. He closed his eyes and swallowed. “Someone else can blackmail the surgeon. Not Rebecca.”
“I doubt it, because she kinda has to first get his attention by seducing him at a club,” Nilesh cut in, “and I can’t really see myself pulling that off very well. Not sure about you guys.”
“Also, it’s already done,” I announced. “I checked the Commune. Cordeaux is meeting him in front of Pendergast tomorrow morning, in about four hours. So at this point, if we intend to fulfill M’s order to pick her daughter up in London, Liam will just have to be part of the package.”
Rick closed his eyes and glared at Nilesh. “You lied to me.”
Nilesh held up his hands. “I did not lie! I… omitted a portion of the truth.”
“This does mean we can’t wait around for St. Peters to get to work though,” I said, “so change of plans: we’re going to his flat. He’ll be asleep when we arrive. Ana gave me the address. Don’t worry, I already rerouted the pilot bot and, e-hem, took the liberty to break communications with M. We are apparently having some issues with our private comm links,” I told Rick when he made to move into the cockpit.
Rick turned to glare at Nilesh, who gave him a wide-eyed shrug and a don’t-shoot-me grimace.
“You people are insubordinate,” was Rick’s worst epithet as he stomped off to the cockpit anyway—probably because he just couldn’t stand the sight of us.
It was four-thirty in the morning when we arrived at David St. Peters’ flat, and he was, of course, asleep. Apparently he was a heavy sleeper, because he didn’t hear our doorbell either. Rick frowned at me as if this were all my fault, but said nothing, since we were out in the open and surely everything we said would be caught on camera. I knew what he meant though: if St. Peters didn’t answer the door, Rick would be forced to break and enter, which would violate another of M’s instructions. We were to give St Peters a choice of whether to come with us or not, and so that he would feel free to choose, we were to meet him in a neutral space—not force our way into his flat at night.
What Rick didn’t know was that all of that was a concession to Ana, who insisted that we treat her boyfriend with dignity. M had just wanted to kidnap him from the start. She wouldn’t be unhappy with this change in plans.
Rick pressed the doorbell one more time, scowling at Nilesh and me. At last, we heard a click on the other side of the door, and another, and another—latches sliding open from the keypad on the inside. A disheveled, gray haired man blinked at us with sleep still crusted in the corners of his eyes, but he was awake enough now to seem wary.
“Dr. David St. Peters?” Rick asked him.
The professor glanced at our three faces, landing on Nilesh. “Yes? Don’t I—know you from somewhere?”
“You probably saw me on campus, Sir. I worked in Dr. Ana Yin’s lab.”
St Peters’ expression cleared. “Oh!” Then it sank into suspicion once more. “But—it’s half four—”
“Dr. Yin sent us, sir. She told us to give you this.” Nilesh pulled out the note Ana had written and handed it to St Peters through the door. I knew what it said, of course: “Dear David, I’m sure you’ve noticed by now that I’ve been absent for some time. I am running for my life, and I need your help. If you go with the men who deliver this message to you, they will explain the rest. But I must warn you: if you do go, you will become a target yourself as well. If you choose to stay behind, you will be safe for now—as safe as anyone is. But you will never see me again. Please, David. More than just my life may depend on your assistance. xoxo, Ana.”
St. Peters stared at the letter much longer than would have been necessary just to read it. In the filtered light from the hallway, I could still see the color drain from his face.
“Just—let me get dressed,” he told us in a low voice, and shut the door.
Nilesh and Rick exchanged a look and glanced at me. I could read their expressions quite plainly: Do you think he’s calling the police bots? I shook my head in reply, confident. He believed us. I could see it in his face.
A few minutes later the door opened again, and St. Peters emerged in street clothes, clutching a small bag and a bowl holding a goldfish. All three of us stared at the goldfish.
“I don’t want him to starve,” St. Peters said defensively.
Nilesh shrugged. “New mascot. Cool.” Then his face froze, as he presumably realized what he’d said—our last ‘mascot’ had been Queenie, the dog Julie had found which had gotten both her and Jake killed.
