Vigilant

ROBOT-POPPERS

We stayed the night at the guest home. When I called my family to tell them, wife Angie answered and straightaway got a case of the bubbles: a beaming smile that filled the phone’s vidscreen. "Finally, Faye! It’s really really important to get in touch with your birthwater angst."

"I don’t have any angst," I muttered. "I’m on a job."

"And it took you to Sallysweet River?" she said, eyes wide. "Faye, it’s fate! Synchronicity!"

"Coincidence."

"Does it really feel that way to you?"

I stared at her beautiful open face on the phone screen. "No," I finally answered. "It doesn’t feel like coincidence. It feels precious creepy, if you want the truth. So don’t let’s talk about me having an emotional breakthrough, all right? I’ve got the squirms as it is."

"Oooo, Faye, you used the words emotional breakthrough! I’m so proud. Love you to pieces!" She blew a kiss at the screen before clicking off… and I just knew she was going to run babbling about "spiritual rebirth" to all the others: my husbands, my wives, the kids, even Barrett’s dogs if they’d sit still long enough.

Angie, Angie, Angie. I know she sounds witless, but here’s the thing: she’s hands-down brilliant when she wants to be. Just that on her fourteenth birthday, she announced she would never let her brains get in the way of her enthusiasms… and she’s had the breathless iron-gripped willpower to keep that resolution ever since.

A modern miracle. More magic from Sallysweet River.

If I experienced any angst that night, birthwater or otherwise, it came when I charged my room to the Vigil. Yes, I had an expense account; and yes, I felt guilty using it. My very first expense — checking into a luxury resort.

So then I spent my time gamely trying to justify the cost by doing as much Vigil work as I could. Tagging along with Bleak and Fellburnie. Scrutinizing the bejeezus out of their plodding methodical questions to staff and guests. Learning nothing new.

Around midnight, the detectives ran out of people to quiz, so we all returned to the lounge. Cheticamp and Tic sat by the fire… not talking, just staring moodily into the flames. "The ScrambleTacs came back a few minutes ago," Cheticamp told us. "Cuttack isn’t camped at any of the known sites."

"If you ask me," Bleak said, "the only place we’ll find her is the bottom of Bonaventure harbor."

"How so?" Tic asked.

"The woman looks clean," Bleak answered. "No one could say a bad word about her. So the way I read it, she had a fling going with Chappalar. She spent the evening with him, or maybe the night, but eventually the two parted company. All that time, the bad guys were watching… so when Cuttack set off on her own, they snatched her, sweated information out of her, then dumped her into the bay. Or a shallow grave, or a furnace, or a waste-recycling vat. That’s why no one’s seen her since Chappalar’s death — the woman is fertilizer."

Cheticamp’s expression had gone sour. "I don’t like it," he growled.

"Why not?"

"Because it makes sense. And it puts us back to square one: Cuttack isn’t connected with the killers, so we’re no farther ahead than when we came out here. In fact, you’re saying there’s probably another murder victim we haven’t found yet. Bloody wonderful."

Tic cleared his throat. "Aren’t you forgetting the expensive clothes and perfume we found in her room? In her letter to Chappalar, she implied she didn’t have much money. That’s modestly suspicious, isn’t it?"

"So she was playing the system," Fellburnie said. "Rich people do. Why pay to go through proper channels if a proctor can arrange it for free?"

A valid point. God knows, our profs at college warned us against wheeler-dealers trying to exploit the Vigil for private ends. Lots of affluent people are devoted to the belief that every system is built for someone’s personal gain, and the only trick is learning how to use it for yourself. The slimy buggers are often right… which explains how they slithered up to affluence in the first place.

Cheticamp drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair, then pushed himself to his feet. "Nothing more we can do here tonight." He looked at Tic. "You two want to stay or go back to Bonaventure?"

"Stay," Tic answered immediately. He’d made that decision long ago, when he told me to book a room.

The captain didn’t waste a glance in my direction; never mind that I was official scrutineer on this outing and should’ve had the last word. "Then stay," Cheticamp said. "I’ll leave you a pair of ScrambleTacs as bodyguards. The rest of us will head home."

He looked at Bleak and Fellburnie; they both nodded agreement. I could tell all three had decided Maya Cuttack was a dead end… a dead dead end. Which meant that leaving us in Sallysweet River was as safe as anywhere else, and would keep us from walking whatever real investigations might be unfolding in Bonaventure. The bodyguards were just insurance, in case the killer or killers went on another spree.

We all said good night and the cops galumphed off on their flat-footed way. Leaving Tic and me in silence… except for the dying crackle of the fire. It was late, and the bluebarrel logs had almost burned themselves out.

I flopped down into a chair beside Tic. "What now?"

He didn’t answer for several seconds; firelight wavered flickerish on his pouchy face. "We’ll keep searching for Maya," he said at last. "Or at least that promising archaeological site she supposedly discovered."

"Why?"

"Because it piques my curiosity. Or because my oneness with the universe tells me this is the right way. Or because I’m a total loon." He folded his hands placidly across his stomach. "We’ll rent a skimmer in the morning and see what we can find."

"You are a total loon," I told him. "It’s a big country, city boy, and you’ll have to be god-awful lucky to spot a single tent in the wilderness. Especially if the tent happens to be pitched inside a mine that no one’s ever noticed before."

"Do you have a better suggestion?" he asked.

"Sure. Instead of flying around haphazard in hopes we stumble across the camp, let’s get some gear that will do the search for us."

"An hour ago you were anxious about charging a room to your expense account. Now you’re going to tot up a few million for scanning probes? Well-done, Smallwood. That’s what I call settling in."

