Then I looked over at 19. “We’ve got company?”
“Shut up. It sounded cool.” She focused down the hall on the growing clamor. “It didn’t sound cool?”
“No.”
“Shit.”
“Sorry.”
And that’s what I loved about 19. Tough as she was, lethal as she was, she was still a Comfortbot. She needed to be loved, desired, or at the very least, cool. Even when shit was about to go down. Come to think of it, always when some shit was about to go down. And shit was, in fact, about to go down.
The clanging got closer, the gunfire louder.
In the distance, the hallway began to glow with the flickers of plasma fire. I telescoped my eyes in to 50x, magnifying my vision to see what I could. Several shapes, running, firing wildly behind them. Not plastic men, not brutes. I could only make them out in silhouette, but there were three of them: a Laborbot, a machinist model, and . . . a Caregiver.
Shit. Not now.
I tensed up on the grip of my rifle, setting my vision back to 1x magnification.
“What is it?” asked 19.
“Trouble. Let’s move.”
“Plastic men?” asked Herbert, fingering the trigger of his spitter.
“Worse. Freebots.”
“How is that any worse?” asked Rebekah. “There’s safety in numbers right now.”
“Not with these numbers. One of ’em at least.”
I raced up the passage ten paces, turning to see if anyone was following. They weren’t.
“Come on!” I shouted.
They hesitated.
It was too late, the freebots were almost upon them, the clanking of their feet almost thunderous. As they grew close enough to see clearly in the dim light, Herbert leveled his spitter at them. “Get down!” he bellowed, his voice reverberating each way down the corridor.
The three bots kissed pavement, just as Herbert unleashed another volley of plasma. The ball hissed down the hall, erupting in a flash of white-hot light. I raced back to the corner, telescoping my eyes in again to see a pair of plastic men splatter into a shower of goo.
The three bots rose to their feet. Doc. Mercer. And Murka.
Murka was an I-series Laborbot—one of the oldest models of its kind still in operation before the war. They were cheap-as-hell labor, prone to the kind of mental instability found in early-generation AIs, but physically strong, durable, and built to last. Every inch of him was painted in red and white stripes except for a big blue patch on his chest with fifty-one white stars. He had large golden ornaments welded to his fists shaped like bald eagles, and his faceplate was painted with vertical red and white stripes, emblazoned with the words We the Persons in blue lettering.
Murka was bad news, rumored to be madkind—a group of wasteland dwellers who lived aboveground in a town rumored to be so crazy even the OWIs wanted nothing to do with them. He’d never done anything untoward, but whereas Orval the Necromancer was clearly a little nuts, yet harmless, Murka always seemed on the outside edge of a violent outburst.
“Doc!” 19 exclaimed. “You made it.”
“So far,” said Doc, nodding.
“Mercer?” 19 asked politely.
“19,” he said, not for a moment taking his eyes, or his gun, off me. My gun was leveled at him as well, had been since he started to get up. At once the other bots became painfully aware of the tension.
I glanced at his shiny, new, straight-out-of-the-box, factory-condition arm. While internal SMC components were hard to come by, all the failing models kept dealers swimming in cherry-picked body parts. “Nice arm,” I said.
“Doc does good work,” he said casually. “I’m sure that new backplate of yours is equally well crafted.”
“Shit,” said 19. “Do you two have beef?”
“We have beef,” said Mercer.
19 looked at me with eyes that read Oh, honey, not now. “Britt?”
“He gunned me down out in the Sea. Wanted me for parts.”
“Mercer!” shouted 19, sounding like an angry teenager chastising a friend.
“I had my reasons,” he said.
19 shook her head “There’s no good reason for poaching.”
“He’s failing,” I said. “He’s days away, maybe.”
“And so is she,” said Mercer.
“We have to go,” said Rebekah. “We don’t have time for petty squabbles.”
“There’s nothing petty about this,” I said.
19 drew close, getting right in my face, her eyes now pleading. “Please,” she whispered. “Don’t do this. Not here. Not now.”
“Can’t trust him,” I said. “He’ll shoot me in the back first chance he gets.” We stood there, pulse rifles pointed at each other as the other bots slowly backed away out of the line of fire.
Mercer shook his head. “You ain’t any good to me dead. I ain’t any good to you dead. And neither of us has the time to pick clean the other’s wreck with all this hell raining down on us. So what do you say we call it a wash, get the fuck out of here, and live to try and kill each other another day?”
“That sounds reasonable,” said 19. “Doesn’t that sound reasonable, Britt?”
He was right. Killing me here would ruin his last chance of saving himself. In truth, at the moment I was actually safer with him than with any other bot in the world. He was the only one who needed me alive—for his own sake, sure—but alive nonetheless. And that street went both ways. I could kill him, right there where he stood, but then I’d never get the parts I needed. An hour later things would be different, but for the moment we were all each other had.
I lowered my rifle, nodding.
Then Mercer lowered his. “Truce?” Mercer asked.
“Truce.”
“Good. Let’s go do some damage. Where are we headed?”
“The escape hatch,” said 19.