We’d parked the hovercraft on the top floor of a parking garage nearby—hovercrafts certainly weren’t common, but they were common enough that there was a section reserved for them in most major commercial areas. Rick had also painted over the government emblems before we had left the underground compound, so that it didn’t stick out quite so obviously. I thought that anybody who paid attention could clearly see that the paint he chose was half a shade off from the gunmetal gray of the rest of the hovercraft’s body, and there was a clear delineation between the original paint and the patch job. Anybody with an ounce of attention to detail would see the distinction immediately and want to know the reason for it, but nobody listens to me. Whatever.
When we got inside, St Peters carefully set his goldfish bowl on the floor of the hovercraft and wedged his bag beside it to keep it upright while Rick went to give instructions to the pilot bot.
“You didn’t fight us at all,” I observed to St. Peters. “You do realize that anyone with eyes presumably could have spotted the relationship between you and Ana, gotten a sample of her handwriting, and forged that entire letter, right?”
“Francis!” Nilesh scolded me, and turned to St. Peters. “It’s not a forgery. Don’t listen to him.”
“No, it’s not,” I agreed, “I’m just curious how he knew that.”
St. Peters hesitated. “I knew… because the police bots already interrogated me once because of Ana. After she disappeared—they told me she was a ‘known terrorist’ and wanted to know what I knew, and if I was involved. I was floored, of course—it was the first I’d heard of any of it, so I honestly told them I knew nothing. But when Ana never returned, I’d started to get very concerned, and very curious.” He looked at me, exhaustion etched into the deep folds around his mouth and creasing the lines of his forehead. “Are you the Renegades?”
I blinked, slightly impressed. “We are. How’d you work that out?”
“It’s the only terrorist organization that I could find that had any close contact with Ana—through one of her post-docs, Liam Kelly.”
“Excuse me? We are not terrorists,” Nilesh cut in, jabbing a finger in the air.
St. Peters nodded at him to acknowledge his comment, but said, “The media portrays you that way, though, and the police bots would therefore have used the same term. I still couldn’t see Ana getting mixed up in any of that, but when I saw Liam Kelly’s arrest, and put together that he was the son of the Liam Kelly, of General Specs, I realized something big must be happening.” He opened his mouth and closed it again. “But I still had no way to find Ana. I’d… almost been hoping she would find me. So here I am. Tell me what’s going on.”
“You’ve seen our films, right?” Nilesh cut in. “And the stories? You have to have seen them, unless you’re living in a cave.”
“Ana was involved with those?” St. Peters glanced from Nilesh to me and back again, and then at Rick, who had just rejoined us as we were airborne.
All three of us nodded, and Nilesh added, “Well. She didn’t play any of the characters or anything. But she was with us when we made them.”
St. Peters closed his eyes and rubbed them with the index finger and thumb of one hand. “So wait… are you telling me… Halpert is… actually a robot?”
“Yep,” said Nilesh, “as are Chiefton, Montgomery, St. James—”
“So that whole film…” he cut him off, “that was… true.”
“You got it.” Nilesh started to fill him in on the rest, but he told the part about what happened in Geneva wrong since he wasn’t there, so I cut in and corrected his narrative a few—eight—times. He finally looked at me, exasperated. “You want to tell it?”
“Oh no, please. Go ahead,” I told him.
St. Peters gestured at Rick, standing with his enormous arms crossed over his enormous chest. “Does he ever talk?”
“I’m decorative,” said Rick, deadpan.
St. Peters let out a heavy breath. “Okay. I’d love to think that Ana just sent for me because she missed me, but the note said that she needed my help. I must presume that means professionally, correct? Why do you need a virologist?”
“Excuse me. May I?” I glanced at Nilesh, who rolled his eyes at me.
“You might as well. You’re going to anyway.”
I explained about the virus that attacked synthetic mitochondria, designed to take down the Silver Six. “We’ll release it via the labyrinth, but as you know, every human with an A.E. chip is connected to the labyrinth also. We need you to verify that this virus will not have any effect on human mitochondria.”
