The Cityborn

by Edward Willett

  The rotund, apple-cheeked, gray-haired woman on the screen was the very image of a cheerful grandmother—and one of the brightest minds in the City. “We found something strange among Erlkin Orillia’s effects, sir,” she said. Her voice had a cold note that belied her appearance. Her image vanished, replaced by that of a metallic sphere on three spindly legs. Kranz recognized it at once as a docbot, though it was practically an antique; there’d been one like it at Retreat Kranz when he and his late “brothers” had been children. It had always terrified him. More recent models were egg-shaped and had four legs instead of three. They also tended to be white or pale blue or green instead of shining chrome. The one at Retreat Kranz had been special, of course, designed to check on and maintain the nanobots that would eventually. . . .

  Wait. Is it possible . . . ?

  “It’s an old docbot,” Kranz said. He wouldn’t jump to conclusions—let Prentis tell him what she had found. “Not surprising that Orillia would have an obsolete model, if he scavenged it from—”

  Prentis’s face reappeared. “This wasn’t scavenged, sir,” she said.

  That alone told him that what he suspected was true, as did the fact she had dared to interrupt him, so rather than bite her head off for the breach of protocol, he leaned back and said, “Explain.”

  “It looks old, but both its hardware and software have been extensively upgraded.” Her face was replaced by the docbot again, this time exploded so that its interior could be seen. A green arrow appeared, pointing to a trio of gleaming hair-like needles folded up inside a small compartment. “These are nanoprobes, sir. They’re used to remove, program, and reinject nanobots.”

  Kranz already knew that, of course. He stared at the probes. So much for his assumption that Danyl’s nanobots would have failed by now. On the one hand, the fact that Danyl’s nanobots had been maintained made it somewhat more likely that the boy had survived whatever had happened on the Rim. But on the other hand . . .

  He felt like gears were engaging in his head, clicking into place, making connections. But he didn’t like the connections they made. “All docbots are manufactured by Beruthi Enterprises, are they not?” Kranz asked slowly.

  The Science Officer nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “Including this one.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And how easy are they to modify?” he asked, even though he already knew.

  “That’s just it, sir,” Prentis said. “They can’t be modified unless you have the correct encryption codes. Any maintenance work on a docbot must be done by a Beruthi Enterprises technician. And even they couldn’t go out and modify one. That would have to be authorized by someone at the highest levels of the company, and it would have to be done right in the Beruthi Enterprises factory.”

  A bubble of anger rose inside Kranz, hot as lava. “Beruthi.”

  Prentis said nothing.

  “Thank you, Science Officer. You’ve been . . . most helpful.”

  “My pleasure, sir.” The screen blanked.

  Science Officer Prentis had no doubt been very pleased to be able to attach Lieutenant Commander Beruthi’s name to the modified docbot. Her own family had a robot manufactory as well, but their bots were limited to street-sweeping and window-washing. Acquiring Beruthi Enterprises after its owner’s arrest for treason would be of huge benefit to the Prentis clan. But even allowing for that personal animus and ambition—something Kranz was used to, since personal animus and ambition drove every aspect of Officer interaction, each Officer eager to increase his or her own standing in the centuries-old hierarchy—Kranz did not doubt Prentis’s claim. It was too specific and too easy to check to be a lie.

  Someone at Beruthi Enterprises had had a hand in the abduction of Danyl and the murder of the other Cityborn twenty years before. Add that to the mysterious knowledge Alania’s would-be kidnappers had had of her movements when she was being escorted to Quarters Kranz, and Kranz suddenly had no doubt at all who the traitor among the Officers was, despite the years of Kranz memories within him telling him the Beruthis were the most loyal of all.

  “I trusted the bastard,” he snarled out loud. “Hell, I promoted him.”

  He called up a map. Estate Beruthi was just a few kilometers from the City—easily accessible on foot from the very spot where the helicopter had crashed on the Rim.

