Metal Fatigue

by Sean Williams

  "Perhaps nothing. The Head likes you. He doesn't want to see you get into trouble."

  "What sort of trouble would that be, exactly?"

  "That's up to you, my friend. If you look for it, it'll find you."

  "Are you threatening me?"

  "Quite the opposite. The Head asked me to give you a warning. He won't hurt you, but there's plenty who might."

  Roads absorbed this in silence. That was the second time the Head had hinted at forces massed against him. A genuine warning? Or a threat, despite the messenger's protestations of innocence?

  Seeing Raoul again brought back memories of their first meeting, in the cellar on Old North Street. The sight of another person with biomodifications in Kennedy had taken Roads completely off-guard. Fear that Raoul might recognise him — might even have been under his command and remembered what he had done — had left him frozen, unable to think. He had believed himself alone for so long that to learn otherwise had shocked him to the very core of his being. Only later had he realised that he should have suspected earlier.

  Morrow was a junkyard man, quite literally, but he collected more than just machines; he collected people as well. Roads had needed his help to survive in the past, and it made sense that others had come along since then — and not all of them would share Roads' law-abiding nature. Biomodifications before the War had proliferated outside the armed forces as technology had become cheaper. Raoul could have been anything from a tech-freak to a hired killer. Morrow had lost a valuable ally when Roads had joined RSD, and would regard Raoul's abilities just as highly. No wonder that he had been in charge of the Old North Street operation, or that Morrow had sent him to deal with Roads in person.

  But why now? Did Morrow suspect that Roads had learned of a connection between him and Cati? Was Raoul — like the RUSA — a threat, or an opportunity to be exploited?

  "Tell me something, Raoul. What do you think of the Reassimilation?"

  "Me? I think it's a bad deal."

  "In what way?"

  "Well, just look at them." Raoul gestured at the troops below. "They come here offering us equality and a place in their government and all that shit, but that's not what they're really here for. They're a military state, and they want what all military states want: power. Over us, and the rest of the continent. We're just a small step along the road they're travelling, another hurdle to be crossed."

  "You think they're going to take us over?"

  "They won't need to. Not that we could resist if they tried. I mean, all these years we've been thinking that Outside was full of savages, and look what rolls in. I haven't seen stuff like this for years. Ever! Field-effects, for chrissake? No, they won't need to invade us; we'll just roll over and play dead."

  The control caravan wasn't in view, but it was obvious that Raoul had already heard about it. No doubt from Morrow, via his own implants and the underworld equivalent of PolNet.

  "They're going to kill us by economics," Raoul said.

  "Economics?"

  "It's simple." The black man took off his glasses and wiped his crystal eyes. "When we join the Reunited States, we'll become part of a vital industrial nation. We'll have to compete on equal terms with everyone else, which means we'll have to produce in order to survive. But what exactly do we produce here? Recycled shit, that's all. We'll be buried alive."

  "We'll adjust — "

  "Sure, eventually, but not before we're in debt. And once in debt we'll always be in debt. They'll make sure of it."

  "So you think we shouldn't Reassimilate?"

  Raoul shook his head. "That's the problem. We have to; in a manner of speaking, we already have, by letting them come this far. I just don't like to see it happening this way, that's all."

  The summary reflected Roads' own feelings on the matter. Again he wondered what Raoul's occupation had been before the War. Not the same as his — Morrow had suggested as much when Roads had asked — but not simple thuggery either. His opinions were too considered.

  "What about Keith?" Roads asked. "How does the Head feel about it?"

  "Oh, he's cautiously ecstatic, as you can imagine. All the new gadgets to play with, all the new markets to invade. He'll be in computer heaven once the lines are open."

  "Yes. That's what I thought." Roads pointed at the control van, which had just floated into view. "But what if he's outclassed? What if their computer technology beats his?"

  "It won't. He's easily the most sophisticated artificial intelligence on the planet. Being stuck in Kennedy for forty years hasn't kept him from growing."

