“Good luck,” Greta said. She kissed Drew’s cheek, too.
“I’ll miss that,” he said. “You know, if the Fathers and Mothers really just want to rebuild the City in the Sky and you arrive at an agreement with the cult, I might end up back in a machine shop programming Doormen or something.”
“How do you feel about that, old man?” Elizabeth asked.
“I’d rather fight and stick to Hearst than have diplomacy succeed. I’d really rather not end up doing any of that shit for the Fathers and Mothers. Luck to you both.” Drew bowed and turned to his duties.
Elizabeth wiped away a tear.
Gently, Greta took Elizabeth’s arm and led her down the path, careful to avoid debris amid the smoking rubble of the Dreadnought attack. Shattered wood stoves had spread hot death amid the fallen houses of the village. Innocents had died screaming. The unlucky welcomed death in their traps of searing fire, their skin split by the heat. The lucky didn’t burn, but they went hard, too, gasping for air and choking on smoke as they tried fruitlessly to dig themselves free.
“This new NI…Matthew…it’ll pay for this,” Elizabeth said.
“Only if we can crack the alliance it has made with the Fathers and Mothers.”
“I want this machine to see its destruction coming. I want it to worry. My mother told me that when she was young, every machine had an on/off switch. We should get back to that.”
19
As Greta and Elizabeth picked their way through the remains of the village and the market, men, women and construction bots worked side-by-side to dig through the debris. They hadn’t found a survivor since the night before. Now they only pulled out the dead. The people wore masks soaked in water and spices to cover the smell of charred flesh. They rarely spoke and, when they did speak, it was in the hushed, reverent tones reserved for the graveside.
“Hearst is a tomb,” Elizabeth said. “If those Dreadnoughts come back — ”
“We won’t let that happen,” Greta said. She pulled Elizabeth’s elbow, hurrying her past a line of corpses that had been pulled out of the rubble.
Elizabeth resisted, pausing to look at each corpse’s face closely. “Rick, Darryl, Glen, Laurie.”
“Please, my queen. Let’s just go.”
“Cut the crap,” Elizabeth said. “It’s just you and me now.”
“Okay, Liz.”
Elizabeth lingered over a dead girl of no more than eight. “Enid,” she said finally. “I knew all these people. I wish I could have protected them.”
“No one blames you.”
Elizabeth squeezed her friend’s hand and they continued down the hill. “You know I think the whole king and queen thing is stupid, right? Before Joe was King Joe, he was just a man who imposed order on chaos. Calling him a king started out as a joke to the survivors of the Terrors.”
The pair went silent and cut a diagonal path across the long slope to the sea. To get away from Hearst’s destruction, they found a way through the hillside farms to the southwest.
“Did your husband take it seriously? Being a king, I mean?”
“He thought it was useful. People need order most when things go bad. There is a time for kings and queens. I understand it, even if I think, ultimately, it’s unfortunate. If we can eliminate the threat posed by the Next Intelligence, maybe the need for kings and queens will pass into history again.”
“Or we’ll all die out and — ” Greta stifled a nervous chuckle. “Sorry. My mouth ran off on its own.”
Elizabeth squinted at her friend and nodded. “That’s a real possibility. I appreciate you being my seeing eye, but if the time comes that you have to run and leave me behind, go. Don’t risk yourself.”
“Of course I won’t leave you. Look what happened to Hearst when I left you alone for a few days.”
“Mouth ran off with itself again, did it?” Elizabeth said.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. I know you love to sail. I want you to sail a long time.”
Greta glanced toward the ocean. “It does feel free out there.”
“I wish I’d taken up sailing with you. I could have, but life went another way.”
“You get seasick too easily. You wouldn’t have liked it.”
“Maybe I could have learned to like it.”
“Nobody really learns to like anything except beer.”
“Yeah…I suppose. Still, sometimes I think if I’d planned things better, I wouldn’t be where I am now. I’m not old by old people’s standards, but people are dying younger these days. It’s a sure sign of age when your sight is fading and you start second-guessing every step in the road at your back. What if I hadn’t gone running this or that day and met my first love? What if I had stayed home? I made a million little decisions. Never thought I’d end up here.”
“You’re a monarch, Liz. That sounds pretty good to most people.”
“Heh. Monarchy was incidental. It came with marrying Joe. I miss his strength. Even as he got older, his will was iron. His hands and knees ached every morning and night. He’d complain in secret, but only to me. In public, people still saw him as the man who built a little kingdom out of nothing.”
“You’re not just some powerful man’s wife, Liz. You freed minds.”
“Jonas said the Fathers and Mothers call me a rebel. That much was right. That’s what got me out of the City in the Sky. But I think being a rebel hasn’t always served me. Sometimes I said no to the expected things just because they were expected. I could have married someone else and things would have been simpler. A tinsmith asked me to marry him. I could have been down in the village when the Dreadnoughts came. Rick was one of the dead men back there.”
“He asked you to marry? You never told me that.”
“I almost said yes. It was when I first came to Hearst. I was tempted. I wanted to have children. It wasn’t too late then.”
“What made you say no?”