  But that wasn’t Beruthi’s only property. Like Kranz himself, like many of the wealthier Officers, the Lieutenant—Lieutenant Commander, Kranz thought with another surge of anger—maintained a Retreat. His was located in the northern foothills of the Iron Ring. Kranz’s eyes traced the transport roads: Estate Beruthi and Retreat Beruthi were directly linked. He frowned. It was unlikely Beruthi would have taken them up there when his Estate was so close, but just to be sure . . .

  He activated the communicator panel again and issued orders.

  This ends tonight, he thought with grim satisfaction as he sat back in his chair. And then his eyes strayed to that other display.

  The Captain’s vital signs had continued to deteriorate. More green symbols had slipped to yellow. A couple of yellow ones had turned red. The Captain’s ancient heart still beat, but slowly . . . so slowly . . . and unsteadily, too.

  Kranz’s satisfaction ebbed. This has cost me too much time. If Alania had come to me when she was supposed to, we would already have a new Captain, and together she and I would be working to save the City.

  The minute the girl was back in his possession, he would take her to Thirteenth Tier. He shifted his gaze to the Elevator. The City would have a new Captain, and new life.

  And so would he.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  ALANIA WATCHED THE HELICOPTERS settle into the compound, the blast from their rotors making Beruthi stagger. Her emotions swirled as wildly within her as the air buffeting the distant figure of her erstwhile guardian. She didn’t know how to process what she and Danyl had been told, didn’t know what to think of the man in whose house she had grown up, the man from whom she had longed for affection as a child but who had always remained a cold, distant figure, right up until the moment he had handed her over to Kranz—and then, apparently, had attempted to kidnap her right back. He had sentenced her to twenty years of what was essentially house arrest merely to keep Kranz from looking for Danyl down in the Middens. What kind of man could devote two decades of his life to a scheme like that? What kind of man could turn away from the smile of a little girl at every birthday party?

  Not that she’d been smiling at him at birthdays for years.

  As for the rest . . . genetic modification? Nanobots? She glanced at Danyl. Her brother. And he’s not just my brother. He’s supposed to be the new Captain.

  Although it seemed she could have been the Captain instead. Even thinking it seemed absurd, but it was hardly the only absurd thing she was expected to believe. According to Beruthi, she and Danyl were literally offspring of the Captain, a figure of such myth that they might as well have been told they were demigods.

  And First Officer Kranz was their father. That was just . . . disgusting. Especially if he’d been watching her over the years through that camera in her bedroom . . .

  Beruthi could be lying, she thought. There could be something else happening here.

  There could be. But she couldn’t imagine what.

  The rotors slowed, though they kept moving, the ’copters ready to take off again at a moment’s notice. An amplified voice rang out, carrying clearly up to the ridge where Alania and Danyl waited. “Lieutenant Commander Ipsil Beruthi, you are under arrest on suspicion of mutiny. Raise your hands and keep them above your head.”

  “They don’t intend to kill him,” Alania said, feeling an unexpected surge of relief.

  “No,” Danyl said. “They want to question him.”

  Beruthi raised his hands above his head as ordered. Provosts emerged cautiously from the ’copter
s, weapons ready. One of them, clearly the Commander, strode toward Beruthi.

  “There’s no need for this,” Beruthi said. Even without amplification, they could hear his words—the courtyard of the house and the enveloping mountain ridges forming a natural amphitheater. “I’ll come quietly. I can explain everything.”

  “Save it for the First Officer,” the Mission Commander growled.

  At that moment, a robot trundled into the open.

  It wasn’t one of the security robots, which had clearly been ordered to stay out of sight. It looked, in fact, exactly like the gardening robot Alania had glimpsed through the gate of Estate Beruthi, brushes and clippers attached to its arms. Harmless. But it clearly startled Beruthi, who jerked toward it, half lowering his arms . . .

  One of the Provosts must have been nervous. You could hardly blame him, Alania thought later; three helicopters full of Provosts had been blown up just the day before, and the man they were arresting might have been behind it all. They must have been under orders to take him alive, but . . .