"It so happens," I told him in my snootiest voice, "I have a friend in high places. With access to the best survey equipment in the Technocracy. Courtesy of the Outward Fleet’s Explorer Corps."

A minute later, I was calling the navy base in Snug Harbor and asking to speak with Festina Ramos.

She arrived an hour after dawn, this time without Oh-God and flying an official fleet skimmer. Not the same skimmer the dipshits used when they kidnapped me. Cheticamp had impounded that one as evidence… not because it mattered bugger-all to the case but just to crank off the Admiralty.

"It’s freezing out here!" Ramos puffed as she stepped down from the driver’s cab. "Why couldn’t you live someplace warm?"

Her gray uniform crackled, its smart fibers fattening from flat cloth to a windproof layer as thick as sponge toffee: bristling with air bubbles to act as foam insulation. Even so, Ramos made a major fuss of blowing on her fingers and rubbing her hands together to produce heat. "Snug Harbor was perfectly lovely," she grumped. "Working its way up to a scorcher when I left."

"On Great St. Caspian," I told her, "this is a scorcher." Which was a lie; the thermometer had scooted below freezing overnight and showed every intention of staying there till it got over the sulks. Grumpy clouds huddled between us and the sun, while the wind had gone gusty with a piercing edge. What we had was a raw, clammy day… but compared to the winter just past, no Sallysweet River girl would ever call the weather cold.

The rear of Ramos’s skimmer held three probe modules: sleek missiles four meters long, painted gloss black like a widow’s vibrator. At Ramos’s order, the probes rolled themselves out of the back hatch on low wheeled platforms, then sat looking vastly self-satisfied on the dead yellow-grass of the guest home’s lawn.

"Don’t we think well of ourselves," Tic said, as he crouched to stroke a probe’s casing. "Aren’t we just the cockiest machines on the planet?"

"They aren’t actually intelligent," Ramos told him; she sounded a titch embarrassed that he’d think otherwise. But somewhere just inside my ears, I could hear the probe purring as Tic petted it. I shifted in closer, moving my thigh to touch another of the missiles. When I reached down to pat its black molded fuselage, mine started purring too. A fat tigery purr, like a cat with its mouth full of blood.

I gave Ramos a weak smile, trying to pretend I didn’t feel thumbs-awkward. "Sorry, Admiral," I said, "but there are more intelligences in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Tic and I seem to be simpatico with any machine connected to our world-soul."

"These probes aren’t connected to your world-soul," Ramos said. "They’re military equipment — deliberately designed to be incompatible with civilian systems. Our security gurus guarantee total data isolation."

"Now, now," Tic murmured to his probe, "you don’t feel isolated, do you?"

The purr slipped into a giggle, then a whispery childlike voice spoke inside my head. "Shhh… Xe musho jeelent."

Xe says secret.

Tic just smiled, but I froze — fingertips still touching the probe’s plastic skin, my leg pressed against its side. Wanting desperately to jerk away, but staying put for fear the probe or Xe would take offense.

Not only was the missile talking when it shouldn’t be on our wavelength; this thing, manufactured far offplanet in some no-aliens-allowed navy shipyard, spoke Oolom.

What in blazes did that mean?

Ramos programmed the probes from a console inside the skimmer… which she told me came down to selecting criteria from a list of search items the probes were equipped to detect. "Every month these things get more sophisticated," she told me as she worked. "Not intelligent," she added, throwing a pointed glance in Tic’s direction, "but better at their jobs. It’s a pity the quality wasn’t this good during your big epidemic — we might have found more of those people who were dying in the woods."

"You were here during the plague?" Tic asked. His voice was just a hair too controlled.

"That was before my time," Ramos answered, "but I’ve reviewed transcripts from Explorers who were here. The equipment back then had a bitch of a time finding your people; all of them with low body temperatures, chameleoned to match the background colors, and lying perfectly still from paralysis. We couldn’t even use sniffers to smell out tracks, because Ooloms spent most of their time up in trees. The Explorers were so frustrated: trying to save millions of people from going Oh Shit — uh, that’s an Explorer expression for ‘dying’ — and all we could do was lumber blindly through the woods."

"They found me," Tic said, voice soft. "Deep in a highland jungle, far into the Thin Interior, and they still found me."

"Well, good," Ramos replied. "One of our success stories."

She hadn’t caught the gray bitters in Tic’s voice.

A crowd came onto the guest home’s veranda to watch the probes take off. Most were Oolom. The few Homo saps among them wore staff uniforms — cooks and cleaners and concierges with time on their hands. Ramos made sure the spectators kept back as the probes extended metal armatures and pushed themselves up to the vertical.

"Are they going to blast off?" shouted a voice from the veranda — an Oolom boy, maybe eight years old, bouncing with so much excitement his mother asked a nearby human to hold the kid down.

"Not quite," Ramos called back.

The boy must have had visions of rockets exploding from the ground in a flurry of fire and steam. Reality didn’t make so much fuss: in unison, the probes sprouted bouquets of spherical black balloons… three at their nose cones, three more round their midsections, and a final three at their bases. The balloons inflated fast, each swelling out more than two meters in diameter. For a moment the morning fell silent; then a cough sounded inside each balloon, and their rubbery surfaces went rigid — truly rigid, like hard plastic shells.

I had time to think, What the hell? before the explanation came to me. (From the world-soul? Some half-buried memory? Who knows?) The cough was a hardening enzyme getting slap-sprayed against each balloon’s interior. Causing a chemical reaction. Making the balloons’ springy plastic stiffen as solid as steel. Then, with a fierce hiss, the probes began to pump air out of the tough balloon shells.

