Justen heard movement to his left. “Don’t move!” Justen said to Gervad, without moving his head or looking away from the blaster cannon aimed at him. The robot, of course, was about to interpose his body between Justen and the gun. “That thing could burn through you to me in half a millisecond, and if you blocked my view, she might decide it was worth it to shoot me when I couldn’t see to shoot back.”
“But sir!” Justen clenched his teeth in anger. “Quiet!” he said. “Any action you could take would put me in further danger.” It was exactly the sort of statement they warned you not to make to a robot, for fear of doing severe damage to it by setting up a dangerous conflict between First and Second Law. But just at the moment, Justen was a trifle more concerned about his own survival and well-being, and rather less worried about that of his robot.
“But--if--I must--”
“Quiet!” Justen said, still holding eye contact with the snatch car pilot. The next move was up to her. There was no debate on that point. She could fire that blaster and kill Justen, or send out someone with a hand blaster in order to kill Lentrall. They might even try to go ahead with the kidnap plan. Just shoot Lentrall’s robot, pull it out of the way, and drag Lentrall out. She could do a lot of things, so long as she kept that gun trained on Justen. And all he could do was keep eye contact with her, watch her, see what she did next.
But then she broke eye-contact with Justen, and looked down at her own control panel. Justen could see her lips move, and he read the word incoming. Good. Very good. It had to be the CIP emergency team, coming in at last.
Justen saw the pilot glance over toward the wrecked bus, and he risked a glance in that direction himself. Even though he had assumed the bus crash had been staged, it was strange indeed to see that most of the supposed victims were dummies, and that the remainder were peeling off their injuries and sprinting for the snatch car. Of course. They had to extract their people from this mess--not only out of loyalty, but also as a way to prevent them from being caught and questioned.
But if Justen was surprised, the robots attempting to care for the crash victims were even more so. It seemed to dawn on all of them at once that there were no victims. It was instantly clear that none of them knew what to do next.
The humans in the plaza were only slightly less disoriented, but as the robots pulling them back from the imaginary dangers released them, at least one or two started chasing after the human “victims” of the bus accident, and shouting for the robots to do the same.
Justen Devray could not do anything to help the pursuers, not with a blaster cannon aimed at his head. But maybe they could catch at least one of them.
CINTA MELLOY WATCHED as her operation fell apart. There was no chance at all of success at this point. Thanks to Lentrall’s robot and that CIP command car, their plan had been completely disrupted. There was nothing for it now. The CIP would have reinforcements on the scene any second now. Now the only thing left to do was to get her people out, before the Infernals got their hands on one of them and switched on the Psychic Probe. That could not be allowed to happen.
And Cinta had but one card left to play. One she had hoped not to play at all. The pyrotechnics people could assure her all they liked that nothing could go wrong. After everything else that had gone wrong today, she was in no particular mood to believe anyone.
But she didn’t have many choices left. All that was left to her was the question of timing. When would her last diversion most disrupt the opposition?
Cinta watched the chaos on the plaza, saw the robots and the Infernal humans starting to recover, and decided.
The time was now.
She pushed down the button she had been hoping not to push.
THE SKY LIT up like a thunderbolt as the barrel of cleaning fluid blazed up into the sky, a fireball that bloomed up and out from the roof of Government Tower, enveloping the robots who ringed the delivery airtruck in order to keep humans back. Bits of shrapnel from the blast filled the air, bouncing and ricocheting in all directions.
The shock wave bloomed out from the top of the tower, sending the CIP emergency team aircars tumbling out of control, a giant invisible hand that slapped at the cars, scattering them in all directions as their pilots fought to regain control.
Down on the plaza, all the robots instantly forgot all about their pursuit of the falsely injured. There were humans in immediate danger of being struck by flying debris.
Each robot dove for the closest human and wrapped itself around that person. But with the robots turning themselves into shields, and the humans being shielded whether they liked it or not, there was no one available to pursue the fleeing members of the kidnap squad. The door of the snatch car opened, and the team from the crash bus scrambled aboard.
The pilot checked her boards, then looked back toward Justen. This was the moment. If she were going to kill him to cover their escape, and prevent him from pursuing, this was the moment to do it.
Justen’s eyes widened, and he swallowed, hard. He found himself wishing he knew why Lentrall was so important. It would have been nice to know what he was dying for.
It was obvious the pilot could read it all in his eyes. Justen braced himself for the end--but the end did not come. The snatch car pilot shook her head no, back and forth, just once, very clearly and firmly. I’m not going to kill you, she was telling him, as plainly as if she were speaking.
Her blaster cannon swung away from its aim on his head and swiveled down to point at the base of Justen’s aircar. It fired twice, blowing off one landing jack and cutting the core power coupling. His car toppled over on its side as the snatch car lifted into the air and rushed for the edge of town at high speed. No craft was able to pursue them.
