The Last Good Man

by Linda Nagata

  Miles says, “The Saomong could have been running North Korean hardware. Something new. Unknown at the time.”

  Lincoln shakes his head. “I’ve seen a hundred intelligence reports from conflicts involving Saomong. None mentioned a robotic fighting system.”

  True thinks about the Chinese and the speculation that they interfered in the recovery of the prisoners because they wanted no witnesses… but no witnesses to what? Could the Chinese have been running an experimental combat system in the forest around Nungsan? A robotic system that went disastrously wrong—and wound up targeting allied troops?

  Her heart hammers, flushing out the lethargy of her grief, allowing outrage to blossom. Was Rogue Lightning sacrificed to keep an embarrassing failure secret? Had someone, somewhere, made that decision?

  Comfort, True decides, can have many definitions. Over the years she has taken some comfort in the simple fact that all those involved in Diego’s death are themselves now dead and gone. But the existence of a killer robot means she’s been wrong about that.

  It’s not something she can discuss here, now, in front of the Ocampos, but that’s all right. She has only one more question. She leans in, gaze locked on Daniel. “Have you ever heard from the American, or heard of him, since that day he broke open the cage?”

  “No. Never. I have never heard from him, never heard of him, never seen him again.”

  True stands up. She is ready to go. She needs to go before her anger becomes visible. “I want to thank you, Mr. Ocampo—”

  “Just one more thing,” Alex interjects. “Mr. Ocampo, do you remember what kind of a hammer the American was using when he broke the cage?”

  Despite the heat, True shivers. She looks to Daniel to find his head cocked, expression puzzled. “Is it important?” he asks.

  Alex says, “Maybe.”

  Daniel looks like he wants to ask why, but he doesn’t. “I remember it clearly,” he tells Alex. “Because I saw it before. It was the kind of hammer with a large, heavy head, like this.” He touches the tips of his fingers together, enclosing a space with his hands. “The kind of hammer used to drive stakes into the ground. Or into a man.”

  True refuses to even consider that image. Instead she recalls Lincoln’s description of the two bodies the forensics team found in the village, close to the pyre, both with crushing skull injuries. And she remembers Hussam’s story of Jon Helm killing the men who tried to crucify him. She does not doubt the truth of it anymore.

  Lincoln asks, “Where were you when the village was destroyed?”

  Daniel shakes his head. “Those who cared for me told me that place was blown up. I don’t remember it. It must have been after I crawled away from the cage. But I don’t remember.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Lincoln says. He leans forward in his chair, extending his hand across the low table. “We appreciate your willingness to discuss—”

  From outside, there’s a sound like glass breaking, followed by a startled cry from Rey, “Ai!”

  Lagging by half a second, the sharp crack of a gunshot.

  Biomimetics

  Lincoln swivels out of his chair. Keeping low, he scuttles to the window. True shoves her tablet into her pack, swapping it for her MARC visor as she moves to the door. She slips the visor on. It boots, syncing with the earpiece. She shrugs on her pack. Her hand slides into the front pocket of her utility vest where she’s got her pistol, but she doesn’t pull it out yet.

  As she reaches the screened porch, Rey appears from around the corner of the house. He’s in a panic. “Someone shot your drone,” he blurts as he bounds up the porch steps. “It came down in pieces over the goat pen.”

  She scans the yard and the bushes around it, but sees no one. The MARC’s threat assessment function doesn’t highlight anything.

  Lincoln comes out of the house. He passes her, passes Rey, strides down the steps. That’s when a kid comes into sight from the direction of the driveway—a petite teenage girl dressed in jeans and a body-hugging green-camo T-shirt, a .22 rifle carried comfortably in her hands. The MARC scans her face, tags her as unknown. Tags the make and model of her weapon.

  She backpedals when she sees Lincoln, looking like she’s about to turn and run. But Daniel has come out to the porch too. He sees the girl and shouts to her. “Divina! What did you see? Has someone come?”

  His presence emboldens her. Holding the weapon with the muzzle toward the ground, she approaches, pausing to stare wide-eyed at Lincoln’s scarred face and artificial eye.