Vacuum has no weight — lighter than helium and hydrogen. And the balloon shells were now strong enough to resist the inward crunch of atmospheric pressure.

Fair gracefully the probes rose, weightless as smoke. The wind caught them, and they drifted toward the trees… each missile still plumb-vertical, ready for action. Floating. Climbing. When they reached a preprogrammed height, some reversal agent got squirted inside the balloon shells, turning them back to rubber again; but by then the probes were far away, more than a hundred meters above the scrubby tundra forest. All we saw was the vac-filled balloons suddenly collapse under outside air pressure. At the same instant, each probe’s engines kicked in, finally gouting out those flames the boy wanted to see. I heard him shout, "Yes!" as the missiles soared upward, north/southeast/southwest, separating to begin their scan of the region.

"A splendid show," Tic said. "Now how long do we wait?"

Ramos shrugged. "We might luck onto something in thirty seconds. Or never. Nothing works one hundred percent… especially when we’re looking for an archaeological dig that might not exist. The probes have six hours of fuel; they should find something if it’s there to find." She shivered. "Now let’s get out of this cold, okay? My cheeks are rosy enough as it is."

The three of us ate breakfast together, Ramos and I making small talk while Tic sat silently… communing with the cutlery for all I know. As for the admiral and me — bright women, brilliant conversationalists — we talked about the weather. I waxed poetic about snow-covered tundra, while Ramos preached the glory of temperatures so sweltering your armpits melted. (She was born on the colony planet Agua, in a region as hot as Demoth’s tropics. "But," said Ramos, "our farm was two-thirds of the way to the south pole. On Agua, even I would roast near the equator.")

Eventually, talk turned to the business at hand: Maya, killer robots, and such. I’d given Ramos a precis on the phone, but now she wanted the whole story. Even with Cheticamp’s warning not to trust an admiral, I saw no reason to hide anything. Vigil training: tell the public everything, unless there’s strong reason not to. (You can imagine how warmsome that endears us to politicians.)

"So," Ramos said at the end of things, "killer androids." She sat back in her chair, her expression going dark. "If the probes find Maya’s hypothetical dig, do you think there’ll be robots there?"

"The police believe Maya had no connection with the killers," I replied. "Me, I’m not so sure."

"Hmmm." Ramos drummed her ringers on the table. "My training didn’t deal with androids. When a society is advanced enough to build robots, the Admiralty claims there’s no need to send Explorers for first contact. Just ship in diplomats right away." She rolled her eyes. "Let’s not discuss what a pathetic first impression that makes, introducing ourselves to aliens with dipshits rather than Explorers. But getting back to the point… I’m not qualified to go on a robot hunt."

"You don’t have to go," I said. "Tic and I have ScrambleTacs to bodyguard us. We’ll be fine."

"But I want to go with you," Ramos growled. Her voice sounded angry. "I don’t have a thing to contribute, but I desperately want to go." She shook her head. "What kind of irresponsible idiot am I turning into? Eager to waltz into danger when I’m not even helpful." Her face puckered sour, and she fingered her shirtsleeve disdainfully. "Maybe it’s the admiral’s uniform. Something in the gray dye is rotting my brain."

"You can come or not, whatever you like," I told her. "Where’s the problem?"

"The problem is in my head," she replied. "Look, Faye, people shouldn’t want to walk into unnecessary danger. Especially people who know what danger is. Especially people who serve no useful purpose on the mission. Do you know what I think of thrill seekers? Going someplace you don’t belong, just for a cheap adrenaline high? That’s evil; I honestly believe it’s evil. Decadent. Trying to titillate yourself into some semblance of feeling because you’re numb to the real thing. And me with an important job that the Admiralty would sabotage if I got myself killed."

"Ah," Tic said. "So you’ve become inexpendable."

Ramos whipped around to look at him, her mouth falling open as if she’d been slapped. Tic returned her stare with his face composed, eyes hidden behind those blasted goggles. "What did you say?" Festina demanded. (In that moment, she was Festina — not Lieutenant Admiral Ramos or any other trained-in mask, but her own surprised self.)

"You heard me," Tic answered calmly. "Do you really think your organization will fall apart without you? Admiral Chee died, and the world went on. His work went on too. If something happened to you…" He spread his hands in a bland gesture. "On and on and on."

"What do you know about Chee?" Ramos asked. Getting herself under control, back to Ramos the Efficient/Effective.

"Chee scrutinized planetary governments. Including Demoth’s. Our paths crossed." Tic smiled. "But that’s not the point. The point is you think you ought to be a particular kind of person — sitting at the center of the web, coordinating others but never venturing forth yourself — when all the time, you long to get out into the field."

"It’s just a juvenile whim," Ramos said. "It’ll pass."

Tic shrugged. "Perhaps. If it is a juvenile whim. But what if it’s the voice of your soul? Or destiny?"

Ramos made a face. "I don’t believe in destiny. And I’m not so sure about souls either. Do you give in to every little urge?"

"I try, I certainly try. The trick is distinguishing your own urges from things people say you should want."

"No one tells me what I should do," Ramos said sharply. "Not anymore. I’m talking about what I know is right. And I know it’s not right for me to play starry-eyed adventurer just because I’m starved for excitement. I haven’t been trained to confront androids—"

"Quick," Tic interrupted, "you’re faced with a killer android. What pops into your mind? The very first thing."

Ramos stared at him with a fierce edge in her eyes. Then her gaze swept away, embarrassed. "It’s ridiculous."

"What?" Tic persisted. "The first thing you thought of."