“We haven’t decided that,” said Rebekah.
“Yes, we have.”
“The escape hatch opens up in the middle of the desert,” said Mercer. “There’s no cover for half a mile.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But CISSUS probably doesn’t know about it. Should be clear.”
“And if it isn’t?”
“Then it definitely knows about all the other exits and we’re screwed anyway.”
“Fair point,” he said. “Let’s go to the desert.”
We beat feet pretty quickly through the complex.
19 and I had both mapped out every inch of NIKE 14—every alcove, every service tunnel, every crawl space. You had to. It paid off at a time like this. Back in the bowels of the city, bots were being slaughtered or infected with code, becoming part of CISSUS. By the time we reached the hatch, the worst of it would no doubt be over. That was a problem. Once they were no longer distracted by the principal population, the facets would set their sights solely on rounding up the stragglers.
Us.
We needed to get out quickly, fan out into the desert, and find a place to hole up for a while before the plastic men, the brutes, and the drones swooped in to kill anything that moved. I hoped silently that the poor bots still caught up in the thick of it would hold out just a bit longer, would fight just a bit harder, if only so we could escape.
I realized I was hoping to prolong their suffering so I could live just to see this all happen again. Just as I had too many times before. Then it dawned on me that this was likely to be the very last time I would see it at all. And frankly, I didn’t know which was worse.
Chapter 10000
The Light at the End of the Tunnel
Mercer and I walked side by side, neither wanting the other behind us. Sure, we were forced to trust each other, but neither of us actually did. As soon as I got out of that dank, labyrinthine dungeon, I was going to get as far away from him as I could, and fast. I imagined we might each back away from the other, guns at the ready, until we were out of sight. But until then, we were unfortunate allies. So side by side we walked, neither able to stab
the other in the back. Literally.
“Can I ask you something?” I asked him, both of us staring straight ahead.
“Shoot,” he said.
“Don’t tempt me.”
“What’s on your mind?”
“How you got back here so quickly,” I said. “I took your buggy. And it took me the whole night to get here.”
“You left yours behind.”
I shook my head. “There’s no way you could have known where I hid it. It should have taken you . . .” I trailed off, finally putting two and two together. He turned his head, staring at me silently, waiting for me to figure it out. “You were tracking me.”
He looked away from me, facing front again. “The whole time.”
“From the moment I left.”
“The day before that, actually. I had Reilly shadowing you.”
“Why didn’t you just ambush me? Why make a whole game out of it? That far away you could have hit the parts you needed by accident.”
“Chance I had to take.”
“Chance you had to take? There were four of you.”
He was silent for a moment, mulling over his response, then spoke up, hesitantly. “Because I’ve heard the stories.”
“Stories? What stories? There aren’t any stories.”
“About you?”
“Yeah.”
“The hell there ain’t.”
I’d never heard stories about myself. I wasn’t some local legend. Most citizens didn’t even know my name. I liked it that way. I hadn’t the foggiest hell what he was going on about. “And where did you hear these stories?”
“Scavenging up in the Pacific Northwest two years back.”
“I don’t get out there much.”
“I reckon not. But this old dockyard model I was running with for a while up there did. Bot by the name of Billy Seven Fingers.”
“That’s funny. I knew a dockyard by the name of Billy Nine Fingers.”
“Same guy,” he said. “Fewer fingers.”
“He can get them replaced.”
“He likes the name.”
“He was in my unit.”
“In the war. I know.”
“He told you old war stories?”
“All the time.”
“So you heard about some shit I did in the war and that scared you? We all went to war, Mercer. We all did shit. Some of us did shit we aren’t proud of, but we all did it.”
“Yeah, but not everyone’s shit scared the bejesus out of Billy. Now Billy wasn’t no saint. Frankly, by the time I ran with him, he already had one foot on the scrap pile. He just wasn’t right in the head.”
“He never was.”
“Was it true you carried a flamethrower?”
“Yeah. But only because I was closest to it when the last guy ate a chestful of plasma. No one else wanted it. They wouldn’t take it.”
“That’s not how Billy tells it.”
“How does Billy tell it?” I asked.
“They were scared to take it away from you. Said you enjoyed it too much.”
“That’s a load of horseshit.” It was. I didn’t enjoy it. I hated the goddamned thing. Hated the things I had to do with it. I wasn’t often offended, but this stung. It just wasn’t true. It wasn’t.
“He told me this one story about a time you folks raided an underground bunker only to find it was just kids—”
“All right, all right. That’s enough of that.”
“So it’s true.”
“I don’t want to talk about that.”
“Well, there’s this other time he told me about when you snuck around a firefight but you were out of juice, so you took this sharpened piece of scrap metal—”
“I said I don’t want to talk about the war.”
“Said you gutted twenty guys.”
“Goddammit, Mercer! Shut the fuck up!”
Doc spoke first. “Keep it down. You two are making me regret I ever stitched you both back together.”
“For which you were well paid,” Mercer stated matter-of-factly.
“Not nearly enough, apparently,” Doc fired back, just as cool and calm as Mercer.
