by Todd McAulty
Soldiers. Had Hayduk finally discovered the reactor? Or were they Perez’s men, maybe just delivering equipment?
We weren’t going to find out down here. “Stay here,” I said. “I’ll go upstairs, see what’s going on. If everything’s clear, I’ll come downstairs and get you.”
She shook her head. “I’m coming with you.”
We rode the main elevators to the seventh floor. I was grateful for the opportunity to focus on Joy. It helped keep my mind off my own situation.
I put my hand on her shoulder. “You didn’t do anything wrong. No one will blame you for leaving.” She gave me a weak smile.
Joy stayed in the elevator when we reached the seventh floor. I left the bag with the suit in the elevator and stepped out to glance around. Everything seemed normal.
“Stay here,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
I strode quickly down the hall. There was a pair of soldiers walking toward me, and I was nervous until they passed by. I waited until they were well out of sight, and then headed into the conference room the medical team had commandeered for the bioreactor.
The place was still a hive of activity. I counted nine people working on the reactor, plus two technicians fussing over the process control software in the corner. Hardly anyone noticed me when I walked in. I spotted both people who’d been on the team accompanying Sergei and Joy during the theft.
So they hadn’t been arrested, then. That was a bit of good news, at least.
They’d made a lot of progress just in the hours I’d been gone. They were just about done wrapping insulation around the cooling pipes, and everything else looked ready. Three new tables had been set up in the corner, with cylindrical devices I assumed to be the centrifuges placed on top of them. Two carpenters were already building an isolation unit around the tables.
“Has anyone seen Sergei?” I asked.
Much of the work stopped. I could tell from the look on every face that turned toward me that the answer was no.
“Were soldiers here a while ago?”
“Yeah,” said one of the welders. “They were looking for the medical station. They wanted to buy condoms, I think. I sent them downstairs.”
Condoms. Of course they were. “Thanks,” I said. I left and returned to Joy.
She had stepped out of the elevator, carrying the bag with the combat suit, and was bravely taking slow steps down the hallway alone toward the bioreactor. I intercepted her.
“Everything’s fine,” I said. “But there’s still no sign of Sergei.”
She took both bits of news with equal stoicism. “Perhaps I should rejoin the team,” she said. “The first seed batch will go into the reactor in a few hours. The control software will need to be ready.”
“Hey—don’t give up just yet. I thought you were going to help me look for him?”
“How?”
“The old-fashioned way. On foot.”
We dropped off the suit in my room, where Croaker greeted us both excitedly. We waited there until 5:00 a.m., when the AGRT curfew officially lifted. Then, for the next two hours, until the rosy fingers of dawn started to peek around the massive steam clouds rising out of the lake, the three of us did slow circuits of the city blocks between the hotel and Columbia College.
“What’s wrong with your dog?” Joy asked, the third time Croaker collapsed in a happy panting heap.
“She’s a rescue dog,” I said.
“What does that mean?”
“Well, in her case it means she was rescued from an abandoned condominium, nearly starved to death. She doesn’t have much stamina.”
“That’s awful!”
“Yeah, but she’s recovering okay. This is the longest walk I’ve ever had with her, actually.”
“She looks terrible. We should go back.”
“She’ll probably last longer than we will.” Just as I said this, Croaker rose up on wobbly legs and set off again, away from the hotel, pulling on the makeshift leash I’d fashioned in the lab.
“Are you sure she’s okay?” Joy asked, falling in step at my side.
“When she wants to head back, she’ll let us know.”
As it turned out, Croaker did outlast us both. She needed plenty of rest stops, but was excited to be out in the cold morning air and seemed ready to go all morning. But as the sky got lighter, both Joy and I began to flag. I was exhausted. My eyes hurt, and it was getting harder to focus. Joy wasn’t doing any better.
“Let’s get back to the hotel,” I said. “Get some rest.”
“I cannot sleep while Sergei is missing,” she said miserably.
