Spaced

by Greg Curtis

  It took hours to go through the entire building. Long, torturous hours as every sound heard, she heard. She believed either someone was getting the drop on her or the building finally collapsing. Annalisse reckoned it had to be just as bad for everybody else, but the naval officers appeared to handle it better. But then she’d never been in a warzone. They quite possibly had. The Navy still fought smugglers and pirates. And there were always the conspiracy theorists' stories of battles with mutes. This might not be completely new to them.

  During those hours she walked two people outside to waiting vehicles, neither of whom was an owner. They were unarmed workers and both were completely terrified. She also helped pull several more out from under piles of rubble. But she wasn't sure if any of them were alive. Whatever that weapon was that had blasted down out of the sky, it had been brutally effective.

  None of the people she’d escorted knew anything. She didn't have to be a trained interviewer to know that. She didn't even have to ask them anything – they were so scared the first thing that came out of their mouths were questions about what was happening and why they had been attacked. They'd done nothing and didn't want to be shot. These people were the ancillaries: the circuit designers, programmers and graphic designers, not the owners or the managers.

  They were desperate to tell the navy anything they wanted to know. Fear had robbed them of any thought of resistance. Annalisse couldn't blame them for that – she wasn't much better herself. She was just fortunate enough to be on the winning side.

  As the long hours rolled by and none of the wanted people showed up, she began to worry they might have escaped. They’d probably never been there – and yet she still hoped. Logic told her they had never been likely to find their bomber, as he or she had had two weeks to prepare. The bomber or bombers must have had contingency plans. They appeared to have had one for everything else.

  Late in the afternoon came the word that she'd been desperately waiting for. That Maximilian White-Jones (or Max White as he was commonly called), had been located in a bunker deep under the factory, suggesting he’d been prepared for this day long in advance. He had been prepared for it – but he hadn't run. That confused her. It would have been safer and easier to simply surrender and leave it to the lawyers. Or else to run and hide. This just looked stupid.

  The other piece of news she was given was that his three partners had been found with him in the bunker – dead. But the warbots hadn't killed them. They'd been murdered some time before they'd entered the bunker, which meant that Max White, with his thirty-five percent share, was now the sole owner of Billingsgate Lucius Scientific. It appeared there had been a business coup on top of everything else.

  Unable to contain herself, Annalisse hurried outside to see him. She had to see the suspect being taken into custody. Her friends and colleagues were dead. Some form of justice for that had to happen and it had to be witnessed. Besides she was tired of picking her way through piles of rubble, looking for survivors or anything that might be evidence at the trial.

  Outside she, like so many others who had had the same idea, had to wait. It took time for the warbots to clear a path to bring their prisoner outside. But she could be patient, and soon she heard the noise of the warbots approaching. She waited, filled with anticipation, not quite knowing what to expect.

  Her first thought when he walked out into the daylight was disappointment. He neither looked like a master criminal nor a terrorist. She didn't know exactly what one looked like but she knew it wasn't him. He was a businessman. He was wearing the latest in fashion – a business suit that probably cost more than she earned in a month or maybe even a year. It wasn't even crumpled. His hair was neatly combed, his shoes polished and he was wearing a holochip. That was odd. Why didn't he have it implanted in the back of his hand like everyone else? But nothing about him said psychopath, or even dangerous.

  There was also nothing about him that said he'd been captured. The man neither looked frightened nor beaten down. Instead he looked confident, as if he was simply heading into a business meeting.

  She also noticed that he didn't seem bothered by having a warbot's huge steel hand on his shoulder while being escorted. They were heavy and powerful, and she somehow doubted the warbot had a delicate touch. But it didn't seem to bother him at all. Was he stronger than he looked? He was certainly looking healthier than he should. The man was seventy-two according to his files, but looked twenty-five. Obviously longevity treatments were working better on him than they did on most people. It wasn't unheard of, but it did send little warning bells ringing.

  “Maximilian White-Jones, I am placing you under arrest on suspicion of terrorism and multiple counts of murder. Specifically the murders of—” a naval officer stepped forward and began reading out the charges.

  “Yes, yes yes!” the suspect waved his hand at the man as if shooing him away. “We can discuss that later. For now—” he paused and looked around him, his eyes judging everyone and finding them wanting. “We have other things to talk about.”

  Annalisse would have liked to know what he was talking about. But instead there was a sudden lurch in the ground and she had to concentrate on keeping her footing. Then the sound hit, and she didn't care about whether she was standing. She knew what had just happened. She'd heard and felt that sound once before – a thermo-kinetic blast.

  The tremor came first – a hypersonic shockwave blasting through the ground at impossible speeds. Then came the thunderclap – the sound of a million bolts of lightning hitting the ground simultaneously. And last of all was the flash.

