by Linda Nagata
“Roger that.”
Despite the unknowns, and despite his history, his lethality, they are operating in tandem tonight. The agreement has been made, and she can go forth or she can go home.
She’s not ready to go home, so she steps outside.
Her slim pack hangs low on her back. Her right hand is tucked into her pocket, fingers resting lightly around the pistol’s grip. There are no streetlights and no lights seeping from the nearby buildings, but the moon is bright and through her MARC she can see every detail of the empty street. She can hear a steady low hum of printers. Or maybe she feels it as a faint vibration rising up from the ground. From a few streets away comes the static of tire noise.
She follows Shaw’s instructions, walking quickly, staying close to the building. A narrow alley divides it from the next building in the complex. She trots across the open space and keeps going.
“At the end of the warehouse, turn right,” Shaw says. “Okay, you see the angled driveway to your left? Take it. You’ve got twelve seconds to make it to the other end. Go.”
She sprints the length of the alley, holding tight to the pistol so it doesn’t bounce against her gut. She can see that the alley spills into a wider street ahead. Short of the end, she pulls up. Shaw says, “Good job. They’re a block over, but their Sibolt just found you. So they should roll in shortly. If you’re still into it, go say hello.”
She takes a deep breath, squares her shoulders, and moves ahead until she has a clear view of the cross street. She doesn’t move away from the alley. She wants the option to retreat if it comes to that.
She hears the static crackle of the truck’s racing tires, then it screeches into sight around the corner, headlights off. Her hand is still in her pocket as she tries to strike a nonchalant pose. No worries here. I’m just a harmless little girl. She came out to meet them because she believes their assignment was to watch her, not to kill her. She hopes she’s right, but her chest is tight and she’s sweating under her arms all the same.
The truck is a four-door SUV, desert brown, tinted glass. She can’t see inside. It brakes hard, stopping ten meters away. The front doors open. Two men get out. They step clear. Neither wears an AR visor, relying on moonlight. The driver is an older man, straight-backed, strong-featured, both hair and beard neatly trimmed and shot through with gray. He appears calm and self-assured—in contrast to a partner who is younger, bulkier, more heavily bearded, at least three inches shorter, and who walks with a bully’s strut.
It’s immediately clear she’s misjudged the situation, because both men are carrying assault rifles. They haven’t aimed their weapons at her. Not yet. But her working theory, that they are not here to kill her, seems a bit strained at this point.
They yell at her in Arabic, telling her to put her hands in the air.
Shaw sounds amused when he asks, “You gonna do it?”
Nope.
Her heart races; she keeps her shaking hands hidden in her pockets. Inappropriate time, but nevertheless she thinks of Alex and how pissed off he’s going to be if she gets herself killed even before he has a chance to file for divorce. That would not be fair. Still, she is not going to surrender. Gray and the bully need to know that, first thing.
Her guess is that they both speak some English and if she’s wrong, well, maybe they have access to a translation program. The bully, at least, is wearing an earpiece that looks a lot like a TINSL. So, in a voice carefully modulated to sound strong but nonbelligerent, she asks, “Who hired you? I want a name.”
The bully doesn’t take well to her defiance. A flush darkens his face where it’s visible above his beard and he yells at her again, this time in English, “Hands in the air! Now.”
Her chest tightens, even as she thinks, A man should be able to control his temper.
Gray appears to share this sentiment. He speaks in an undertone, harsh words for his partner. But it’s another sound that draws True’s attention. A distant, waspish buzzing. She wants to make sure her assailants notice it too, so she lets her gaze drift up into the hazy night sky. She doesn’t see anything. She doesn’t expect to. But when she looks again at the two soldiers, the dynamic has changed. Gray has realized they’re in trouble. He gestures at his partner to move back to the truck and the bully complies. Even he has recognized that this encounter is escalating.
They don’t move fast enough.
