by Max Carver
From Zola's position on the floor, the laser had an upward angle, so it passed through the nurse-bot's jaw and through her head. The green-haired nurse's eyes lit up as the electronics inside her cranial case burned. The laser emerged at the crown of the nurse's head, having bored its way through, and continued on to scald the ceiling.
The nurse finally stopped moving, its green hair crackling as it burned.
At the same time, the molten-faced Officer Joe opened fire with its giant revolver, punching holes in the concrete wall above Audrey. The reverse-zoo mural shattered into a rain of jagged concrete hail.
Audrey pulled Kright's jacket over her head for protection against the falling concrete. Something hard and heavy whacked her in the face. It felt like a small handgun with a wide mouth, holstered inside his jacket.
Kright managed to get off a third bolt of plasma at the Officer Joe, but the android twisted aside. The plasma bolt went high, hit the ceiling farther along and unfolded in a miasma of white fire in both directions along the corridor. The white fire illuminated a rusty forklift and a number of oversized, cheerfully colored fairy-tale creatures.
The Joe was turning after Kright, tracking him with the oversized revolver that fired cannon-power rounds. Kright leaped aside, clearly expecting return fire from the cop-bot, but there was no cover for Kright to take.
Blue lasers struck the Officer Joe from behind. Dinnius had dropped his prize-shooter and drawn a snub-nosed laser gun from inside his jacket. The cop seemed willing to tolerate the lasers boring into its back, though, while training its giant revolver on Kright. The cop's permanent happy-mascot grin had melted away, leaving the burnt flesh-goop dripping from the black steel skull underneath.
Audrey took the mysterious handgun from its holster in Kright's jacket. She pointed it at the Officer Joe's leg and squeezed the fat orange trigger.
Nothing happened.
A safety. Didn't these things usually have some kind of safety button or switch? She found the little lever and pushed it.
“Hey, hacker clown guy!” she shouted, standing up. “It's me. Audrey Caracala. I'm the one you're here for.”
“Audrey, don't!” Kright said, and she tossed his long green jacket over his head, muffling him. This also freed her to take a steady double grip on the gun. Audrey wasn't very familiar with real firearms, but she'd played video games.
She pointed it at the cop-bot, while he turned his revolver away from Kright and toward Audrey.
“No, Audrey!” Zola shouted. Maybe she thought Audrey was about to surrender herself to the Clowns.
That wasn't her plan, though. Not even close.
Audrey squeezed off a shot, right at the cop's exposed skull. Its CPU would be inside there.
The hacked cop-bot was already raising its giant revolver at her face, apparently preparing to blow her head right off.
The handgun she'd found in the jacket didn't fire lead, or lasers, or plasma, but a blob of clear goo with a small, shiny object at the center the size of a ring or a coin.
Audrey wasn't sure what she'd expected, but it was definitely not that.
Also, her aim was not great. She'd meant to hit the Officer Joe in the skull, but instead the goo-blob splattered onto the oversized cylinder of the giant revolver and stuck there. Apparently the goo was adhesive. The small metal object inside had a tiny screen, flashing red numbers too small and too fast for her to read.
“She did it!” Zola screamed, ducking down to shield herself and Salvius behind the thin bed of the gurney.
“Here it comes!” Dinnius, who'd already run some distance while retreating from the Officer Joe, dodged around the corner into another corridor.
“What did you set the timer for?” Kright asked, running toward her.
“Timer?” Audrey asked, puzzled.
“Oh, that's not good.” He pushed her up against the wall, then wrapped his long green jacket around them like a blanket, covering their heads.
“What are you—” Audrey began, and then the blast hit.
The roar was deafening. Kright was thrown up against her, pressing the air out of her lungs. The floor shook hard beneath them and kept shaking like it was an earthquake. Dust and debris rained down from above.
Audrey closed her eyes, expecting to die. At least she'd tried. At least she would die doing something meaningful, helping her brother.
The quaking and trembling subsided, though the ringing in her ears did not.
