by Mel Odom
One of the units was a heart and lung unit that took over when a patient’s natural organs couldn’t function well enough to keep the person alive. That was bad. Another unit charted medirepair nanobots used on humans, but I wasn’t familiar with the code or the tracking software, so I didn’t know what they were doing or if they were effective.
I was still paralyzed from the waist down.
I knew that somewhere in that room there would be e-documentation, a file that would tell me who I was supposed to be. My curiosity filled me, consuming my thought processes. When I tried my right arm, I discovered it was weak. Forcing myself onto my side, I rolled that way and pushed up with my left arm.
The arm didn’t hold me. It buckled under my weight and I collapsed back to the bed. The situation was most curious and I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do.
I tried to access the Net again, but remained blocked. I tried to call out for a medical assistance personnel, but the words never came.
Still, my efforts to elevate myself had registered on the machines monitoring me and an alarm now sounded—gentle pulses of insistent noise.
A moment later, a white-uniformed male nurse hurried into the room and inspected me. That told me a lot about who I was. Typical hospital patients didn’t receive human contact because waldos could be operated by nurses from the nurses’ station to turn a patient, to manage bed pans, and to administer medication in IV bags.
The nurse glanced at the machinery surrounding me, then took a small penflash from his shirt pocket and peeled my left eyelid back with his thumb. He shone the light in my eye and it felt like a laser. Pain flashed through my eye and crashed against the back of my skull.
Finally, he took the light away and thumbed open the comm control on his collar. “Dr. Kellory, you’re needed with your patient in 32B.”
I summoned enough strength to grab the nurse’s hand as he turned to go.
Quietly, patiently, he pried my hand from his. “Dr. Kellory will be here in a moment. Please remain still. We’re doing everything that can be done.” He walked through the opening back into the big room beyond.
I swallowed—another human thing that I discovered I didn’t like doing—and waited. My throat was dry and I thought I might be thirsty, though I had never before experienced that sensation. The feeling fit what Shelly had referred to as “parched” while we’d been on the go.
I couldn’t help wondering if I would feel better if she were there now. Everything I was experiencing was new to me and confusing. I didn’t like being confused. I liked having answers, and now even the most basic ones were beyond my means.
Another minute and twenty-nine seconds passed.
A tall man in pale blue doctor’s scrubs walked through the entrance, followed by the black-haired woman. She looked pensive. She also looked older than I remembered from the hotel on Mars. Her face appeared the same, but her age showed in and around her eyes.
The doctor was all grim efficiency. His gaze swept the machinery plugged into me. His body language told me he was not satisfied with the results he saw there.
He leaned down and focused on me. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes.” My voice was a paper-thin rustle that barely cut through the air.
“Good.” Kellory paused. “I don’t have good news, I’m afraid.”
I knew he didn’t. What little I knew of the monitors watching over me told me that.
“The damage has been extensive. In addition to the hopper wreck, you were also shot twice. One of those bullets severed your spinal cord, blowing out the L1 and L2 vertebrae. Given time, I think we could heal you and get you back up on your feet with nanobot remodeling or a cybernetic prosthesis implant.” Kellory’s gaze remained steady and his voice never changed. “Unfortunately, I can’t guarantee that time. Your body is failing, and it’s doing so faster than we can augment the failed systems.”
I was dying. That was what he was telling me. I was dying. I thought about Shelly and wondered what she would have done or said if she’d known she was dying. I wondered how holding her and watching her slip away would have affected me.
Life and death were biological functions. No matter how good technology had gotten, it hadn’t been able to eradicate death, only to ensure a longer span and a better quality of health. Still, I knew that people wanted more than that.
As a bioroid, I was virtually indestructible. Barring a terminal accident, I would survive until someone switched me off. Lying there in that bed, I understood how humans could resent and fear us so much. Clones were more perfect than humans, but they still had to face death.
I didn’t.
Yet…here I was, facing death.
Kellory turned to the woman. “She has asked me to allow your memories and personality to be downloaded into a neural channeling program.”
I looked at the woman.
Tears streaked her face, but she showed calm and strength. She stood there silently with her arms folded.
“I told her the process would probably kill you because it would be too stressful right now.”
I knew that was true. From what I had learned about neural channeling, the subject was processed through a gamut of emotions for several hours before all the necessary information was downloaded.
Kellory shot a disapproving glance at the woman before focusing on me. “The choice is yours.”
“Am I going to die?” My words were weak, and I was surprised at the fear in them.
Kellory hesitated.
“Tell him the truth.” The woman spoke harshly, but her gaze never left me. “As long as I’ve known him, he’s always told me the truth. He deserves to know. He wants to know.”
“I do.”
Kellory crossed his arms and turned coldly professional. “In my opinion, your death is just a matter of time. I can’t—this hospital—can’t do anything to prevent it.”
“Then, let’s do the neural channeling.”
Kellory’s mouth thinned. “We could guarantee that you’d be comfortable to the end. If you do this, I can’t guarantee that.”
