Android: Rebel (The Identity Trilogy)

by Mel Odom

  “Yes.”

  “He unpacked the warroid programming in you, and it’s slowly been evolving your personality.”

  I looked at the dead people lying in the room. “This…is not what I wanted.”

  “I know.” Mara’s voice firmed. “But this is necessary, Drake. If you were any less, you wouldn’t have been able to find me. You wouldn’t be able to stop Rath.”

  On the vidcast, Bloomfield was still talking, still trying to pacify citizens who were up in arms about the arrival of the warroids. He suddenly fell silent as a burst of gunfire heralded the arrival of John Rath and the Chimeras.

  Dead sec guards dropped around them and I felt certain as the warroids spun to confront Rath that the merc colonel and his people were about to die. The warroids leveled their weapons.

  Rath grinned and held up a hand, walking fearlessly toward Bloomfield and the other governors. “Execute Chimera Protocol Alpha Tango Frostfire.”

  The warroids cradled their weapons and stood at attention. Inside, I felt new programming unpack that I had never known was there, and I realized what Thomas Haas had truly done to me. On the Net, a meetbox was already pinging a connect code I didn’t recognize. But I had a suspicion who was going to be on the other end.

  Rath never broke stride.

  “Who are you?” Bloomfield demanded.

  “My name is Colonel John Rath,” Rath declared. “And I’m here to save Mars.” He leveled his pistol and shot Bloomfield through the head.

  Bloomfield flew backwards in the lesser gravity and hit the floor at the feet of the other governors. None of them moved.

  Rath pointed at the nosies in the group. “Get me on camera now.”

  All of the nosies pointed their vid equipment at him.

  “You people have seen what the colonial governors were prepared to do,” Rath said as he reloaded his pistol. “They were going to force you under the thumb of Earth corps and pro-Earth civil service. The time has come to break the ties to Earth. The time has come for Mars to be free. We can stand strong without Earth, and you people need to realize that.” He snapped the pistol closed. “Some of you may be afraid right now. That’s to be expected. New life and dreams never come without fear. But you don’t have to do this alone. I’m going to guide you through it. I will lead you to the destinies you deserve.”

  Sec reinforcements burst into the large meeting room. At Rath’s order, the warroids spun around and shot them down, charging forward to chase down those that did not die in the initial assault. The nosies recorded the carnage immediately.

  When the sound of the gunfire died away, Rath called for the nosies again.

  “You have a choice,” Rath told the viewers. “Follow me as I take you to better lives…or I’ll bury you.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  I looked at Mara. “You need to get out of here.”

  “What do you mean?” She looked at me in disbelief.

  “When Rath, or one of his seconds, is unable to reach this team, they’ll send someone. You need to be gone. Get somewhere safe.”

  “Simon—Drake—no place is safe as long as Rath is out there.”

  “I know.” I bent and began retrieving weapons from the fallen mercenaries. I found a flak jacket with deep pockets for ammo for my weapons and filled them. “I’m going to stop him.”

  “Rath will kill you.”

  “I’m going to try to not let that happen.”

  “Don’t do this.”

  “I have to.” I looked at her. “This is who I am, Mara. I was programmed to stop people like Rath. I can’t walk away from this. Rath can’t be allowed to do what he’s doing.” I paused and looked at Shelly. “He killed my partner, and when something like that happens, you’re supposed to do something. I’m going to bring Rath to justice.”

  “You won’t make it past the warroids.”

  “I will,” I said, and left her there.

  On my way to the tunnel Rath had used to infiltrate Khondi Tower, the connection to the meetbox clicked through. I paused against the wall and accepted the connection.

  * * *

  I stepped into a plush office and found Thomas Haas sitting at an ornate desk with his fingertips braced against each other. He looked much as he had the last time I had seen him. Lean and dressed in an expensive suit, his honey-colored red hair trailing past his shoulders, he looked up at me from behind his signature pink-lensed sunglasses. His Asian features gave him a more youthful look than his nineteen years.

