by Mel Odom
“I knew that. Something more helpful.”
“I don’t know anything that would be helpful.”
“Good thing for you that I have a plan.” She spun us around and headed down the west tunnel.
I leaned into her, thinning my profile so we became a projectile barreling through the ductwork. I could not comprehend what she was thinking, but I searched for her possible destination. The ductwork was self-contained, all underground. Even if we escaped to the lunar surface, there would be nowhere to go.
The NAPD would be tracking us. They would have people waiting for us wherever we came out even if we managed to avoid the transit authority guards.
Ahead of us, three guards suddenly flew into the ductwork. I pulled a filter down over my vision as their bright lights stabbed through the darkness. The woman sped up. At the same time, she pressed a keypad on her left forearm.
Ahead of her, a high-explosive blast ignited near the guards. The concussive wave knocked the transit authority guards into the sides of the duct, but our velocity allowed us to blow right through. I had to replay the preceding vid to spot the nanobots bundled on the wall. Their e-tags identified them as part of the cleaning bots for the ductwork.
“Spybots.” The woman’s voice sounded strange in the reverb from the blast that echoed along the ductwork. “I had to call in a favor from a corp spy to get them.”
Spybots were a necessary security risk for the corporations. They knew cyber thieves were constantly trolling for information regarding research and development projects. Some of those thieves targeted individuals that worked at corps. Others created cyberware.
Corps invested in honeypots—strategically created false sites that cyberware thieves could send their nanobot observers to. While the spies were “stealing” false data planted at the honeypot, the corp spies were specing the nanobots in order to develop countermeasures against them. The techwar between the various corps and cyber thieves was ongoing and escalated with every new software and hardware upgrade that came out.
Including those that didn’t.
It only made sense that spybots would mask themselves as cleaning drones in the ductwork. That was the easiest path to anywhere along the Moon.
The woman propelled us down another tunnel that ran south. But we didn’t run long. She couldn’t afford to give away her destination. The transit authority was moving too fast. Even now, more guards were hot on our heels, gaining quickly.
I knew where she was going now, and I knew it was risky. “If you pursue this course, you could die.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“You should surrender me.”
“You don’t know how much I’m getting paid for this job. This isn’t just a bankroll. It’s a lot of favors, too.”
If I’d had any doubt before about my rescuer’s identity, it was removed. I knew Rachel Beckman had made good on her promise to reach me.
“And if I stop now, let them take me, I’m going to go away for a very long time. I’m not going to let that happen.”
She turned again, and this time she intentionally twisted me to force me into the wall. Sparks flared from the friction with my metal body. Not all of them had died away by the time the four transit authority guards closing on us reached them.
Ahead of us, a port opened onto a cargo room that allowed access to lunar surface vehicles that serviced the Docklands. Another explosion ripped the protective vent away and we shot through like a bullet into a large cargo room. Thankfully the makeup air vent was located near the ceiling and we didn’t crash into any of the stacks of crates that filled the room.
Rachel kept her airbelt at full acceleration as we crossed the warehouse, never backing off. She twisted and put me ahead of her. I saw the nanobots bundle clustered on one of the transplas observation windows just before it exploded.
The detonation sounded for just a moment, then the transplas gave way and the vacuum covering the Moon sucked the air in the cargo room outside in a rush. The noise of the explosion went with it because there wasn’t enough air in the room to conduct sound.
Caught in the draft, we accelerated again. I managed to twist and push Rachel back from me. My efforts slowed her acceleration some, and she fired her airbelt again, desperately trying to keep from slamming into the wall.
I spread my arms and legs and flew toward the ruptured observation window. My body blocked part of the air evacuation and may have helped Rachel. I wasn’t sure.
Behind us, the automatic safety systems slammed the ductwork shut. I thought I saw the safety hatch vibrate a little as the transit authority guards struck it, but that may have been a creative logic circuit supplying the image.
Once the air was out of the room, I dropped from the wall and walked over to Rachel. In the microgravity, I had to move slower. I was still coordinated enough to move faster than a human in the reduced gravity, but I couldn’t move as fast as my programming demanded. Out in the open like this, Rachel would suffocate.
Chapter Forty-Two
I reached Rachel and rolled her over, ready to tear the mask from her face. Emergency masks with a ten-minute supply of oxygen sat in safety lockers.
The comm-link was still active, and Rachel was conscious. “I’m okay. Got 02 in suit.” She freed her tranquilizer pistol and looked around the cargo room.
Five other men had been in the room when we’d arrived. All of them had sprinted for the panic room inside the structure. Panic rooms were ten meters by fifteen meters, made of plascrete, and had their own oxygen supply that could last for two days if need be while emergency crews reached them.
Crossing the room, Rachel ran down into the mechanic trench designed for lunar crawlers. Three such vehicles sat in various stages of disrepair in the cargo room, along with stacks of cargo that I realized were strategically placed to impede the seccam array inside the room.
I accessed the seccams but couldn’t see Rachel or myself.
Obviously everything had been choreographed for our arrival. Rachel had been very thorough, but during the time I’d worked with her, I’d realized that.