St Peters blinked at me, and it was a long moment before he spoke. “Well.” Then he said, “I must confess, I have little to no experience working in a biochemical-synthetic interface…”
“You don’t need to really, we have that part covered,” Nilesh told him. “We’ve got one of the original creators of the humanoid bots on our team. What we do need is for you to just verify that the virus will have no effect on human tissue.”
St. Peters nodded once. “What kind of laboratory have you got, wherever we’re going?”
I raised my eyebrows. Nilesh looked at me, and Rick bit his lip.
“I see,” St. Peters frowned. “Well, I’ll need a lab. If you can just take me back to Dublin University, I can probably extract what I need from my own lab—”
“Sorry, we’re on a bit of a tight schedule,” I informed him. “We’ll get you what we need one way or another, but we’ve got to get to London by six in the morning.”
The creases around St. Peters’ mouth grew deeper. “Because?”
Nilesh made a clicking noise with his mouth. “Yeah. So, you mentioned Liam Kelly earlier? We’re… kind of going to break him out of prison.”
St. Peters blinked several times, very rapidly. “I’m sorry. We?”
“You can hide in the back of the hovercraft,” Rick grunted. “You’ll be safe enough there. Unless they shoot us out of the sky.”
St. Peters grew very pale. Comforting wasn’t my strong suit, so I took that as my cue to stand up and check in with M via the netscreen while Nilesh rambled on, “Sorry, we’d have made that a separate mission, but there just wasn’t the time… you understand…”
“Is there no other way to reach your compound except by hovercraft?” St. Peters demanded. “Can’t I take a Quantum Track or something?”
“Well…” Nilesh trailed off, glancing at me. “There isn’t a straight Quantum Track, but if we went from London to Great Exuma and then took a boat from there…”
“Cameras,” was Rick’s one-word protest. “You’d be seen.”
“Yes, but St. Peters wouldn’t set off any alerts,” said Nilesh, “nor would I, fortunately, since you and I were on camera almost constantly after you abandoned us in the midwest and we had to find our own way to the docks. And the only people really necessary to rescue Liam are you two plus Becca, right?” Nilesh gestured at Rick and me.
I shrugged, glancing at the Commune screen. M was not active at the moment, but I could send her a message for later. I dashed off a note that told her we’d recovered St. Peters, and were headed to London for Rebecca and Val. I just left Liam out of it. We could surprise her.
To Nilesh, I said, “True—and I suppose it’s a better idea for us to separate and at least get St. Peters to the Renegades safely. And Val could go with you, as well. I’d prefer that, actually—she’d otherwise require babysitting. Rock of Gibraltar she is not.”
Nilesh perked up at the mention of Val’s name, I noticed, and I arched an eyebrow at him, suddenly considering their coupling for the first time. How had I missed his interest in her before? But then I realized, Nilesh had been gone for some time, and I had only seen them together very briefly in the Exumas before we left. I could be excused for missing it. Perhaps this was even the first he knew of his own feelings.
“She is still in love with Liam,” I told Nilesh, “but she’ll have to get over it after today one way or another, anyway. He’ll either be dead, or reunited with Cordeaux. So, you might have a shot at Val yet.”
Nilesh, already dark-skinned, seemed to deepen a few extra shades. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he muttered. “Val’s a sweet girl, but that’s all.”
I rolled my eyes at him. Why did people bother to pretend I was wrong? We all knew I wasn’t. It was a waste of oxygen. And also, very irritating.
“So I will be on a Quantum Track then,” St Peters clarified this all-important point. “Not breaking Liam Kelly out of prison?”
“Yes, yes, you’ll be safe, for heaven’s sake,” I muttered, still mostly annoyed with Nilesh. “You’ll need to act like you don’t know each other of course, since the cameras did pick up Nilesh outside your door, and if you travel together, it might perk the interest of anybody paying attention. But if you’re ostensibly alone, and it will just look like you’re going on holiday. With your goldfish,” I added disdainfully.