  “You shot down our bird,” Lincoln concludes in a tone half-annoyed, half-amused.

  “Your bird?” Daniel asks. He is not at all amused.

  “A surveillance drone,” Lincoln says. He looks at True. “Take Rey. Have him show you where the pieces came down.”

  She moves down the steps, gesturing at Rey to follow, while Daniel speaks in an angry voice, “You had me under surveillance? For how long?”

  True does not stay to hear Lincoln’s answer. But as Rey follows her, he murmurs, “I didn’t think of it to warn you, but he is angry because he’s been harassed by political enemies, spied on, his home vandalized.”

  True is angry herself, emotionally worn, her mood brittle. “No one’s been hurt,” she snaps, seizing on cold practicality. “I’m sorry he’s upset, but it was a matter of security.”

  She studies the bushes, and the trees beyond, allowing the MARC to survey for hazards, but detects none.

  They reach the side of the house. Out of habit she scans the wall, the windows, the eaves. This time the MARC finds something to highlight. It’s at the top of the white window frame. The object looks like a dark-gray leaf that’s gotten hung up in a spider’s web, but it’s not a leaf. It’s a mech designed to mimic one.

  She averts her gaze, keeping the leaf mech in sight but not looking directly at it, not wanting to warn its operator—or its algorithms—that it’s been noticed. Still moving slowly, breath gone shallow, body tense, she considers her strategy. There is a waist-high hibiscus hedge alongside the house. She will not be able to get past that before the leaf mech alerts—and she’s certain it’s capable of flight. She will have to intercept it in the air.

  Despite the example of the teenage Divina, True rejects the idea of shooting down the little mech as too dangerous, and too likely to result in a miss. What she needs is a net, but she doesn’t have one so she’s going to have to improvise.

  Quickly—still without looking directly at the mech—she unbuttons her utility vest and drops it on the grass. “Don’t touch that,” she warns Rey, not wanting him to pick it up and wonder at the pistol’s weight.

  Rey is behind her. He sounds confused when he says, “Your broken drone is in the goat pasture.”

  “I know where it is.”

  She peels off her shirt. Why not? It’s the closest thing she has to a net and there’s nothing shocking underneath. Just a beige bra precisely engineered to secure her small breasts while making her look good. She calculates her best line of attack. Then she bounds toward the window, shirt clutched in one hand, ready to swing.

  She’s almost at the hedge when the leaf mech reacts. It emits a sharp pop! True ducks at the noise—she can’t help herself. “Fuck!” she swears, already guessing the sound is harmless, an effect meant to startle, like the furious burst of a pheasant’s wings when it springs from dense grass. Works damn well.

  Her momentary hesitation allows the leaf mech time to deploy a buzzing propeller that lofts it from the window frame. True leaps after it, swinging her shirt to try to bring it down, but it’s already out of reach, streaking away toward the goat pasture. Her MARC tracks it, highlighting its shifting position.

  She takes off after it. A device that small and fast won’t have the battery life to fly far. If she can track its flight path, she’ll have a real chance of catching up with it. She stoops to scoop up her vest, shrugs it back on while she runs, and stuffs her shirt into one of its large pockets.

  The fen
ce that surrounds the goat pasture is coming up. It’s made of wooden posts with four-foot-high field wire strung between them. She gets one hand on a post, climbs the wire in two steps, and drops on the other side—just as a blue-gray biomimetic hawk shoots across the pasture propelled by silent bird wings.

  The hawk is on a path aimed to intercept the tiny surveillance device. The two mechs collide—they seem to collide—then the hawk wheels and streaks off toward distant trees while the leaf mech is simply gone.

  “Shit,” True whispers, staring after the hawk. “What the fuck? That was fucking amazing.”

  The interaction was too fast for her to follow. She’ll be able to analyze the video later, but she is sure the hawk collected the leaf mech out of the air and carried it away, extending its range, possibly by miles—which means the operator could be anywhere… even on the other side of the world?

  No.

  She rejects this thought as soon as it comes. She does not want to believe Shaw is behind the hawk or that his network is so sophisticated and widespread that he was able to detect their destination and deploy surveillance ahead of their arrival.