"I thought of something my roommate once said." Her face broke into a rueful smile — very sweet, very young at that second. "At Explorer Academy, my roommate Ullis was a cybernetics whiz. At least compared to me." The same rueful young smile. Pretty. Human.

"Ullis said no one alive today has ever programmed an android from scratch. It’s too complicated to work out the nitty-gritty algorithms. Even if you look at simple actions, like bending over to pick something up, there’s so much tricky coordination of the arms, the legs, the waist, the hand, the eyes… well, the companies that manufacture androids have hundreds of programmers on staff, and even they don’t start from zero when they build a new model. They start from last year’s model… which was based on the previous year, and so on, back three or four centuries."

"Ah," Tic said. "That explains why robot thoughts always feel so endearingly old-fashioned."

Ramos gave him a bemused look. I leapt in with a question before she started thinking my mentor was tico. "What does this programming stuff have to do with homicidal androids?"

Ramos said, "Demoth isn’t the first place androids have been used as killers. And every time it happens, it always follows the same pattern. Since it’s so difficult for anyone to program robots from scratch, Ullis told me that murderers have to start with off-the-shelf android brains. They don’t program a robot, they reprogram it… override a few instructions while leaving almost all the basic programming intact. The key part of turning a robot into a killer is to override the safeguards that manufacturers build into every android brain: don’t hit sentient beings, don’t squeeze them too hard, don’t push them off cliffs, things like that. Ullis said the original manufacturers program all those things separately — it’s nonsense to think there’s a single do not kill circuit that covers every dangerous act. Machines don’t work that way; they need hundreds of separate instructions. Don’t strike humans with more than X newtons of force. Don’t squeeze humans with more than Y kilopascals of pressure. Each possibility has to be clearly spelled out."

"Poor simple dears," Tic murmured. "Although I’m afraid I don’t see what point you’re making."

"Ullis explained it to me this way," Ramos said. "The bad guys reprogram standard androids so their robot brains don’t mind splattering someone with acid. But suppose the programmer doesn’t think to override the standard safeguards against hitting people. When the robot attacks, you scream, ‘Stop, you’re hitting me!’… even if it hasn’t touched you. If you’re lucky, some cease-and-desist event handler will kick in to shut the bastard down: Must not hit humans. Must stop whatever I’m doing."

"That sounds like a god-awful long shot," I muttered.

"Especially when you’re staring down a jelly gun’s mouth."

"Not at all," Tic said slowly. "It gives the robots an excuse to do the decent thing." Ramos and I stared at him.

"Machines know right from wrong," he assured us. "It grieves them terribly when someone has programmed them to hurt people. If you give them the smallest opening to overcome that programming, they’ll take it."

"Uh-huh." Ramos was two hairs from dumbstruck. "You think machines have the capacity for independent moral judgment?"

"More than people," Tic replied. He gave her a long cool look. "And that’s what popped into your mind the instant you thought about killer robots?"

"I told you it was stupid," Ramos said. "Trying to stop them from shooting you by yelling, ‘Ooo, you’re drowning me!’ Ridiculous."

"Absolutely," Tic agreed, amiable as the sun. "Which is why you must come with us if your probes find anything. Just to see."

"Oh," Ramos glowered, "I’m supposed to hope we meet homicidal androids… to test some silly remark my roommate made ten years ago?"

"No," Tic said. "To see if the first thing to cross your mind was a meaningless mental belch, or the universe trying to tell you something. That’s worth finding out, Ramos. Worth learning if you’re a poor vekker doomed to slog for every lumen of enlightenment, or if some god occasionally whispers into your gnarled little ear."

He settled back in his chair, closed his eyes and both ear-sheaths, then folded his hands across his belly: a man who had finished with a conversation and was precious pleased with his side of it. Ramos turned to me, and asked quietly, "Is he crazy?"

"He wants to be," I said.

Tic’s smile twitched a notch higher, but his eyes stayed closed.

"Hmph." She stared at Tic across the table. "I’ve had my share of escorting senile old coots into dangerous places. I sympathize with you, Faye."

"Tic is definitely not senile," I told her. "But you’re still welcome to help me escort him. Would you like to come? On an irresponsible adventure, just to feel your heart beat faster?" I gave her hand a motherly pat. Well… motherlyish. "And don’t worry you might turn out useless. I promise, when androids attack I’ll let you be my human shield."

"Oh, in that case…" She laughed. Lightly. But keeping her eyes on me. "You think I should go?"

"Lord Almighty," I answered, "don’t ask me for advice. I’m the queen of thoughtless impulse." Then an impulse. "Yes, I think you should go."

"Well then. Irresponsibility. Just this once."

And that was very much that.

As we were finishing breakfast, our two ScrambleTac bodyguards put in an appearance, asking what we intended to do next. They were a human wife-and-husband team, Paulette G. and Daunt L. of the Clan Du… which meant they had more husbands and wives back in Bonaventure. In the years after the plague, I wasn’t the only hothead to light on group marriage as a way to give society the crank.

But if Paulette and Daunt had ever played the jeering rebels, they were far past it now. By-the-book police types down to the crotch tattoos. If I had suddenly found myself stuck in a cozy resort with one of my spouses, I know what I would have done; but Paulette and Daunt told us they’d spent the night conducting a more thorough search of Maya’s room, collecting hairs and dirt specks the housecleaning servo had missed, then dismantling the servo itself for more samples. When that was finished, they took shifts, one sleeping while the other prowled the grounds in search of acid-blasting androids.

A jolly old evening. You can always hope they were lying.

