by Mel Odom
I braced myself and yanked hard. The door shuddered and squealed as the servos fought me, but they weren’t strong enough. With a shrill scream, the servos buckled and the door shot back into its housing. An emergency alarm stuttered to life and a red light above the door whirled madly.
I forced myself into the hallway outside the room in time to watch Dwight Taylor step into a small elevator. The doors closed and he was gone.
“Detective Drake, this is Dispatch.” The man’s voice was flat and practiced.
“I read you, Dispatch.” I crossed the hallway and surveyed the elevator’s control panel. There was no exterior fire alarm or emergency stop control, and there was no indicator that marked what floor Dwight Taylor was currently at.
I pulled up the building blueprints and discovered a network of tunnels beneath the building. Many structures in that part of the New Angeles megapolis had them for vendors and for VIP patrons who wanted privacy.
“We have a report of multiple gunshots at Kilgore’s Venus. I show that you are at that twenty.”
“I am.” I shoved my damaged fingers into the gap between the doors. The blue fluid I’d leaked lubricated them and made entry a little easier. The feat still required considerable effort. “I’m currently in pursuit of the perpetrator. Send emergency medical teams and the medical examiner. You’ve got two dead at the scene and some people that are lightly wounded.”
“Copy that. I’m also sending assistance.”
“Acknowledged. Do you have an ETA on the assistance?” I shoved the doors open slightly, managing to get a shoulder through. I pushed again and got my chest through as well.
The elevator cage was five floors below me and accelerating. The unit was designed for high-speed usage, probably to ferry important guests in and out of the club or casino via the tunnel entrances so they wouldn’t be interrupted. Or perhaps so they wouldn’t be seen.
“ETA on assistance is plus two minutes.”
“Understood. Be advised there is only one shooter. He is armed and dangerous and has shown no hesitation to kill.”
“Copy that, Detective Drake.”
Two men came through the door on the other side of the hallway. They had guns pointed at me.
“I’m Detective Drake, New Angeles Police Department. Stand down.”
The men hesitated but they didn’t lower their weapons. They also didn’t open fire, so I was ahead.
I didn’t hesitate. I stepped through the doors and into the elevator shaft, launching myself into free fall after the descending cage. For a moment, I thought the cage was plummeting at the same speed I was, but that was an inconsistency caused by switching over to my infrared vision. I used my internal gyros to right myself and landed on both feet on top of the cage. I weighed 113.4 kilos. I didn’t land like a butterfly. The loud thump of contact echoed in the shaft, and the cage jostled beneath me.
Immediately, Dwight Taylor fired up through the roof of the cage. Bullets struck sparks off the elevator shaft’s infrastructure. One of them caught me in the right ankle and knocked me off-balance. I stagger-stepped for a moment, then my quarry fired another salvo of rounds.
I ducked backward from the center and managed to stand only centimeters away from the carbosteel support struts that framed the shaft. My damaged hand banged off one of them as it hurtled by and my arm jumped suddenly over my head. Carbosteel hissed only centimeters from my head and I knew that if I made contact at this speed, I would suffer serious damage.
Abruptly, the cage shrilled to a halt. I staggered on my damaged ankle, but the nanobots were already remodeling the joint. The elevator doors dinged open beneath me.
The chatter over the NAPD frequency continued unabated and I knew that at least three patrol hoppers were en route.
I took a step forward and reached for the cage’s emergency escape hatch. As soon as I did, Dwight Taylor fired a half-dozen bullets through the roof again. Four of them hit me with glancing blows and knocked me off-balance.
Taylor’s footsteps ran from the cage and echoed in a narrow passageway. A brief inspection of the blueprints informed me that we were in the underground service tunnels.
I drew my damaged foot back and slammed it through the top of the elevator cage instead of trying for the hatch. A section of the cage top broke and collapsed inward at an angle as I’d intended. I slid through the opening into the lighted cage, dropping to one knee and raising the Synap before me.
Twenty meters down the passageway ahead of me, Dwight Taylor turned the corner to the left. I launched myself in pursuit. “Dispatch, this is Drake.”
“Copy, Detective.”
“The perp is in the underground service tunnels.” I checked my internal compass and sent the dispatch officer a copy of the blueprints. “The perp took the eastern tunnel from the four-way in front of the elevator.”
“Copy, Detective.”
I propelled myself down the tunnel, listing slightly to the right because of the damaged ankle. As I moved, though, the nanobots firmed up the joint and my strides grew longer and more balanced. Even damaged, I was now running faster than anything human.
Dwight Taylor was too, and I knew he’d had his body enhanced at some point. It was expensive, and usually only corps paid for those kinds of upgrades. Only mercs or sec men traded out perfectly good body parts for those abilities.
I ran, threw a hand against the opposite wall and bounced off, pushing my body harder. Taylor’s footsteps rang ahead of me in the dimly lighted tunnel. We were quickly closing on one of the entry points into the building and I knew catching him was going to be a near thing.