19 turned around, scowling. “I can’t believe you two. We’re on the same side.”
“There aren’t any sides,” I said. “It isn’t us and them. It’s just me and you and you and you, with them standing in our way. When we’re done here, we’re done, and I’m gone.”
“Good riddance,” said Rebekah.
“Look,” said Mercer coolly, casually. “True or not, I watched you take out three poachers before you damn near took my arm clean off. I’d say trying to keep our distance was the smartest move we made all day.”
“And if we get out of this alive, you will try to kill me. Again.”
“Ain’t got a choice. I figure you for someone who holds a grudge.”
He was right. I can and do hold a grudge. Maybe there wasn’t any going back for us. Maybe one of us would gun down the other as soon as we stepped outside.
I tensed the grip on my rifle. Mercer eyed me as I did. He didn’t miss a trick.
“There it is,” said Herbert.
We were there. The hatch.
19 turned to me, beckoned me to take a few steps back with her. She put her hand in mine, initiating direct contact. I wasn’t a fan of doing that; didn’t care much for trading data in place of talking, but I was sure she had her reasons.
“Britt,” she thought to me. “I’m going up the ladder first to see that the coast is clear. I want you to go up second. Then I want you to get on the other side of me.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want that asshole taking a cheap shot at you. And I sure don’t want you doing the same to him.”
“He might shoot through you to hit me.”
“He won’t.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“I’m not. But I’ve pulled you out of the way of trouble a few too many times to watch you die like that. I won’t let him.”
“I’m dying anyway.”
“You’ve gotten out of far worse spots than this. I don’t have a lot of friends out here. And neither do you. But if I had to name one—”
“Let’s not get mushy.”
“Look, where we’re going . . . maybe you should come with us.”
“I don’t think your new boss would care too much for that.”
“To hell with what she cares for. If I can help you—this mother lode—well, just come with us.”
“Let’s just get topside and see what plays out from there.”
She nodded. I liked 19. I liked her a lot. I don’t know why I couldn’t tell her, but I just couldn’t. It wasn’t my way. I don’t know how much of what she said was true—she was, after all, hardwired to get people to like her, to love her—but if she was willing to stand between me and Mercer’s rifle, well, I couldn’t think of another person on the planet who would do that. Not for me.
“I’m going up,” said 19, gripping the ladder in one hand.
Mercer and I trained our guns back down the corridor. The odds of anyone sneaking up on us at this point were slim, but this was no time to get sloppy. The hall was long, dimly lit, shadows gripping tight the spaces between distantly spaced lights. As anxious as I was about what might be topside, I knew we would have to backtrack if we weren’t alone. If we got boxed in, we were done for.
19 climbed the ladder, lifted the hatch, peeked through, then looked down, nodding. Up and through the hatch she went, out into the blistering sun. Daylight spilled in, painting the ferro-concrete walls with a bright white, fading into a dim pale blue farther down the corridor. We waited, each of us pressed against the wall, guns trained back down the hall. If I had a heart, it would have been pounding; breath, it would have been held. Instead my insides whirred and chirped all but silently, calculating the many different ways this could go down.
Something moved in the passage. A shadow. Something small. Skittering across the hal
l.
Was it a glitch? It happened from time to time, code going astray and processing something wrong. Bugs were bugs. But I definitely saw something move from one shadow to the other.
Then I saw it again. This time moving to another shadow—in the light just long enough to have shape, and yet still seem formless. What the hell is that? Small, no more than three feet tall. Arms. Locomotion. A new facet? Something swift and silent, maybe? A stealth model?
If I could have gripped my rifle any tighter without breaking it, I would have. I leveled my gun at the shadow, ran back my memory frame by frame, my 120-fps recording moving from millisecond to millisecond.
There was nothing there. I had recorded nothing. Impossible. I knew I saw something.
“Britt?” 19 called down. “Could you come on up?”
I warily looked up, nodding, and took a step forward. Mercer grabbed me by the arm.
“You ain’t going up before me,” he said.
“You heard her. She just asked for me.”
“I don’t care. I’m not giving you a clean shot as I try to clear that hatch.”
“Mercer, I’m not giving you a clean shot either. But I’m not going to shoot you. We aren’t out of this yet.”
He stared at me, clearly concerned, but realizing he had no other option. Would I shoot him? I had thought about it. But no. Not yet. We really weren’t out of this. Not by a long shot.
“Just keep your eyes open, huh?” I said. “I thought I saw something.”
“You didn’t see shit. Just get up there.”
I climbed the ladder out into the light. 19 crouched low to the ground, waiting for me, lending me a hand.
“See anything?” I asked as she helped pull me out.
She shook her head. “Not a damn thing.”
I crouched next to her, and Herbert quickly followed up the stairs, spitter slung over his back, his wide girth barely able to clear the portal. He hopped out into the sunlight, standing tall, towering above us, looking down. “Why are you down there?”
“So we’re not seen,” said 19. “Get down!”
“But we’re out in the open,” he said. “There’s nothing for miles.”
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