by Mel Odom
I moved to the next man, sorting quickly through his injuries. I left his helmet intact, then opened the suit briefly to reveal a laceration across his stomach that had nearly disemboweled him. I seared the skin together and pulsed a command through the hardsuit to immobilize him so he couldn’t move around and re-open the wound.
He started trying to fight me as the air evacuated from his helmet and left him not enough oxygen to satisfy his needs.
“Easy, Corporal Mullins. I have you.”
“Can’t…breathe.”
“You will in a moment. Be patient.” I knew that the advice was wasted. There was no way a human who thought he was asphyxiating would be able to be patient.
Once the hardsuit locked down as I’d instructed, Mullins could no longer fight with much effect. The lack of oxygen triggered hypoxia and his consciousness started to fade.
I repaired his suit, made it airtight, then signaled the suit to release reserve air into the system to keep him alive. The blue coloration left his features almost immediately. I triggered a round of medication to ease his pain as well, followed by narcotics that would alleviate his anxiety.
I moved to the next man, listening to the cries of the other wounded in the other vehicles, knowing I would never be able to get to them all in time.
A harsh voice cut through the comm. “Screaming Mimis, stand down and abandon your vehicles. If you do so, you will be allowed to live.”
I accessed the exterior cams on the crawler and pulled up several views of the area. The nine crawlers that had been struck by the Taejo mines looked like they were connected by thin, gossamer webbing. Those vehicles were not traveling any farther without extensive work, and I doubted that would help all of them. Several of the Screaming Mimis soldiers had crawled from their vehicles and had taken up defensive positions along the passage. Some of them tried to manage wounded, but I knew that some of the wounded struck by the monofilament wire were strung up inside the crawlers, either dead or dying or severely wounded.
I continued working even as hoppers from the enemy group lowered and hooked onto the cargo containers with grapples. Within a few moments, they were flying away.
* * *
Out of one hundred and fifty men in the unit, only eight-seven remained alive. Eleven of the crawlers had been rendered inoperative, but Captain Venturi, replacing Major Randall who had expired in the firefight, had managed to get the remaining four operable. The jackers—everyone called them that, but I doubted the people who had attacked us were anything less than full-scale militarily trained combatants—had left the civilian vehicles as well. With the cargo gone, there was more room for our wounded, but oxygen shortage was a real concern.
The bodies of the dead had been left with a GPS beacon so they could be recovered later. But only if someone wanted them home for burial. Otherwise they would be left where they lay.
“Well, that couldn’t have gone any worse,” Hayim said as he helped me take care of the wounded. He had enough medical experience that he could take care of everything that wasn’t a life-threatening emergency.
I appreciated the extra help. “You’re still alive,” I said.
“I wasn’t talking about me,” Hayim said. “I was talking about this team. A lot of these soldiers are greenies. Not more than kids somebody’s recruited to fight their wars for them.”
I had not noticed that before, but as I polled the list of Screaming Mimis combatants from the medical files I had on the men, I realized the average age was twenty.
I shut off the hardsuit to a young woman who had just expired. Our casualties had just risen to sixty-three dead. I pulled out the air reclamation system I had and affixed it to the suit so I could drain the oxygen to use for the rest of the team that still lived.
Hayim cursed. “You realize that you’re drawing her dying breath into that system.”
“Yes,” I replied. “And you or one of these other soldiers might be thankful for it later. Podkayne colony is too far away for us to comfortably make.” I looked over the convoy. “We may lose more of them before we get them home.”
* * *
I sat at a corner table in the Inn of Two Moons and watched Captain Venturi try to entice other soldiers to sign under our banner. He wasn’t having much success because no unit had endured the casualties we had suffered. There was some talk of the Screaming Mimis being cursed with bad luck. Who was supposed to have cursed us was not known.
Private Deng, still in a soft cast with a broken leg, joined Hayim and me at the table. He was young and talkative, one of those men who lived on social networks when he wasn’t in the field. He placed his drink on the table and eased into a chair, which I helped pull out for him.
“You shouldn’t be walking around so much,” I told him. “You should be in bed with that leg elevated.”
Deng waved my comment away with a bandaged hand. Monofilament wire had shot through his hand in two places but hadn’t done any permanent damage. He shook his head and took a sip of his drink. “Bed’s the last place I want to be. Every time I try to sleep, I fall right back into that ambush. Only this time I don’t make it out of there alive.” He grinned without enthusiasm, baring his teeth. “Not until I wake up screaming, anyway.”
“I can give you something that will help you sleep,” I offered.
“No. The last thing I want is an endless cycle of nightmares.”
I let him be the judge of his situation. During the last three days, my evenings had been filled with the need to find Mara Blake. But I couldn’t do that until I found out where the chimera mercenaries were. They were tied up too tightly in everything that had happened to not be part of her disappearance as well.
“Maybe you’re investing too much into the Chimeras,” Shelly said as she sat on my right.
“I’m not,” I replied.
“If you’re not careful, you’re going to develop tunnel vision on this investigation.”
“It’s not tunnel vision if I’m correct. It’s focus. You taught me that.”
“I did.”