The waspish buzz ramps up, a dopplered assault of sound as a dark meteorite impacts the hood of the truck, smashing through it into the engine block where it explodes in a confined burst of brilliant light and a harsh concussion that True feels in her chest.
The two soldiers throw themselves clear, diving for the ground. True ducks back into the alley, using the moment to get the pistol out of her pocket. With the weapon secured in a two-handed grip, she peeks out again.
The two men are face down on the street. The engine block of their truck is shattered. “Damn it, Shaw,” she whispers. “I came here to circumvent a war, not start one.”
“So get on it, ma’am. Best you exert some authority while they’re still down on the ground.”
Yeah. Good advice. Already the two are looking up, looking around, reassessing the situation. She decides to clarify things.
She steps out of the alley. Determined to remain polite, she keeps the pistol pointed at the asphalt—although it’s a section of asphalt right in front of the bully’s nose. In a soft voice made gruff by the dryness of her throat, she warns them, “Stay on the ground or the next kamikaze targets you.”
Anyway, she hopes Shaw has another projectile or two in reserve.
When she hears his low amused grunt, she decides this was a good bet.
Both men still have a hand on their assault rifles, but they don’t try to pick them up and they don’t try to get up. True suspects the faint sound of a buzzing wasp is encouraging their cooperation. She says, “I don’t want to see you hurt. And I’m sure you don’t want to hurt me, right?”
“We don’t want to hurt you, ma’am,” Gray says in accented English.
The bully says nothing. The look on his face doesn’t support his partner’s words, but True decides not to comment on that. Instead she tells them, “I’m the nervous type. I get jumpy. So take your hands off your weapons, okay? I’ve got just a couple of questions and then we can go our separate ways.”
“We are not here to hurt you, ma’am,” Gray repeats as he slides his hand off his assault rifle. He orders his partner to do the same, but the bully only glares at True, a look that promises a very unpleasant future should she lose control of this encounter. The wasp buzz grows louder. She watches his face as he processes that fact. After a few seconds, he takes his hand off the weapon.
“Make sure they don’t touch those guns again,” Shaw warns her.
“That’s the plan,” she whispers.
“Sure. I just want you to understand. It would be bad.”
The way he says it, it’s as if there is an inevitability to the situation, but she doesn’t question him. There isn’t time. A new note is playing against the quiet of the night: a faint, faraway siren. Maybe it has nothing to do with the explosion that destroyed the engine block but she doesn’t want to wait around to find out, doesn’t want to stay any longer than it takes to ask the questions she came to ask.
“What I want to know,” she tells them, “is who hired you to follow me. And what were you supposed to do when you caught up?”
To her surprise, the bully volunteers an answer. “We work for your business partner,” he says in lilting, contemptuous English. “The one you are here to betray.”
Lincoln? She doesn’t believe it. Lincoln would not hire uncredentialed thugs. “Damn it, I want a name. What is the name?”
“Chinese name,” Gray says nervously. “Li.”
“Li what?”
The bully says, “Li Guiying.”
True is so surprised, her mind blanks of everything but that name. Li Guiying. The roboticist. Tamara’s colleague
. What does Li Guiying have to do with anything?
“That name mean something to you?” Shaw asks.
She doesn’t answer. She questions the thugs instead. “What did Li Guiying want you to do?”
“Follow you,” Gray says. “Find out who you are working with. Tag him. That’s all. Not hurt anybody.”
“Then why the guns?”
Even as she asks the question, she notices the bully’s hand moving again to his weapon. “Don’t touch it,” she tells him, but her warning is smothered by the sharp buzz of a descending wasp.