  Rey has caught up with her. He is leaning over the fence, eyes wide as he searches the trees like he’s hoping the hawk will reappear. “What was that?” he asks.

  She arches an eyebrow. “Not yours, huh?”

  “Are you kidding?” He turns to look at her, and even though her eyes are hard to see past her MARC’s tinted half-visor, he can read her expression well enough that he looks chagrined. “Yeah, you are kidding,” he concludes. “But hey, I didn’t know bots could do that. That thing moved like a real bird.”

  True nods agreement, except she has seen similar raptors before—videos of them, anyway. Both Lincoln and Miles recorded biomimetic hawks turning in gyres outside their apartments—but those videos did not show the model’s full capabilities. The quality of its engineering calls to mind the deer mimetic.

  Rey says, “You can see why Mr. Ocampo is touchy. Always someone trying to know his business.”

  True would like to believe Rey is right, that the leaf mech was here as part of a regular surveillance operation targeting Daniel Ocampo—but she doesn’t believe it.

  She looks out across the pasture. She still needs to recover whatever is left of the blue gull. So she gets her shirt back on and with Rey helping, she starts to look—though she feels vulnerable out in the open among the white goats. The MARC detects no threats but she can’t see far and she feels like a target. The animals are friendly and curious, nibbling at her clothes, but beyond the trees is an unknown enemy.

  Brooke’s words come back to her: The Chinese wanted that village erased along with everyone in it.

  Why? Just because they wanted to keep the secret of a killer robot?

  True can’t believe it. Even given a desire to save face, it doesn’t make sense. Friendly fire incidents happen. They’re an unfortunate fact of war. An inquiry might have led to punishment for those individuals held responsible, but no one would have considered such an incident a breach of the alliance or an act of war. The reaction—providing misinformation on the location of the surviving soldiers, allowing Diego’s death, and ultimately destroying Nungsan—it’s all out of proportion to what happened… at least as Daniel recounted it.

  There is more going on.

  The presence of the biomimetic hawk suggests that someone besides herself is still very concerned about the incident at Nungsan. As she wanders the pasture, True feels the intensity of that concern like crosshairs on the back of her neck.

  Rey startles her with a shout from the pasture’s back corner. “Here it is! Some of the wrecked parts anyway. I think maybe the goats have taken the rest.”

  True goes to see what he has found.

  Ramping Up

  Quickly, quietly, in a huddle beside the black SUV, Lincoln and Miles listen as True describes what she saw. “I don’t think it’s Shaw who fielded that hawk,” she concludes as she packs her MARC away. “It’s like we were told. The Chinese have a concern.”

  Her face is flushed, there’s a sheen of sweat on her cheeks, and her eyes are bright—almost fever bright. Lincoln watches that intense gaze shift to Miles. “Some branch of their intelligence network is probably monitoring chatter on Nungsan.”

  Miles leans in, speaks sharp words at low volume. “I drew their attention. I get that. But I can’t do my work anonymously—”

  “It’s not the time to debate it,” Lincoln interrupts, eyeing the porch where Rey and Alex still talk quietly with Daniel.

  Their host’s burst of temper over the blue gull was mostly soothed when Lincoln explained his concern about outsiders following them here and eavesdropping. Daniel’s answer was bitter: “You’ve heard of my troubles, then. The government is always watching me. They won’t leave me alone.”

  It wasn’t the government watching today. Lincoln is sure of that.

  He crooks a mechanical finger at Alex. Now that True has reported on what she saw, it’s time to go.

  Alex acknowledges the signal with a nod. A few more words, handshakes exchanged on the porch, and then Alex and Rey cross the lawn.

  Lincoln murmurs, “No mention of a Chinese connection in front of Rey, understood?”

  Miles nods. True whispers, “You got it.” She adds, “I can’t wait to get out of here.”