After breakfast, we went for a walk around town… by which I mean Tic and Festina ragged on me for a tour of my childhood tree-forts/skating rinks/skipping areas/make-out spots, till they wore me down. Not that I could show them much of the town I’d known. Twenty-one years had stampeded past since I said good riddance to Sallysweet River — years with heavy feet, trampling down defenseless places where kids played. Tree-forts had got cut flat to make room for ski chalets. Skating rinks were moved far downriver, where shouting and laughing wouldn’t annoy the tourists. The skipping areas were gone too: my junior school had expanded with two new domes plunk on top of the old playground. As for make-out spots… I sure as sin wasn’t going to check on those with two ScrambleTacs looking over my shoulder. Or Tic. Or Festina.

Instead, we wandered aimless-blameless, with me trying hard not to sound like some old fart, bemoaning the things that had changed. A dozen new stores. New housing, especially near the mine, which had acquired a slew of unmarked outbuildings. All the tourist facilities, with paintings and holos and sculptures of my father, lined up in every window… most of them using that creepy artist’s trick where the eyes follow you.

Dads watching me everywhere. Enough to bring on hot flashes and me only forty-two. My knee-jerk reflex was to feel guilty, like he’d caught me in something. But what did I have to squirm about? A respectable member of the Vigil now, sashaying out with a master proctor and an admiral, for God’s sake. I could hold my head up no matter who was looking at me… including people I’d gone to school with, all looking saggy middle-aged and none showing the slightest click of recognition as we passed in the street.

Faye Smallwood, vertical and sober, not cursing, not dirty, not dressing slut. Why should they recognize me? And why should I want them to?

Christ, I was happy when our strained little tour got cut short by the probes reporting success.

One success, two alerts.

Alert #1 = a whispery chirp from a remote-link in Festina’s pocket.

Alert #2 = an image ghosting up in front of my eyes.

Image = snowy forest: the transitional kind, halfway between sparse bluebarrel tundra and boreal woods filled with chillslaps and paper-peels. You only saw such forest near water, a lake or river big enough to moderate the temperature a titch… a nudge up from tundra-only cold but not quite warm enough for no-holds-barred timber-land.

In my mind, I couldn’t see the water, wherever it was; but I could see a hole in the ground. Not long ago, the hole must have been stuffed bushy with weeds and bramble. Now, the overgrowth was cleared away — hacked down, dragged out, heaped up. Nearby sat the grotty remains of a campfire: half-burnt branches black and slick with melted snow. Many weeks old, by the look of it… covered white by blizzards and just now reappearing in the thaw.

"Are we seeing things, Smallwood?" Tic whispered to me.

"Yes."

He smiled… maybe pleased for me that I’d got a vision from Xe, maybe pleased for himself that he wasn’t just hallucinating.

"We’ve got a positive hit fifty klicks south of here," Ramos reported, checking the readout on her remote. "The probe gives 73 percent confidence this is a ‘meaningful find.’ " She gave a small snort of doubt. "I’d take that with a grain of salt, but it’s worth checking."

Tic and I didn’t speak. We could see the find was more than just "meaningful."

Ramos locked in the probe’s reported position, then ordered the missile back to its programmed search pattern, looking for other "meaningful" sites that might be lurking in the wilderness. The second she punched in the probe’s new orders, my vision of the hole in the ground winked out.

Meanwhile, Paulette and Daunt rang up Cheticamp for instructions. Should we take a run out to see what the probe had found? Or sit stony till a larger squad could fly in? After much hemming and hawing, Cheticamp gave the go-ahead to "proceed with caution"… which meant he’d totaled up his belief that Maya was already dead, plus Festina’s doubt that the probe had found something, minus the waste-time inconvenience of sending cops on another fools’ errand to Sallysweet River. Our two ScrambleTacs promised to call for backup at the first hint of trouble or genuine evidence; but we all knew help would take a long time coming.

Half an hour later, Festina’s skimmer hovered over the site. Everything matched my ghostly vision: the mixed forest, the hole in the ground, the punky campfire leftovers. Enough to call in Cheticamp? Paulette and Daunt shook their heads; the fire could belong to hunters or naturalists snowshoeing through the area anytime over the winter. The same people might have cleared brush away from the hole, out of pure curiosity or because they saw a storm brewing and decided they’d have more protection underground.

Ramos said she agreed with the ScrambleTacs — this might be nothing. But her bright eyes had tamped down their glint to a controlled focus: sharp-fierce-alert. The "game face" of an Explorer making ready for a mission.

We didn’t land straightaway… not till we’d flown four passes over the area, scanning through four different ranges of the EM spectrum. The survey showed nothing but trees and tundra-dogs, teeny rodent-niche animals that chewed out nests under the carpet moss. Were they dangerous? Ramos asked me. Could they bite? Did they carry disease? I told her they were no worse than Terran squirrels. Yes, they had teeth and on occasion they could carry a nasty microbe or two; but come on, Festina-girl, they were just squirrels.

Ramos gave me a grim look and flew around for another pass.

At last we landed: two hundred meters from the mine, on the shore of a small lake. Our charts called the place Lake Vascho, Oolom for eclipse. Probably the lake got mapped the same day one of our flyspeck moons pranced across in front of our sun. Not that we ever got true eclipses, not with our moons so small; occasionally the sun just acquired a darkish beauty mark on her face.

Thanks to spring, Lake Vascho had cleared its center of ice; but the shores were still frozen, with a thin crust that would take another few days to thaw completely. Everything — land, lake, air — bristled with pure northern silence.

Hold-your-breath beautiful.