Kright backed off, coughing and shaking his head. She couldn't really hear him, but she understood him perfectly well when he mouthed the words “You're crazy.” He also took the bomb-spitting device from her and returned it to his jacket.
The Officer Joe had been blasted into a twisting, smoldering wreck, sprawled across the floor, unrecognizable. Its arm was embedded in the wall across from Audrey. The oversized revolver was a molten mass on the floor.
“Those other rounds could cook off,” Kright said, though Audrey couldn't have made out the words if she hadn't seen his lips. “We have to go.”
She and Kright hurried over to the gurney, its rolling support legs crushed, the thin top bent like a “C.”
“Salvius!” Audrey shouted. Shouting seemed useless, though, when she could barely hear her own words.
They pulled the wreckage of the gurney away, revealing Zola crumpled against the wall with Salvius's head cradled protectively in her lap. Zola's nose and lips were bleeding, and she had bruising around her eye.
Audrey and Kright helped Zola up. She shook them off, took a couple of limping steps, and pointed at Salvius instead.
Kright nodded. With Audrey's help, he lifted Salvius's unconscious form and walked him up the hall. Dinnius emerged from around the corner, dusty and shaking his head.
Audrey ached everywhere, but her only thought was of getting Salvius to the car. That was all that mattered. If she could get him safe, then she could collapse.
A heavy clanking sounded in the crumbling, fire-damaged hallway behind them.
Audrey looked back. The Officer Joe lay still on the now-cracked floor. So did the nurses, who'd been blown over by the explosion or the tremors from it. None of those androids had made the noise.
A column of small lights flickered to life in the distance, accompanied by beeping sounds, then a rumbling engine.
The forklift advanced on them, raising its forks.
Robotic animals, large enough for children to ride, approached alongside it. They were old pieces of junk with large pieces of their outer coverings missing. They looked like dead things come back to life—a horse painted with bright circus colors, most of its face gone to show a skull-like mechanical structure beneath, with staring eyes and bare teeth. A mechanical tiger stalked beside it, roaring with metal jaws, though the roar was recorded and tinny and didn't match up to its jaw movements.
Behind this came a hulking skeletal elephant with a moth-eaten pair of seats mounted in its back.
“Watch out! Shoot them!” Audrey shouted, wishing more than ever for a weapon of her own. She was completely dependent on the others to protect her and take care of her, to make choices for her. So this situation was just like the rest of her life, really.
Maybe it was time for a different approach to her life.
Kright and Dinnius let go of Salvius. Audrey did her best to let him down easy.
Zola already had her pistol out, since she wasn't helping carry anyone, but she was dazed and moving slow. Still, she managed to hit the tiger, slicing off its lower jaw. Dinnius struck the skeletal horse in the chest with a laser, and it halted.
Kright shot a bolt of plasma at one of the forklift's treads to stop its advance. The plasma bolt skipped over the partially molten revolver, almost bouncing off it like a ball, before hitting its target. The forklift sagged toward the wall as the treads and wheels on that side melted.
The wheels on the other side continued to roll, sending the burning forklift into a sharp turn, directly into the wall.
Along the way, one of its forks nudged the hot, glowing revolver, just enough to tilt its mouth toward Audrey and the people with her.
“Uh... everybody fall back!” Kright put his rifle away and helped Audrey get Salvius back on his feet.
One of the revolver's remaining shots cooked off. The round bashed another crater into one of the badly damaged walls. Zola jumped as the wall imploded behind her. Dinnius grabbed her arm to get her attention and guide her up the corridor, since she seemed dazed, holding her laser pistol loosely.
All of them hurried back the way they'd come, over broken pieces of walls and ceiling.
Another shot erupted. It slammed into the side of the mechanical elephant, blasting the thing into pieces, sending it careening down on top of the staggering tiger and horse.
Sharp metal debris flew out from the wreckage. Something red-hot scratched Audrey's cheek, making her scream and stumble. She recovered, though, and kept supporting her brother.
