Vigilant

by James Alan Gardner

Debris flew in all directions: robot guts, missile guts, a fierce hail of wreckage spraying around the forest. Chunks of shrapnel sliced into bluebarrel trunks, spilling out spring sap. The trees between us and the crash site blocked most of the flying shards…but still I could hear fragments whizz near my head as I hugged the dirt and prayed.

  “Up, up, up!” Daunt yelled. “They aren’t all gone yet.”

  Two androids were still left, the ones who’d been running farther behind. They’d got knocked down by the missile strike, but hadn’t been close enough to ground zero to take damage. Now they were clambering up again, getting their bearings.

  “What about the other two probes?” I asked Ramos.

  “Far away. Never get here in time.” She stood up, bold-angry-fierce, and planted herself between Paulette and the last two robots. “Stop,” she shouted, “you’re hurting us. Stop, you’re cutting us. Stop, you’re making us choke.”

  “That’s so stupid!” Daunt snapped as the androids started to sprint toward us.

  “It’s all we’ve got left,” Ramos replied, still facing the robots head on. “Stop, you’re poisoning us. Stop, you’re electrocuting us.”

  “Stop, you’re corroding us,” Paulette said weakly.

  “Stop, you’re shooting us,” Daunt yelled angrily.

  “Stop, you’re hanging us,” Ramos called. “Stop, you’re crucifying us. Stop, you’re beheading us.”

  “Stop,” I shouted, “you’re making us allergic!”

  Whump.

  Still life. Sudden silence.

  No thundering android footsteps. Just our own panting. The soft drip of tree sap trickling out of gouged bluebarrels.

  The robots stood frozen on the carpet moss.

  “You’re making us allergic?” Ramos repeated in disbelief.

  “It just popped into my head,” I mumbled.

  It just popped into my head.

  “They’ve stopped,” Paulette whispered. “They’ve bloody well stopped. Holy Mother of God.”

  “The bad guys missed a safeguard,” Ramos breathed. “And no wonder. Who would ever…well yes, it stands to reason androids would be programmed to avoid people who were allergic. And the bad guys never thought to override that. But…holy shit.” She laid her hand on my shoulder. “Faye. You’re brilliant.”

  “Thanks,” I said, feeling the shakes sneaking over me. I just wished I could be sure the inspiration was mine.

  Fifteen minutes later, the first police reinforcements arrived—Sallysweet River’s two constables. One was a boy wet-ink fresh from the academy, while the other was a woman pressing hard against retirement, if not a titch over the line. I’d seen them the night before as Cheticamp briefly touched base with them…but these two weren’t the types for playing detective or ScrambleTac. They were bull-big village cops, well suited for breaking up bar fights and scaring the bejeezus out of teenage shoplifters, but not digging into planetwide conspiracies. Still, when a fellow officer radioed out a mayday, the Sallysweet River constabulary came running top speed, no questions asked.

  By the time they arrived, we’d unlatched the ScrambleTacs from their armor. Daunt had got off lucky—a single round of shots. Paulette had taken two volleys: one that Swiss-cheesed her body shell and a second that splashed through the holes. She had dozens of vicious-bad burns, arms, legs, stomach, even one on her cheek.

  Ramos gritted her teeth at the sight of that one.

  We sponged down Paulette’s wounds with snowmelt, trying to ignore the hiss of steam whenever we touched water to acid. All of us had trained in first aid, but Tic took charge of the treatment—the world-soul had linked him to a burn specialist down south, and now he was talking us through what we had to do. Soon after the Sallysweet River contingent landed, Paulette was stable enough to transport. We packed her and Daunt into the police skimmer, then dispatched the baby-boy cop to drive like a demon to the nearest hospital.

  The retirement-age cop stayed behind to “protect” us. Mostly that meant she glared suspiciously at the motionless robots and occasionally muttered, “We should yank those guns out of their hands.”

  She never actually tried it; we would have stopped her if she had. Let sleeping androids lie.