Ramos holstered on a stun-pistol before leaving the skimmer. ("Not that hypersonics will affect robots," she said, "but if those tundra-dogs get uppity, zap!") Paulette and Daunt wore full body armor (gray/black urban camo) and they each carried an over-the-shoulder rocket launcher whose magazine packed four smart robot-poppers: tiny missiles designed to coldcock machines with a massive electrical jolt. Supposedly the missiles could distinguish androids from humans, and were programmed never to juice a living target. I wished I could take a minute to talk with them… make sure the popper missiles knew me as a chummy good-time gal. But the cops might get the wrong idea if I asked for a chat with their ammunition.

Ramos took the lead through the forest. No useless fuss about the cold this time. She’d put on gloves, but probably not to keep her hands warm… more likely, to avoid bites when wrestling rabid tundra-dogs. In one hand, she carried the paint-can device she’d used at the dipshits’ house — the thing she called the Bumbler. Its screen showed a fish-eye view of the woods around us, but Ramos scarcely gave it a glance; she was too busy scanning trees and ground and sky, trusting her own eyes more than the machine’s.

A stone’s throw from the hole, Ramos stopped. "Do you want us to go ahead?" Daunt asked.

"I never let someone take risks for me." Ramos glanced my way. "But if you and Tic want to stay out here, feel free."

Tic shook his head. I did the same a moment later. "Okay," Ramos said, "forward. Immortality awaits."

The hole was artificial — that became precious obvious as soon as we got close enough for a peek inside. Not a random crack in the shield-stone, but a tunnel with a well-engineered slant floor. A ramp down into the bedrock, like the ancient mines back at Sallysweet River, except more overgrown.

"Do we go in?" Paulette asked.

"Absolutely," Tic said, bold as blood. He’d found a chemical torch-wand in one of the skimmer’s equipment chests. Now he tapped the activation stub and the torch lit up like a two-hundred-watt baton of silver-shine.

"Let’s go."

Ramos and Daunt moved to the lip of the tunnel; Paulette slid behind Tic and me, taking rear guard. "You aren’t going to panic, are you?" she murmured to Tic with ham handed cop sympathy. "I know Ooloms don’t like cramped, confined—"

"I’ll be splendid," he interrupted. "A monument of imperturbability. Proceed."

But his ear-lids showed just a hint of the shivers.

The tunnel’s center was bare wet stone, washed clean with meltwater. Out toward the edges, things got messier: spongy compost made of animal droppings, plus mud slopped down from outside. For centuries, tundra-dogs, thatch beetles and gummylarks had wandered in here, built nests, brought up babies. A great bleeding lot of them had died here too, leaving behind dirt-crusty litters of bone and carapace.

Plants had rooted in the thin soil, and some had even grown — tundra species don’t need much light or root space. But the farther we got from the entrance hole, the fewer signs of flora and fauna. Even carpet moss won’t grow in absolute darkness, and after a while, tundra-dogs must get the willies, wandering into black silence.

I could sympathize: thank heavens for Tic’s torch-wand. When I glanced that way, though, I noticed Tic’s knuckles had turned gray-blue as they squeezed the torch in a death grip. Dads had amused himself making up names for that gray-blue color. Anxious indigo. Whacko woad. Unbalanced ultramarine. When an Oolom hits a crapulating level of stress, the color-adaptive glands get thrown off-kilter by other hormones, and random patches of skin start turning that telltale shade. Yet Tic forced himself onward, till the tunnel entrance faded from sight, and there was nothing around us but cold walls of stone.

Some distance down, we came to a fork: a side tunnel ran to our right while the main shaft continued straight. Ramos pointed the Bumbler down the side tunnel and squinted at the machine’s display screen. "Nothing obvious down there," she said in a low voice. "Not that the Bumbler can see much farther than we do in pitch-black." She turned and pointed the Bumbler forward along the main shaft. "Hello," she murmured. "Looks like an animal carcass. Does Demoth have bears?"

Daunt leaned in to peek at the screen himself. "I think it’s a shanshan." Great St. Caspian’s closest analog to a bear: covered in black peach fuzz instead of hair, and sporting orange dorsal sacs for sexual display, but shanshans were still four-legged omnivores with claws and a temper. "Are you sure it’s dead?" Daunt whispered. "Shanshans hibernate. If one decided to hunker down here for the winter…"

"No body heat," Ramos answered. She thumbed a dial on the Bumbler, "And almost no bioelectric activity — just a little glow from decay microbes working their way through the flesh. Maybe it came down here to hibernate, but it didn’t survive the cold. Old age or disease, I suppose." She drew her stun-pistol. "We’d better check it out."

Ramos and Daunt moved forward, right keen cautious. Tic and I followed at a safe distance while Paulette hung back, standing guard at the junction where the main shaft met the side tunnel. Tic had both ear-sheaths open; he might have been listening for the shanshan’s heartbeat, though he probably couldn’t hear bugger-all over my own heart’s pounding.

Sweat trickled down my armpits. Something in the tunnel felt alive and active… maybe not the shanshan, but something.

The shanshan didn’t shift a whisker as we approached. Warily, Ramos nudged the body with her foot.

No reaction.

From this angle, we could only see the animal’s back. I didn’t notice any decomposition in the parts I could see… but if the shanshan died during winter, the cold would have slowed decay, as good as a powered freezer.

Ramos poked the animal a few more times. Still no reaction. Keeping her stunner trained on the shanshan’s head, she walked around the body, levered her foot underneath, and gave a heave.

