“But it wasn’t just business for her,” he insisted. “She loves me, like I love her. I know it!”
“And you’re sure she’s innocent?”
“Yes, sir!”
“You know that Dow did some horrible things to her?”
“Yes! She…she told me!”
Interesting. Eve hadn’t been inclined to give me details about her clientele until Manchester had told her to. If she’d talked about it with Henry, maybe she did feel something for him.
I wasn’t ready to believe that a bioroid could feel love, however. Henry was deceiving himself, I thought—a love sick, love-blinded puppy.
“If you really believe Eve is innocent,” I told him, “you’ll be able to help her best by telling me everything you know.”
“Okay.” He didn’t like it, but he was scared to death, not only for himself, but for her.
“So…you knew she was there that night? With Dow?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How did you know?”
“Mr. Green told me. At the Challenger Nearside Terminal, just before I went to the hotel.”
“He told you she was with Dow?”
“Yes…”
“What did you do?”
“I took the suitcase through the hotel lobby and up to the hallway. I…I stopped outside of Room Twelve, though. I listened at the door.”
“Those doors are well-insulated.”
“Yes. But I have very good hearing. I could…I could hear what he was doing to her.”
“And what did you do then?”
“I took the suitcase to Room Sixteen, as I’d been ordered. I sat on the bed and assembled it.”
I could hear the strain in his voice. “You wanted to go back to Room Twelve and break that party up, didn’t you?”
A strangled sob came across the intercom cord.
“When, when Mr. Green told me about Eve, told me she was with Dow, he told me I could help her! He told me I could do something about it, about Dow…that all I needed to do was take that laser tunneler into Room Twelve and use it to kill him! He gave me a card key to the room. He told me that no one would ever know, that I could take Eve and they would help me get away, maybe down to Earth! They would give me more money. We could be together. We could start over!…”
“Whoa. Who’s ‘they’? Who would help you get away, start over?”
“SAM.”
That rocked me. Maybe I’d been wrong jumping to conclusions about Human First. SAM, the Simulant Abolitionist Movement, had political connections with Humanity Labor, but they were a separate organization entirely. Where the anti-simulant groups wanted to do away with clones in the workforce by any means necessary, SAM wanted to do away with slavery. Full civil rights for clones, including the vote, free speech, and an equal chance at jobs for full, equal pay.
But this still didn’t smell right. There have always been rumors that SAM was trying to organize some sort of rebellion among the simulants, but in all my years with the NAPD I’d never seen any real proof. So far, SAM’s fight for freedom among clones had involved lawyers and public relations, not murder.
“Sir, they’re coming. They’re going to be looking for me!”
I nodded. “Okay. Get on the hopper. I’m taking you into protective custody.”
On the hopper, we disconnected the intercom cable and switched on our radios. Charlie seemed to understand that we were headed back to the big 2M.
Twenty minutes later, we were descending through the black sky, the main Melange Mining facility in sight just a few kilometers ahead.
Then something hit the safety railing a couple of centimeters from my right hand, hit it hard, splitting the metal tube open and sending a shock through my hand and wrist despite my glove. The impact occurred in complete silence—sound doesn’t travel through vacuum—and made me swear and lurch back a step.
Turning, I looked up and back.
And that’s when I realized we were no longer alone in that sky.
Chapter Thirteen
Day 6
“We’ve got company!” I called over the radio. “Look!”
Two silver skyhoppers, larger than ours, were approaching fast, fifty meters behind us and perhaps twenty meters higher. Standing on each hopper were two men in white space suits: one driving, one with a rifle.
They were shooting at us.
I felt a jolt through my boots as a round struck the minihopper’s undercarriage. The craft lurched to one side, threatening to tumble. One of the big water tanks had been breached, and the water inside was blasting out into space like a rocket’s exhaust. Charlie struggled silently with the controls, taking us lower. I slapped him on his arm, pointing urgently. Take us to the base! But we continued our erratic descent as the skyhoppers behind us raced closer. Three meters above the gray surface, the turtleback released the controls and leaped over the side, dropping slowly to the ground, hitting and bouncing in a billowing gray cloud, then skittering away at high speed.
Had he just panicked and run, or was this part of a setup? I didn’t have time to think about it just then. I stepped into the pilot’s spot and grabbed the controls, two joysticks half a meter apart, one controlling speed and direction, one controlling pitch and yaw. The design was simple enough, but it takes experience and a delicate touch to handle a small craft like that. My experience was with Strikers, which are just a bit larger, but I was able to pull us up before we plowed into regolith, and start us moving forward again on a level plane.
“They’re getting closer,” Henry called. “Watch out!”
He ducked, and a bullet slammed into the deck grating a few centimeters from my left foot. I hauled over on the pitch and direction controls, sending us skittering just above the surface to the right. We were still leaking from one tank and that was making handling the minihop damned tough, but as I banked the platform I saw a trio of dust geysers puff silently from the surface ahead and below. If one of those rounds even nicked my suit it would be bad. Yes, I’d had respirocyte injections when I was in the military, but explosive decompression is no one’s friend. It would put me in a world of hurt—probably blind me as moisture froze on the inside of my helmet and on the surfaces of my eyeballs, and likely incapacitate me as my lungs were sucked dry.