  11

  JUNIOR ATTACHÉ

  When Cheticamp arrived, he brought a whole platoon of ScrambleTacs…and they all wanted to blast the two frozen androids with robot-poppers. “Must you?” Tic asked. “They’re no threat now. And a violent electric jolt will frazzle their memory. Possibly useful evidence.”

  Cheticamp grouched about safety first, protection of his officers, blah-blah…but he agreed to hold off till cybernetics experts could arrive to try a “sanitary” shutdown. The experts were already on the way—Tic had beeped them while we waited for the cops to show. (Naturally, Tic knew all the top boffins in the Civilian Protection Office; or at least he knew the top boffins as of seventy years ago, which was when he’d last had dealings with that particular branch of the government. Amazingly, a few of them were still alive…and tickled three shades of pink to be called into the field again.)

  The boffins were headquartered (or perhaps nursing-homed) in Comfort Bight, halfway around the world…but sleeve travel got them to Bonaventure up-down-done, and from there it was only forty-five minutes to our position. Under the watchful eyes of the ScrambleTacs—dour as Judgment, robot-poppers trained and ready—the tottery old experts deactivated the androids with nary a whiff of excitement.

  “No self-destructs on these,” Cheticamp observed.

  “No,” I agreed. “And the androids down the mine didn’t blow up either. Odds are, the killer never expected these ones to be found.”

  “Lucky for us,” Cheticamp said. “Though we had to catch a break sooner or later. And maybe there’s more to find down the tunnel.”

  “We’ll see,” I answered.

  His eyes went squinty. “I hope you weren’t planning to go with us underground. There’s no place for civilians—”

  “But there is for accredited members of the Vigil,” Tic interrupted. “Proceeding with a duly authorized scrutiny of police methods. You know we’re legally allowed to watch everything firsthand.”

  Cheticamp looked like he’d bitten a toad.

  Tough titty.

  Into the hole again. And just when Tic had lost his gray-blue hives from the last time.

  This trip, we set our sights on a survey of that side shaft: the one where the androids had been waiting. No one wanted to jinx things by predicting what the side tunnel might hold, but we all expected to find something momentous. Even the ScrambleTacs, young bucks who desperately wanted to come off as grim servants of justice, occasionally let the corners of their mouths twitch up into we’ve-got-the-bastards smiles.

  A short distance in, we passed a patch of moss that was crushed down and crumbled—the spot we’d all landed after tumbling out of the peacock tube. It occurred to me none of us had talked about that tube: not in the quiet before the police arrived or in the bustle after. Sure, Cheticamp had asked me what happened, and I’d given him the full rundown…but he’d just recorded that part of my statement without comment. None of the clarifying questions he’d asked about other parts of the story.

  Tic hadn’t talked about the tube.

  Festina hadn’t talked about it.

  I hadn’t talked about it.

  I hadn’t asked, “What in blazes is this peacock thing, and why does it keep following me around? When it showed up in the mine, why did it materialize in front of me? In Pump Station 3, why did it save me from the acid but not Chappalar? And if it did want to save my life for some reason, why did it disappear both times before the threat was actually over?”

  No answers. No explanations popped magically into my brain.

  So I continued to trudge downward, over the hard stone floor.

  A dozen ScrambleTacs went into the side tunnel ahead of us, advancing with show-off military precision: at any given time, only two were moving forward while
the rest held ready to fill the tunnel with covering fire. Oooo, those boys and girls loved to deploy. If there’d been any androids still on the hoof, those old bit-buckets would be wearing a bouquet of robot-poppers in the blink of an eye.

  But we found no more androids—none but the conked-out bodies of the ones Daunt and Paulette had shot. They looked completely human: a teenage Asian boy, a grandfatherly African man, a fortyish Frau not so different from me…down like corpses now, creepily motionless. We lifted our feet high-warily over them and moved on.

  Some distance from the main shaft, the side tunnel ended in a chamber twenty meters square and two stories high. Clumps of rusty metal dotted the floor, junk an archaeologist might understand but I didn’t. This could be the remains of a machine shop, a locker room, a bunch of air pumps, or any of the other equipment needed by ancient miners. Three thousand years had reduced everything to least common denominators: lumps and stains on the rock.