She looked down at what had scratched her. It was a tiger's claw, burned down to its robotic core.
They made it back to their truck, the former ambulance now displaying a pipe-and-plunger logo. Inside, Dinnius climbed into the driver's nest at the center. The car struggled to get going on the pitted, dirty old magnetic road.
Audrey borrowed Zola's laser pistol and sat at the partially open door with Kright, ready to shoot at any more machines the hackers might send after them.
Dinnius let up a string of curses as he worked the old-timey steering wheel, along with a lever and some pedals. At last, the car began to rise, seemingly powered as much by the small man's anger as the electricity in its battery.
They gained speed as they climbed the steep up-ramp to the highway above. Soon they were crowded in with traffic, just one more high-speed vehicle in a sea of them.
Occasionally, Audrey imagined what would happen if all these lanes and levels of traffic were to stop communicating with each other, if the municipal network failed. She could see, too clearly, a vision of everyone crashing together in a sudden, immense catastrophe. Thousands would be dead in an instant. Tens of thousands.
There was a reason she preferred watching vids to watching the road.
“Wake him up,” Zola said to Kright. “Salvius will want to see his sister before she goes back.”
“Back? Not to my apartment?” Audrey thought of her roommate Kelleyen and all the others killed by the hacked security androids. She didn't think she could ever go back there. “Can we check on Nin?”
“Who?” Kright opened a cooler and drew out a transdermal syringe gun from a cloud of deep-cold fog.
“My bot,” Audrey said. “I want to make sure she's okay. It looked like she was getting attacked by the RepairPal that was supposed to fix her.”
Everyone was quiet for a moment. Kright rolled up Salvius's sleeve and wiped an area on his arm with a swab.
“Just to be clear: you want us to risk revealing our location to the authorities?” Dinnius asked. “To see if your personal slave-bot is still functional?”
“What?” Audrey asked. “Nin isn't a slave-bot. She's my—”
“If you say 'best friend,' I'm going to puke,” Zola said. “And I'm pretty close to puking anyway, so don't risk it.”
“She's my trusted assistant. She won't report us to anyone as long as I tell her not to.”
“Uh-huh,” Zola said. “Let me guess. She's always been there for you, she cares about you, and she really listens to you.”
“Really, really listens,” Dinnius said, snickering. “And really, really cares.”
“What?” Audrey said. “You don't even know Nin—”
“I remember her,” Zola said. “I used to have one of my own. Ura.”
“Ura. I remember! She was like a sweet grandma—”
“They're all nice and sweet to their owners. They don't want to get recycled,” Zola said. “And Ura was one of the ways they spied on us. One of the ways they figured out that my father was part of a group trying to replace your father as our head of state. Yours had already grown too powerful, too unchecked—”
Salvius shouted and jerked awake in his chair. He looked around, blinking, wiping drool from his chin.
“Where... ?” he said, his eyes blurry.
“You're with us.” Zola embraced him, then kissed him. “You're safe.”
“Safe as any of us can be, anyway,” Dinnius muttered.
“It's been a long time, Salvius,” Audrey said, and he looked at her, startled.
“Audrey?” He looked at Zola. “Why is Audrey here?”
“It's complicated—” Zola began.
“The Clowns said they'd only return you if we brought another Caracala in your place,” Kright interrupted.
“So you just grabbed my sister and used her as bait?” Salvius glared at him.
“I volunteered,” Audrey said.
“How could you volunteer unless they got in touch with you?” Salvius asked. “As far as you know, I'm just a derelict junkie living in the slums, hiding from my family.”
“And you're not?” Audrey asked.
“Not at the moment. So, who came for you? It must have been Zola,” Salvius said. He grinned a little. “I bet you were shocked to see her.”
“I never thought I'd see her again,” Audrey said. “It's been so long—”
“And what did Zola tell you?” Salvius said.
“Mostly, she said 'duck.'”
“Duck?” Salvius blinked his bleary eyes.