  She turned in the direction she thought the sound had come from just in time to see the entire sky light up with a brilliant white glare. It was followed by the first trickle of dust and fire shooting into the air like an angry tornado. It was only a couple of klicks away, and in a direction that she knew was only lightly populated, but there would still be casualties. Standing there staring at the angry finger of black fire menacingly rising into the heavens, she attempted to answer the question.

  That area was mainly farms, along with a few hydroponic reserves and some light industry – a floater factory as she recalled – and the Barclay Hamilton soil reclamation facility.

  The moment Annalisse realised that she knew where the epicentre of the blast had been, and who many of the victims would be it hit her hard. Because she knew that officers and technicians were still out there, working on the crime scene. They’d been a second time. And she knew who'd done it. Everyone knew. That was the point.

  When she could finally draw her eyes away from the spectacle, she turned back to the prisoner. A man who was still calmly standing there – and smiling. He was enjoying this, laughing at them even. Telling them he could hit them no matter what, even when he was in custody.

  Others saw that too and, despite their training and everything they believed in, hands went for weapons and fingers tightened on triggers. Only the sudden shout of the Commander stopped them from killing the man on the spot. But it was close.

  “Do you have anything to say for yourself Mr. White-Jones?” the Commander asked, taking control of the situation.

  But then came the worst four words out of the man's mouth which were the worst Annalisse could have heard. Words that sent all that remained of her once high hopes crashing to the floor.

  “I want a lawyer.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The station was quiet, which it was always these days. People were still doing what they were supposed to, but they did it silently. It wasn't out of grief or shock but the calm of those who had a lot of work to do. They had to find justice for their dead colleagues. When that was done, when Max White had been jailed for the rest of his life – or better yet executed if the Navy’s lawyers had their way – then they could relax.

  Was there anything which could truly make things right? So many had died doing their jobs: keeping the city safe and brave soldiers killed while protecting the people.
Only a DD could imagine that there was anything that could fix that.

  Max White wasn't saying anything. He'd demanded a legal representative the moment he'd been arrested and ever since then he'd kept his mouth firmly shut. He smiled sometimes, the smile of someone who thought he was winning. And it usually came out when an interrogator was demanding information at full volume, or trying to appeal to his better nature. Max White didn't have one of those. He would sit quietly, say nothing, and smile occasionally. He was obviously waiting for something. And she and the other officers got to see a holo of the interrogation as they worked, in the hope that he would say something they could use. But as he said nothing, all they got to see was their own frustration.

  Annalisse desperately wanted to know what he was waiting for. Rescue perhaps? She failed to see how, but she knew he was devious and clever. Or was he perhaps going to try extortion? They already knew he’d detonated two thermo-kinetic devices. Did he have more? Was he going to start making threats unless he was released? That was the Navy’s fear, and even now they were scouring the city from one end to the other with their best detection units.

  The one thing Annalisse was certain of was that he wasn't waiting for his trial. The evidence against him was overwhelming – and growing every day. After only five days they had proof that it was his code that had corrupted the bots. They had the evidence that his company had fabricated the duplicate androids. They could even show that it had been done according to commands he had given. He was the man in charge of it all. There was no doubt about any of that.

  But every time the interrogators dropped another little bombshell like that in front of him, he just remained calm and looked away, preferring to spend his time studying the spotless room. Sometimes he'd turn to his lawyer with a raised eyebrow and the man would promptly jump in with the standard line about how his client was observing his right to silence. That was as far as his side of the interrogation went.

  Five sharding days! Five whole days of smug silence. Everyone was nervously walking on eggshells waiting to find out what would happen next. Because they knew it would be bad: the man obviously had a plan and his plans were never good.

  Annalisse felt it too. She had a permanent knot of burning acid in her stomach which told her that. Concentrating on her duties was next to impossible. Because of her anxiety she'd told her parents and her younger sister to stay at their cabin on Lake Tranquility for a few weeks. She couldn't tell them why – she didn't even know what the danger was – but she could at least get them out of the city to somewhere safe.

  “Does that sharding bastard ever stop smiling?” Nero dropped a pile of holochips on her desk with a few angry words and a scowl. “Honestly some days I think the stars will burn cold before he loses that self-satisfied smirk.”

  “At least we've got him. He's not going anywhere,” Annalisse replied diplomatically. Privately she agreed with him. The man was pure New Athenian jackass – all teeth and grins. He didn't even seem to sweat - something that kept making her think he wasn't quite human. However their technicians had done the tests: he was quite organic, with not a trace of circuitry. There were no implants at all. And the drug tests had come back clean as well. He was no DD. This was just who he was.

  “You think so?” Nero wasn't finished with his complaining, his scowl deepening. He turned to look at the holo of the interrogation cell. “That is not the look of a man who’s been caught, but the look of a man with a plan. A sharding arsehole with a seriously nasty plan.”

  “He's not even sharding human.”

  “He is human. They did the tests.” Nero wasn't the only one to voice that particular opinion – Annalisse had said so herself. He was human: he just didn't act like one.

