Dot Robot

by Jason Bradbury

  ‘Are you getting this?’ asked Jackson, hovering Tug next to what appeared to be a massive plug made of rock. To anyone else, the huge bung in the rock wall would have been invisible, its edges perceived as natural cracks in the rock. But both roboteers had seen the close-up footage from Brooke’s camera on their previous visit and knew this was the place where billions of litres of stolen water had terminated.

  Jackson had a flashback to the patent website. ‘It’s a rock-plastic amalgam!’ he declared. ‘It was developed by Real Holdings.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘It’s similar to the stuff they use for making climbing walls. It’s like rock, but it’s not rock. They must have just squirted it in, like a dentist filling a cavity. It’s very clever – by the time anyone discovers it, they’re long gone.’

  ‘All I know is it doesn’t really matter,’ said Brooke, sounding frustrated. ‘There’s nothing that will come out on film here. Unless we’re looking to enter Lear for a Best Kept Valley Award, I reckon our best bet now is to head for the vanished village. We can only hope there’s enough evidence left to link Lear to the devastation and persuade him to let the Kojimas go.’

  ‘A few pictures of the crumbled foundations of a village no one’s heard of won’t be enough to make Lear or anyone else sit up and listen, Brooke. We need to get to the other side of the mountain. Lear is treating it like a bank. He deposits the water in one end and then draws it out of the other. And what’s on the other side? Moldova!’

  ‘Come off it … whatever that swindler was up to, he’s long gone now.’

  ‘D’you remember our research on the area for the original mission?’ asked Jackson.

  ‘Nope,’ replied Brooke. ‘I only read what I had to – I is here for the machines, remember!’

  Jackson raised an eyebrow, invisible to Brooke on the other side of the world. ‘Fine. Well, listen to this,’ he said, minimizing his view from Tug to bring up a web page he had looked at for very different reasons a week ago.

  The former Soviet country of Moldova has a thriving black market, where all kinds of contraband are available. Anything from ex-Russian tanks to nuclear materials and oil are known to be trafficked across its border, using long-established smuggling routes and gangs.

  ‘If there’s a place where Lear could find a buyer for his water, it’s there! Why settle for a few snaps of an ex-village when we can film his whole operation? That way, we’ll have enough to secure the twins’ release and end his operation for good!’

  ‘All right. But whatever we do – it had better be quick.’ As Brooke sent Punk after Jackson’s stout machine, the banging and cries from the other side of the steel door were giving way to the sound of drilling.

  J.P.’s voice had boomed loud in the speaker until Brooke turned it off, but she’d have to live with the drilling of the metal door. Her father had access to a real-time stream of data from the mission. He might not understand where his robotic prototypes had gone, but he knew they had taken a downward trajectory over the western edge of Russia – and that his daughter had locked the rest of the launch team out, to make it happen. She could see her furious father pacing up and down and gesticulating at the camera that fed the screen above her station.

  T minus fifteen minutes till Pops gets in here, she thought.

  CHAPTER 31

  The land beyond the mountain top was a smear of purple black below a mackerel sky, as if the sun got to choose a new colour for each country. Jackson was using a combination of topographical information from his research and gut instinct that whatever Lear was up to on the other side of the mountain had to be within spitting distance of a road of some kind. There were three roads leading to the foot of the mountain on the Moldovan side – he led the robots down towards the one furthest from the official border crossing.

  Punk’s sensitive microphones picked up the soft crump of explosions first, and then the faint echo of rifle fire. And it wasn’t long before Brooke and Jackson could make out the telltale shapes of Lear’s road-trains, like big black grubs lining up to feed. They pulled the two robots close to the edge of a large rocky horseshoe where they couldn’t be spotted.

  ‘OK, Factoid Boy, what are they up to down there?’

  ‘I’m not entirely sure, but it makes sense that the Moldovan dealers will use their black-market connections to find the highest bidder for Lear’s water. It’s as valuable as oil. In some countries, where there are huge water shortages, they refer to it as “liquid gold”. There is either not enough to go round, or it’s polluted or controlled by rogue governments. The government of Bolivia, for example, sold the rights to all their natural water to a corporation. If you collected a cupful of rainwater in a downpour, you’d have to pay to drink it! If they can’t get the price they want locally, they’ll just send it elsewhere.’