“Do you think I’m wrong?” I asked.
“No.”
Deng stretched his injured leg out, wincing as Private Kulemeka bumped into him and pulled out a chair.
“Sorry,” she apologized, then pulled the chair out to a more agreeable angle. She was young and dark-skinned, a native of Malawi, Africa, who had signed up for a Mars security post, then became a mercenary after her initial three-year contract was up because she wanted to see more of the planet. Her hair was pulled back and tribal tattoos marked her slender neck. She sat uncomfortably and winced in pain. During the attack, she had suffered three cracked ribs. She looked at me. “I’m having trouble sleeping, McDreamy.”
“I can give you something to help you sleep.” I pointed at the globe of alcohol in her hand. “You will have to monitor your alcohol consumption.”
“No problem.”
I reached into the medkit and found a blister pack of medication that would help her sleep. I passed the meds over and tapped the wrist monitor she wore. The monitor buzzed.
“Hey! What’s that?”
“Your wrist alert is tethered to my overwatch programming. If you misdiagnose yourself, I will know it.”
Kulemeka pulled at the wrist monitor.
“It’s now sealed,” I said. “It won’t be released again until you’ve finished with the sleep aids.”
“Big brother, much, McDreamy?” she asked.
“I’m here to care for you, Private.”
Deng drained his globe. “You wouldn’t have to take care of us so much if Earth would just go ahead and release those fighting bioroids they’ve been working on.”
Kulemeka shivered and then grimaced in pain as she tried to find a comfortable position for her broken ribs. “I don’t know that I like the idea of bioroids capable of harming—or killing—humans. Some of those old 20th century sensies about killer robots from the future are pretty scary when you think about how many bi
oroids are in the world now.” She looked at me quickly. “No offense, McDreamy.”
“None taken,” I assured her.
Deng grinned at her. “Bioroids used in battle is great by me. If they get blown up, you just fix them or part them out, send them back in. It also means you and I don’t have to die with our guts blown out somewhere in the colonies.” He accepted his drink from the server and thumbed the tab he’d opened up with his credstick. “Besides, bioroids would be trained for fighting, not making other bioroids.”
“That right, McDreamy? You don’t know how to make bioroids?” Kulemeka looked at me.
“I don’t know how to construct bioroids,” I told her.
She regarded me for a moment, then blew out a breath. “Just because McDreamy doesn’t know how doesn’t mean Haas-Bioroid doesn’t have bioroids on the assembly line right now putting units together.” She sipped her drink. “Besides that, you know how to do surgery on humans.”
“Limited surgery,” I told her. “I don’t know everything about the human body.”
“Yeah, but the human body has got to be more complicated than a bioroid.”
I admitted that it was.
“See?” Kulemeka lifted an eyebrow at Deng. “Bioroids can start building bioroids if they want to.”
“The Three Directives will keep bioroids from harming humans,” Deng said.
“Are you even listening to yourself? You’re talking about combat-ready bioroids. They wouldn’t have the Three Directives as part of their programming.”
“Sure they would. They’d just have it so it could be turned off during combat. You drop them into a kill zone, have them decimate the enemy, then switch the Directives back on once the mission’s over. In fact, you could have the reinstallation of the Directives be part of the mission. They finish up, the Directives go right back into place. No problem.”
“I think McDreamy needs to check your pain meds.” Kulemeka snorted in disgust. “You’re living some kind of whacked out sensie fantasy.”
I ran a quick diagnostic on Deng and found that he was operating within acceptable tolerances.
She shifted her attention to me. “What about you, McDreamy? If you could have the Three Directives lifted from you—if you were able to harm humans—would you do it?”
“I can’t envision circumstances where that facet of my performance would be necessary.”
Memory of the rooftop where Shelly and I had been pursuing the murderers of Cartman Dawes, the CEO of IdentiKit, flashed into my mind. I had shot her killer with a Synap but he had been out of the weapon’s effective range and the beam hadn’t kept him from shooting her and killing her.
My colleagues at the NAPD faulted me for Shelly’s death. They said that if I’d been a human partner or if I’d been equipped with a lethal handgun, Shelly would be alive today, not just a ghost in the machine.
They were right.
Simon Blake would have made a better partner. He would have shot that man on that rooftop that night and Shelly would have gone home to her family.
“Don’t give in to that,” Shelly told me. “There are other times that the fact you are a bioroid saved my life.”
I hung onto that and tried not to figure out the percentages of whether it was better that I had been a bioroid protecting her or if I hadn’t been human that night.
“It was one night,” Shelly told me.
But that one night had made all the difference, hadn’t it?
“It might have made a difference that day,” Deng said.
“No,” Kulemeka said, “it wouldn’t have. McDreamy saved lives out there. If he’d been engaged in fighting, some of us wouldn’t have come out of that ambush alive. More than that, if he’d stayed on the attack instead of standing down the way we were told, he might have gotten us all killed.”
I told myself that wasn’t true. If I had been permitted to engage our attackers, I would have known when to stand down. I didn’t know that for certain, though. I was faster and stronger than a human. I could have killed a lot of those men who had ambushed us. So would I have made a difference?