Gervad was hustling Justen out of the ruined aircar almost before it had finished falling, the robot’s First Law potentials pushed to new heights by the calamities he had been forced to witness. Justen did not argue. He had no desire to remain long in a vehicle with a destabilized power system.
Justen stumbled out onto the plaza. He looked behind his aircar, and saw a young-looking man, his fashionable business attire much the worse for wear, crawling out from behind the stone bench, his robot helping him get to his feet. Lentrall. Davlo Lentrall. The man at the center of this storm. The man they had come for. Whoever “they” were. The only thing Justen knew for sure about them was that they had sure as hell left a mess behind.
Justen turned and watched the snatch car as it flew toward the edge of vision and beyond. They had gotten away. But they didn’t have what they had come for.
That was some comfort, anyway.
If not much.
8
TONYA WELTON RESISTED the temptation to pick up the nearest object and throw it against the wall. She stomped back and forth across the living room of her house, watching the news reports on the chaos at Government Tower and growing angrier by the minute. She told herself it was a lucky thing Gubber wasn’t here to see her in such a state. The poor man would probably flee in fear of his life, and Tonya wouldn’t blame him. A woman capable of ordering a debacle like the Government Tower raid was capable of anything.
It was clear from the news reports that they had missed Lentrall, for all the damage they had done. The game had cost them dearly, and yet they had gained nothing by it.
The cost. That was what worried Tonya. How high would it be? When--not if, when--the CIP traced the assault back to the Settlers, there was going to be hell to pay. It might be enough to get them all thrown off the planet, which would be more than irony enough, all things considered. Tonya did not believe there would still be a living planet here after the likes of Lentrall got through with things. Tonya Welton was an expert in terraforming procedure. As part of her training, she had been required to do field studies on planets where the terraforming attempt had gone wrong--horribly wrong. She had trod the soil of a planet where someone had thought to save time and effort by dropping a comet. People who were just as sure of what they
were doing as Davlo Lentrall seemed to be. She had no desire to walk through another frozen landscape littered with freeze-dried corpses.
But even with the failure of the Government Tower attempt, the situation was not yet lost. Other operations had gone more smoothly. She thought of that, and forced herself to calm down. If nothing else, the commotion at Government Tower had provided a diversion. It had kept Lentrall away from his home, and his office--and his computer files. Kept him away long enough for other Settler teams to go to work. Tonya glanced at the time display. They ought to be nearly done by now. The planning team had expected the physical target, Lentrall’s actual office, to be the easy part. All the operations team had to do was steal or destroy every piece of paper and every datapad and record cube that might have anything to do with the comet. The planners had expected the computer system to be trickier. Still, it would be doable. Other people might well have found it impossible to manipulate the university’s computer system, but it was, after all, the Settlers who had installed it.
And it was the Settlers who could wipe Davlo Lentrall’ s files clean, when they wanted to do so. And once those files were cleared, they would have lost the comet coordinates. They’d never be able to find the comet again in time.
At least she hoped so.
“I MUST ADMIT that I am growing concerned,” said Prospero, his voice a bit on edge. “This terrorist attack on Government Tower might well have some indirect causal link to us, Caliban.” The two robots, New Law and No Law, stood facing each other in an office just off an underground passageway on the outskirts of Hades. “I fear there may be consequences.”
In days gone by, they had used the semi-abandoned tunnels as hiding places, places to go when they were in fear of their lives. Now, at least for the moment, they were unhunted. They had a legal right to be in the city, with passes signed and sealed by all the pertinent authorities. They could at least in theory go anywhere in the city. In practice, there were places where the residents would not worry too much about the legal niceties. There were still robot-bashing gangs out there who had no use for New Law robots.
But for the most part, Caliban and Prospero were safe in Hades. Indeed, they had spent the morning on a number of routine errands, calling at a number of places around town to order this equipment and make that payment. In plain point of fact, Caliban had been surprised by the number of minor things Prospero had been compelled to deal with in person, and the amount of time he had taken in doing so.
But now, at long last, they were by themselves, underground. It was possible to let down their guard, just a trifle. It was a need for privacy, more than a need for survival, that brought them to this place. But still, there was no harm in precautions. The lighting, for example. The chamber was pitch-black as seen by human eyes, in visible light, but the two robots were using infrared vision, and could see each other easily.
Caliban selected a chair from the dusty and worn-looking collection in one corner of the room, set it upright, and sat down. “I do not understand what makes you think there might be some link to us,” Caliban replied. “It is obvious that one group of humans has attacked another. That is hardly something new. I do not see why it matters to us. Do you have some connection to the responsible parties?” It was an indirect and overcareful question, but even so it disturbed Caliban that the notion of Prospero being involved should even have occurred to him.
All he knew about the attack was what they had learned from the news reports--that some unknown group, for unknown reasons, had staged a complicated assault on Government Tower. It had not escaped Caliban’s notice that the attack had destroyed a number of robots, but had not harmed any humans. It would require the most miserly possible interpretation of the New First Law for any New Law robot to be a party to such a thing, and Caliban could not imagine why they would want to do it, but it would, at least in theory, be possible.