“There’s nothing comfortable about death.” I knew that was true. I had seen the sadness in the faces of all the families of the victims Shelly and I had dealt with, and I had seen it in Shelly’s own family and her colleagues.
Still, the part of me that wasn’t on that table, the part of me that was Drake 3GI2RC, wanted to know why the woman wanted the neural channeling done.
“You heard what I said.”
Angry, Kellory nodded and left the area.
The woman came closer to me and took my hand. “I don’t want to lose you.” Now that we were alone, her voice was no longer as firm or as certain. Her flesh felt warm and strong against mine. I knew my grip was barely there. In just the last few minutes, my strength had ebbed even further.
“You won’t lose me. Not completely. I’ll still be here.”
More tears came. She brushed at them with her free hand, but there was an onslaught.
I wanted to ask her how I’d been shot and how the hopper wreck had occurred. I wanted to know who was responsible. I couldn’t find the words. They were inside my thoughts, but I couldn’t ask.
Not knowing those answers was very uncomfortable.
She lifted my hand and held it pressed against her face. “I love you, Simon, and I don’t know what I would ever do without you.”
I blinked.
Chapter Thirty
When I opened my eyes again, I was back in the hopper with Blaine and the mercenaries. Evidently, no time had passed while I’d been otherwise engaged. Blaine was talking.
“…a very convenient hopper crash. The way I heard it, he even had a couple bullet holes in him. Haas-Bioroid perhaps, though it was never proven. I believe they were behind the murder, though. They just didn’t get Dwight Taylor. Managed to get off the planet and lost himself in New Angeles. Till you turned him up.” He spread his hands. “Now here we are, all of us trying to figure out how we’r
e going to stay alive with everything turning upside down on us. My compatriots want to know if it’s better to let you run free or destroy you. You’re pulling too many pieces out into the open, attracting the wrong kind of attention.” Blaine paused. “And we want to know if you’re working for Haas-Bioroid.”
My thoughts were busy as I tried to make sense of the latest episode.
Why had Dwight Taylor been there again? Who was the black-haired woman? Why did she call me Simon? Who was Simon? Had I been Simon Blake in those episodes?
Not knowing the answers raised my curiosity to uncomfortable levels. I accessed the Net and pulled up images of Mara Blake. She had black hair, though it was shorter than it had been in the episodes I’d had. Still, the feature comparison led me to believe that she had been the woman I’d just been with in the hospital.
I was surprised because, for the first time, I’d been able to hang onto an image of her features from one of the episodes.
Why had Mara and I been on Mars? Or, rather, why had Mara and Simon been on Mars? Who had been trying to kill her? Or them? Or us? Each question led to the birth of several others. And those questions had various permutations as well.
I had gone from having too few pieces of the puzzle to having too many. The combinations I could easily conceive whirled through my thoughts.
“Ease up, partner.” Shelly stood in front of the hopper’s rear door. “Work on one piece at a time. That’s how we do it. You know that.”
I did. She had trained me.
Shelly glanced around the hopper, at the male and female warriors gathered around me. She stared at Blaine. “You’re not in a safe zone. You can’t let yourself get distracted. You detect when the detection is protected. Until then, you’re in survival mode. You’re in enemy territory. That’s how it is out in the field.”
I knew that, too. Unconsciously, I tried to draw a breath. I could inhale because that was how my olfactory sensors worked, but the air only passed through me. I had no lungs where it could gather.
“They asked you a question, Drake.” Shelly shifted uncomfortably. “They’re waiting for your answer.”
I focused back on real-time.
“Well, are you?” Blaine was asking.
“I’m not working for the corp.”
The woman hissed like a scalded cat. “You can’t just ask him that.”
Blaine glanced at her. “Why?”
“Because he’ll lie to you.”
“He can’t.”
“What makes you think he can’t lie to us?”
Looking back at me, Blaine appeared confident. “Because Drake knows if he lies to us, he’s going to get us all killed. According to the First Directive, he can’t do that. He’d have to tell us what was going on in order to protect us. Isn’t that right?”
I nodded. It was the truth. In fact, now that the subject had come up, I felt compelled to tell them one more thing. “Thomas Haas came by my flat to see me yesterday.”
That sparked interest in Blaine’s muddy eyes. “Why?”
“He’s convinced his mother has a special interest in me.”
“What would make him believe that?”
“He says she has a file on me.”
“What kind of file?”
“I don’t know.” The body language of the mercenaries let me know the tension they were feeling had dramatically increased. None of them were happy.
The more I knew, the less things seemed to make sense. Blaine and the mercenaries didn’t speak. They knew where we were going and why. I didn’t. It wasn’t a good place to be, but there was nothing I could do about it at the moment.
I didn’t think about that much. I was more intrigued with Simon Blake and the MirrorMorph, Inc. murder of Rachel Giacomin. I didn’t believe that the killing was simply the result of leaked research and development. There were a lot of suspects and a lot of motivations, but how did that tie into Cartman Dawes’s death? I remained convinced that it somehow did. I just had to find the right rock to flip over, as Shelly would have said.
The problem was that I also had no shortage of rocks. Some of them were flipping over all by themselves. And some of them were armed to the teeth.