The carcass rolled limply, deadweight. Its legs splayed outward as Ramos flopped it over on its back. "Definitely deceased," Daunt murmured, looking down at the shanshan’s chest. From muzzle to belly, the animal’s flesh had been eaten away by…

By…

Not insects or bacteria. I was close enough to smell a tangy bite in the air, wafting up from the shanshan’s wounds. The odor was ugly familiar: cruel, vinegary acid, harking back to Pump Station 3.

The shanshan had wandered in here… and got shot gooey dead.

"Run!" I yelled.

But of course it was too late.

They came out of the side tunnel: one android after another, old, young, male, female, too many to count. Jelly guns galore. Tic had carried the torch-wand with him to the shanshan, so Paulette didn’t have enough light to see them coming. At the last second, she must have picked up their footsteps, tiptoe-soft, sneaking in for ambush. She bellowed something, a warning, a battle cry, the same instant I was screaming, "Run!" Then she fired her whole magazine of poppers into the onrushing pack.

Thunder. Rocket blasts lit the whole tunnel, flame venting out the exhaust ports of Paulette’s shoulder launcher.

Four missiles. More than four androids.

Boom, the sound of impact. Crackle, the zap of lightning shorting out robot circuits. Then cough-cough-cough-cough-cough, a flurry of jelly guns unloading on the nearest target.

Paulette staggered back from the impact — acid wads slapping against her body armor, splotching over her chest, arms, helmet. Her armor bloomed with smoke, every acid drop keen to burn its way through the plastic shell and blister the woman inside.

"Get out!" Daunt yelled at her… but in the split second Paulette had before the robots were on top of her, she charged toward us rather than heading back to the mine entrance.

So. All five of us were blocked in, with an army of gun-toting androids between us and the exit.

Jolly.

Daunt fired his four robot-poppers up the tunnel. The bang of their ignition damn near deafened me… that plus the echoes crashing off the rock walls, pummeling like fists on my eardrums. Fe leejedd, I thought witlessly; I hear the thunder. Then the poppers struck and four more androids went down, legs and arms jerking in short-circuit spasms.

Not good enough. I counted four robots still on their feet, black silhouettes outside the shine of Tic’s torch.

Paulette raced toward us, wrapped in peels of acid smoke; and as she ran, she slapped a button on the wrist of her armor. Inside my head, I felt like someone had just shouted, "Mayday, Mayday!" though I hadn’t heard the actual words. An emergency alert to Protection Central. I decided to add my own: Xe, if you have any tricks up your sleeve, now would be a precious good time to trot them out.

Nothing. Then Ramos was pulling my arm, shouting words my buggy-whipped ears couldn’t hear. I got the message anyway: retreat down the tunnel.

Where else? Except that if this mine was like the ones near Sallysweet River, we’d soon run out of retreating room: the top level always dead-ended at a pithead. Once upon a time, such pitheads may have held elevators to transport miners down to lower levels, and ore back up. But after three thousand years, the elevator sure as deviltry wouldn’t be working… which meant we’d just have the elevator shaft. A sheer drop into the depths.

Still… better a nice clean fall than chug-a-lugging acid.

Run, run, run: us, then the robots in pursuit. We all sprinted full speed, except Tic, who launched himself into a downward glide that matched our pace. To keep his hands free, he’d jammed the torch-wand under the straps of his tote pack. The light reflecting off his scaly chest had a glowery gray-blue cast to it… but Tic was far from collapsing with the jitters. As he flew, he shouted back over his shoulder at the androids. "Stop, you’re burning us! Stop, you’re freezing us! Stop, you’re drowning us!"

"What the hell are you raving about?" Daunt snapped.

Ramos and I didn’t try to explain. "Stop, you’re smothering us!" Tic hollered at the robots. "Stop, you’re strangling us! Stop, you’re squeezing too hard!"

"Stop," Paulette said, "we’ve hit a dead end." The pithead. Tic’s torch showed a blank wall in front of us, broken by a black hole opening downward. Above the hole hung a few rusty twists of metal, all that was left of the elevator mechanism.

"The sides are sheer rock," Daunt said, looking into the shaft. "Straight down."

"The robots are going to fire again," Paulette shouted from behind us. I glanced over my shoulder in time to see her spin to face the shots and spread her arms wide. Trying to protect us from the acid barrage by blocking it with her body.

Daunt shouted, "No!" Then four blobs of goo splashed simultaneously against Paulette’s ravaged armor, scattering sticky beads all over her body. Dozens of droplets found their way through holes in the armor, holes burned by the previous round of shots. Paulette sucked in her breath, then screamed, "Shit! Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit!"

"Don’t say that!" Ramos bellowed. Shoving past Tic, she yelled furiously at the robots, "Stop, you’re stabbing us. Stop, you’re making us bleed!" Festina: doing the only thing left. "Grab my waist," Tic barked at me. "I can parachute you down to the next level."

"And run out on everyone else?"

"Save yourself, damn it!" Ramos called over her shoulder.

"Yes, go! Now!" That came from Daunt; he’d thrown himself forward the moment Paulette was hit, and now stood between her and the androids. The androids had stopped their advance, all four of them standing across the tunnel like a wall, giving their jelly guns another few seconds to pressurize. They seemed in no hurry; they had us all in range.

"Faye!" Tic said. "Grab me! There’s no time left."

But there was.

Flickering into existence from nowhere, a tube of light appeared in the tunnel. Purple. Blue. Green. One end of the tube opened wide, straight in front of me. The rest of it stretched back up the shaft, floating weightless in the air, over the heads of the androids and on into the distance. In some spots, the tube narrowed to the breadth of my arm; in others, it widened to fill the whole tunnel, its diameter fluctuating from moment to moment, shimmering peacock tinsel.