  ‘How d’you find that stuff out? Do you ever sleep?’

  ‘Yeah, well, someone I know went and got themselves kidnapped in a different time zone – and I’ve been jetlagged ever since.’

  ‘OK, so Lear has the makings of another very profitable business – as if he needs it – but how’s it work here?’

  ‘I’m guessing the Moldovan gang are the couriers. They find a buyer and send it on.’

  ‘Sure, but how do you send billions of litres of water?’

  ‘In the same way as oil … you use pipes and boats!’

  The summer in this part of Eastern Europe was just beginning, but the days were hot enough, and the nights cool enough, to mix up a thin fog that shrouded the two robots as they descended to a vantage point above the action. There had been the odd snap of gunfire, but nothing like the thuds and rumbles that had brought them here. As Punk offered Brooke a full panorama of the one-time wasteland, now converted into a busy hub for big rigs, pick-ups and armed guards, she became aware of some strange flashes from inside the trees across the valley.

  ‘You won’t believe this,’ said Brooke, who had zoomed in on the tree line with one of Punk’s telescopic lenses.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ replied Jackson. ‘Dragos.’

  The General, with a mixture of his militiamen and ten or so shabby-looking civilians who doubtless had followed him from the vanished village, were holed up above the compound. Brooke panned her view further down the slope and recognized the army-green jump-suits of a few groups of Lear’s security men. It looked like two squads of Lear’s men were making their way up to Dragos’s position. The two groups of fighters were about a hundred metres or so apart – an advance party, whom Brooke assumed were tasked with flushing out the General, and a rearguard to finish him and his men off.

  ‘I’m no expert,’ said Brooke. ‘But by the looks of the load-out Lear’s men are carrying, our handsome General is outgunned.’ The auto-focus on Punk’s camera was moving between the shiny faces of Lear’s men and the assortment of scary-looking weapons on their backs.

  ‘Do you know what really bugs me?’ said Jackson. ‘The fact that Lear isn’t down there himself.’ But even as he said it he suspected that Lear was there in all but body – like a poltergeist, watching, listening and keeping things moving.

  ‘He doesn’t need to be,’ said Brooke. ‘If you can get all this on camera, the only water supply he’ll be getting his hands on will be the sink in his jail cell. We better get on with this. You could try getting Tug in between Dragos and the advancing soldiers.’

  ‘What’s Tug going to do – shunt Lear’s heavies into submission?’

  ‘No, we don’t want to get into a fight we can’t win. I dunno … create a diversion, while me and Punk get busy with our photo shoot.’

  Jackson dipped his control stick forward. He had J.P.’s computer-assisted fly-by-wire system to thank for the ease of handling. All he had to do was watch that he didn’t pitch the nose too steeply – get the balance wrong and, as he’d found during the earlier part of their journey, Tug would bite the dirt, digging up great chunks of earth. Do that here, where there was little else but rock
and pine trees, and Jackson could say goodbye to his robot.

  Jackson aimed for the rearguard first, a tight formation of just four men. Tug’s electric fan screamed just millimetres above their heads, sending the men scurrying for cover like silverfish. It took the men only a few seconds to come to their senses, and a hail of gunfire followed Tug. Jackson seized his chance and pulled back on his chrome metal stick to flip the robot on to his back, then dropped him behind a row of bushes. To the rearguard whose bullets were chasing him, it looked like whatever had just buzzed them had been downed, and they set off, weapons primed, to investigate.

  Tug had left the unit looking for him in the stunted shrubs that clung to the hillside and now circled around the vanguard group, using wispy pockets of fog for cover. But, as he approached Lear’s men, Jackson spotted a new threat to Dragos and his band of freedom fighters in the corner of Tug’s video feed. A battered Land Rover with a large-calibre machine gun mounted in the back was picking a route up the hillside. Jackson reckoned the Ukrainians had about a minute before the long-haired brute behind the machine gun zeroed in on them.