At the bottom of the mechanic pit, Rachel reached the wall and punched buttons on the forearm keypad. She waited, frustration showing in the tightness of her shoulders, then punched the keypad again.
A moment later, a section of the wall opened up that was barely large enough for me to follow her through. The darkness on the other side was complete. I switched over to thermographic vision and trailed Rachel as she kept moving forward.
In short order, we reached an airlock just big enough for the two of us. I stood behind her inside the airlock and focused on the transplas observation slit. Sections of the tunnel floor rose and locked into place, suddenly filling the space we’d just quit.
The airlock cycled with a steady hum and I noted the increase in oxygen saturation that quickly returned to Earth normal. Once the cycle had completed, the other side of the airlock opened.
Five men armed with slug-throwers and lasers stood in the small plascrete cave on the other side of the airlock. The plascrete coating hadn’t been expertly done, just shot into the void and left to take whatever form it wanted. Small plascrete stalactites hung from the uneven ceiling and the floor had hardened into irregular puddles. Two of the men carried flashlights.
One of the men, a grizzled individual that was too skinny to be optimally healthy, gestured at me with his slug-thrower. He looked Asian, but he could have just as easily been Russian. “Don’t try nothin’, and maybe you’ll live.”
I didn’t “live” now, but I didn’t have a reason to point that out to him. I took in his grey and black whiskers, the mop of shaggy hair, and the ill-fitting cyber-eye in his right socket. He wore a spacesuit and had a helmet buckled at his shoulder.
“Ease off, Bolo.” Rachel tabbed her hood open and it fell in a loose cowl around her neck. She took the voice modulator from around her jaw and stuffed it into a thigh pouch. “This is my op and we’ll pl
ay by my rules.”
Bolo cursed and spat at the plascrete at my feet. “You ask me, somebody paid too much money to get this thing off the Moon.”
“Nobody asked you. Got my suit?”
Bolo jerked his head and one of the men with him pulled a spacesuit from a cargo bag at his feet. The man tossed the suit to Rachel and it moved at a slightly slower speed through the reduced gravity.
“This was a good place, Rachel.” Bolo’s voice was a low, bitter dirge. “Nobody knew about this route. Got a lot of stuff in and out of here. But with all the heat you’re bringing down on us, that’s over with.”
“It wasn’t my decision to come to your rat’s nest. You want to gripe about that, you take it up with your boss.”
Bolo scowled, evidently not pleased with that prospect. He set down his slug-thrower and reached into another bag and pulled out a mining laser. Walking toward me, he powered the unit up and the blue-white beam jumped out 16.83 centimeters.
“I’m going to need you to stand still, tin man.” Bolo started to level the laser at my chest.
I took a step back and raised my hands to defend myself.
The other men leveled their weapons at me.
“Hey!” Rachel’s sharp voice blasted inside the plascrete-covered cave. “Back off.”
Bolo shook his head but didn’t power down the laser. “We got to get that PAD out of him. If we don’t, the NAPD’s going to trace it eventually. Them, or Haas-Bioroid.”
That was true. I had been masking my GPS signal, but that was getting harder to do.
Rachel turned to me. “Drake, let him burn it out.”
I stepped forward and wondered what it would be like to be cut off from the Net. I had been cut off from the feed while in jail, but I had known that eventually my systems would come back up. Destroying the PAD would reduce my functionality in several ways. I had never led a self-contained existence. I had been built to complement the Net and for the Net to complement me. Access to the Net was an appendage that simply existed.
Sparks flew as Bolo applied the laser. My metal chassis scorched, then melted, and finally caught fire. I kept watch on my internal diagnostics and peered inside my body. The man had a good knowledge of bioroid architecture. The beam never touched anything other than the PAD, which it melted into slag. I listened to the Net die, all the datastreams turning quiet by degrees.
Bolo stepped back when he’d finished. He smirked at me. “I’ve cut up a lot of tin men and parted them out. You’re the first one I’ve left standing. Feels like I’ve left things undone.”
I didn’t reply. One of the smaller industries in the black market was salvaging bioroids for parts. The pieces were used for different machines, different vehicles. Some of the cargo handlers on the Docklands were a hodgepodge of salvage forced to work together. They weren’t efficient, but they were functional.
One of the other men pointed a portable fire retardant canister at me and covered my chassis with foam. The fire went out and left metal drippings that turned into wire.
Rachel touched my arm. “Drake?”
“Yes.”
“The PAD?”
“It has been disabled.”
“And the GPS?”
“Inert.”
“Good.” She patted my shoulder. “We’ll get you fixed up as soon as we can.”
“All right.”
“Come on. We have to get out of here.” Rachel latched her spacesuit helmet on and tabbed the control panel to pressure up. She went through the airlock on the other side of the room and turned on a flashlight built into her suit.
When the second airlock finished cycling, I stood behind her in a long, airless tunnel. The marks on the sides of the tunnel told me this was probably a supply channel for a helium-3 excavation. A lot of the mining was done on the surface, but sometimes the mining corps found rich veins and followed them underground.