  Lincoln is in full agreement. “We need to move,” he tells Rey, speaking louder now. “It’s late. I want to get to the hotel so we can eat and get some sleep before tomorrow’s flight.”

  ~~~

  It’s late afternoon. The sun has broken out past rainclouds to shine on the towering, glistening green vegetation hemming in the narrow road. Occasionally visible beyond that living barricade are rice fields and coconut plantations. Miles stares out the window, watching the countryside roll past—but his thoughts are turned inward.

  He is uneasy, uncertain, and unhappy. Coming here, he decides, was a mistake. They intruded on the peace and privacy of a man who has already suffered too much in life, and for what? They knew already that Shaw Walker is alive. All they’ve really learned is that Rogue Lightning may have fallen to “killer robots” and for that fragment of knowledge, they may have exposed Daniel Ocampo to an uncompromising enemy.

  True put it delicately: The Chinese have a concern.

  That scares the fuck out of Miles. The village of Nungsan was incinerated to eliminate witnesses and, eight years on, someone is still on guard, monitoring interest in the Nungsan incident.

  Miles woke up a monster when he went digging for long-buried rumors—and he’s deeply worried there could be blowback against Daniel, even though the man knows nothing dangerous, nothing that could compromise anyone. All he really remembers is a fever-hazed image of Shaw Walker, and maybe Walker never really said those words, killer robots. Daniel might have misheard or misremembered or dreamed it as he lay dying in the mud.

  Daniel is no threat to anyone.

  For fuck’s sake, Miles prays, let the enemy understand that.

  A new idea occurs to him. Maybe it’s not Daniel they’ve endangered by coming here. Maybe what they’ve done is to shine a light on Shaw Walker. If so? If this enemy decides to finish what should have been finished eight years ago?

  Fuck it. That bastard deserves whatever he gets.

  ~~~

  Lincoln sits in the front seat, swaying as the SUV rolls past the bumps and swales of the rough country road. He thinks about True’s report—the leaf mech perched on the window frame, the biomimetic hawk that intercepted it—and assumes that everything Daniel related to them is known.

  But known by who? True’s answer is a Chinese faction. A logical deduction, given the information relayed to them by Brooke. The question Lincoln faces now is whether the activity will be limited to surveillance, or if it will escalate to active interference. They encountered no trouble on the way out. They detected no vehicle following them, but a ground vehicle wouldn’t be necessary to an enemy
with sophisticated aerial surveillance.

  He studies the narrow road ahead, uneasy. Traffic is light, but he can’t see far. No way to know what’s around the next bend, or a few more kilometers down the road. He asks himself, What can be gained by attacking us?

  Nothing.

  An assault would lead to an investigation, and eventually the reason they came here would be made public. No one involved in this tangled operation, whether known or unknown, wants that. And still his anxiety is ramping up. He’s got a feeling trouble is coming—and that’s a feeling he’s learned to trust.

  The SUV rocks as it plows through a rain-filled pothole. Lincoln is abruptly conscious of the pistol’s weight in his pocket. They printed the guns as an insurance policy in case Shaw had a presence on the ground. But the situation is changed and Lincoln senses the weapons are now a liability.

  He glances at Rey behind the wheel. The journalist, focused on driving, doesn’t notice the attention.

  Lincoln returns his gaze to the road. He slides his right hand, his organic hand, into his pocket. His fingers close on the pistol. He pulls it out and surreptitiously passes it back to True, who’s sitting behind him. He feels her take the weapon.

  Next, he pulls out his tablet, taps out a text, and sends it to her: Break it down. We’re done with them.

  He glances back to see her eyeing her tablet, an anxious flush heating her cheeks. She looks up, nods.

  He consults his tablet again, reviewing a satellite map of the road ahead. Then he turns to Rey. “Let’s stop.”

  Rey looks around in surprise. So does Miles. Rey says, “Sure, we can stop. There’s a store just—”

  Lincoln interrupts him. “The map shows a bridge five hundred meters ahead. I remember crossing it. Let’s stop there. I need to conference with True.”

  He’s barely gotten the words out when it starts to rain again, a heavier shower than before. “Crap,” True says from the backseat.

  Lincoln laughs at the sincerity in her comment. “Pass me my jacket,” he tells her.

  She takes off her seat belt and turns around. Their packs are in the back. She rummages among them. Alex turns to help out. Miles is alert, looking around, looking for danger.