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The idea of bioroids with a license to kill is a nightmare.” The subject matter of the vid playing on the vidcast was an old one, but the subject matter had become relevant again given the news of the warroids circulating through the colonies. “The concept of machines and artificial life forms able to kill humans alone is enough to scare any sane person to death.”
After Hayim had declared himself done for the evening, we’d returned to the hotel room we were renting. We didn’t have much in the way of conversation. Both of us appeared occupied with our own thoughts.
I sat in a chair by the wall while Hayim stretched out on the bed and watched the vidcast.
The speaker was on a media program with Lily Lockwell, one of the best roving nosies on Earth. Her auburn hair looked immaculate, every strand in place. Beautiful and articulate, she captured the attention of viewers. A monocam covered her left eye and the vid operators running the presentation kept cutting back and forth between vids that showed Lockwell and her guest and her POV of the man.
Tall and powerfully built, Alton Fuller looked almost too big for the chair he occupied on the media set. His bronze hair was combed straight back from his broad, handsome face. Muddy green eyes like those on a reptile made him look distant and cold. He was one of the top spokespersons for Human First.
“—idea of a war bioroid isn’t a new one, Ms. Lockwell,” Fuller was saying. “I’m sure you’ve heard of it before.”
“I have,” Lily Lockwell responded. “But we still haven’t seen them in action. For all we know, these warroids are a smokescreen, an unsubstantiated threat. Until one of them kills a human, there are a lot of people who won’t believe in them.”
“The people who would build such a machine,” Fuller stated, making his disapproval evident audibly, “would, of course, pay off the media.”
Lily Lockwell’s mouth twitched a little at that, and I knew she was annoyed but holding herself in check. She always made sure she got the story she was looking for without becoming the story in the process. “I’m not paid off, Mr. Fuller.”
“You wouldn’t admit it if you were.”
“Have you been able to prove any of your allegations, Mr. Fuller?” Lily Lockwell’s voice never rose, never changed in any way.
“Proven that military bioroids are battle-tested?” Fuller shook his head. “These people cover their tracks far too well for that to happen. The only time we’re going to know killer bioroids exist is when they shove a blaster down our throats and pull the trigger. If you ask me, it’s going to be almost too late by that time. We’ve had our warning. People are just choosing to ignore it.”
With those words, one of Simon Blake’s memories drew me out of the hotel room.
* * *
“Do you swear to uphold the laws and obligations of the New Angeles Police Department to the best of your abilities?” Commissioner Chen Mai Dawn did the swearing in herself on the stage in front of several dozen leading corp execs and favorite sons. She looked trim and athletic in her black business suit, but she was totally professional.
Floyd 2X3A7C stood in front of her, his right hand lifted as he faced the commissioner. I hadn’t expected to see him there, and the sight of him almost separated me from Simon’s memory, but I held fast to the past.
In Simon’s memory, Floyd looked shiny and new, dressed in a tailored NAPD uniform. He wasn’t going on the street with the other police officers, though. Commissioner Dawn had agreed to let Floyd work out of her office, where he still worked even now. He had been the first bioroid to be contracted to the NAPD and the event was carried throughout the media. The act divided the populace sharply at the time, bringing out the worst of the Human First groups.
Floyd didn’t wear the rosary then, and he didn’t seem as curious about his environment and what might lie beyond as he did currently. The Floyd I had me
t had been on the PD for years before I arrived. By that time he had developed a need to know things, to understand people, and mostly to discern how he fit into the world he’d been brought into.
“I do so swear,” Floyd answered in a flat voice that carried none of the character that I had come to see in him. Shelly had been on the force when Floyd had first signed on. She had been a rookie then, still wearing a uniform but already fast-tracking through vice units because a lot of the johns still preferred flesh and blood to gynoids or cloned prostitutes.
“Then, Detective 3rd Grade Floyd 2X3A7C, let me be the first to welcome you to the New Angeles Police Department.” Commissioner Dawn held out her hand.
Floyd took her hand and shook it once, mechanically perfect, and released it. “Thank you, Commissioner.”
The audience broke into applause, but the effort was lackluster at best and bordered on insulting. My own swearing in ceremony had been perfunctory, done in a small room, and recorded for my file, with only the required witnesses present. I had never again looked at that vid, but now I was curious to see how much I had changed.
That thought tugged at me, threatening again to split me from Simon, so I pushed it away for the time being and concentrated on what I could gather from being there.
Mara Parker sat beside me. She looked tired, but excited. I knew she had been putting in a lot of hours at MirrorMorph, Inc., writing and rewriting code. In her black dress, she looked attractive and I felt some of the interest Simon had for her and it was stronger than ever. The feeling was alien to me, yet I understood it on a level based on the sex crimes information in my knowledge base. It was discomforting.
She looked up at me. “Do you know what this means?”
“I know that you’re going to tell me.”
She treated me to a small smile which quickened Simon’s pulse. “It means that all the neural channeling work I’ve been doing is going to be successful. Imagine it, Simon: a world where bioroids can replace flesh and blood police officers in the police departments in megapoli. Men and women in law enforcement won’t be casualties anymore.”