“Let’s get some breakfast at least, before we head out again.”
She nodded at that. We turned around, heading back north. I kept scanning west every time we reached an intersection, looking for a lone figure. But except for a pair of bicyclists we saw on Michigan, the streets were empty.
There was something I’d been meaning to ask Joy, and her comment about not being able to sleep seemed like a good opening. “Are you and Sergei . . . ?” I began.
“No,” she said. There was a hint of annoyance in her voice. “He is too involved in his work.”
“That he is. He’s a dedicated man.”
“Too dedicated, sometimes,” she said.
“How long have you known him?”
“Not long. He assisted Dr. Thibault during a critical equipment failure in October. We worked together then.”
“You work with Thibault?”
“Yes. I’m stationed at the Venezuelan field hospital in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with Dr. Thibault. I was part of the team Sergei alerted to the threat of the pathogen several weeks ago. We’ve been working together to assess the threat. Dr. Thibault believes she is in charge of the team.” She smiled. “But really, it’s Sergei.”
“Yeah.” I knew exactly what she meant.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw a drone gliding up behind us. I turned, watching it warily.
At least, I think it was a drone. I’m not sure what it was, to be honest with you. It wasn’t an aerial unit. It looked like a one-ton, riderless motorcycle. It was gliding along South Columbus Drive, virtually soundlessly. It ignored us, rolling to a stop about fifty feet north.
Long vertical rods extruded out of the thing, like thick antennae, some more than fifteen feet tall. One flowered into a mini-sensor array at the top, pointed to the east.
“What the hell is that thing?” I whispered to Joy. We were on the west side of the street, headed north. It appeared to have absolutely no interest in us, but I’d had my share of run-ins with hostile machines already today, thank you.
“That is American Union technology,” Joy said.
“The sensors?”
“Yes. It is taking long-range readings on the lake.”
“What’s a Union machine doing here?”
“Spying,” she said simply.
Being that close to a Union surface drone made me nervous. Fortunately, after a few seconds it retracted its sensors and began rolling away, gliding gracefully between the abandoned cars on Columbus as it accelerated, before turning left and vanishing to the west.
“This is why I don’t like to walk around Chicago,” Joy said, staring after it. “You run into machines more often than people. Who knows what they’re all up to?”
“No one,” I agreed, before a sudden thought hit me.
“What is it?” Joy asked.
“Come on,” I said, squeezing her shoulder and unable to keep the excitement out of my voice. “I think I know how to find Sergei.”
We hurried back to the hotel. Joy was obviously curious, but she kept her questions to herself. As we approached the doors, both of us steeled ourselves. But the young Venezuelan soldiers on duty made no move to arrest either of us. They simply looked bored, and one of them even held the door open for us.
Just inside the door, I saw the tall rods of the new metal detectors. Croaker and I passed between them without comment, and Joy foll
owed. If Hayduk had had them installed all over the city, as Sergei had suggested, then he was definitely taking his search for the combat suit seriously. If they were at every exit from the hotel, they’d certainly make permanently disposing of the suit a challenge.
Once we were in the lobby, Joy started for the elevators. She stopped in surprise when I headed toward the escalator instead.
“You cannot access the second floor,” she said, catching up. “It is forbidden.”
“Stay close,” I told her.
As always, Zircon Border made a striking and imposing figure at the bottom of the escalator. Joy followed at my side, but fell back as we got close, eyeing the hulking robot nervously.
“Good morning, Mr. Simcoe,” Zircon Border said as we approached. “Everything work out okay this morning?”
“It did,” I said. “Thank you so much for your help. May I introduce you to Dr. Joy Lark? She’s with the Venezuelan surgical team.”
“Delighted,” said Zircon Border. “I’ve seen you upstairs, working on that big secret project.”
Joy didn’t respond. She glanced at me uncertainly, then took a hesitant step closer. She’d passed Zircon Border in the basement a few times now, but always in the dark, and she’d never spoken with him. Now she looked him up and down, searching in vain for a head she could address.