“I think I was comparing him to Carter. No man can live up to a dead first love who died a martyr. Joe came close, though. I’m glad I didn’t say yes to the first man who asked to marry me.”
“I like saying yes to men,” Greta said, “but never for very long.”
“I know. I know how they look at you, too. A bunch of them want to get you to settle down in one port, I’m sure. Stay home. Make babies, or at least spend a lot of time trying to make babies.”
“Liz! I thought you couldn’t see so well!”
“I see well if I’m near enough. Mostly, all I have to do is listen and I get everything I need to know.”
Past the farms, a sudden cold wind blew in from the West and pulled at their clothes. Whitecaps climbed higher and the waves crashed.
“I don’t need to see to know a storm’s coming. I can feel it.”
“Don’t worry. Our trip won’t be rough or long. No seasickness for you.”
“You’ve held out on me long enough. No one’s around, are they?”
“We’re alone.”
“What’s the plan? How are we getting to the City in the Sky?”
“Ghost has a plan for that, too.”
“Drew doesn’t think we know her well enough. We’re gambling a lot on the word of a stranger.”
“She’s very smart, Liz.” Greta stretched her left arm out of her poncho and squinted at her timepiece. “Ghost has calculated the gaps in the satellite coverage.”
“How does she know all that?”
“In the short time I’ve known her, I get the feeling Ghost is the sort of person who knows something about everything. She’s a soldier, but — ”
“I saw her scar. You think she’s augmented?”
“Must be. If she had gotten that scar from a brain injury, she wouldn’t be able to do what she does. She’s really smart.” Greta squinted at her timepiece again. “I’m sure you’ll find that when you go for a ride with her.”
“What?”
“The NI in Colorado can’t use satellites to spy on us now. We
have to move.”
“Where?”
“You’re going to take a ride in Lucille.”
“Lucille? What’s that? Oh…no. I am not going underground in that big drill.”
“It’s going to work out fine. We have to split up for a little, but I’ll see you soon. If the satellites see us together making a move toward the City in the Sky, the NI will send hunter-killers after us.”
“Where will you go?”
“My ship is moored up the coast, beyond the Dreadnoughts. I’m going to take an exoskeleton, run inland and then swing back to meet up with my ship.”
“Why can’t I do that with you? We’ve done that before.”
Greta cleared her throat and looked away to the sea. “I was a kid last time we made those runs — ”
“And I was much younger and less blind,” Elizabeth said.
“Yes.”
“So you get to do the fun stuff while I travel underground? What am I good for?”
“I’ll catch up with you later after I do what I have to do. Side mission, need-to-know, hush hush and super secret.”
“Uh-huh.” Elizabeth gave her friend a hard look. “I repeat, what am I good for?”
“Ghost will get you to the City in the Sky safely. The Fathers and Mothers will listen to you. You’re not just a rebel. You’re the head of state of a neighboring nation on a diplomatic mission. Make them realize they’re being played for fools. Ghost says there’s a good chance they’ll hate that more than they hate you.”
Elizabeth took a long breath and let it hiss out between her teeth. “Are you sure Ghost is smart? This doesn’t sound smart.”
“Ghost says she’s a student of human nature.”
“Uh-huh.”
The earth rumbled beneath their feet and, not far away, the ground began to heave, then churn. Within a few moments, a spinning drill began to appear and, behind it, a long tube began to emerge.
Greta and Elizabeth stood frozen.
“You’re seeing this?”
“It’s bigger than I pictured,” Elizabeth said.
“It’s smaller on the inside, Liz. It will feel like you’re being buried alive.” Greta laughed.
“Nice. You can go back to calling me Queen Elizabeth again.”
Greta smiled and hugged her friend tight before stepping back. “I’ll see you at the City in the Sky. Don’t worry so much. If you know exactly what’s going to happen next, this isn’t an adventure. It’s boring as shit if you know what’s going to happen.” Greta ran back the way they’d come.
Ghost emerged from a hatch atop the Sand Shark. “Hello, again. Ready to take a ride? Come. I’ll help you into your seat.”
Elizabeth approached the machine. As she got closer, she saw the hull was dented and scratched. “You sure this thing is safe?”
“Lucille’s been around the world, but she has a little more life left in her. I even stopped at Cal Tech to augment her.”
“Funny you should use the word augment. Greta and I were just talking about augmentation.”
Ghost held out a hand to help the older woman climb up the side and through the hatch. Elizabeth almost fell and ended up collapsing into her seat.
“Sorry, it’s not exactly fancy and fit for a queen. Lucille wasn’t built for two people originally. I had some repairs and changes made.”
Elizabeth wiggled a little, trying to get comfortable. She wasn’t. The seat was too narrow. Ghost strapped her in, as the belts locked in place, Elizabeth looked up at the Sand Shark pilot curiously. She got a good look at the scar across the soldier’s cranium. It appeared precise and surgical. “Ghost? You’re augmented, aren’t you? But you look far too young to be an Augment.”
“I’m not an Augment,” Ghost said. “Before I was human, I was NI.”
Elizabeth’s blood went cold. “What?”
“You heard me correctly.” The young woman broke into a broad smile and patted Elizabeth lightly on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. I’m on your side.”