Two more turns and I was locked into the final approach. Taylor remained ahead of me, still out of range of the Synap. He wasn’t focused on me, though. He was looking out into the parking area for service and cargo hoppers. Vehicles there were in motion, but not many. Most of them were exec or corp luxury hoppers picking up or dropping off board members or other VIPs who preferred anonymity over arriving in style on the rooftop.
If Taylor got his hands on one of those in the confusion, capturing him would become even harder. A luxury hopper was built like a tank, and many of them came with high-powered weaponry.
I ran faster, gaining now with every stride.
Taylor reached the open area and immediately the buzz of comm chatter over the NAPD frequency died inside my head. “Dispatch.”
No answer.
“Dispatch.”
Everything remained silent, but a low-level magnetic field suddenly registered on my senses. Someone somewhere had just switched on a white noise damper that had taken out my comm. I amended that, knowing that the damper had probably taken out all the comms nearby.
Taylor rushed to the first luxury hopper and pointed his pistol at the pilot’s face through the hatch. The pilot sat calmly at the controls.
“Get out of the vehicle! Get out now!” Panic razored Taylor’s words into hard explosions, and he was breathing hard from the run.
The pilot remained put.
Angrily, Taylor fired his weapon, but the bullets only bounced off the reinforced transplas. Thwarted, he turned from that hopper and raced to another.
My range finder indicated that Taylor was now within my weapon’s reach. I raised the Synap.
At the same time, a sleek hopper jumped out of the shadows and throttled straight toward Taylor. He saw the vehicle coming and tried to avoid it. He never had a chance. In the end, he leaped up rather than getting hit flat-footed. He crashed against the transplas nose and went up over the top.
The hopper pilot brought his craft around in a tight turn that sent him briefly skidding out of control into a parked corp luxury hopper. The corp hopper barely moved while the side of the moving hopper crushed in.
Dwight Taylor struggled to get to his feet but one of his knees wouldn’t support him. Still, stubbornly, he lifted his pistol and fired at the hopper as it came around for another try. His bullets tore through the nose hatch and hammered the pilot
in the shoulder. Evidently, the man was wearing some kind of bulletproof armor, because he didn’t deviate from his course.
Even if I hadn’t wanted to talk to Dwight Taylor, I wouldn’t have been able to stand by and watch him get run over by the hopper. The First Directive had already impelled me to rescue him if I could, even though he had just shot and killed two people.
The hopper passenger fired through the nose hatch and two of his rounds stitched Taylor’s chest, knocking him sideways as the hopper bore down on the stricken man.
When I was only a few meters from Taylor, I threw myself forward, wrapping my arms around him, and my momentum carried us both out of the way. The hopper whizzed by within centimeters.
I rolled and cradled Taylor to me, handling him easily with my augmented strength. In two steps, I reached shelter behind a thick support pillar while the hopper gunner strafed the area and the pilot brought the vehicle back around.
Spotting the pistol still clenched in Taylor’s fist, I grabbed it in my free hand, thinking that I could shoot out the hopper’s tires. Instead, the Directives kicked in and my hand spasmed, forcing me to release the weapon. I could only confiscate a lethal weapon. I couldn’t use it, not even on hopper tires, because the resulting wreck might endanger the same humans that sought to kill Dwight Taylor.
The situation was discomforting, more so than I’d ever felt. I longed for the freedom I’d had in the Mars episodes.
But I didn’t have it.
“You’re dead.” Taylor gasped and grabbed a fistful of my jacket. “You’re dead.”
For the first time, I realized what he’d said hadn’t been meant as a threat.
“What are you talking about?” I tracked his biometrics through my contact with him. His blood pressure was quickly dropping. I tried to access my internal PAD and comm out to Dispatch, but the white noise damper was still in play.
“I saw you die.” Blood flecked his lips and I knew that one of the bullets had pierced a lung. Maybe both had been pierced.
Before I could ask him another question, the hopper braked to a stop. I peered around the corner and watched as the passenger got out of the vehicle without undue hurry and pulled a massive rifle from the rear. I pointed my Synap at him, but he was just out of my range and the blue bolt sputtered out before it reached him.
He smiled at me as he fitted the rifle to his shoulder and took aim.
I wrapped my arms around Taylor and tried to protect him as best as I could. I was trapped with him and I knew there was no way we could escape. Still, I lifted him and ran.
The first rifle shot caught me in the middle of my back, punched through my chest because it was an armor-piercing round, and ripped through Taylor’s abdomen. Blood and intestines flew everywhere, mixed in with fragments of ribs and hipbones. Taylor died between heartbeats.
The rifleman’s second round caught me in the back of the head. My diagnostics went off-line. I struggled to hang onto consciousness as my body stopped responding to my command. My carbosteel skull was shattered and broken, and twenty-seven percent of it had been ripped away by the round.
If I’d been human, I would have died. But my bioroid nature meant that the part of me that was me was scattered throughout my body. However, my systems couldn’t support emergency reconstruction and my ability to function.
I toppled to the ground and fell onto my side, completely paralyzed. Reports flooded my cognitive mind as the nanobots rushed to save systems they could and jettison those that they couldn’t. I fragmented as their efforts concentrated on saving me from getting erased.