“Say hello,” I suggested.
“Hello,” she said uncertainly.
“Hello!” boomed Zircon Border. “She seems rather shy,” he said to me.
“She is,” I agreed. “But she’s marvelous when you get to know her.”
“Dr. Lark, I’d love to know what you’re building up there,” Zircon Border said, his voice friendly. “I don’t have many eyes on the seventh floor, and to be honest all the equipment you’ve carted up there has me very curious. It is a cryogenics unit?”
Joy glanced at me helplessly.
“I’m sure Dr. Lark would be delighted to discuss that later,” I said smoothly. “But right at the moment we need to get ahold of Black Winter.”
“I’d be happy to help with that,” Zircon Border said. “I can ask the front desk to call a courier for you. They can have a message to the Manhattan Consulate in twelve minutes.”
I scratched my neck. “Unfortunately, it’s a bit of an emergency. And, given the choice, we’d prefer to contact him discreetly.”
“I see. Diplomatic stuff, huh?”
“Nothing like that. It’s a personal matter. But it should be handled with some discretion.”
“Gotcha. Let’s avoid formal channels, then. Fortunately, there’s an ongoing debate in the private cetacean discussion forums on how to interpret certain narrow-band signal forms. Nineteen Black Winter is an active participant.”
“That’s ideal. Can you get him a message through those forums?”
“I already have. I’ve told him privately that you and Dr. Lark need to get in touch. He has already replied, asking how he can be of assistance.”
“Excellent. I knew I came to the right place. Can you tell him we need to meet him, as soon as possible?”
“Certainly. Nineteen Black Winter says he can pick you up in a Consulate car. Would that be acceptable?”
“Fantastic. Zircon Border, once again you have proven yourself to be one of the most capable and amiable machines of my acquaintance. We are both in your debt.”
“Think nothing of it. Nineteen Black Winter says his car will be in front of the hotel in approximately fourteen minutes, and he will be inside.”
I bowed. “You have my thanks.”
“Not at all. Don’t forget to come back when you want to talk to my pod!”
Joy whispered to me as we headed back across the lobby, “How did you meet him?”
“A mutual friend,” I said.
She glanced over my shoulder at the clock by the front desk. “If we have fourteen minutes, I’m going to check in with the reactor room and make sure the batch seed culture is ready for insertion. Do you want to meet in the front of the hotel in ten minutes?”
“Sounds good,” I said.
We rode the elevator up together. Joy got off on the seventh floor, and I rode it all the way up to my floor. I dropped Croaker off in my room, spent a few minutes in the bathroom, splashed some water on my face, and was back in the lobby with time to spare.
I waited on the curb in front of the hotel, watching the empty streets of Chicago. The AGRT has limited street traffic in the city to official vehicles only, which means cars of any kind are a rare sight these days. There were none in sight at the moment. To the east, massive thunderclouds were billowing up out of the lake like smoke from an apocalyptic forest fire, and I could see static discharges between the clouds—great blue bolts that illuminated them from deep within, giving them stark shape and definition.
The streets were empty of traffic, but the sidewalks weren’t empty of soldiers. The AGRT had established an additional checkpoint west of the hotel after the Juno attack, and I watched a squad of off-duty soldiers walking back toward my location. Across the street, the last remnants of the battle had been swept up against the stone railing overlooking the Chicago River. Most of it looked to be metal debris from the robot that had lost to the Juno. I wondered what had happened to it.
Joy joined me after a minute, just after the soldiers passed. She handed me a green Anjou pear. “I stopped at the hotel restaurant,” she said.
“Thank you.”
She was holding a grapefruit. She peeled it expertly and began to eat it like an orange. I watched her, shaking my head in admiration. I like grapefruit just fine, but not without a little sugar.
“Of all the things for the restaurant to have in stock,” I said.
