The Last Good Man

Ice-Cold

The wail and stutter of sirens rises in the distance as True flees down the alley. It reminds her of the chorus of howling dogs on the outskirts of Tadmur. That night, they had the legal authority of a bounty behind their actions, but tonight no documentation protects her from the consequences of what just happened, of what should not have happened.

“You overreacted,” she pants, not knowing if Shaw is still there, still listening. “You didn’t have to kill him!”

Two more explosions go off behind her.

“Fuck! You’re a fucking maniac!”

This time he responds, his voice calm and absurdly soothing despite what he has to say: “You know why autonomous systems make good soldiers, True? It’s because they follow the rules of engagement, even in tricky situations. They don’t let sentiment or doubt or mercy get in the way.” Shifting to a matter-of-fact tone, he adds, “Turn right at the next corner.”

She slows almost to a stop. “That’s not the way I came.”

“Do it, True.”

What choice? A wrong move now might make her the next target of the swarm.

All in, then. She jogs to the corner as the sirens are multiplied by echoes resounding off the buildings. “Where am I going?” she asks. She sounds surprisingly calm. Just a slight tremor in her voice.

“Past the next building on the left. There’s a small parking lot. You see it?”

“Yes. I see an autonomous cab with the interior lit.”

“That’s the one. Get inside.”

It’s a tiny, two-passenger vehicle. She gets in. The light goes out, the windows darken. The wailing of the sirens is muffled. She gets the belt on and the cab slides out of its parking space on a silent electric motor.

“Li Guiying,” Shaw says.

“A robotics engineer.”

It’s an absurdly inadequate answer. He must have searched the name; he knows that much already. But True is distracted. She’s thinking about the dead man: her responsibility for what happened to him, and her liability. They are not the same things. She went to meet the two men, thinking it was right action; she was motivated by worry over what Shaw might do if she didn’t defuse the situation. But the situation escalated. A man is dead—maybe two men are dead—and she is fleeing the scene.

I let this happen.

“Damn it, True.” His harsh tone anchors her. “Don’t spin out on me. You’ve seen blood before.”

Oh yeah. Roger that. She’s seen worse in combat but this wasn’t combat. A man—an idiot, yes, but a man—got his head blown off on a peaceful street in a peaceful city. And she doesn’t want to ask but she’s pretty sure the old man is dead too. No witnesses.

Maybe the truck had a dash cam, although that was probably destroyed when the engine block went up.

“I didn’t come here to trigger that kind of shit,” she tells him.

“I need you to tell me who this Li Guiying is to you.”

She shudders, understanding that what happened doesn’t mean anything to him. It doesn’t deserve so much as a comment or a denial.

He adds, “I’ve got you as co-author on a paper with her, along with six other names. What else is there?”

“Nothing. Not really.”

The car is leaving the warehouse district, joining a light flow of traffic. True leans forward, cycles through the dash display until it shows a map of the cab’s planned route: a circuitous path marked in green that runs past the tourist district before turning toward the ocean, doubling back, and ending at a neighborhood less than a kilometer from her hotel.

She leans back again, working her cheeks to get moisture in her mouth. “Am I bait?” she asks. “You trying to see if something’s following me?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“Not that I can see. Not so far. Tell me about this Li Guiying. You must know her.”

“Sure, I know her. I don’t work with her. She’s not my business partner.”

“Would she like to be?”

True thinks about this, recalling Tamara’s teasing words, She likes you, True. I can’t imagine why, but she does. She thinks of you as a friend.

“I don’t know what she wants,” True admits. “I only met her once in person but she’s friendly to me. Too friendly. It gets awkward. But she’s a really good engineer. She’s mostly in academia now, but—” True breaks off in midsentence, thinking of the hawk that flew past Daniel’s house… and the biomimetic deer.

“Say it, True. Whatever the hell you’re thinking.”

She does: “What kind of surveillance did you have on my house?”

Two seconds of silence. When he answers, there’s suspicion in his voice. “Why?”

“What kind of surveillance?” she insists.

“Nothing. You were not on my hit list and I was not running any kind of surveillance on your house.”

They had all believed Shaw was behind the ongoing surveillance. They interpreted it as a warning, clear notice that he’d mapped their lives and could hit them at any time.

He asks, “Did Li Guiying have you under surveillance at home, too?”

“Why would she? There’s no reason for it. I only know her because we attended a seminar together, six or seven years ago. That paper you found with my name and hers, it’s the collected presentations. I remember, at the time, she’d just moved into the private sector. She was networking, making new contacts. Before that, she worked for Kai Yun Strategic.”

“Kai Yun?”

His voice is abruptly lower, with that lethal note she heard before. Her own tone softens in response. It’s instinct. She speaks innocuously, determined not to trigger his temper. “A Chinese government company. Cutting edge technological development.”

“I know what Kai Yun is.” That low, ice-cold tone.

A flush prickles in her pores. Her voice sharpens. “What do you want me to tell you, Shaw?”

“Tell me what she did for them.”

“As far as I know, the same thing she does now. Autonomous swarms. She’s strictly civilian though. I remember she told me she won’t work in the defense industry.”

“Kai Yun is defense industry,” he growls.

“Yes, and that’s where she got her start. But that was years ago and she’s done with it. That’s what she told me. She works on humanitarian projects now. She wants to make a positive contribution to the world, and she has. She’s done good things.”

An alert pops up, telling her the voice link to Shaw has closed.

“Fuck,” she whispers in frustration. What did Shaw have to do with Kai Yun? Did he work for them? Was he running from them? “Damn it, Shaw,” she says out loud, using her data glove to reestablish the link. “Don’t you disappear on me.”

The link stays closed.

Frustrated, she drops the MARC on the seat beside her and gets her burner phone out instead. Powers it up and calls him.

No answer.

She berates herself. She should have said nothing about Li Guiying. Held back the information. Traded for what she needs to know, but she didn’t know. She didn’t know Guiying mattered. Not to her, not to him.

Damn it.

Now he’s gone.