Have Robot, Will Travel

by Alexander C. Irvine

  He couldn’t have been out for long, because when he was able to register his surroundings again Derec could see people running through the spacious room he’d crashed into. A voice came from the flier’s console: “…this facility will be evacuated within the next five minutes. All personnel evacuate immediately. Terran Military Command assumes no responsibility for loss of life or property following five minutes from the broadcast of this message.”

  Derec tuned the rest out. He’d gotten the important number. Ten 239

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  minutes. He found the flier’s harness release and sprung himself to topple out of his seat into the tiny cabin space behind the cockpit.

  The flier was largely intact, and all of its inertial dampers had triggered, saving Derec’s life and keeping him from serious injury.

  His nose felt broken, and he had a feeling that in the morning he wouldn’t be able to turn his head, but he was breathing and ambulat-ory.

  It took two hard kicks to spring the flier’s hatch, and then Derec had to drop two meters to the floor. The Terran military’s message droned from an intercom system, echoing over the commotion in the room as Nucleomorph staff ran for their lives. The flier had shattered most of the glass on the side of the hall he’d impacted, coming to rest in a system of girders that supported the transparent domed ceiling.

  The upper half of the atrium’s internal walls was ringed with office facades, through which Derec could see people moving around. Exactly the kind of commanding position an executive would consider his due; Brixa would be up there if he was anywhere.

  Derec saw a stairwell and ran toward it, banging into a portly woman on the bottom step. “Where’s Brixa?” he shouted at her.

  She waved up the stairs and ran. Derec bounded up the stairs and turned left. Hologrammed plaques identified the occupant of each office, and the fifth door said ZEV BRIXA. He opened it and went in.

  Brixa lay in a heap behind his desk, as dead as any one man could be. At least Derec assumed it was Brixa; he’d never met the man, and the corpse was disfigured by the force of the assault. Whoever it was had been beaten with the kind of savagery and monstrous strength that could only come from a cyborg; arcs and spatters of blood were strung across the furniture and the flatscreens that took up the office walls. On each screen was a view of a different part of the complex.

  Leaving the dead man, Derec went from one to the other, looking for a clue about Ariel’s whereabouts.

  He didn’t see her, but one thing Derec saw did catch his attention.

  The cyborg leader, Basq, was bulling his way through a tide of fleeing 240

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  technicians in what looked like a research wing. People bounced away from him like hailstones.

  Derec checked the caption of the view as Basq passed from it. He pressed his hand against the screen and said, “Directions to this location.”

  The facility RI was apparently still functioning; a holographic map appeared next to the display. Derec took it in, and then he ran.

  When he got there, Basq was gone, and the area was deserted. He’d been wrong about it being a research wing; it appeared to be a medical area, set below ground level. Doors stood open, revealing what were unmistakably operating tables.

  Derec wondered what Basq had been doing in the area, or if the cyborg had just happened to be passing through. Where had he gone?

  Derec looked up and down the hall, and that was when he saw it: next to a door, a screen listing Ariel Burgess as patient and Krista Weil as surgeon. The door was broken in and smeared with blood, the frame bent and the room within empty. Where was Ariel?

  “You’re too late,” someone said from behind him.

  The speaker was a small, wiry woman with bruises on her throat, bleeding from a puncture on the back of her right hand. Her voice was hoarse. Derec had no idea where she’d come from, or if she’d been there all along without him noticing.

  “Too late how?” Derec asked.

  “She woke up. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but she did, and she got out. It’ll be years before I get to try the procedure on another Spacer.”

  Derec wanted to kill her. Instead he asked, “Are you Krista Weil?”

  She nodded.

  “This complex is going to go up in smoke any minute,” Derec said.

  “You can’t sit here.”

  Weil gave him a pitying look. “Indeed I can. This was my work. If it is destroyed…” She shrugged. “I’m Terran. I won’t live long enough to rebuild it from the ground up.” A bleak smile broke over her face.

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  “Brixa told me I should have done it myself. Too uncertain, though, at least that’s what I thought. But that wily bastard was right, as usual.”

  Except right at the end, when he was badly wrong about Basq.

  “Where did Ariel go?”

  She shrugged and wandered away down the hall. Derec would have gone after her, but if he hadn’t used up the five minutes yet, there wasn’t much left. He ran down the hall in the opposite direction, taking the first staircase he saw and willing himself to believe Ariel had gone this same way.

  As he got to the top of the stairs, the first explosions shook dust down around him. Derec ducked his head at the impact, glanced up to see part of the corridor collapsed and smoke billowing toward him.

  He turned in the other direction and ran on.

  Derec had just turned down a side corridor, with an emergency exit visible at the far end, when a door on the left side of the hall burst outward and a robot appeared—a Cole-Yahner domestic with a blast wound on the side of its head and visibly damaged optics.

  “Echo,” it said. “Echo. Echo.” It was Parapoyos, blinded now but making his crippled housing work as well as it could.

  Without facing him, Parapoyos said, “Who’s that?”

  “Where’s Ariel, Parapoyos?” Derec asked.