  At the far side of the room, two ScrambleTacs had stationed themselves by an elevator shaft, just like the one in the main tunnel—no elevator, merely an open hole. The club-thumpers trained their poppers down into the darkness; if robots clambered up from the depths, our fierce protectors would be ready. Other ScrambleTacs had spaced themselves out around the room, but most had congregated in a knot off to my right.

  They were circled around a corpse. Not human. Not Oolom.

  Freep.

  The ScrambleTacs surrounded the body, but stood well back from it. I suppose they didn’t want to disturb the death site. Or should I call it a murder site? Hard to say. The Freep lay flat on his back, eyes closed, hands folded cross his chest: a natural position for a corpse tucked into a coffin, but hard to imagine anyone dying half so tidy. Most likely, someone else had arranged the body after death—maybe the robots.

  And the cause of death? Nothing obvious. The Freep was healthy-looking and only thirtyish. He wore a good winter parka, clean of acid splashes, knife wounds, and bloodstains. Maybe the poor sod had frozen, even with that parka—Freeps were designed for hard ultraviolet and blazing heat, not Great St. Caspian cold. But no sense speculating, when an autopsy would provide a definitive answer.

  Tic stood beside me, looking down at the body. He cleared his throat. “Captain Cheticamp? I recognize the deceased.”

  Cheticamp blinked in surprise. “You do?”

  “His name is Kowkow Iranu. You can check with the Freep embassy. Until his disappearance three months ago, he was a junior attaché with their trade-treaty negotiating team.”

  “Shit,” Cheticamp said. He spoke for us all.

  The police began their death scene cha-cha: taking pictures, scanning the area for hairs/fibers/scales/etc. Eventually they’d get a vacuum servo to suck up everything in the room, but they did a manual search first so they could record the position of everything they picked up—who knew if the location of a fluff-speck might be important? The servo did a better job of sweeping, but it didn’t make note of where each feather of lint came from.

  We so-called civilians kept out of the way and watched. Scrutinized the heck out of everyone…for a minute or two anyway. Festina scanned the corpse with her Bumbler. Tic kept himself moving, looking over shoulders, busy-busy-busy so he wouldn’t think about the claustrophobic screamy-weamies. As for me, I soon let my mind drift away from the meticulous-fastidious-tedious police work; and timidly, shyly, asked the world-soul for anything it could tell about this Kowkow Iranu.

  Instant data dump…and I knew a bunch more than I did before, thanks to a missing-persons report filed by the Freep embassy twelve weeks earlier. Kowkow Iranu: age twenty-three Freep years = thirty Earth standard. Family connections to several corporate barons in the Free Republic. Ergo, stinking rich with some political pull. One of four dozen staff members assigned to provide background info to the three senior Freep negotiators working on the trade treaty. The embassy hadn’t stated Iranu’s area of expertise, what kind of background bumpf he was supposed to provide…but the missing-persons report said he had graduated from a Freep university with a top-rank diploma in archaeology.

  Hmmm.

  Maya Cuttack spent time at archaeology digs in the Free Republic; no great surprise if she met Iranu there. Suppose they stayed friendly. While Iranu was on Demoth, he might have taken a break from the treaty talks to visit Maya here.

  Then what happened? Did she kill him because he learned something he shouldn’t have? Or was Iranu in on this too? Whatever “this” was. Perhaps he and Maya were working together on something shady and they’d got into a disagreement…

  Wait now—go back. Why did the trade talks need an archaeologist on staff? To play devil’s advocate, I could explain it away: young Iranu indulged his interests by taking an archaeology degree, but found there was no money in it and fell into a government job. Lots of people study one thing, then get a job doing something on a whole other block.

  But.

  But, but, but…

  Here’s the thing: Freep scientists weren’t noted for pursuing knowledge out of dainty love of learning. Most just wanted to cash in. For Freeps, archaeology was a commercial enterprise—grave-robbing and treasure hunts, where you might find anything from ancient art objects to alien technological wonders.