  “Hello, Drake 3GI2RC,” he greeted in a warm voice.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “Things have gotten out of hand on Mars.” Thomas waved an indolent hand over to the vidcast that was lagging several minutes behind real time on Mars.

  On the screen, Rath strode into the room and shot Bloomfield through the head again.

  “Wow.” Thomas leaned forward and tapped the PAD in front of him. “I’m gonna have to save that one. It’s a keeper.”

  “I don’t have time to waste.”

  Thomas relaxed back into his chair. “I’m not wasting your time, Drake 3GI2RC. I’m here to help.”

  “How?”

  “I suppose you know I was aware of the warroid program my mother has unleashed on Mars?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that I was ultimately working with Mara Blake?”

  “Get to it.”

  On the vidcast, Rath was addressing the audience.

  “Allow me to savor this a little,” Thomas said. “You know my mother and I don’t share a lot of…familial feelings. But I do have part ownership in this corporation. I check into more projects than she is aware of. I knew that she was planning to send them to Mars to shore up our corporations there if it ever became necessary. Which it has. I also knew that someone had interfered with that program, putting in a command structure in the neural programming MirrorMorph, Inc. provided.”

  I thought about that.

  “Mara Blake didn’t know about that, but she told me about you. She suspected my mother would try something at some point, so she wanted to have a secret project of her own.” Thomas Haas shot me with his forefinger and grinned. “That was you.”

  “Play your games with someone else.”

  Thomas’s face hardened. “I’m not playing games. What are you planning on doing? Confronting Rath in that room? You’ll just get yourself killed.”

  “It will be worth it if I kill him first.”

  “It’s not like you’re really going to die either, is it?” Thomas cocked his head. “Of course, Simon Blake has already died once. Maybe it’s him that’s not afraid of dying again.”

  I started to break the connection.

  “I can tilt the odds in your favor,” Thomas said.

  I waited.

  “I put my own program artifact in the encoding of those warroids. I could have stopped Rath’s plan altogether, but I didn’t know who was ultimately behind that subterfuge. Trying to excise the program would have been impossible. Besides that, I wanted my mother to get her comeuppance. I wanted her to be embarrassed and have legal repercussions that will consume her attention for a year or more. This will do it. In the meantime, I’ll have less attention focused on me and what I’m doing.” Thomas paused. “You can shut those warroids down, Drake 3GI2RC. I put a subroutine in there that would allow me to do that, but I hadn’t planned on them ending up on Mars.” He shrugged. “Since I’m not there to save the day as I’d hoped, this is my gift to you.”

  “How?” I asked.

  He gave me the password and I dropped out of the meetbox, returning to Mars.

  * * *

  I didn’t know if Thomas Haas was telling me the truth or not, but I knew that secrets didn’t hold up much in the corp world. It seemed like everyone had dealt themselves into this one, and the double-crosses and triple-crosses flourished like ragweed.

  I headed down the hall again, not knowing if I had an edge or I’d been set up by Thomas Haas.


  * * *

  Minutes later, I reached the meeting room high in Khondi Tower. I remained tapped into the vidcast, listening to John Rath continue his diatribe.

  “I was born on Mars,” Rath was saying. “My parents and my sister were killed in a corp attack on what was supposed to be the hidden headquarters of Martian rebels. I vowed then that Earth and pro-Earth Martians would pay. I became a mercenary, and I took Earth corps’ credit and pro-Earth Martian profits, plowing it back into my own operations till I could reach this point. Ways for me to accomplish this fell into my hands like it was meant to be. I am your savior.”

  Three chimera mercs guarded the entrance to the room. Rath didn’t leave things to chance. I was running at full speed by the time they saw me, closing rapidly. They started raising their weapons, but mine were already in my hands and I shot them without mercy, following Simon’s instincts, not the Three Directives.

  I was past them before they fell to the floor.

  Rath whirled on me and I stopped to face him because I was already drawing the attention of the warroids in the room.

  “I don’t know what you’re doing here, golem, but you’re dead,” Rath growled. “Warroids, kill him.”