  Throwing Tug across the slope towards the vehicle, he had the robot break cover fifty metres from the converted off-roader. As Tug approached at speed, Jackson could clearly see the Land Rover’s driver shouting to the man behind him to open fire. Without really knowing what to expect, Jackson depressed the button on his lightsabre handle, which he’d mapped to the CLAW function. Seconds from impact and Tug’s nose opened, splitting into two sections of a powerful pincer. The gunner’s enraged face lit up as he pulled the trigger, and several rounds of burning red tracer flew either side of Jackson’s view before his robot butted the gun barrel.

  As soon as they impacted the gun, Tug’s pincers closed round it, ripping the weapon from its housing and knocking the gunner off his feet. Jackson released Tug’s grip and the mangled weapon clattered on to the rocks, then he brought him into a steady hover in front of the Land Rover.

  The driver sat open-mouthed, the fear in his eyes showing through his cracked windscreen. And Tug’s optics were sensitive enough for Jackson to notice the driver’s eyes suddenly focus as he understood the consequences of the robot’s next move.

  In all honesty, Jackson was a little disappointed at what happened when he pressed his GRENADE button. A small canister, about the size of a fizzy drinks can and covered in a treacly, gloppy substance, shot from the robot and stuck to the vehicle’s hood. For a good ten seconds nothing happened. The driver just stared into Tug’s camera, and Jackson stared into his monitor back at him. Then the grenade started to fizz and smoke and a brilliant plume of molten metal and sparks spurted into the air. When his engine stopped, the driver knew whatever was in the can had made it to his engine, and he wasn’t staying to find out if it could eat the rest of his car.

  Brooke had heard the firing up on the hillside, but she was too focused on her side of the mission to worry. Punk was hovering beside the cabin of one of Lear’s massive rigs. Of all the views offered up, the one that interested the young American most was showing her a portable office building in which she could just make out four men chatting. Doing her best to keep an eye on all eight of Punk’s camera feeds, she sent the robot towards the mobile office, bringing him to rest on the building’s roof. After retracting the rotorblades, Punk rolled slowly forward and a few degrees to the right, until his listening spike was touching the thin flat roof of the movable building.

  It took a moment for Brooke to tune her ears into the thick East European accent of one of the men. He spoke in a monotone with a measured voice and his ‘r’s were rolled.

  ‘How long until your pipeline is ready to connect to ours?’

  ‘The first of our trucks have already reached the outskirts of Giurgiulesti.’ The second voice belonged to an Englishman, or a European who spoke very good English. It was precise and businesslike, with no hint of colour; the voice of a military man, she thought. ‘I anticipate we should be able to start pumping within the next thirty minutes, Mr Josan. Assuming you have greased the right palms?’

  ‘Everything will go smoothly at our end,’ said the East European. ‘You can tell your boss that if this first transaction is successful, my network stands ready to connect you and your … product to markets who will pay more for it than oil.’

  ‘Believe me, sir, once we have completed certain operations we have planned for the water supplies of vulnerable nations, our product will be worth more than gold! We have found that a little poison, or even the rumour of contamination, has made the water we offer extremely desirable.’

  If Brooke understood what the man in the cabin had just said, Lear, the supposed ‘friendly face of computing’, was about to add the wholesale poisoning of water to the theft, kidnapping and murder he was already responsible for. Thankfully, she had it all recorded. And now, as the four men dropped from the cabin on to the grass, she had their faces too.

  ‘Does “Giurgiulesti” mean anything to you?’ said Brooke, her voice crackling in Jackson’s headphones.

  ‘Of course. It’s Moldova’s only port. Privately owned and operated. It’s connected to the sea by the lower Danube river.’

  ‘Well, that’s where they’re sending the water.’

  ‘What did I tell you – he’s using boats!’