  In a Vigil law course, my professor talked about a group of Freep archaeologists who’d been caught smuggling artifacts off Demoth: fiddly-dick trinkets, lumps of junk, probably intended for sale to some tico collector who’d pay top dollar just because the stuff was old. But the incident had blown up to a major pissing match between us and the Freeps…them howling in righteous indignation at wicked Demoth, cruelly jailing honest Freep citizens for exercising their right to engage in commerce. The whole kerfuffle had soured relations between our planets for ages. In fact, the mess had happened three decades ago, just a year before the plague; and it was only now that our two planets had cooled off enough to talk about trade treaties again.

  So the Freep contingent had an archaeologist on their negotiating staff. Something important there…but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  “Tic,” I murmured, “what does the trade treaty say about archaeological artifacts?”

  “Not much,” he replied. “Considering past history, no one wanted to address archaeology at length—if they had, both sides would have been obliged to start blustering about sovereignty versus nearsighted greed, and that argument might have devolved all the way into a discussion of real issues. Couldn’t have that: bureaucrats love to dicker about minutiae, but have aneurysms when you suggest they question first principles. So our negotiators took a low-key approach on archaeology in exchange for concessions on…oh, I think it was an acreage cap, how much agricultural land Freep citizens could buy on Demoth.”

  “What exactly is this low-key approach?”

  “Archaeological sites are just another type of mine. Anything dug up will get taxed at the same rate as iron or copper, and Demoth won’t raise a fuss about ‘priceless artifacts’ leaving the planet. No one thinks there are priceless artifacts here anyway—certainly not the Technocracy’s Heritage Board. I’m doubtful myself; Ooloms have lived on Demoth nine centuries, and we’ve never found anything worth cheering about.”

  Time for a snort of derision. So the Ooloms hadn’t made any dazzling archaeological finds? What a thundering surprise. Tic might have been the first Oolom ever to come down one of these tunnels, and he was only staying out of bloody-minded determination. Blessed near his whole body had turned gray-blue now, and his ear-sheaths were fluttering like caffeinated butterflies. I could flat-out guarantee that Ooloms never tried a systematic survey of a single one of these mines, let alone the hundreds all over Demoth.

  But I could imagine the Freeps doing it.

  And what did they find? Before the plague, they were smuggling out trinkets…no, sorry, the ones that got caught were smuggling out trinkets. Who knew how many other secret expeditions might have been digging around? And who knows if any of those hit p
ay dirt?

  Then the epidemic came to town. Explorers flooded in, searching the countryside for sick Ooloms. The Freeps must have been forced to scurry away before they got noticed.

  After the plague, Demoth had laid down tighter controls over incoming spaceships, funneling all arrivals through a down-to-the-marrow medical exam to make sure they weren’t carrying alien microbes. That had mightily cranked off Freeps at the time; before, they’d been able to come and go without passing through any control authority. Away from urban centers, small ships used to be able to slip down to the surface without being noticed.

  But postplague, Demoth bought state-of-the-art detectors to monitor the outer atmosphere. Had to keep out those germs, didn’t we? And even the best stealth countermeasures can’t hide a ship when it’s hanging all by its lonesome, nothing but near vacuum for a thousand klicks in any direction. Drop your radar profile to the size of a chicken, and people will still wonder what a chicken’s doing, flying through the Van Allen belts.

  So: no more Freep archaeologists. Except Kowkow Iranu. And maybe Maya Cuttack—human, but on the Freep payroll.

  What could they be digging for? Not knickknacks. Not the remains of old elevators, or the crumble-rust debris moldering on the floor all around me. Freeps would be chasing the Big Strike: alien tech. Whizbangs beyond the current knowledge of the Technocracy. With so many ruins on Demoth, you got rumors galore of high-tech gizmos, buried just out of sight, waiting to be discovered by the next idle spelunker who scuffed up a bit of dirt. It hadn’t happened yet…but that meant nothing. Who knew if Demoth had been hiding alien treasures for thousands of years?

  Such as a machine for making peacock tubes appear out of nowhere?

  Speculation, I told myself. But worth discussing with someone. With Tic? Not right now—he’d already scooted away to watch a ScrambleTac officer poke at a lump of dirt. Tic was not in a stand-steady, rational-discussion mood at the moment.