  "The States won't approve of him. They hate biomodification as much as Kennedy does."

  "He knows that. But he's not biomodified; he's bio-transcended, as he puts it. A whole new class entirely."

  "But in their eyes — "

  "Yes, yes. Let's just say he'll keep his head low and leave it at that. He's got more to gain from an alliance with the States than any of us."

  Roads nodded. That much seemed to be true, even though it didn't jell with what he'd learned. Why would Morrow send Cati to kill anyone in favour of the Reassimilation he wanted to happen?

  "And here's the man himself," said Raoul sharply. "The invader from the north ..."

  The control van had reached level with the statue. General Stedman was visible from its upper entrance, waving every now and again. Whether word had spread or this section of the crowd was more genial than that by the Gate, there were no disturbances. Roads said nothing as the RUSAMC leader rumbled by on his unlikely vehicle, for all the world like Santa in a Christmas pageant.

  As though consciously echoing the metaphor, a long line of supply trucks followed the control caravan, all loaded down with food and equipment: the first shipment of outside goods to Kennedy Polis. Roads thought about Raoul's gloomy prediction. The first shipment was free, but who would pay for the second?

  He watched as the last of the trucks rolled by. The final vehicle was a ground-effect jeep. Two metres above it, a banner snapped and flicked in a nonexistent wind. There was no pole.

  A hologram, obviously, but it looked convincing enough. The blue and black RUSAMC emblem was as crisp as reality, with every detail sharply delineated. Roads had seen the design several times before, but had never studied it in detail. He did so now, using his implants to enhance the image.

  The motto was unclear, and seemed to be in French not Latin, suggesting possible Canadian ties. An animal crouched among symbolic heraldry, clutching a knife in its mouth. Something about the animal rang a bell, and he zoomed closer still. The image at the heart of the RUSAMC's coat of arms appeared crystal clear in his field of vision. Roads remembered a grey shape loping across a dark lawn, lean muscles rippling in moonlight.

  The animal on the RUSAMC coat of arms was a timber wolf...

  "Here's your pass," said Raoul, handing him a sliver of black plastic. "It'll get you through a side way: Exit Fourteen. Once you're in, it's up to you what you do."

  Roads accepted the pass and slipped it into a pocket. "Thanks. Tell Keith I owe him."

  "That you do." Raoul rose to his feet and dusted his pants. "Just be careful, man. Someone wants your arse."

  "I know. Everyone keeps telling me."

  The black man slid down the shins of the statue and vanished into the crowd.

  INTERLUDE

  4:00 p.m.

  The air in the ventilation shaft had become scaldingly hot, but he did not notice. Midway between sleep and wakefulness, he waited patiently for something to happen. What, exactly, he wasn't sure. Until his orders changed, he was incapable of moving.

  Outside his metal womb, he could hear birds, the whistle of the wind and a crowd of people gathering. The mingled voices reminded him of his life before Sanctuary: whenever crowds had gathered, it had always been to drive him away, or to kill him. Anger was part of this crowd's faint tone, but he could hear laughter among the arguments, and children, and singing.

  The people seemed to be waiting, jus
t like him.

  Time passed quickly. As the city focused its attention on a place a kilometre or so from him, he allowed himself to relax. No-one would be looking for him. He would be safe for a while — safe to rest, safe to sleep.

  He closed his eyes and curled tighter around himself.

  The dream, when it began, was unexpected — even welcome, in that it was familiar. It was one he'd had on several occasions before:

  He was dodging into a gutted building with bullets cracking like whiplashes at his naked back. As he stumbled up the stairs, he warded off the blows of an old woman wielding a broomstick. Although his hands were large enough to snap her like a twig, he did not.

