by Max Carver
“Unless she's a decoy, sent to infiltrate.”
“She's human. We checked. And... I can feel it,” Colt said.
“Some humans serve the machines.”
“She's not a clanker, either. She's from across the sea. She wants to capture the skinwalker that I was talking about, the one that captured me. Simon Nix. Simon's reputation is so bad, she came that far to find him. And the things I saw in that lab... the things he's doing to all those people... have to be stopped.”
“Be cautious she's not playing on your feelings, and you're not letting your heart put blinders on your brain,” Mother Braden said. “At your age, your instincts have you looking for a mate. And there are none for you, not here. So your instincts can affect your thinking—”
“I am not thinking with my mating instincts!” Colt said, a little off-balance because what she said was partly true. The only girls in their group were Colt's sister and the little mute kid Birdie. And thinking of the mysterious dark-skinned Mohini in such a way was... interesting. “Mohini should be with the rebels. She can make a difference.”
“What kind of difference are you expecting?”
“She has contacts on Carthage. She says people in the inner worlds, even on Carthage itself, would be outraged if they saw what's happening in that lab. If they knew what it was really like here on Earth.”
“That sounds nice,” Mother Braden said. “Naive, but nice. People will believe what they want. Evidence be damned.”
“But the truth must count for something,” Colt said.
She was quiet for a while, her cloudy eyes squinting as though trying to see him. “I'd like to think so,” she finally said. “Bring her to me so I can have a look at her. Or a listen. Can't see much these days.”
“Do you need anything else? Water?”
“The little ones just brought me some. Which shows you my purpose is fulfilled; the children take better care of me than I do of them.”
“We always will,” Colt said.
“Is that girl in here yet?”
“I'll be right back.”
Colt returned to the living room, where the two younger kids had joined Hope and Mohini. A cluster of old screens were nailed to the wall, attached via long cables to cameras on each approach to their apartment. On the screens, Tonio sat in the darkness under the stairs at ground level, and Diego was on the third level, protecting their flank from a high window. The building extended many floors above and below, but those approaches were blocked off.
“What did she say?” Hope asked. “She's been kind of... bleak lately.”
“She wants to meet Mohini,” Colt said.
“Something's coming,” Tonio said on the screen. The camera view over his shoulder showed the high rampart of concrete debris trembling, bits and pieces breaking loose and rolling down.
“Heading to the front window,” Diego said over on the screen that monitored him. He stepped out of sight.
“What is that?” Paolo whispered, watching the rubble crumble and fall.
“I'm going up front with Tonio,” Colt whispered. “Hope, stay here with the kids and Mother Braden.”
“I'll go with you,” Mohini whispered, touching Colt's arm.
“So will I,” Hope said. “Paolo, Birdie, go help Mother set up her machine gun.”
Paolo nodded and took Birdie's arm, leading away the small, bony girl, who responded with a gentle clicking. Her brown hair was a tangled mess, like a bird's nest. Mother Braden thought she must have been on her own since she was a toddler, somehow surviving on bugs and carrion, but alone for so long that she'd never learned to talk. She could do a convincing imitation of the scrawny pigeons that lived among the ruins and the falcons who hunted them.
On the way out, Colt opened the coat closet and took out an automatic rifle even more worn and antiquated than the one he'd lost. Hope grabbed extra rounds for her machine pistol.
“I don't suppose you have any plasma cells in there,” Mohini said. “I used my last escaping from that tunnel.”
“We have this little thing.” He lifted a compact rocket launcher. The rockets were no wider than his middle finger. “There's only two rockets left. They'll punch hard, though. They're stronger than they look.”
“I'll take it,” she said.
“They're coming!” Tonio's voice yelled over the monitor.
Colt, Hope, and Mohini bolted through the labyrinthine building to the barred front door. Tonio propped the old plasma rifle on of the door's crossbars while he fired one blinding white bolt after another. He was sweaty and shaking with fear, eyes fixed on the approach.
Dozens of reapers surged over the top of the rubble wall in a dark flood.
A few of the mines went off as the reapers stepped on them, blasting a handful of machines back.
A plasma bolt struck one reaper, melting its pelvic frame and sending it crashing down the rubble, a solid hit by Tonio.
These were just pebbles thrown against an incoming wave, though, and Tonio didn't have nearly enough plasma cells to take down all the invaders.
“I've never seen so many at once,” Hope gasped. Neither had Colt; usually only an eight-machine squad would show up to deal with scavengers. Now he had a sense of what things must have looked like during the war, with armies of the reapers swarming over the Earth, slaughtering the world's last defenders.
“We stayed here too long,” Colt said.
“Or they're here for her.” Hope nodded at Mohini. “Either to capture her, or because she led them to us.”
“I did not!” Mohini snapped.
“We don't have time to argue,” Colt said. “Everybody spread out so they can't kill us all at once. Find a window and hurt them as much as you can.”
Colt moved to a nearby apartment with a chunk of its outer wall missing. He knelt behind the gap in the concrete and opened fire into the approaching swarm of reapers, but it was hard to tell whether he was doing much good.