  Now the robot did face him. “Well, if it isn’t Derec Avery,” Parapoyos said. “Your girlfriend doesn’t need you around. She’s gone.” A distant explosion sounded, and one more alarm added its counterpoint to the general din. “I’m guessing the Terrans fried her once she got out of the building, if she did. Doesn’t matter much. I’ve got a ride to catch.”

  Turning away, the robot moved down the hall. Then Basq came out the same door it had used. “Parapoyos,” he said.

  The robot halted. Basq took a step toward it. His hands, hanging open at his sides, dripped blood from gashes across his knuckles, and 242

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  more blood streaked his face and hair. “You were called to answer once, and shown mercy. Again you have betrayed us.”

  “Mercy,” Parapoyos said. “You made me into a tool. Blame yourself if the tool had more functions than you realized.”

  Faster than Derec could follow, Basq closed the distance to the robot and wrenched off one of its legs.

  “Gernika is ashes,” Basq said, standing over the supine robot. “You did that. The previous generation you only turned out to die. This one you killed yourself.”

  “And what did you do to me?” Parapoyos asked.

  “Gave you better than you deserved. An error I now rectify.” Basq flipped the robot’s leg aside. He knelt beside it. Parapoyos struck at him, and Basq let the blows land as he worked his fingers into a seam in the robot’s torso and tore it open.

  “You ungrateful bastard,” snarled the voice of Kynig Parapoyos.

  “You’d be dead if it wasn’t for me.”

  “I would also be free of guilt,” Basq said.

  Exposed beneath the shell of the torso was a gleaming silver ovoid, with hoses running into and out of it and extruded filaments connect-ing it to what Derec could identify as the robot’s primary systems interfaces. With horrifying delicacy, Basq snapped each of these filaments. The robot’s arms fell limp.

  “Basq, don’t. You’d have done the s
ame thing,” Parapoyos pleaded.

  “At one time,” Basq said. “As recently as today. No longer.”

  With the stiff fingers of his left hand he punched a hole through the ovoid. Parapoyos howled, a wordless wail that abruptly became a series of choked grunts as Basq tore open the ovoid and ripped loose the brain of Kynig Parapoyos.

  In the silence, Derec was aware of his own breathing. Basq held the brain in both hands and squeezed. Tissue and blood spurted out from between his fingers to spatter on the floor, and it was done.

  Basq stood. “We have all been used, Derec Avery,” he said. “It is time we made sure we are not used again.”

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  Ariel ran down the corridor until she saw a stairwell. She glanced in and saw that it only went up, so she took it, on the chance that she was undergound. One flight up, she opened the door and came face to face with Basq.

  “You live,” he said. “A fortunate surprise.”

  “For both of us.”

  Static flared from the complex intercom. “Attention. This facility will be evacuated within five minutes, on the orders of Terran Military Command. All personnel evacuate immediately. Terran Military Command assumes no responsibility for loss of life and property following five minutes from the broadcast of this message.”

  Basq bared his teeth in a feral grin. “A good day to die, as the saying goes.”

  “A better day to get out and live,” Ariel said. “Let’s go.”

  “If they will hunt me here, they will hunt me anywhere,” Basq said.

  “I was naïve to believe that you could protect us.”

  The comment stung, but Ariel let it pass. “Basq, I need you to survive this. Is Gernika destroyed?”

  “Gernika was always destroyed. It is in the nature of Gernika to 244

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  suffer destruction.” The cyborg was coming apart, Ariel realized. “I have already visited Zev Brixa. Now I seek only Parapoyos, and my work will be done.”

  A pair of Nucleomorph security personnel came around the nearest corner. Seeing Basq, they leveled their weapons. “Stay right there!”

  “Basq,” Ariel said. She felt his motion rather than saw it; he was gone before the guards had finished shouting. One of them fired reflexively, gouging a hole in the wall less than a meter from her.

  She dove to the floor with a scream, and the guards ran to her.

  One of them hung back a little, covering her with his rifle, while the other squatted. “Who are you?” he shouted in her face.

  “Ariel Burgess, legal liaison to the Triangle,” she said.

  Disbelief was plain on the guard’s face. She was naked, and had immediately before been seen talking to Basq. It was easy to see how that would be difficult to square with her claimed identity.

  “Look,” Ariel said. “Arrest me if you want, just as long as you do it once we’ve gotten out of here. We’ve got to stop this.”

  They were coming out the front doors, and Ariel had just convinced one of the guards to lend her his comm, when the first raider buzzed in low over the trees and began firing. The first volley blew out three walls of the first building she had toured with Brixa. All those people, recuperating in their berths, their lives blown out like candles for the sin of wanting to live. Ariel was screaming, stabbing emergency codes into the comm and demanding access to Exa Lamina, Kalienin, someone in the Terran military who could stop this. Her calls were intercepted by a military monitor with a voice like cold ashes, who informed her that no communication was permitted from her location at that time.

  “You inhuman bastard!” she sobbed at him. “There are children in there!”

  “You need to get yourself out of there, Miss Burgess,” the monitor said.