  The warroids swiveled.

  I pulsed the disarming code. For a moment the warroids held their ground, then they shouldered their arms, and shut down, slumping to resting positions.

  Recovering quickly, Rath pulled up his rifle and opened fire. But I was no longer where I’d been. Bullets tracked me but they didn’t catch up to me as I ran behind the closest row of inert warroids. The surviving sec guards realized the odds had shifted as well and grabbed the weapons they’d abandoned earlier when confronted by the warroids. Both sides opened fire immediately, but I had no doubts about the outcome of the battle. The Chimeras were heavily outnumbered in the gubernatorial chamber.

  Rath’s rifle cycled dry. He cast it from him and reached for his sidearm, but by then I was already closing on him. I fired several rounds into his chest and drove him backward, but he remained standing. Through the rips in his uniform, I saw the ballistic under armor that had protected him.

  I aimed for his head, but he was in motion too, moving at superhuman speed. The hardsuit was wired for micro-exo supports, increasing his strength and his speed. He fired his pistol, emptying it into me, blowing holes in my chassis and coming dangerously close to my brain center, but the extra shielding prevented him from killing me.

  Weapons empty now, I threw myself at Rath as he tried to reload his pistol. I grabbed the weapon and ripped it out of his grasp. I swung a fist at his head, pulling the punch so it wouldn’t kill him, only render him unconscious.

  Rath countered my punch with an arm block the way he used to when he fought Simon in their practice bouts. As I regrouped, he pulled a microfilament dagger the length of his forearm and shoved it into my midsection. The monofilament edge sliced easily through my chassis and the extra armor.

  I managed to pull away when he was only five centimeters from my brain box. The dagger slid out of me with a metallic shriek. My online servers struggled to work around the injury, nanobots rewiring components and circuits to bring me back to full function.

  Rath swept his blade at me again and I jumped back. The monofilament tip scraped a fresh scar across my chest. “So who are you, golem? Simon or Drake 3GI2RC? Do you even know? Or has Mara’s tampering got you so screwed up that you don’t know?”

  I batted his next strike away and launched a kick of my own that sent him scrambling back. “I know who I am, John. And it’s not just Mara’s programming that has been confusing. You had your hand in it, too.”

  Rath grinned and the bloodlust glowed in his eyes. He swung at my head, causing me to step back, then performed a spinning back kick that caught me on top of the earlier slash and knocked my chest chassis in a little. Sparks shorted in my chest and part of my systems went down again, slowing me. By the time I’d almost recovered, Rath had spun low, raking both of my legs with his blade, then coming up from my crotch toward my chest again. If I had been human, he would have unmanned me and disemboweled me with the same stroke.

  I caught his wrist, but he spun out of my grip before I could lock down on him.

  “Then you’ve figured it all out?”

  “Simon Blake was a clone,” I said. I exchanged blows with him, blocking and being blocked, locked into the rhythm of the battle now the way he and Simon used to be. “DNA at Jonas Salter’s crime scene was a sixty-eight percent match for Simon Blake. There’s only one way that could happen.”

  Rath threw another flurry of blows, but I managed to block them. He stepped back to regroup, breathing rapidly. Displeasure showed on his face as he saw the Chimeras going down under heavy fire. The sec team was drawing blood, too, and the chamber was littered with bodies. The nosies were getting it all on record. Including my battle with Rath.

  “Simon was your clone,” I said. Floyd’s investigation into Simon’s autopsy had revealed that. “You created Simon. That’s how I was able to remember the deaths of your parents and sister and thought they were my family.”

  “You only remembered that because I told you. I wanted you to have a reason to hate Earth and their toadies here as much as I do. You could have been with me, Simon. You should have been. Only you went and fell in love with that woman. That screwed up everything we were doing.”

  “Everything you were doing,” I replied. “You made Simon over in your image the same way Mara made me over in Simon’s. Neither of us turned out to be you.”

  “We should have been together. You should have been the perfect partner.” Rath whipped and ducked, and he suddenly threw his hand out.