*
Seventeen minutes later, the cargo hopper landed. My internal GPS told me we’d flown around the city and arrived only a few blocks from where we’d started. I supposed if our conversation hadn’t gone well, they would have destroyed me, lasered me into chunks, and heaved me out all over the city.
I still didn’t know if I was going to survive the night.
Once the hopper had touched down, the woman opened the door and shoved me out. Two of the other mercenaries flanked me and kept their weapons at the ready.
I looked at Blaine. “What’s going to happen?”
“We’re going to sort this out.” Blaine shrugged. “You got farther into this thing than anyone thought you would. You even found out some things we didn’t know.” He looked at me. “I know how it is to lose a partner. You go the extra distance.”
I remembered how Blaine had lost his partner, and all the vicious rumors that suggested the man had died because Blaine had sold him out or hadn’t been there when he’d needed him. Either one of those reasons was enough to make sure that whatever career Blaine had left in the NAPD, it would be an unpartnered one.
He was alone and vulnerable out on the street.
Except now he had all the chimera mercenaries around him.
“These people could have vanished at any time.” I matched his pace. “Why did they stay?”
“Some of them are running out of places to go. And for some, it’s about losing a partner. Shelly Nolan killed Brock Thurman.”
“He would have killed her.” I didn’t bother to tell him that I’d already nullified Thurman. That would have only confused the issue.
“You get killed by friendly fire, you’re still just as dead. These guys still want payback against the person that set this up.”
There hadn’t been any friendly fire in the L’Engle Hotel that night. No one had known anyone else. The fight had been an orchestrated event, an escalation of violence primed and readied.
No matter how anyone viewed it, the whole thing had been murder by proxy. The hotel had become a kill box, an area zoned to eliminate targets. That was what the military and police called such circumstances.
I intended to find out who had built the kill box, and why. Things like that were done for reasons, and finding out those reasons was what I had been created to do.
I walked along the alley next to Blaine with the mercenaries flanking us. Dark shadows occupied the space sandwiched between two empty warehouses. The area was zoned for future construction and several of the buildings were marked as unsafe. That didn’t keep out the homeless or the gangs, though.
I knew the mercenaries didn’t trust me. They were so busy watching me that they didn’t see the attack group lying in wait until the bullets started flying.
Soft, rapid chuffs exploded from silenced weapons all around us. I tracked the movements immediately and felt bullets thud against my chest. The First Directive kicked in and I was compelled to take action to save human life. I assessed the situation and saw there were too many attackers to take out and that they were too far away, though that was changing rapidly because some of them were closing in.
The mercenaries tried to hold their ground. At the same time, several warehouse doors opened beside us and more mercenaries that had been hidden inside opened fire. In seconds, the alley became a bullet storm, filled with light and thunder, bullets chipping the warehouse walls.
The phalanx of advancing attackers staggered for a moment, but they were heavily armored and weathered the onslaught surprisingly well. They shifted, though, switching their attention from the mercenaries caught out in the alley to the ones that had been set up inside the warehouse.
Armored attack choppers floated into view and opened up their mini-cannons. Deafening explosions raced through the
alley and half-meter sized holes appeared in the walls. Smoke and mortar dust choked the alley.
“Form a line!” The woman yelled orders and I heard them over my comm. I’d already tracked their frequency and joined them on it. “Form a line on me!” She had her assault rifle up and was firing controlled bursts.
I was torn. Blaine stood on one side of me and the woman stood on the other. I had to choose one. I went for the woman, perhaps thinking that I made a better shield for her because I could cover her with my body. Or perhaps I was remembering how I hadn’t been able to protect Shelly.
The attackers staggered for a moment, then resumed their attack without hesitation. They came at us, moving quietly and quickly behind bulletproof shields. Bullets from the mercenaries’ weapons sparked as they struck the shields, and every now and again one of the attackers spun backward as a heavier burst struck home or a grenade landed in their midst. None of them went down. They remained inexorable, stepping relentlessly toward us.
I stepped in front of the woman. “You can’t hold a line here. They’ll kill you.”
Angrily, she stepped forward and to the side, bumping me out of the way with her left forearm. I was too big for her to move with just her own strength, but I knew she wanted me out of the way. So I went.
She fired again and again and again. The brass from the assault weapon hammered against my bulletproof jacket and pinged from my face. She pursed her lips in frustration. “Fall back! Fall back to the warehouse!” She cursed.
Helpless, I tried to stay out of her way. We edged toward the open warehouse doors, but I knew we were moving too slowly. Yet, if the mercenaries broke and ran, their attackers would charge into them. Bullets continued to strike me. I tried to maneuver myself so I could provide partial protection for the woman, but she kept shifting to clear a line of sight for her weapon.
Then, in a crimson rush, the woman’s head came apart beside me at the same time two heavy caliber rounds hammered into my back. My bulletproof jacket stopped the rounds, but it was covered in the woman’s blood and brain matter. She stumbled and fell. I caught her, but I was only holding onto a corpse. At the same time, another mercenary beside me jerked and spun, then fell as well.