The rifleman approached me calmly. He looked at Dwight Taylor and spoke into his comm. “Taylor’s dead. Looks like the golem is, too.”
A tinny voice sounded over his comm. “Make certain. Drake is getting to be a problem.”
Without hesitation, the rifleman shoved his weapon point-blank into what was left of my face and pulled the trigger.
I went off-line in a twisting black rush.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Drake 3GI2RC, can you hear me?” The woman’s voice was soft and gentle. For a moment, I thought it belonged to Shelly, then I remembered that I’d been there the day Shelly had been buried. I could almost hear the hiss of the rain that day falling around me.
“Yes, I can hear you.”
“Excellent.” The woman sounded relieved.
I felt distinctly uncomfortable in the darkness. “I can’t see.”
“I’m aware of that. We’re going to bring your vid systems back on-line in a moment. Some of the reconnections have been problematic.”
“I understand.”
“What’s the last thing you remember?”
“Getting shot.”
The woman chuckled. “Apparently you have a very eventful assignment, Drake 3GI2RC. You have been shot on a number of occasions. Which one do you remember last?”
“I was in the service area beneath the Hollander Building. I was with Dwight Taylor. He died.”
“That’s correct. You’ll be happy to know that we’ve recovered nearly all of your memory files.”
“That is good.”
“That, Drake 3GI2RC, is nothing short of a miracle. When you tell people about me, you tell them you were put back together by a miracle worker.”
“I will.”
“Not to overly belabor a point, but I could have put Humpty Dumpty back together again if I’d been around when he fell off that wall.”
“Humpty Dumpty?” I didn’t know who that was.
“A character in a fairy tale. Don’t worry about it. Those references probably aren’t part of your job package.”
“No.” I waited patiently, but I began to feel increasingly curious about my condition. I didn’t have access to my diagnostic systems or the Net. I wasn’t just blind, I was disconnected from the world.
I assumed she kept working, but I didn’t know because I had no way to tell.
“May I talk to you?”
“You already are.”
“What day is this?”
She told me, and I realized that three days had passed since I’d last been part of the world.
“Am I in Heinlein?”
“No, we had to put you back together under the auspices of the New Angeles Police Department.”
“Why?”
“In case you had any information about the killings at that club.”
“I filed everything I knew before I went down.” I’d uploaded all my files, including the vid of Dwight Taylor shooting the two people in Kilgore’s Venus. “Did they catch the two men that killed Taylor?”
“I don’t know. They didn’t tell me and I’m not a media junkie.”
“How much damage was done to me?”
“To you apparently not so much since your memory is as intact as it is. That’s surprising, I have to tell you. Usually when you see a bioroid come in with damage this extensive, they get scrapped.”
I didn’t say anything, but the realization made me feel hollow inside, which was ironic. “So, why go to all the trouble over me?”
“Because Haas-Bioroid has a considerable investment in you. They can’t replace the seven years you’ve spent working with the New Angeles Police Department.” She said that automatically, as if it was something she had memorized. “Haas-Bioroid wants to see the relationship between our corp and the NAPD continue to flourish.” She paused. “If you’d just been a uniformed officer, the decision might have been made to just cut their losses.”
“That makes sense.” I knew that a human would have felt relief knowing he or she was considered valuable and worth special effort. I didn’t. I still had a number of questions. “What’s your name?”
“Miranda.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Miranda.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Drake 3GI2RC, and after everything I’ve poked through over the past seventy-nine hours, I feel like I know you very well. I have to say, I’m really impressed with your architecture.�
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“Thank you. Haas-Bioroid designs and provides an exemplary product.”
“I know.” Miranda sounded amused. “I helped design part of it.”
“Sorry.”
“Nope, don’t be sorry. I had a hand in designing the product placement subroutines as well. Not my best work, but it had to be done. Now…are you ready to have the lights turned back on?”
“Yes.”
“Here we go.”
My body came on-line in a rush of data streams. For a moment, I basked in the completeness that came with the onslaught of information. I opened my eyes and saw the white room filled with suddenly noisy computers. Evidently, Miranda had been speaking directly into my consciousness.
I lay on a link-chair and felt the exterior programs running through my mind and my body. Miranda sat beside me, a petite woman with her dark hair tied in dreadlocks. Her skin was the color and texture of cocoa butter—smooth, dark, and unblemished. She looked too young, too fit, for it not to be ascribed to body cosmetology. She wore bright yellow scrubs polka-dotted with red and green and blue. I knew then that she was high up in Haas-Bioroid’s R&D department. The corp didn’t allow much individualism inside their walls.
“How are you feeling, Drake 3GI2RC?”
“Much better.”
“You should.” Miranda put her hands behind her back and stretched. “I’m beginning to feel the way you looked when they brought you in here.”
“How bad was I?”
“Oh, you are a curious one, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I was told that you were.” She smiled. “I’m glad. I actually had a hand in designing the special investigatory software that motivates you, too.”
“Thank you. The software program is very good. Haas-Bioroid always—”
Miranda held up a hand in surrender. “Stop. If I hear one more artificially triggered accolade about this corp, I’m going to scream.”
“Do you not like your job at Haas-Bioroid?”