I found myself thinking of Bob Vargas, of the agonized expression frozen on his wide-eyed face outside the airlock door.
I twisted the controls left, then right…then right again, abruptly changing course to head back toward our pursuers. The maneuver surprised them. They’d dropped almost to our level by that time and it looked like I was trying to ram. They split, left and right, and I hurtled between them, swinging back through a sharp 180-degree turn as they slowed and turned around.
My Number Three water tank was showing empty. The minihop’s mass was badly unbalanced now, but at least the water jet wasn’t trying to throw me into a tumble. Another geyser spat dust silently from the surface off to one side. I think the most terrifying part of the entire encounter was its utter and complete deathly silence. No gunshots. No screaming ricochets or thumps of bullets hitting dust, no screech of steam jets.
Silence.
Well, I could hear my own breathing, rasping loudly inside my helmet, and the pounding of my own heartbeat in my ears.
“They’re getting closer!” Henry called over the radio.
I risked a glance back over my shoulder. One hopper was fifty meters back, the other thirty. The passenger in the nearest skyhopper aimed his weapon.
With a nightmarish detachment of thought and emotion, I noticed that his weapon was an M460 military assault rifle with a bullpup magazine, that he was using a camera-sighting unit so he could aim the thing while wearing a space helmet, and that he had the weapon’s selector switch on full auto because I could see the twinkle at the muzzle as he fired. Even with the camera sight, he was having trouble hitting us. Between the movement of his own skyhopper and the way I was jerking my minihop around, most of his shots were go
ing wild.
They were slug-throwers rather than lasers. That was a good thing, though not unexpected. The military has “man-portable” lasers, but they are considered such only as a courtesy. You need either a massive battery to give a laser enough juice to do serious damage, or the ability to hold the beam on-target, at a time when the target is going to be doing its very best to move. Army laser rifles aren’t as big or as massive as the mining laser that sliced up Dow, but they come close. For this kind of work, though, you needed either old-fashioned slug-throwers like the M460, or you needed linear accelerator rifles.
Our pursuers, it seemed, had gone the old-fashioned route. The bullpup design packed one hundred .115mm caseless rounds into a cassette magazine clipped to the butt. The way the one guy was spraying at us, I wondered if we could just play dodge-’em until his weapon ran dry.
Hard left!
Who were these guys? They wore suits like mine, though with white torsos rather than orange. They were standard issue for Melange Mining’s airlocks, but probably standard for every other airlock in Heinlein, too.
If they were trying to kill us, they knew who we were. Henry had been afraid that someone in Melange would come out to check on his radio silence…or that they might overhear what he had to tell me. His record said that he’d been involved in trouble with human miners before, that his human co-workers didn’t like him.
But this seemed to go a bit beyond mere dislike or bad feelings in the workplace.
They were faster than we were, and getting too damned close. The only thing that made them hang back was the erratic way I was twisting the damaged minihop all over the black lunar sky.
Another jolt, and now tank Number One was starting to drain, and quickly, so quickly that the minihop began shuddering and losing altitude fast. I increased the power to the main exhaust, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep it flying much longer. The domes and surface tubes of the Melange Mining headquarters were just a tenth of a kilometer ahead, but I didn’t think I’d be able to keep the platform up for even that far.
“Get ready to jump and roll,” I told Henry.
“What are you doing?”
I didn’t answer. The minihop was skimming the regolith now, and in another instant the undercarriage dragged through powdery gray dust. The unconventional landing had one effect I’d not been expecting; as we dragged along the surface, the undercarriage threw up an immense and utterly opaque cloud of dust, forcing both of the pursuing skyhoppers to break off once again. We dug in deeper…and then the hopper pitched over wildly, sending both Henry and me hurtling forward and a meter above the surface.
I hit, hard. One-sixth Earth’s gravity or not, I still massed eighty kilos or so, and I think the only thing that saved me from a very unpleasant jolt and a sudden loss of pressure was the soft dust, the way it exploded up and forward with my impact. I bounced a couple of times, then rolled. Henry didn’t go as far; his arms and legs flailed wildly as he flew, and he caught the ground sooner than I did. Dust was everywhere, filling the sky.
Shakily, I got to my feet, still half expecting to feel the bite of cold as the air in my suit explosively expanded into hard vacuum. My suit seemed to still be intact, however.
There were no rocks to hit, thank God. This part of the lunar landscape had been plowed over by strip-miners already, reducing it to featureless, craterless, rockless anonymity.
“Run!” I screamed at Henry. He was getting up, clumsily and awkwardly. In the distance, the two skyhoppers were joining up again, clear of the looming rooster tail of dust we’d thrown up with our landing.
I started back toward him, but he waved me off. “I’m okay!” he called over the radio, and then he was running past me, covering ground in long, loping strides that sent him flying with each step.
The two skyhoppers accelerated toward us.