  He terminated the link, and Ariel looked up to see two more military 245

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  craft converging on the complex. The guards dragged her across the open field to the fence, and through it to the other side, where she watched building after building disintegrate in blinding flashes and columns of smoke. Ariel stared at the carnage long after the explosions had blinded her. In the afterimages, she saw the bright colors and simple shapes of the playroom, with its children running and laughing with joy at the strength of their new bodies.

  When it was done, elements of the Nova Levis militia arrived in a column of aerial transports. A medic draped a blanket around her.

  She accepted it and walked away, refusing his attempts to examine her. Her only injury was the small tear at the inside of her left elbow, and allowing him to treat it when there must have been other survivors in the wreckage of Nucleomorph would have been an obscenity.

  Enough obscenity, Ariel thought. Enough of all of this. If Brixa and Krista Weil are dead, and Basq, does that justify this?

  I will take part no longer.

  An aerial fire-suppression crew appeared and began foaming the ruins. Ariel watched it, and at first didn’t notice that someone had sat on the ground next to her. After a while she looked over and saw Derec.

  “I went in there looking for you,” he said. “Basq told me you’d already gotten out, but I wasn’t sure whether to believe him.”

  “Basq doesn’t lie. At least he never did to me. He held things back, but he never told me an active falsehood.”

  “Puts him a step above the rest of them.”

  Ariel nodded.

  “I saw him kill Parapoyos,” Derec said.

  Still nodding, Ariel said, “He said he was going to.” After a pause, she added, “Where did he go after that?”

  Derec shrugged. “He didn’t say. I doubt he got out.”

  For a while they watched the foam settle over Nucleomorph. Then Ariel said, “Kalienin did this. And Lamina.”

  “Not just them,” Derec said. His face was bleak, and even after 246

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  everything she’d gone through in the last day, Ariel found herself afraid to hear what he might say.

  Yet she gathered herself and said, “Tell me.”

  It was a week or so later that Ariel answered a knock at her door to find Filoo shifting his weight from foot to foot, and trying, without much success, to look her in the eye. “I’m surprised to see you, Filoo,”

  she said. “Did you survive Gernika?”

  “I got out, yeah.” Filoo tried to bite back what was coming next, but he couldn’t. “Because Vorian tipped me off.”

  “Anyone seen Masid?”

  Filoo shook his head. “Be blunt about it, I don’t think anyone’ll ever find him without running a gene sampler over the whole place.

  It’s not easy having to be grateful to that conniving sneak.”

  Ariel had to laugh. “Do you want to come in?”

  “No. I came to tell you about a meeting you should go to.” He handed her a flimsy with a handwritten address and date on it. The address was in New Nova, the date two days away. There was no signature, but below the information was a crude outline of a horse trying to rise to its feet.

  Ariel folded it into a pocket. “I’ll be there.”

  “Avery, too,” Filoo said, and walked away.

  She walked to Derec’s lab. He didn’t want to leave, but she showed him the note, and he frowned and followed her outside.

  “Basq?” he asked when they’d walked some distance down the street into a residential block.

  “Filoo was the courier. I’m not sure who else he’d be running messages for.”

  “So Filoo’s alive, too.” Derec mused over this. “I’ve got Hofton’s datum in storage. I wonder how much he knows.”

  “If they know Basq is alive, they might do something again.” It was still hard for Ariel to speak directly of Hofton. She had known him—it—for years, and felt deeply betrayed by his subterfuge. Also 247

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  murderously angry about his provocation of the Gernika massacre.

/>   Yet there was vindication at her furious opposition to Derec’s construction of Bogard—how many people were dead now because Bogard and Hofton had given the Three Laws a utilitarian revision?

  And who had made that possible?

  Derec shook his head. “I don’t think so. They’ve taken care of the cyborg problem. It’ll be a long time before someone attempts it again.”

  “That’s what they thought after the last one.”

  “What do you want me to say, Ariel? Eventually it’ll be true. No one is going to just let cyborgs develop, and now that Gernika exists as a precedent, anyone who starts developing cyborgs is going to know that bombs will fall sooner rather than later.”

  The destruction of Gernika and Nucleomorph had served another purpose, far from Nova Levis. The fact that a number of humans and Spacers had died in the raids provoked a furor even among the Managin segments of the Terran electorate, and their discontent was nothing compared to the volcanic outrage coming from the Settled worlds at this ruthless exercise of authority. The Spacers, too, had made it clear that another unilateral action of similar nature would mean war, and a skirmish had broken out between Spacer and Terran ships around Kopernik. Faced with the tipping point into open slaughter, both sides had yet to blink. The mood on all of humanity’s planets was bleak and outraged.

  The Gernika massacre was generally viewed as a sacrifice of lives on Nova Levis to make a political point on Earth, and nowhere was this feeling more loudly voiced than on Nova Levis itself. The Triangle was hunkered down, with President Chivu unlikely to survive and rumors swirling that he would take down a large number of the top legislative leadership with him. Street unrest was on the rise, and the attention of Earth and the Fifty Worlds was elsewhere.

  Put another way: the horse was trying to rise.

  “Will you come to the meeting, Derec?” Ariel asked.

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  Silence between them, with the rustle of leaves on the breeze, sounds of traffic and human voices on Nova Boulevard.