Three turtlebacks waited in the tunnel with three mini-hoppers calibrated for lunar gravity. The specially engineered clones were designed for work in vacuum. They were named Homo vacuo operae, but the common slang for them was “turtleback.” At one meter in height and protected by what resembled a shell, the name was a natural fit. They had tiny, deep-set eyes, and four slender arms, all of them ending in hands. Jinteki had spliced genes to give the clones an internal air reserve, protection against radiation, extreme temperatures, moisture loss, and ultraviolet. They were the common guide for travel for anyone wanting to cross the Moon without a hopper.
Or for anyone who wanted to travel through old mining channels.
I assumed the trip wasn’t going to last long. Even with respirocytes in their blood system to increase the oxygen exchange inside the body, the turtlebacks couldn’t depend on their internal air supplies for much more than an hour.
The mini-hoppers were skeletal, built with no frills and only a few emergency precautions, like reserve oxygen and an epoxy to help patch holes caused by micro-meteorites, should we get caught outside while they fell. The spacesuits themselves had fail-safes built into them for emergencies. If an arm or leg got punctured and the oxygen inside the suit thinned too much, the suit’s survival programming would tourniquet the arm or leg and sacrifice the limb to save the individual.
Outside the Moon’s megapolis, the lunar landscape was an inhospitable and dangerous place.
I slid onto the mini-hopper beside Rachel and addressed her over the comm-link. “Where are we going?”
“To safety.”
I tried to see her face through the UV face shield that covered her helmet, but couldn’t. “Karanjai sent you.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“The captain, and some of his supervisors, want you running free Drake.” Her helmet turned toward me. “I don’t know what you’re mixed up in, but it’s bigger than just a load of illegal weapons.”
“I believe so, too.”
“Do you know what it is?”
I thought briefly of John Rath and Mara Blake and her deceased husband, Simon, whose neural foundation my own core personality had been based upon. I kept being pulled in those directions. Jonas Salter had had a connection to Mara Blake as well. There was something she was hiding.
Or something—or someone—was hiding her.
The need to find Mara Black hummed even more strongly in my programming.
“No. I do not.”
“I think it has something to do with Mars. The riots that are going on there. The rest of the shipment of weapons you and Chyou were after is headed that way.”
That confirmed what I already knew, that not all of those weapons had been destroyed. “How do you know?”
“While you’ve been singing the blues in jail, I’ve been nosing around on behalf of Captain Karanjai.”
“I don’t sing the blues.”
“Well, you had the opportunity.”
“Do you know where those weapons are now?”
“Gone, Drake. Hours ago. There was nothing you could do to stop them.”
The mini-hopper lifted and shot through the tunnel. Bolo and his group rode the other two. Beside me, Rachel cringed a little, and I read her body language, knowing at once that she was uncomfortable with the turtleback’s headlong speed.
“Where do Captain Karanjai and his cohorts want me to ‘run free’?” I used her inflection.
“Mars. For now. They want you to follow that weapons shipment off the grid.”
“That does not make sense. The NAPD should seize the weapons shipment.”
“It’s too late for that. All the lies are in place. The corps involved in this, whoever they ultimately are, have protected themselves. If the NAPD tried to intercept a trans-system shipment, it would be difficult at best. And if the ship were seized, whoever owns it would blow it up.”
“At least the weapons wouldn’t reach their destination.”
“A lot of good men would die in the attempt, Drake. Nobody wants a body count like that.”
“Bioroids or clones could be sent to do the interception.”
“Think about it, Drake. Let’s say you knew that a ship was armed, booby-trapped to blow up and kill the men aboard. Could you close on that ship and attempt to take it? Knowing those men would die?”
That took only a nanosecond of consideration. “No. I could not. It would cause a programming conflict.”
“Exactly. Also, those booby-traps would pretty much guarantee that whatever that ship was carrying is potentially vaporized. Gathering evidence out in space would be difficult. It would also be hard to prove that everything gathered out there belonged to that ship—if someone decided to roll the dice and finance a search for pieces that continue to fly through the universe at whatever speed an exploding object achieves.”
I started to present her with the various theorems based on known explosives, but I gathered that she did not really wish to know.
“That ship is flying a Martian flag, too. With everything going on out there now, everybody involved in the investigation wants to make sure that their ducks are in a row before they make a move.”
I did not remember Karanjai mentioning the ownership of ducks, and I did not see how knowing that farm fact would be helpful in this instance. Of course, I immediately saw the problem with getting ducks lined up. Unless they were flying. They flew quite nicely in lines.
I waited, but Rachel did not seem inclined to say more.
Chapter Forty-Three
We traveled underground for several kilometers, coming close to using up the hour of air the turtlebacks kept. When we came out of the tunnels, which honeycombed the Moon, we’d reached a defunct mine. Melange Mining Corporation had the area posted with KEEP OUT beacons, but didn’t bother with security in the area. A security effort would have been costly, and 2M had already taken everything from the ground that was worth having. The postings were mandated.
Bolo and his companions separated from us at that point, and no words were spoken. Evidently they had only been there to supply equipment and the turtlebacks. If I’d had access to the Net and NAPD files, I was certain I could have turned up warrants for them.