  It made complete sense. Using huge tankers, the water could be shipped to whoever in the world was willing to pay the highest price. Jackson had seen huge tankers on the Web that carried what were called Bulk Liquid Cargoes. Every day, oil, liquid gas, chemicals, even wine, were carried across thousands of miles of ocean. Imagine that, he’d thought. A wine slick! Lear’s liquid cargo wasn’t any different. The predictions of global water shortages that he’d read about would only make Lear’s watery ambitions much more profitable.

  The drilling had stopped. All Brooke could hear now were the grunts and curses of Goulman, applying his body builder’s physique to the end of a crowbar in order to peel back the edges of the door.

  ‘Jackson, I reckon we got about five minutes before my dad gatecrashes his own party. Am I hearin’ things or are you startin’ a brawl up there?’

  ‘You just keep snapping,’ Jackson replied, watching the Land Rover’s front tyres blow out as molten engine metal congealed round them. ‘Me and Tug have things under control.’

  Jackson wasn’t entirely convinced if his confidence was well placed as he turned Tug round and looked back up the hillside. While he had been dealing with the Land Rover, Dragos and his men had engaged the security men that formed the rearguard. Their shabby appearance belied amazing skill and, after a brief but fearsome firefight, Lear’s men gave up and joined the Land Rover driver in running away down the hillside. But as Tug got closer, Jackson could see that Lear’s other mercenary unit was now on the offensive, raining down a storm of automatic gunfire on the General’s position.

  Jackson could see that several of Dragos’s fighters had been injured and some members of the team were carrying them off in a bid to retreat, while the General attempted to cover them. Tug banked hard above the rocky outcrop on which the remaining gaggle of Dragos’s men were marooned. Jackson could see the brave General with his signature black beret and the four remaining villagers at his side, attempting to hold back at least ten heavily armed mercenaries. But for each shot they fired, they received a barrage in return.

  Jackson knew it was only a matter of minutes before they were overrun. He tilted Tug into a steep dive, pulling up so close to the hillside that clumps of dry grass lashed at the edges of his view. Then he flung the robot sideways, so his back was to Dragos and his nose was trained on Lear’s unit, and began to circle them. He was ‘slicing the pie’, a gaming tactic he’d used to devastating effect in countless virtual battles. The idea was to force your enemy to turn on the spot, preventing them from setting up a steady aim. It was no different here, with the sideways-moving robot sweeping a speedy arc round the hired shooters, causing them to empty their magazines
with wayward shots as each of them attempted to pirouette and keep the flying machine in their sights.

  As the shooting dried up, Jackson pushed Tug towards the men while pressing his thumb over the tiny metal knob to which he’d assigned the MAGNET function. The effect was instant. Some of the men squealed as their fingers were twisted and their metal weapons were wrenched from their hands. Jackson had to apply extra thrust just to keep Tug from dropping like a stone with the extra weight of the rifles and machine guns now stuck all over his underside. Without warning, Dragos and his four men leaped from the rocks and ran into the midst of the disarmed unit.

  It was hard for Jackson to see the details of the fight, given that the curved magazine of an AK47 assault rifle was covering Tug’s camera lens. But it was less than a minute before half of Lear’s unit were cowering at the feet of Dragos’s biggest man – an enormous villager who, but for his large blue lumberjack shirt, could have been mistaken for a very angry bear – while the other half were being pursued up the mountain.

  Jackson had just released the MAGNET function, letting the weapons drop to the ground, when Tug was suddenly hit by something, as if the robot had been slapped by a giant hockey stick. All Jackson could see was ground and sky in lightning quick rotation, until Tug slammed into the floor of the compound, finishing upside down at the foot of the slope, a smouldering stump where the tip of his left wing should have been.

  J.P. and Goulman had bent back so much metal, they almost had an arm in the operations room. Brooke quickly captured the insides of one of the pipe-laying road-trains that was coupled up to a large chrome tap-exchange at the base of the mountain, ready to file-transfer to a secure server at her dad’s ranch with the other photos and video. She positioned Punk for a final shot of what she guessed was a massive drilling machine, badly hidden under illfitting tarpaulin on the back of an eighteen-wheeler, when her MeX handset rang.