  It had begun with a confrontation, as it always did. Perhaps he had walked into a village and been driven out ahead of the witch-hunt. Or he had been discovered in the wasteland by a band of fellow-wanderers and forced to retreat. He might even have been startled from hasty dream-sleep in some ruined shelter by a hand on his shoulder or a knife thrust in his face. His assailants were always strangers, and their brutality robbed them of any individuality they might have possessed. They mobbed him, tore at him, hunted him like an animal — when all he wanted to do was leave them alone, let them get on with their lives as they had before his arrival.

  But it was too late: the truth of his nature had come to light, and a near-primal anger had erupted, a tide of hatred directed solely at him, against which he was unable to defend himself. All he could do — all he was permitted to do — was flee for his life.

  The unreasoning wave of violence carried him on its crest for what felt like hours, until he despaired of ever awakening — until it seemed that it was his destiny to be persecuted, to run just ahead of the pack, never dying and never killing, forever.

  Yet, although the dream began as a nightmare, it did not normally end that way. As he fled, unable to fight the ones he was supposed to protect, he heard a woman calling to him. Her voice was soft and gentle, almost inaudible above the baying of the pack, but insistent. She called him by his real name — the name he and his brothers had once shared. She told him to come to her, to be with her, to love her and to protect her.

  No matter how much he ached to return her call, he could not. His throat was as silent in the dream as it was in waking life. His only course of action was to follow the voice to its source, to a city in the middle of a wilderness, surrounded by gnarled forests of hatred.

  The woman's name was Sanctuary; the city's name was Peace. And this was reality, beyond the dream. He had simply become so used to the nightmare in his years before Sanctuary that part of him still thought it would never end.

  But this time the dream didn't end the way it usually did, with him in that city of Peace and the woman called Sanctuary at his side.

  This time he found himself standing on a building in the heart of the city. A crowd had gathered beneath him, filling the streets as far as he could see: a veritable sea of people, all standing still and silent, all staring upward, watching him. The mute intensity of their regard made him nervous.

  Just as he realised that Sanctuary's voice had stopped calling for him, the crowd began to change. One by one, as though a wave had rippled across them, the people shimmered and vanished, leaving only a faint heat-flicker where they had been. The wave of invisibility spread rapidly through the silent masses, until the streets themselves seemed to liquefy and melt, and the city floated like a herd of icebergs in a sea of bent light.

  The people were still watching him. He could feel their combined stare like pointed fingers on his skin, testing, probing, dissecting, judging.

  Exposed and therefore vulnerable, he quailed and tried to hide. He ducked behind a ventilation duct, but that too dissolved into nothing, leaving him as naked as before. Panic welled in his chest as he ran from side to side, leaving a path of evaporated shelters in his wake. And still the crowd watched, the weight of eyes becoming heavier by the second.

  When the top of the building was smooth and featureless he fell to his hands and knees in despair. There was nowhere left to run: the long chase was over, and he had finally lost everything.

  Then the building itself vanished, sending him falling into a roiling gulf that pulled at him, yawned to accept his spinning body —

  "I am Lucifer."

  He awoke with a panicky start, the echoes of the voice still ringing in his mind.

  "I am Lucifer!"

  He screamed silently into the void, pounding the sides of the ventilation shaft with his feet and fists, exorcising the fear and hopelessness of the dream by attacking the space within which he cowered.

  The city hated him, everybody wanted to kill him, and his controller would not let him forget. Perhaps reality was the dream, and the nightmare had been biding its time all along.

  What had he done to deserve this?

  "I AM LUCIFER!" repeated the voice, more firmly still, as though sensing his anguish, his unwillingness to obey. He wanted to shout his defiance, to rebel against the authority that made him do wrong, made people afraid of him.

  But he could not voice his protest. He was as mute now as he had been in the dream. And the wrongness of disobeying far outweighed the crimes he was forced to commit.

  Regaining a measure of self control, he forced his heartbeat to slow and his panic to subside.

  Closing his eyes, he whispered acceptance of his fate outward into the distance.

  And the voice that called itself Lucifer told him exactly what he had to do.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  7:55 p.m.