  “There's absolutely nothing human about him! Look at the bastard! He's one giant defect hiding behind a gigawatt smile!” With that Nero grunted and walked off, no doubt to bother someone else. He had reason, having been on the front line when they'd taken the plant. He'd lost friends, had even seen them die. And then he'd lost more when the soil reclamation plant had been bombed.

  He couldn’t be blamed him for his anger though; Annalisse worried from the way he held himself that he might think about doing something stupid. But he was a good officer and he would get back to work soon and do it well. And that was what Annalisse had to do too.

  She reached for the first of the chips then dropped it in the slot. It was merely holo evidence, testimony from witnesses who'd seen the explosion. Her job was to watch it, enter it into the databases, maybe pick out a few salient points, and then move on. There were so many witness reports – it had taken at least fifty officers to gather them all and they were still working.

  What they were looking for were sightings: sightings of the suspect anywhere near the soil reclamation plant. Or actually his androids. But not the ones they knew about. She rather suspected that the duplicate Barclay Hamilton had been vaporised in the latest explosion just as the duplicate Doctor Carmichael Simons had been. For all his self-confidence the man still covered his tracks. Just not well enough. And so they had enough evidence linking him to the killing of Barclay Hamilton.

  The android had been seen, though not recognised as such. But when the real Barclay Hamilton had been at work, they knew it was the duplicate.

  Unfortunately the duplicate hadn't been sighted doing anything suspicious like planting a thermo-kinetic device. It had mostly been travelling, going back and forth between the factory and the soil reclamation plant, and once between there and the New Andreas central police station. There was no shortage of evidence linking the android to the company. There was just no android left to confirm exactly what it had done.

  As she worked Annalisse kept finding herself distracted by what Nero had said. She kept thinking he was right. They'd done the scans and found nothing, but there was no way that man could be human. No one could be that relaxed. that sharding smug, as Nero called it. Not when the evidence against him was so strong. Even his lawyer had the humanity to look nervous – and confused most of the time. Max White clearly thought he had a nova in his pocket.

  Plus he still annoyed her because he looked too young. He moved a little too fast for his age. But if he wasn't an android and he didn't have any cybernetic advantages in him, what did he have? Drugs? Some new DD which in spite their tests they hadn’t been able to detect? Illegal organ transplants? Was he a mesh-head even though they couldn’t find any chips in his brain? Completely lost in some mesh-based insanity? He had to have something.

  As the hours crept by and she continued working no answers presented themselves. In the end she wondered if there were any questions to answer. Perhaps he was just naturally lucky with his longevity treatments. And maybe the stars would all burn a little brighter just for him if he needed them to.

  Five o'clock rolled around and she sighed. The sharding bastard had made it through another day of interrogation. She hated the idea, but she also realised it had always been going to happen. He had done his ten hours and since there was no evidence of an imminent crime being committed, that couldn't be extended.

  From here White would go back to his cell to spend another night while the team of interrogators discussed the day’s progress. There wasn't much to discuss nor would there be much more over the coming days and weeks. The man had his strategy and that was silence. And waiting for something. Nero was right – the man had a plan.

  So it came as no surprise seeing the interrogators leave the room, their faces once more telling a story of failure. Nor was she surprised a few minutes later to see Max White being led out of the room by a couple of officers and their new warbots. He had to be protected. She wanted to shoot him so badly. Everyone wanted to shoot him.

  But then everything changed unexpectedly when an officer walked straight up to the suspect, and she knew from the set of his shoulders that he was filled with rage. Just as she knew even before he opened his mouth that it was Nero. She could only see his ba
ck and one man in uniform was much like another, but still she recognised him. What was he doing up there? The sudden chill told her that it was bad.

  “You interstellar arsehole!” Nero didn't waste words being polite. But that wasn't his nature. “All the people you've murdered and you just sit there and smile like it's some sort of joke?!”

  The lawyer didn't think it was funny as he took a hasty step back. The escorting officers didn't either, moving to stand between him and Nero. But Max White was completely unperturbed. He was beyond cold.

  “Say something you mute!” Nero took another angry step forward, the officers raising their hands while readying their weapons. They had their duty and they had to protect the prisoner even if it was against one of their own.

  “Why?” For probably the first time that day they heard something from the prisoner. But it wasn't what anyone wanted to hear. Not when his tone implied a dismissal of some sort, as if none of it mattered.

  It mattered to Nero though.

  “You …!” The rest of what he yelled was unintelligible, but the threat was clear as he advanced with his fists raised.

  It was clear to White too, as he abruptly broke free of the warbots holding him, pushed his way through the two officers protecting him, knocking them aside, and smashed Nero hard in the chest.

  Nero flew backwards as if he'd been hit by a runaway floater. The two officers who’d been standing between them also went flying. And strangest of all the warbot which had managed to get its giant steel hand on the prisoner's shoulder was impossibly spun around. In that moment Annalisse understood what was wrong with Max White. He was too fast, too strong.

  He wasn't human at all.