This time she gets a clear glimpse of the device as it drops. Its fuselage is a flattened, aerodynamic diamond shape, around six inches long and less than three across at its widest point, covered in a dark photovoltaic skin. Its wings are surfaced in PV too. They’re long and narrow, mounted on ball joints. Each supports a single rotor. A tiny third rotor sparkles in a vertical mount on the shark-fin tail. Four jointed legs flex to cushion the mech’s abrupt landing as it smacks down against the back of the bully’s neck. At the same time, the wings sweep back and up. There, revealed on the dorsal surface of the nearest wing, visible for a fraction of a second, a familiar emblem. It’s too small, too far away to see in detail, but True knows it anyway. There is one just like it at home, displayed alongside Diego’s formal army portrait. Dark star fields flanking a bright sun, angled lightning bolts splitting the sections.
The bully rolls to grab his gun. The mech’s legs must have hooked into his collar or his flesh because it doesn’t dislodge. It holds on. As his fingers touch steel, it explodes.
True squeezes her eyes shut against the blast, spinning into the alley, hunkering down against the wall. “Tell me you didn’t just do that,” she says in a furious whisper.
“I didn’t,” Shaw assures her. “The swarm is autonomous. It’s been assigned to protect you and that’s what it’s doing.”
Every word calm. Utterly rational. A man in control.
It’s True whose breathing has gone ragged, whose hands shake.
She looks up from where she’s crouched to see the bully’s headless corpse feeding an oozing pool of blood. Gray is a couple of meters away, still on the ground, his blood-spattered face staring in shock at the corpse.
She flinches as a third explosion—more distant—booms out of the night sky, echoing off the buildings. “The swarm just took out a surveillance drone,” Shaw tells her. “Probably police.”
She retreats down the alley at a run.
Ice-Cold
The wail and stutter of sirens rises in the distance as True flees down the alley. It reminds her of the chorus of howling dogs on the outskirts of Tadmur. That night, they had the legal authority of a bounty behind their actions, but tonight no documentation protects her from the consequences of what just happened, of what should not have happened.
“You overreacted,” she pants, not knowing if Shaw is still there, still listening. “You didn’t have to kill him!”
Two more explosions go off behind her.
“Fuck! You’re a fucking maniac!”
This time he responds, his voice calm and absurdly soothing despite what he has to say: “You know why autonomous systems make good soldiers, True? It’s because they follow the rules of engagement, even in tricky situations. They don’t let sentiment or doubt or mercy get in the way.” Shifting to a matter-of-fact tone, he adds, “Turn right at the next corner.”
She slows almost to a stop. “That’s not the way I came.”
“Do it, True.”
What choice? A wrong move now might make her the next target of the swarm.
All in, then. She jogs to the corner as the sirens are multiplied by echoes resounding off the buildings. “Where am I going?” she asks. She sounds surprisingly calm. Just a slight tremor in her voice.
“Past the next building on the left. There’s a small parking lot. You see it?”
“Yes. I see an autonomous cab with the interior lit.”
“That’s the one. Get inside.”
It’s a tiny, two-passenger vehicle. She gets in. The light goes out, the windows darken. The wailing of the sirens is muffled. She gets the belt on and the cab slides out of its parking space on a silent electric motor.
“Li Guiying,” Shaw says.
“A robotics engineer.”
It’s an absurdly inadequate answer. He must have searched the name; he knows that much already. But True is distracted. She’s thinking about the dead man: her responsibility for what happened to him, and her liability. They are not the same things. She went to meet the two men, thinking it was right action; she was motivated by worry over what Shaw might do if she didn’t defuse the situation. But the situation escalated. A man is dead—maybe two men are dead—and she is fleeing the scene.
I let this happen.
“Damn it, True.” His harsh tone anchors her. “Don’t spin out on me. You’ve seen blood before.”
Oh yeah. Roger that. She’s seen worse in combat but this wasn’t combat. A man—an idiot, yes, but a man—got his head blown off on a peaceful street in a peaceful city. And she doesn’t want to ask but she’s pretty sure the old man is dead too. No witnesses.
Maybe the truck had a dash cam, although that was probably destroyed when the engine block went up.
“I didn’t come here to trigger that kind of shit,” she tells him.
“I need you to tell me who this Li Guiying is to you.”