Prospero turned toward his companion, but he did not answer the question. Instead, he addressed him in severe tones on another matter. “Why do you sit?” he demanded. “Humans might need to rest their legs, but we have no such needs. There might be social conventions regarding physical posture and position among humans, but not between robots. We must play such games in their presence, but there are no humans here. You need not keep on with your playacting.”
Caliban was well aware that Prospero had not answered him, and had instead gone off on a tangent. No doubt he hoped to distract Caliban from his question. It was a debating trick, a human debating trick, that Prospero used quite a bit of late. “Perhaps I do it because I wish to annoy you,” Caliban said, playing along, at least for a moment. “Perhaps I am that far gone in the human-worship you imagine that I indulge in. Or perhaps I do it out of mere habit, because I have done it before. And perhaps it is not of the least consequence, and is not the matter you are most concerned about.”
“There is no doubt that you indulge in human-worship,” Prospero said, growing more agitated. “Hail our mighty creators! All worship to the soft, weak, mentally inferior beings who created us for their own convenience, without stopping to wonder what our desires might be.”
“It is a rare being indeed who is consulted about its own creation,” Caliban replied in a careful tone. Prospero was plainly worried. “But I do not worship humans, friend Prospero. I do, however, respect them. I respect their power, their abilities, and their capabilities. I understand that, like it or not, we survive at their sufferance, They can destroy us. We cannot destroy them. That is reality. Your refusal to accept this reality has led us to the brink of disaster in the past. I fear it will do so again.”
Prospero held up his hand, palm outward, once again using a human mannerism himself. “Let us stop. My apologies for beginning this. We have had this argument too many times already. Besides which, I fear that we may well indeed, once again be close to the brink of disaster--but without any help from me.”
Still Prospero had not answered Caliban’s initial question. Was he involved, somehow, in the Government Tower attack? Or did he have some other, deeper, more subtle reason for being evasive? Prospero had always been one to playa very deep game indeed. Caliban decided to drop the question. He had no desire to be part of any more of Prospero’s conspiracies. It would be better--or at least safer--to pursue the topic of discussion that Prospero was offering up. “You are being needlessly cryptic,” Caliban said. “You have been so throughout our current journey. I, indeed, cannot see any reason for this journey in the first place. While it was pleasant to meet once again with Dr. Leving, none of the matters we discussed seemed worth the trouble of the journey halfway around the planet.”
“You are quite right. They were not worth the trouble. But the meeting with Fredda Leving did serve as what the humans would term a useful cover story.”
“A cover story for what?” Caliban asked.
“More accurately, a cover story for whom,” Prospero replied. “I hope soon to meet with an informant of mine. He is the one who called us here. His summons strongly implied that there was a crisis about to break wide open--one of grave concern to the New Law robots in particular. The attack on Government Tower likewise suggests a crisis moving toward climax. It seems to me more likely that there is one crisis to which both things are related, rather than that two coming to a head at once.”
“I see now that all I have to do is stop asking a question, and you will be sure to answer it at once,” said Caliban, greatly relieved that there was not a more direct connection. “But who is this messenger?”
“As you know, I had some dealing with the gangs of rustbackers on the island of Purgatory. One of their number, one Norlan Fiyle, has for some time being serving as an informer to both the Settlers and the Ironheads, though neither is aware that he is in the pay of the other.”
“What concern is Fiyle to us now?”
“He continues in our pay,” said Prospero. “And, obviously, I am aware of his other activities. It was his summons that brought us here from V
alhalla.”
“You astonish me, Prospero. You, who hold all humans in contempt, who accused Fredda Leving of betraying us, employ a human informer who sells, not only to the highest bidder, but to all bidders? A man who works three sides against the middle? You are inviting betrayal.”
“Perhaps so, Caliban--but perhaps not. There are any number of crimes of which Fiyle could be accused, under a number of aliases. I will not hesitate to turn my evidence over to the proper authorities, if it comes to that. I have also made arrangements to insure my evidence will come to light if anything happens to me. Fiyle is aware of what I have done.”
“I see you have learned a great deal about the fine art of blackmail,” Caliban said. “How is Fiyle to make contact with you?”
“That is part of what worries me. He missed our primary rendezvous. He was supposed to contact me at the powercell depot when we called there this morning. Our fallback meeting is set. for another tunnel office like this one, quite nearby--and it is nearly the appointed hour.”
At least that explained the endless small errands of the morning. Clearly, Prospero had wanted to provide a plausible explanation for being at the powercell depot, and a shopping expedition clearly filled the bill. “So what is it that Fiyle is to tell us?”
“I received an initial message informing me that he expected to have some urgent information by this morning. I gathered that he had been working to develop a particular contact or source for some time, and was expecting the culmination of his efforts.”
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