  An anti-personnel grenade flipped through the space between us and adhered to my metallic skin. It sat there, no bigger than my thumb, and blinked red lights.

  Rath turned and ran for the observation window, stooping long enough to pick up a machine pistol.

  The grenade went off and blew me off my feet, knocking me back and down. If I had been flesh and blood, the anti-personnel grenade would have killed me. My chassis withstood the blast and loose shrapnel easily. I hit the floor and skidded across pools of blood and through dead bodies. I righted myself immediately, focused on Rath.

  A few meters short of the observation window, Rath fired his weapon and the bullets tore through floor to ceiling transplas window. He followed the chunks out into space. For a moment I thought he’d committed suicide rather than submit to me or die at my hands.

  Then a hopper glided under him and I knew he’d already planned on an emergency exit. That was Rath.

  I ran after him, ignoring the weapons firing all around me. A few stray rounds slammed into my chassis and knocked me slightly off-balance, but I reached the window and dove headlong for the hopper.

  Rath was crawling into the top hatch when I hit the hopper and knocked it off-course.

  In the pilot’s seat, Leigh Bonner tried to correct the flight but ended up losing control for a moment, allowing the hopper to dip sharply to the left. The vehicle sped within centimeters of nearby buildings.

  Rath slid out of the hatch and spilled across the top of the hopper. He screamed a curse and managed to grab a new grip on the hatch opening as I slid to the back end of the vehicle. I kept my left hand against the vehicle’s exterior and tried to magnetize a hold, but only succeeded in slowing my fall. I drew back my right hand, stiffened my fingers, and drove my hand through the plasteel with a rending crunch. Secure again, I pulled myself up.

  Reaching into the hatch, Rath pulled out a submachine pistol as the wind screamed around us. Leigh ducked between buildings, trying desperately to elude the Martian police hoppers that had targeted us.

  “Park the vehicle,” one of the policemen ordered over the PA.

  Rath aimed the machine pistol at me and opened fire. The steel-jacketed bullets tore through my head. He’d aimed instinctively, forgetting that I wasn’t human. My face tore away and my head crumpled
inward. The impacts knocked me backward and almost shook me loose from my precarious hold. The plasteel in my grip slipped and tore and the wind whipped at me.

  “Park the vehicle,” the pursuing officer repeated.

  Turning his weapon on the police officer, Rath opened fire again. The rounds tore through the transplas cover on the hopper and bright blooms of crimson spotted the interior.

  I couldn’t let Rath kill any more people, especially police officers. I was Drake 3GI2RC, designed to uphold the law, to protect the innocent, and to bring the guilty to justice.

  I would not fail in that job.

  And Rath had been responsible for Shelly’s death, for the deaths of a lot of people.

  I drew back my other hand and hammered the rear section of the hopper, tearing through the exterior, getting down to the control systems. Then I was battering them, ripping through them, taking away all of Leigh Bonner’s control over the vehicle.

  The hopper suddenly sped up, lunging out of control. It turned sideways and skidded against a tall building, knocking plascrete loose to fall into the street below.

  Rath turned to me once more and fired again, blasting away my fingers on the hand that gripped the hopper. I tried to hang on, tried to find a fresh grip, but I fell.

  My internal GPS told me I dropped twenty meters before I landed on a hopper pad on one of the nearby buildings. I lay on my back as nanobots struggled to reconnect my systems and salvage what remained of my chassis.

  Above, the hopper screamed toward the glistening dome that protected Bradbury colony. Unable to stop, it wrecked into the thick, reinforced transplas surface and shattered. Even before the pieces fell, an explosion turned it all into a ball of flame. I assumed some of the munitions aboard the hopper had detonated.

  I didn’t think Rath and Leigh Bonner survived the fire because they were both alight. If that didn’t kill them, the long fall to the street did. I got up in time to stagger over to the side of the building and watch them hit.

  Epilogue

  So you’re staying on Mars?” Mara Blake glanced around the small office I’d rented.