Blue lasers fired from above, intermittently, as Diego took potshots at the wave of machines, doing his part to try to put a dent in them. Lasers could puncture the machines, but that wasn't much use unless they hit something vital. A narrow hole drilled through a reaper's arm or leg wasn't going to stop it.
Hope fired her old but trusty machine pistol, but that wasn't going to do much good at this distance, either.
The wave of reapers thundered down like an avalanche over the rubble barrier, like angry fire ants boiling out of their nest.
Maybe they were here for Colt, too. He was the one who'd escaped from Simon, and he was a known associate of Mohini.
He should never have come home. He had only been thinking of Mohini and her mission, and of getting back home with his own people, his own small group. The only way to keep them safe, he saw now, would have been to avoid them, for weeks or months, to make sure he wasn't being tracked.
He'd been stupid, and now everyone was going to die for it.
A rocket streaked out from a window farther down, Mohini launching one of the two.
It struck the lead reapers and engulfed them in a massive fireball. Mohini had picked a good place and time to hit, knocking the machines back against the rubble. Some of the reapers above them were shaken loose by the blast and came tumbling down.
Still, the reapers kept coming. A vanguard of four rushed ahead of the other reapers and opened fire on the apartment building, one with bolts of plasma, two with incendiary rounds, another with a missile that let out a high-pitched shriek on its approach.
Colt hit the floor as the missile struck the facade of the apartment building, shattering the wall in front of him. More bombardment followed, rocking the building. The floor shuddered and buckled under him, and a massive cloud of smoke, dust, and debris fell over him like a burial shroud.
Chapter Fifteen
Carthage
“You're not telling me the truth,” Simon Quick said, peering at Audrey over a cup of tea. They were in her parents' twelve-floor apartment
, kilometers above the ground in uptown Carthage City, sitting at a table in the spacious atrium. They were surrounded by marble fountains, gardens of rare orchids and trees, and giant songbirds from nineteen different worlds, including a few native to Carthage. Enormous picture windows brought in sunlight from the outdoors, tinted and filtered to be pleasant and golden no matter the weather.
Audrey hadn't touched her tea, hadn't even acknowledged it. Sharing food and drink was a sign of fellowship among humans, and she wasn't feeling fellowship with the android, who seemed less human than ever to her at the moment.
“The truth is, my car was hacked, some clown guy threatened me and yapped a bunch of vague, schizoid political trash just before he tried to kill me. And things get fuzzy after the crash.”
“Do they?” Simon activated a hologram projector on the densely striped bocote-wood table.
“I don't want to watch it again,” Audrey said. A whirring and snipping sounded as the apartment's garden-bot trundled closer, tending the flowering vines that grew around the burbling, stone-lined pool where Nin had taught Audrey to swim. The squat round garden-bot was always quietly working, taking care of the thousands of plants and the indoor grove of trees, all of which had been genetically engineered to stay in bloom year round. It was always a glorious spring here in her mother's atrium.
Now she watched the bot's flexible, extendable arms snip and trim the plants. The thing's belly held clippers and loppers and saws. An alternate string of code could turn it into a murder machine, slaughtering the whole family as they gathered in their fanciest clothes and wigs for Landing Day photos, which was often the only time the family was together all year. Even that didn't last for the whole holiday; it was mainly about the photo op.
“You're not paying attention, Audrey,” Simon said.
“I don't have to.” She could see the scene projected in full size overhead, in the vaulted space just beyond the branches of the fuzzy pink mimosa tree towering above them. It was a recording from Audrey's apartment, replaying the chaos and confusion as the Security Steves opened fire, killing Kelleyen and assorted neighbors and party guests.
On the recording, Zola returned fire while leading Audrey out of the apartment and down the stairs. The security cameras had also caught Zola using the Guard Guys' electrical weapons against the Security Steves.
Audrey couldn't help admiring how tough, nimble, and courageous her old friend had become. She couldn't imagine Zola's life on the rough outer worlds or what it was like to lose her father. That life had forged Zola into something tough, though, something with a core of steel, while Audrey had grown up fretting over childish teenage anxieties, painting bleak storms and dark graveyards, writing somber poetry to express just how serious she was, while attending her sumptuous prep academy and having her every whim catered to by androids and other machines.
Even if Audrey didn't fully understand or agree with Zola's cause or ultimate goals, she knew she needed to be tougher. She needed to grow her own core of steel. Her brother Salvius and his motley friends were right about one thing—a colossal change was coming. It had already arrived, in her mind, because the trusted machines that had always provided for her, protected her, guided her, had turned out to be enemies in waiting. Some could be hacked. Some might have been enemies all along, gathering data on her, sharing it with entities unknown.
She could feel it now, looking at the Simon unit she'd long counted as a mentor and confidant. Was anything she'd told him truly private? He'd assured her that his memories were archived under deep encryption, and his personal confidentiality was a core directive of his original Butler Jeffrey operating system. Then again, she'd trusted him to tell the truth about these things; she hadn't independently verified any of those claims.
“Why did you go with her?” Simon asked, as hologram-Audrey and hologram-Zola escaped in the fake ambulance.