  Mayor's House lay half a kilometre north of Kennedy City University. At the summit of a low rise, its white marble and plaster facade reflected the light of spotlights much as that of the long-destroyed White House had — and was just as well maintained, despite the Dissolution. The building was extensive, four storeys high, and contained most of the official chambers required by the Council. A ring of lawn approximately twenty metres across surrounded it, with a thick wall of trees shielding it from the city. The grounds were in turn protected by a three-metre-high mesh fence with security emplacements every fifty metres. Two wide gates formed the entrance and exit of a gravel driveway leading to the building's massive, pillared foyer. Apart from one or two official cars, the drive was normally empty; now, however, it served as a parking lot for the fifteen largest vehicles of the RUSAMC convoy, including the control van.

  Roads, watching from the shelter of the trees, noted the clockwork precision of the RUSAMC troops as they patrolled the area. Most wore night-specs and carried automatic weapons; every security pass, including his own, was checked before admission to the grounds was granted. Through the gloom, he could make out the occasional scampering robot shadowing the patrols and checking in spaces that the troops could not enter. Perhaps one hundred men and women had taken over the lawn, plus the local RSD squads beyond the fence: two hundred and fifty or more, he estimated, all to protect one man.

  General Stedman had left the control caravan shortly before sunset and entered Mayor's House on foot with a small contingent of bodyguards and officers. The control van, with its humming field-engines inactive, had settled on sturdy, retractable legs onto the gravel drive and hadn't moved since. Apart from that, and the ceaseless patrolling of troops and robots, the evening had been uneventful.

  Roads glanced at his watch: 8:00 p.m. The crowd of sightseers around Mayor's House had dispersed some time ago. He envied their ignorance. What happened in the next twenty-four hours could decide the fate of Kennedy Polis, once and for all.

  He turned at the sound of approaching feet. A woman in the uniform of an RSD officer ducked underneath a branch to join him at his unofficial post.

  "Sorry I'm late," Barney said, slightly out of breath. "I walked back in. No free lifts available."

  "That's okay. Did you bring it?"

  She slipped a rucksack from her shoulder. "As requested."

  "Thanks." He rummaged through the bag and removed her laptop.
>
  "The batteries are fully-charged," she said, putting a hand on his arm. "Are you okay? You didn't want to talk earlier — "

  "I couldn't." Roads squatted down and put the computer on his knees. A flickering glow painted patterns on his face as he switched it on. "Give me a second and I'll fill you in."

  The PolNet program booted automatically. Working in the dark, using his amplified sight to see the manual keyboard, he tapped his way into the network's root directory.

  "Anything happening out here?" Barney nodded restlessly towards the parked convoy.

  "Nothing much. Stedman hasn't reappeared, and neither has the Mayor. If I can get into the security program we might be able to find out what they're talking about." Roads shrugged. "Otherwise I'll have to go in person."

  "Morrow produced the goods, then?"

  "I hope so. I mean, I have a pass — but God only knows whether it'll get me into the building or not."

  Barney crouched down beside him. "You don't trust him?"

  "Not any more." While he fiddled with the program, Roads briefly outlined what he had found at Katiya's that afternoon: Keith Morrow's face in Cati's catalogue of non-verbal memories.

  Barney stared at him. "You mean the Head — ?"

  "Why not? He has access to all the city's databases, so stealing the CATI file wouldn't be a problem. He understands the old biotechnology better than I do. He can also hijack official transmitters to broadcast the code, if he needs to." Roads turned to face her. "I'm beginning to think he's the only person in Kennedy who could be Cati's controller."

  "So what's the problem, then? Why are you here instead of down at the harbour?"

  "Because it feels wrong ... somehow. I don't know why. What's his motive, Barney? What does he stand to gain by keeping the States out of Kennedy?"

  "Market share?" she suggested.

  "Perhaps. But that's still not enough."

  "Okay, then," said Barney. "Maybe he's afraid the States will catch up with him. He is outlaw tech, after all. If he thinks they're getting close, he might try something like this in self-defence."