  But.

  There was a flash of flame from one of the helicopters. The sound of the shot reached Alania’s ears a moment later as Beruthi, felled by a bullet to the head, toppled backward in a spray of blood and brains and bone.

  An instant later, the house exploded.

  The windows burst outward in showers of glass riding gouts of orange flame, the blast bowling over the Provosts in the courtyard. The roof lifted as a whole, then collapsed back into the inferno suddenly engulfing the structure. The fallen Provosts were just starting to scramble to their feet when the missiles struck, streaking from wherever a security robot had taken up station around the compound.

  The missiles slammed into the ’copters. The resulting explosions knocked Alania and Danyl from their feet, slamming them onto their backs. Groggily, Alania rose on her elbows and stared down in horror at a lake of fire, a burning sea through which trundled the black shapes of the security robots. One stopped by a writhing, burning figure on the ground and put a slug through its head. The writhing stopped instantly.

  “Captain!” Alania whispered, the oath coming to her lips despite everything they had just learned.

  Danyl staggered to his feet. “Let’s get out of here. Kranz must be watching. More ’copters will be coming. With luck they’ll waste time searching for our bodies down there . . . but not if they see us. We’ve got to find that boat.” He held out his hand; Alania took it and let him pull her to her feet.

  They stumbled along the path and down the other side of the ridge, the sky behind them filled with flame-tinged smoke. Nothing moved among the spiky trees; if any wildlife lurked nearby, it had been terrified into cowering silence. For much the same reason, Alania and Danyl said nothing as they hurried through the forest.

  Once again horrible questions ran through her brain. How many people had died because of what she and Danyl were? How many more would die?

  They could not move swiftly, not with only the stars providing light, though at least the sky was full of them, so they could sort of see the path by their silvery glow. They heard the River before they saw it and slowed; even so, the light was so dim that Danyl had to catch Alania’s arm and hold her back from taking one step too many and tumbling off the edge of a cliff. The path had turned, leading to a wooden platform, which proved to the be top landing of a staircase down into a canyon below—the Canyon, presumably, though they descended only fifty or sixty meters before they reached the bottom, where a wooden pier thrust into the rushing, tumbling water. The River’s surface glittered in the starlight, twisting streaks and swirls of white marking rocks beneath the surface.

  “We’re supposed to take a boat on that?” said Alania.

  “I guess,” Danyl said. He sounded as uncertain as she felt. “Let’s find it and see what’s what.”

  He walked out onto the pier, Alania following close behind. Together they stood looking down into the swiftly flowing water.

  How swift? she wondered. They were a long way from the City, and even a fast river must flow a lot slower than a transport moved. It could take them days to drift down to the—

  A dim green light suddenly sprang to life in front of them, under the water. Alania grabbed Danyl’s arm and took an involuntary step back, then watched in fascination as the light moved toward the surface and broke it. No brighter than the worn-out eternals by the light of which they seemed to be forever negotiating ancient stairwells, it lit the water streaming from the metal sides of the dark bulk on which it rode: presumably their boat. Somehow the craft remained stationary against the current, and in fact it moved toward them, closer and closer, until at last it bumped gently against the pier.

  A hatch opened in its side. Bluish light streamed out. Though it was almost painfully bright to Alania’s eyes after so long in the dark, it revealed little of the vessel’s interior.

  Clearly they were supposed to get on board. Somehow the boat had sensed their presence.

  Danyl glanced at Alania. “Well?” he said.

  “What choice do we have?” Alania said with a surge of bitterness. How many times had she thought that over the past few days?

  But what choice did they have? What choice had they ever had? Beruthi was dead, but he was still manipulating them. The boat was clearly just another of his robots, and while that meant it would presumably take them safely down the river, it also meant that they remained under his thumb, where Alania had lived her whole life. They were still blindly following the path he had set them on before they were even born, the path that ended with Danyl becoming Captain.