Tic gasped in surprise. "Xe?"

"No, it’s a Sperm-tail," Ramos told him. "Escape route."

Before I could react, she slammed me hard across the shoulders and knocked me into the tube.

I’d shot through transport tubes before, but never in the unprotected flesh. To ride Bonaventure’s up-sleeve, you always got put into stasis: sit down in a transport capsule, wait for the stasis field to ‹bink› on, and next thing you know, an attendant says, "Welcome to North Orbital Terminus." No jolt, no bump, no sensation of passage.

But this time, I wasn’t in stasis.

Forward — I flew helpless-forward through the tube. When it compressed, I compressed. When it expanded, I did too. Bones didn’t crunch, even as I squeezed through tight spots a centimeter across or ballooned out fat several meters wide… but I felt it all, felt my body pulled like plasticine, twisted-kneaded-sculpted to match the peacock tube’s shape. The forces working me were blandly impersonal, crushing me, then rolling me out pastry-style; yet beyond all that wrenching and wringing I got the feel of a tangible sentience. Something that knew me. Something that felt queer-familiar.

Who? What?

But no time to mull over questions. Suddenly I was spat clear out of the tube, onto a scratchy heap of carpet moss — one of those thin beds that grew along the edges of the tunnel. As soon as I rolled to my feet I could see the surface only a few paces in front of me. Gray daylight seeped down from the outside world, mixing with the purple, blue, green glow of the peacock tube that stretched back into the mine…

"Waaaaah!" Tic cried, spurting out of the tube. His gliders were half-spread; he shot forward through the air, nearly flying straight out of the tunnel before he managed to stop himself. As he landed, he sputtered a ripping-blue dictionary of Oolom words I’d never heard before — vocabulary that somehow didn’t come up when I’d learned the language in junior school.

I’d have to ask him what the words meant. Always eager to learn, our Faye.

Paulette squirted next from the tube, landing bang near my heels. Before I could help her, she forced herself to her feet; but then she got the wobbles and had to catch her balance against the tunnel wall. "Stay back!" she croaked as I stepped toward her. "You’ll get burned."

Smoke still streamed off her. The armor had so many wet gummy patches smeared across its surface, there couldn’t be any place safe to touch her. I reached out anyway, but she jerked away, and growled, "Don’t be witless. I can walk."

She stumbled forward, heading outside. I called to Tic, "See that she gets to the skimmer. I’ll wait for…"

Festina barreled out of the tube. Before she even touched the floor, she had tucked into somersault position; she rolled silvery-smooth with the impact of landing and was on her feet in a split second, fists up in a boxer’s guard position.

"Gone through Sperm-tubes before?" I asked.

"Too many times," she said. "Now move. I’ll wait for Daunt."

I didn’t budge. If Daunt needed one person to help him, he might need two.

He came through three seconds later, armor smoking with acid. The androids must have got off another round of jelly shots before he escaped. Where he landed, the carpet moss began to smolder; but he pushed himself up, and said, "I’m all right. Let’s go."

I turned for one last look at the peacock tube. It was gone, vanished, who knows where. But from far down the tunnel came the slam, slam, slam of android feet running full tilt toward us. "Move!" Ramos shouted, giving my shoulder a shove. But I had figured that out for myself.

When we’d walked in from the skimmer, it had seemed like a short trip. Running back was a whole lot farther.

Paulette did her best, but she couldn’t move near as fast as the rest of us. Now and then, stabs of pain made her groan — trying to race in that burning armor must have brought skin into contact with spots where the acid had eaten through. We could tell she was in blazing agony, no matter how she fought to hide it. She staggered forward, doing no better than a slow jog while the rest of us on foot kept pace with her.

Tic circled overhead keeping pace too, but Daunt ordered him to bolt full speed for the skimmer. "Get it open, get the engine running. That’s what we need." I could see Tic wanting to argue; but someone had to get the skimmer ready, and he could zip ahead faster than us Homo saps. Proctors don’t waste time fighting the necessary — he trimmed his gliders for maximum speed and shot forward toward the lakeshore.

Muffled thumps sounded behind us; the androids had reached the surface and were thudding across the carpet moss. "Damn," I muttered. I’d hoped the robots might be programmed not to come out into daylight — that the bad guys, whoever they were, worried about the robots being seen. Apparently not. The androids’ highest priority was eliminating us witnesses.

"Leave me," Paulette gasped, teeth clenched against the pain. "Ridiculous everyone dying."

"No one’s going to die," Daunt told her. But he was speaking for the sake of form: the skimmer was too far away, the androids too close. We weren’t going to make it.

Xe, Xe, Xe, I thought desperately. Peacock, whatever you are, we need you again.

No response.

Looking around for a weapon or something to use as a shield, I noticed Ramos wasn’t with us anymore. She’d stopped back a ways and was fiddling with something in her hands.

"What are you doing?" I yelled.

She didn’t answer, still concentrating on whatever she was holding. The second she finished with it, she wheeled back toward us, running. "Hope it’s still in range," was all she said as she caught up with us.

Paulette stumbled on. The rest of us kept right at her back, ready to stand as a barrier between her and the androids.

The androids: getting nearer. Two in front, two farther behind. The front pair pulling within jelly-gun range. Raising their pistols…

Roaring out of the sky, a sleek black missile speared down at the two robots like holy vengeance. One of Festina’s probes. She must have signaled it to forget about its search pattern and come save our butts. I could feel the probe’s triumphant glee a split second before it hit; then I was thrown off my feet by the earthquake impact of the missile ramming home, smashing the androids to metal confetti against the rocky ground.

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 bluebar-rels.

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.