Ghost pulled back to climb into the pilot’s seat before Elizabeth could reach for the blade hidden in her long glove.
20
Dante sat at his favorite spot on the highest catwalk above the factory floor, his legs dangling over the edge. The wire mesh walkways were meant for maintaining the dome, but he was fascinated with the view in daylight. Everywhere, bots worked steadily to construct more battle drones. Truck bots dumped material into a series of printers, carrying everything from microcircuitry to full limbs and torsos.
The production line moved at a steady pace and, every four hours, more battle drones rolled off the line and joined the ranks of their brethren. Each bot was hooked up to a cord to get juiced up and to boot up. Data was then dumped into their operating systems. When they were fully charged and their basic programming was ready, the bots with heads — and for some reason, these drones all had heads — would lift their chins. They did as they were programmed. They disconnected themselves and hooked up the next bots off the line. Then the newly made bots went back to the production line to help make more machines.
The only limitations were source material and energy. Solar and wind fields charged their buried batteries. Those batteries had run low after two days and the factory had to shut down at night, running on geothermal energy alone. There had been sufficient electricity for three manufacturing cycles each day.
Dante had asked Phantom what she wanted with more bots if she was on the side of humans. He’d been met with icy silence. Finally, she said, “I need metal soldiers to throw at the NI, not bags of meat. You were in Marfa. How did the humans fare, going up against bots hand-to-hand?”
Dante blushed and resolved to consider any questions he might ask, long and hard, before posing them to Phantom. He didn’t like appearing stupid in front of Jen, either. When he was surrounded by more people, back in his hometown, he’d never felt stupid. Maybe people of Marfa had been more polite. Maybe he’d been smarter than average there. With only Phantom and Jen to speak with, Dante knew he came in third in any intellectual race.
Raphael would have said, “Better to be lucky than smart. Friends resent luck less.” But Dante’s dead mentor had been the smartest person he had known.
Jen appeared beside Dante and reached out to hold his hand. Her hand was warm and soft in his. He smiled. “It’s quite a show. I told Phantom if they need me to do a little maintenance work on the solars or turbines, I’m up for it.”
“Wouldn’t you rather stay in bed with me? If you’re up for it, I mean.” The bot gave him a lascivious look and let go of his hand to rub his thigh.
“I’m just like a bot,” Dante said. “I have to recharge my batteries.”
“I do have a sex toy that works on batteries. It works on me. It might work on you, too.”
Dante chuckled nervously. “Slow down there. Where’d you get a toy like that?”
Jen gestured to the factory floor. “Printers everywhere. I recycled a toaster. There is no bread anymore, anyway.”
“I wonder, if we got the right materials, maybe we could modify a printer to make bread again.”
Jen shrugged. “My smoothies are better for you.”
Dante sighed. “Yeah.” He almost said, “Yes, Mother.” He pushed that thought away. Instead, he asked, “You ever wonder why the factory is a geodesic dome? I mean, it made sense for the farms to be under domes. Lots of glass for the plants but — ”
“Geodesic domes maximize uninterrupted space,” Jen replied. “No pillars. It’s an excellent design for all kinds of architectural uses.”
Dante looked at the factory floor, uncomfortable again. When Jen spoke like Mother, it scared him. That certainly didn’t sound like a factoid a sex bot would store.
The big battle drone rolled up behind them. “Good morning, kids!”
“Hello, Phantom,” Dante said.
Jen glanced at the bot, flipped a middle finger and turned back to stare at the factory floor.
Dante cleared
his throat and the silence stretched out. “What have you been researching for fun lately? More cat videos?”
“Cooking, actually. There’s a huge database.”
“But…why? You don’t eat.”
The bot tilted its head and raised its arms in a gesture of helplessness that, given the battle drone’s capabilities and heavy armor, was nearly comical. “I don’t have hunger and I don’t eat, but I didn’t know there was such a rich history behind cooking. I was schooled in military history. My graduation paper was about Hernán Cortés’s conquest of the Aztec Empire. Somehow, my education missed out on weird things about food, like the difference between rabbit and rarebit.”
Jen looked annoyed but Dante was curious. “What is the difference?”
“There’s no rabbit in rarebit. Also called buck rabbit and blushing bunny, it’s basically a cheese dish with toast. I never knew that when I was…human. Looking at all these recipes, it occurs to me now that I could have had a different meal every time I ate. There are millions of recipes. I fell into eating the same five things almost all the time.”
Jen looked back at Phantom again, her tone flat. “Battle drones don’t have taste buds. You don’t have the glands to be hungry. You don’t have the sensors I have. You should have downloaded yourself into a sex bot. If you were NI, you would have thought ahead. The Next Intelligence is all about long-term thinking.”
Phantom took a step toward Jen and, for a moment, Dante thought the battle drone might pick her up and throw her over the rail. If that didn’t end Jen, tossing her into the smelter would. Instead, the battle drone straightened. “You’re right when you’re right. We’ll be leaving soon. Jen? Before we leave, I’d like a word with you alone.”
“Why?”
“Please? It’s private.”
“No thanks.”
Robot Planet, The Complete Series (The Robot Planet Series) Page 40