St. Peters still looked unnaturally pale, and murmured, “What did I get myself into…”
Chapter 19: Rebecca
How long had it been since I last slept again?
Between Club Neptune and getting up for my “shift” at Pendergast, I’d gotten maybe an hour, but even that was accidental. I must have drifted off into bleary oblivion in one of Cathy’s guest rooms at some point, though, because I was startled awake by a muffled commotion in the living room. I gasped, looking at the analog clock on her wall, before breathing a sigh of relief again. It was nearly six am; an hour until the shift at Pendergast was to start. It was still dark outside and the blackout curtains blocked out even the first streaks of day, so I stubbed my toe on the bed frame in my haste to get to the door.
“There’s our seductress,” Nilesh grinned at me as I made my appearance—rumpled hair, oversized t-shirt and all.
“Cordeaux,” Francis acknowledged behind him, as Elsie bustled about the kitchen, setting a tea kettle to boil. Francis went on, “We verified that Liam was transferred from Exmorton yesterday evening.”
I saw that Cathy was already up and dressed in the kitchen with Elsie, and Val had emerged from a guest room on the other side of the house at about the same time as I did. I noticed that Cathy kept sneaking surreptitious glances at Francis, which puzzled me. But she gave me a tight-lipped smile.
“Don’t overwhelm the girl, she only just got up,” she scolded Francis. “Gretchen, you want to help Rebecca get ready? Gretchen picked up some scrubs for you that match those worn by other nurses in Pendergast.”
The stylist bot held another canvas package just like the one that had borne my assortment of dresses the night before, and wheeled over to me, jutting her other arm in the direction of the bathroom.
“In,” she ordered.
“Can I at least brush my teeth first?”
Val giggled. “I’ll bring you some coffee, Rebecca,” she offered, and explained to Cathy, “Becca can’t function without coffee in the morning.”
I blinked at her, touched. She must have been paying attention. I didn’t think she�
�d ever called me by my nickname before, either. “Thanks,” I said.
I’d removed my prosthetics hastily the night before when I’d gotten back from Club Neptune, and little pieces still clung to my face here and there. I needed to start with a clean palate, so I scrubbed until my skin was pink and raw. As I ran a brush through my tangled hair, I noticed that my hand was trembling.
I can do this, I told myself, stopping to clutch the countertop and stare at my own reflection—particularly at the deep circles under my eyes. I can do this.
After I finished my personal hygiene routines, Gretchen and Madeline came in to help me as I changed into the light blue scrubs. Gretchen pulled my auburn hair into a high ponytail, and I reapplied my prosthetics. It was a trickier business this time, because I couldn’t apply heavy makeup on top of them—that would seem out of place on shift. So I had to make them look that much more realistic.
Gretchen had apparently gotten clothing for more than just me: once I was dressed, Val and Nilesh came in to share the mirror with me, looking like an upscale couple that might own a house in Cathy’s own neighborhood. They were dressed in business casual clothing, instead of Nilesh’s usual t-shirt and jeans, and Gretchen had slicked his hair back, changing his look entirely. Val’s light brown hair had been pulled back into a tight, elegant chignon, and she wore a pencil skirt and heels. They were supposed to be a traveling business couple, less likely to draw attention on the cameras if anybody was watching than if they’d assumed their own usual looks.
“Here’s your coffee,” Val said tentatively, tucking an errant strand of hair behind her ear.
“Thanks. Wow. You guys look great,” I observed.
“We still have to alter our faces. But don’t worry, I think I can do ours this time,” Val added hastily. “I know you’ve got your hands full.”
I nodded once, feeling my heart thrum all over again. Madeline watched in fascination as all three of us transformed into completely different people. We could fool the humans—hopefully we wouldn’t have to pass retinal scan cameras. Val, I had to admit, had a natural artistic flare: she copied the changes I’d made to her own face almost exactly from the day before, and she thickened Nilesh’s brow, nose, and chin as well, covering the prostheses with darker makeup that matched his skin tone perfectly. None of us spoke—we were all too nervous.