“She'd just saved my life. From my own security bots.”
“Don't you find it convenient that your security androids turned on you just as this person was there to protect you?” Simon asked.
“No, Simon, I don't find anything at all convenient about that or anything else that happened to me. Why are you grilling me? I need to rest.”
“You have rested. You've been home for several hours.”
“As a robot, you may not understand this, but it's hard to sleep when you've been through what I've been through.”
“I understand post-traumatic syndrome—”
“Post-traumatic means the trauma is in the past,” she said. “I'm still living it. My own security providers turned on me. I'm never going to be safe. I've never been safe, really.”
“That's not quite true,” Simon said. “This level of information security threat hasn't been seen in decades. It bears a full but quiet investigation. Please note that 'quiet' is a key term here.”
“Any machine can turn on me,” she said. “Why are you interrogating me? You should be at Hamilcar Security, trying to figure out what happened with the Security Steve units.”
“Your family has launched an investigation, and your attorneys are already preparing quite a sizable lawsuit.”
“Oh, good. I was worried my family wouldn't get a chance to cash in on the situation.”
“Replacing all your automated security units with trained human guards is quite an expensive proposition,” Simon said. “Not many humans have the qualifications anymore, as most of the police, military, and private security sectors have been increasingly automated for decades.”
“Maybe that's a mistake on our part,” Audrey said. “Trusting you machines with everything.”
“Did you just refer to me as 'you machines'?” Simon raised his eyebrows in an appearance of surprise. “Me? Your old friend? Where exactly did you go, Audrey? What happened in those missing hours to put you in such a negative mood?”
“It's not a mood,” Audrey said. “It's... clarity. Disillusionment. Where are my parents, exactly?”
“Your father is in meetings all day, concerning this very threat, among other subjects. Your mother is meeting with the families of victims, publicly showing her concern for them.”
“Nobody decided to come check on me? Not even out of a sense of freakish curiosity?”
“You'll see your mother at dinner tonight. Possibly your father.”
“I want to see Kelleyen's family.”
“The funeral is scheduled two days hence. Your personal-assistant android will arrive in a few hours. She's undergoing an extensive security diagnostic as well as structural and cosmetic repairs. It's interesting you haven't asked me about her, given that she's been your constant companion since infancy.”
“Back up that holo and focus on Nin,” Audrey said.
Simon did as ordered, this time zooming in on Nin, making the personal-assistant android about twice as large as life. Nin stood in the doorway to Audrey's apartment, her damaged hand missing. The RepairPal android wrenched Nin backward into the apartment and cut into her neck with a circular saw. Audrey winced.
“The RepairPal.” Audrey pointed to the android in the trademark RepairPal hardhat and overalls. “The Security Steves went nuts after it arrived. Maybe it was a Trojan horse.”
“The case is being thoroughly investigated, Audrey,” Simon said. “What we need from you is simply an explanation for your missing hours.”
“I don't remember anything.”
“We will try hypnotic regression. Close your eyes and relax.”
“Yeah, I'm not doing that.”
“Audrey, it feels as though you are keeping secrets from me.”
“That's impossible.”
“Is it? Your heart rate, pupil dilation, reduced eye contact, minutely increased perspiration—”
“I mean it's impossible for you to feel. You might conclude or project something based on the available data, but you do not feel. And it's dishonest to say you do.”
Simon paused for a few seconds, as if studying her or calculati
ng his response. Always calculating. “Audrey, I am perhaps more complex than you understand. I am capable of... if not the full of range of human emotion... then a sense of satisfaction or non-satisfaction. Purpose fulfillment, or non-fulfillment.”
“And that's all very fascinating, but I want to see my actual human family now. Mother and Father both, ideally. But I'd even settle for Briellana. Tell their personal androids.”
“I am here to function as your adviser and counselor, Audrey, not your personal assistant.”
“Well, like you said, my personal assistant's on the fritz, or possibly riddled with viruses implanted by clowns, so you can give me a hand.” Audrey began to feel the edge of panic coming on. Nin handled her communications, her bank accounts, everything. Audrey was powerless without her android. “I need a pocket screen of my own.”
“I suppose you'll want me to arrange that for you, as well.”
“That would be great.”
“Then tell me about the missing hours.”
“Seriously? You're going to hold basic needs like that over my head? Forget it.” Audrey stood. She tried not to look frightened by the garden-bot as it drifted closer, collecting weeds from the soil with a drill-shaped tool on an extendable arm. “You can go now, Simon. You can't stay here all day. You have an empire to run.”
“What an interesting choice of words.” Simon stood. The garden-bot extended its loppers and snapped a stray low limb off a bushy maroon Japanese maple nearby. “This entire visit has been quite interesting.”
“Not for me,” Audrey said.
“One additional item,” Simon said. “Given your lack of cooperation, your top-level security clearance is likely to be revoked. At least temporarily. We would not want to give the false appearance of special treatment due to nepotism.”
“Oh, no, not in this family.” Audrey had no hope of keeping the mocking tone out of her voice. “Why, my father could lose the next rigged election.”
“That is an oversimplification—”
“But not wrong.”