My hand came up and slapped at my chest. My service pistol was there, the compact little H&K 2920 slug-thrower I call my hand cannon. I could feel its comforting heft of plastic and metal, but it was sealed beneath my space suit…it might as well have been on Earth.
I ran.
Henry was well out in front of me by this time, bounding across the regolith at a faster clip than I could possibly hope to manage. He was used to this gravity, after all.
Since I was closer to our pursuers, I seemed to be the target of choice. Dust clouds puffed in silence to either side. I tried to turn and nearly sent myself tumbling. Get up a head of steam like that and then try to turn, and your momentum keeps you going in the original direction—the cold, dead hand of Sir Isaac Newton. I stumbled, but managed not to fall.
Something hit me hard on my left shoulder, a solid blow from behind, and I thought I’d been shot…but then one of the skyhoppers flashed past my left side and I realized the pilot had just tried to run me down.
It was a glancing blow, didn’t even knock me off my feet, but it hurt. The pilot was trying to pull his steed up, to bring the hopper to a halt just ahead.
That’s a lot easier said than done. Flying a skyhopper isn’t like flying an aircraft in-atmosphere. Once you get moving, you need to fire rockets to stop…or wait for gravity to bring you down. After brushing against me, the hopper was slewing sideways as the pilot tried to balance his jets.
I changed direction and darted to the right…and ran smack into a wave of darkness. The dust cloud from our landing had followed us, blotting out the sun and enveloping me, falling slowly, not blowing about as it would have in atmosphere, but kind of sliding down through the sky in a steady, opaque cascade. Enough clung to my visor to momentarily blind me. I swiped at it with my glove, leaving a sticky smear.
Twisting left again, nearly losing my balance as I did so, I began running as fast as I could through the unnerving black of the cloud, hoping to put some distance between me and them before the cloud settled out.
I hit something high and solid.
I felt along the smooth surface, and realized I’d run into the side of one of Melange’s domes. I’d been running for an airlock that was off to my left, so I started feeling my way along the wall, moving in that direction.
Quietly, with no fuss at all, the dust fell out of the black sky. Those electrostatic charges in the surface kept some of the finest dust hovering in a thin, almost luminous haze, but the larger particles soundlessly dropped to the ground.
I glanced back. One of the hoppers had landed, and two men in dirty white space suits were moving toward me. I couldn’t see the other hopper. The airlock hatch was twenty meters away. Where the hell was Mark Henry? If he’d reached the hatch and cycled through, it might be a nasty minute or two before I could get in.
One of the space-suited figures stopped and raised his rifle to his shoulder. Firing from a wildly moving platform with any accuracy is almost impossible, but this guy had stopped, taken a solid stance, and was aiming with trained deliberation.
He fired, a single shot, the round striking the titanium-steel wall beside me in an explosion of fragments…and, impossibly, I heard the crack.
At the same instant, a brilliant white star appeared on the helmet’s surface close beside the right side of my face, and I realized that the bullet had shattered on the dome wall, and a ricocheting piece had hit my helmet. I didn’t know if the bubble was plastic or transplas or old-fashioned tempered glass, but the impact had crazed a third of my bubble.
Had breached it. I could hear a thin, high-pitched screech as air bled from my suit, and my face suddenly went cold. When air expands rapidly it carries away heat—the principle behind refrigerators since the 19th century—and right now my face felt like I’d just shoved it into an icebox. I swallowed hard, trying to clear my ears as the pressure dropped. My breath froze across the inside of my helmet, and suddenly I was nearly blind.
Turning slightly, I groped toward the airlock entrance, though I could scarcely see. An orange shape stepped in front of me; I could barely make out that it was a man in a space suit, that he was holding a sem
iautomatic pistol in a two-gloved stance, and that he was aiming it directly at me.
He was too far to rush, too near to dodge. I could see enough to see him press the firing button, see gas erupt silently from the muzzle…
And only then did I realize that he was aiming past me, aiming at the men twenty meters behind me. I turned in time to see the guy who’d shot me crumple and fall in a slow-motion twist, saw the other one running, saw the second skyhopper hovering in the distance, then accelerating forward.
A strong hand grabbed me by my arm and dragged me forward. I felt him haul me bodily inside the airlock as the last of my suit’s air bled away into emptiness and the screech whistled higher into inaudibility. My ears hurt.
The man in orange stood just inside the airlock door, squeezing off silent rounds as the door slid shut. I was on my hands and knees, now, trying to seal off my throat and hold it against the pressure still inside my lungs. Then a dirty, white-suited figure helped me unseal my helmet, and I could hear again, as air rushed in to fill the lock chamber.
The man in the orange suit was braced against the airlock door, now, peering out through the window, his service pistol still clutched in both gloved hands and aimed at the ceiling, his helmet unsealed and hanging open.
He turned and gave me a lopsided grin. “Hey, Fish! Fancy running into you here!”
It was Raymond Flint.
He looked considerably better than he had the last time I’d seen him—his eyes bright, his skin a healthy pink color. Damn it, he looked like he was enjoying himself. “What the hell are you doing here?” was all I could manage to say.
“Happened to be in the area,” he replied. “Just thought I’d drop by.”
Android: Free Fall Page 18