She shudders, understanding that what happened doesn’t mean anything to him. It doesn’t deserve so much as a comment or a denial.
He adds, “I’ve got you as co-author on a paper with her, along with six other names. What else is there?”
“Nothing. Not really.”
The car is leaving the warehouse district, joining a light flow of traffic. True leans forward, cycles through the dash display until it shows a map of the cab’s planned route: a circuitous path marked in green that runs past the tourist district before turning toward the ocean, doubling back, and ending at a neighborhood less than a kilometer from her hotel.
She leans back again, working her cheeks to get moisture in her mouth. “Am I bait?” she asks. “You trying to see if something’s following me?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“Not that I can see. Not so far. Tell me about this Li Guiying. You must know her.”
“Sure, I know her. I don’t work with her. She’s not my business partner.”
“Would she like to be?”
True thinks about this, recalling Tamara’s teasing words, She likes you, True. I can’t imagine why, but she does. She thinks of you as a friend.
“I don’t know what she wants,” True admits. “I only met her once in person but she’s friendly to me. Too friendly. It gets awkward. But she’s a really good engineer. She’s mostly in academia now, but—” True breaks off in midsentence, thinking of the hawk that flew past Daniel’s house… and the biomimetic deer.
“Say it, True. Whatever the hell you’re thinking.”
She does: “What kind of surveillance did you have on my house?”
Two seconds of silence. When he answers, there’s suspicion in his voice. “Why?”
“What kind of surveillance?” she insists.
“Nothing. You were not on my hit list and I was not running any kind of surveillance on your house.”
They had all believed Shaw was behind the ongoing surveillance. They interpreted it as a warning, clear notice that he’d mapped their lives and could hit them at any time.
He asks, “Did Li Guiying have you under surveillance at home, too?”
“Why would she? There’s no reason for it. I only know her because we attended a seminar together, six or seven years ago. That paper you found with my name and hers, it’s the collected presentations. I remember, at the time, she’d just moved into the private sector. She was networking, making new contacts. Before that, she worked for Kai Yun Strategic.”
“Kai Yun
?”
His voice is abruptly lower, with that lethal note she heard before. Her own tone softens in response. It’s instinct. She speaks innocuously, determined not to trigger his temper. “A Chinese government company. Cutting edge technological development.”
“I know what Kai Yun is.” That low, ice-cold tone.
A flush prickles in her pores. Her voice sharpens. “What do you want me to tell you, Shaw?”
“Tell me what she did for them.”
“As far as I know, the same thing she does now. Autonomous swarms. She’s strictly civilian though. I remember she told me she won’t work in the defense industry.”
“Kai Yun is defense industry,” he growls.
“Yes, and that’s where she got her start. But that was years ago and she’s done with it. That’s what she told me. She works on humanitarian projects now. She wants to make a positive contribution to the world, and she has. She’s done good things.”
An alert pops up, telling her the voice link to Shaw has closed.
“Fuck,” she whispers in frustration. What did Shaw have to do with Kai Yun? Did he work for them? Was he running from them? “Damn it, Shaw,” she says out loud, using her data glove to reestablish the link. “Don’t you disappear on me.”
The link stays closed.
Frustrated, she drops the MARC on the seat beside her and gets her burner phone out instead. Powers it up and calls him.
No answer.
She berates herself. She should have said nothing about Li Guiying. Held back the information. Traded for what she needs to know, but she didn’t know. She didn’t know Guiying mattered. Not to her, not to him.
Damn it.
Now he’s gone.
Free Will
Do what needs to be done.
She checks herself for bloodstains, but she’s clean. The pistol is still in her pocket. Logic tells her to get rid of it but instinct’s advice is the opposite. She decides to hold on to it.
She puts her visor back on, then instructs the cab to pull over. The navigation screen shows her still a half kilometer from her planned destination. She notes the address, then resets the screen. The cab doesn’t ask for payment, so presumably she’s been riding on Shaw’s credit.