  They could refuse to board, walk away from the River, but to what end? They couldn’t live in the wilderness. They’d starve or freeze within days, even if they evaded the additional Provosts who would soon be arriving to try to figure out what had happened at Retreat Beruthi . . . and search for them or their bodies.

  Almost angrily, Alania brushed past Danyl and stepped onto the boat, which listed a little under her weight. Ducking, she entered the hatch, finding two steps leading down into a kind of padded cocoon. There was a blank vidscreen at the front—the bow, wasn’t that what it was called on a boat?—and a hatch at the . . . stern? Two narrow cots ran along the sides with latched cabinets beneath them.

  Danyl climbed in behind her. As she turned to look at him, the hatch hissed closed, then sealed with finality. The moment it had done so, the boat thrummed and jerked sideways so suddenly she grabbed Danyl for support. “Steady,” he murmured.

  The interior lights dimmed slightly. Then the vidscreen at the bow flicked on.

  Alania half expected a recorded message from Beruthi, but all she saw was a map showing their location, the twists and turns of the River, and the City . . . almost two hundred kilometers away.

  The thrum of the engines deepened. They were moving.

  Danyl knelt to look in the cabinets under the cots. “Food and water,” he reported. He went to the back of the cabin, opened the stern hatch, and stuck his head through. “Toilet.”

  “I think they call it a head,” Alania said.

  He turned back to her. “What?”

  “The toilet. On boats, they call it a head.”

  “They call it ahead? You have to schedule a time to go?”

  “No, I mean, the name for a toilet on a boat is ‘head.’ So that’s the head.”

  “I thought the head of a boat is the bow.”

  “No, that’s the front.”

  Danyl frowned. “Don’t make me be stern with you.”

  It took Alania a second to react; then she laughed. It felt good.

  Danyl grinned at her, then closed the hatch. “How do you know what things are called on a boat, anyway?” he asked as he returned to her.

  “I had a lot of time to read growing up,” Alania said. “What with being Beruthi’s prisoner and all.”
<
br />   “I read, too,” Danyl said. “Stuff Erl gave me. Technical books, mostly. Although he also made me read a lot of Earthmyth.”

  Alania’s eyes widened. “I love Earthmyth stories.”

  “They’re okay,” Danyl said. “Erl kept telling me they were full of valuable lessons. But I never understood how knowing the ways fictional rulers in a made-up world dealt with things like revolutions and famines and wars and poverty is supposed to help us in the real world. I don’t care how elaborate the made-up world is. And anyway, so much of it is unbelievable: a whole world filled with people, multiple . . . what did they call them? Countries? A bunch of different languages, a bunch of different . . . what’s that word . . . religions? It’s just children’s nonsense.”

  “But that’s what I loved about it,” Alania said. “I knew ‘Earth’ was a made-up place. But it was a different world from the one I was stuck in. And the stories were so exciting!”

  “I had enough excitement in the Middens just staying alive.” Danyl looked around the cabin. “You’ve had rather a lot of excitement yourself these past three days. Still like it?”

  Alania chewed on her lip for a minute, thinking. “Yes,” she said slowly, to her own surprise. “Yes.” She met Danyl’s blue eyes, the same shade of blue as her own—and now she knew why. “Or . . . I don’t like it, exactly but . . . it all matters. It matters like nothing else I’ve ever done. That’s uncomfortable, in a way . . . but it’s better than being a prisoner. Truth is, I wouldn’t change it.” She smiled a little. “Would you?”

  “Not on your life,” Danyl said. His expression hardened. “And if what we’ve been told is true and I really am going to become the new Captain . . . well, then, there are going to be a lot of changes made, and Kranz and the rest of the Officers aren’t going to like them one bit.” He looked down at his hands, which had clenched into fists, and relaxed them. He took a deep breath, looked back up at her, and smiled. “Now,” he said. “I’m hungry. What about you?”