“Hmm?”
“Your grapefruit. They can’t seem to get fresh milk, but they can get a fruit shipment from Florida?”
“Grapefruit can ship without refrigeration,” she said. “They’re like apples.”
“Well, they sure as hell don’t grow within five hundred miles of Chicago.”
Behind us, more soldiers came out of the hotel. One of them looked familiar—one of Van de Velde’s men, maybe? They started talking with the others in low tones. It made me nervous for a few minutes, but they didn’t even glance our way.
That wouldn’t last. Sooner or later, soldiers were going to come for us. I was glad to have something to do, something to keep my mind off of it. Right now I desperately didn’t want to be alone in my room—afraid to sleep, waiting for them to pound on the door. Exhausted as I was, no way I could sleep, knowing that soon enough I’d be shaken awake by Van de Velde’s soldiers and dragged into custody in my underwear. No, when they took me, I wanted to be alert and awake. Well, awake, anyway.
I stood on the curb, eating my pear, mulling over the morning’s events. We had the centrifuges—that was good. No one was under arrest yet, which I suppose was also good news. That might change at any moment, but for now I was focusing on the positive.
There was something else nagging at me. Something I hadn’t mentioned to Joy.
At the start of my long walk back through the coal tunnels this morning, I’d been very concerned that I wouldn’t get permission to retrace my route back through the colony. There was no sign of my guide, Stone Cloud, and I knew I’d be stopped the moment I reached the borders of the colony.
But that didn’t happen. It didn’t happen because I didn’t meet a single robot on my return trip. The colony was completely deserted.
The colony itself was still there. The buzzing computational engine, the cooling forge. The flickering displays and small fires. Nothing looked much disturbed. It looked as if everyone had simply stepped away for a moment.
“Hello?” I’d called out into the tunnels as I made my way through the heart of the subterranean robot village. There was no response.
I’d heard something up ahead. The steady creak of chains got louder as I got closer, until I was finally able to make out what it was in the flickering ligh
t of a small coal fire.
It was a harness. It dangled from the ceiling, one loose chain swinging a few inches above the floor. When I’d passed this way before, with Stone Cloud at my side, there’d been a legless robot strapped into that harness. Now it was slowly coming to a rest in the still air of the tunnel.
Empty.
I walked all the way through the colony, until I came to the place where the pair of fires burned, where I’d first met Stone Cloud. One of the fires had gone out, but the other was still burning. There was no sign of Stone Cloud, or of the big robot he’d been with.
All the robots had vanished.
Perhaps it was nothing. Perhaps all the robots gathered a few times a day in a secluded chamber somewhere. Perhaps they got together to play cricket. Or perhaps they were like the Sentient Cathedral, and they met to pray and actively commune with God.
But I didn’t think so. I had nothing solid to base that on, nothing except a palpable feeling of dread as I’d made the long walk back through the deserted robot colony, smelling the fires and hearing the stubborn silence. Something unexpected had happened here.
I breathed deep of the cold morning air, tried to clear my head. I shouldn’t be worrying about robots. I had my own damn troubles.
But what if something terrible had happened to them? What if I had caused it, somehow? Had the Orbit Pebble gone berserk after its encounter with Van de Velde and her team, chasing them off? Or had something else found them, down there in the dark?
I brooded on that, and other things, while I stood watching the deserted city streets.
“Fourteen minutes,” said Joy, rubbing her arms and shivering. “Didn’t that big Zircon robot say a bike courier could make the trip in twelve? Why does a car take longer?”
“You’ve never seen the way those bike messengers handle these streets,” I said. “They move like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Do you want to wait inside?” Joy asked hopefully.
“I’m sure it won’t be long. How are things upstairs?” I asked, mostly to take her mind off the cold.
“Not good,” she said. “The Venezuelans have denied our request for a power upgrade for the seventh floor. Without it, we cannot initiate the reactor. We are at a standstill.”