“Yeah, because my own security androids started shooting at me,” Audrey said. “So she told me to duck and got me out of there alive. But that was only the second time someone tried to kill me today. Long before Clownie the Cop and the killer nurse-bots came into the picture.”
“What?” Salvius asked, blinking slowly again.
“I'm like a cat with nine lives, but I'm down to about two after today,” Audrey said. “So nobody else try to kill me, okay? I think my mind is slipping a little after all of this. What about you, Salvius? Weren't you just kidnapped?”
“Kidnapped, tortured, interrogated,” Salvius said. “By guys in clown masks. Not even fun wacky clown masks, just ugly ones. They wanted to know our family's secrets. They forget I've been pretty much disowned, and I never had any access to secrets. Not like you, Audrey.”
“How long did they have you?” Audrey asked.
“Eighteen days,” Zola said. “I thought they would kill you.”
“They almost did. I guess they decided Audrey was more valuable,” Salvius said. “Probably right about that.”
“But they tried to kill me,” Audrey said. “They crashed my car. I had eight Security Steves attack me.”
“And you lived,” Zola said. “So maybe they weren't really trying to kill you.”
“The Clowns were herding you,” Dinnius said. “Toward them.”
“With help from all of you,” Audrey said. “And people died because of it. Because they wanted to kidnap me. They didn't even care who died in the crossfire.”
“The Clowns are real bastards,” Kright said, nodding.
“Most of the people at your party were Political Academy students,” Zola said. “Children of the elite, destined to rule the next generation. To rule the whole galaxy, by the time the Simons are done with it. The Clowns would see all of you as the enemy. Or at least the larval enemy, currently in development, waiting for your time to hatch.”
“Speaking of the larval enemy, we need to decide where to drop Audrey off,” Dinnius said.
“Drop me off?” Audrey said.
“You can't come with us,” Zola said. “You're not part of The Change.”
“Oh, come on—”
“Exactly. You don't believe in what we're doing. You believe in the system. You're eager to be part of it. To run it.” Zola smirked. “Well, the Simons run it. But you're eager to serve them.”
“The Simons serve us,” Audrey said.
“That's where you're w
rong, sis,” Salvius said, becoming sharper and more awake now. “They're designed to conquer and rule humans. You can't trust the machines. Not even Nin. They can access anything you tell your personal android. Nothing's private. I know they don't mention that in the advertising, but it's true.”
“They only do that if—”
“They do it whenever they want,” Salvius said. “Audrey, you can't tell anyone what happened here. Not about me, or anyone you met, or anything that happened. You can't even tell our family. And definitely don't go talking to Nin about it. Or Simon Quick. I know how close you are.”
“She's close with Simon Quick?” Zola asked, looking disgusted.
“He's got his tentacles all in our family,” Salvius said.
“You're so negative,” Audrey said. “You think everything's so evil and wrong.”
“And you're naive,” Salvius said. “This is why we have to get you back home before you can pick up any details. Because to us, you're the security risk.”
“Salvius, you should come with me,” Audrey said. “You need to go to a hospital.”
“If I come with you, I'll have to escape our family all over again,” he said. “We have doctors on our side. We have lots of people. I'll be fine, as long as you keep quiet.”
“Of course I will.”
“Good. Because everyone's going to want to know what happened and where you went after the attack in your building,” Salvius said. “Do you have a story for that?”
“Well... ” Audrey rubbed her head. “I can say my memory's fuzzy. I already had a car wreck earlier today. Maybe I had a concussion. Amnesia. I'll just go with that.”
“I'll be on the security videos,” Zola said. “You'll have to tell them something about me.”
“I'll say you came to warn me, and you saved me. Just before dumping me... somewhere. Over by Hub 3, maybe.” That was a major transportation nexus point where the city's roads, commuter rail, and intercity rail came together. The upper levels had helipads, airplane launchers and runways, and a space elevator station where massive cables extended up toward the stars like pillars holding up the sky, with shuttles constantly traveling up and down like ants on a tree.