Steel, Titanium and Guilt: Just Hunter Books I to III

by Robin Craig

  “Is that…” she finally managed, “Is that how you think to control me?”

  “Why, do you think it insufficient? But no. You need to know it, need to know it is there waiting for you in your dreams and nightmares. But too much of it would send you mad. Nor can we use the overwhelming emotional projections you felt earlier: the brain is both too flexible and too fragile. It is like a drug. More and more is needed to get the same effect, until the organism fails. But for all its sophistication, your chair is a blunt weapon. What we can do with more intimate connections is on a higher level entirely. Your prison will be much stronger and more subtle than you can imagine.”

  “Why, you won’t even need this,” he added, as a wave of scintillating pleasure swept through her like the spirit of a lustful god. And though it was a pale reflection of his previous demonstration, she wondered if she should fear the addiction of his pleasures more than the excruciation of his agonies.

  “But…” she gasped. “Why are you telling me all this? If I won’t remember, why are you telling me?!”

  “I have so few opportunities to explain my vision. Yes, my inner cadre knows, but you are a unique combination: a formidable enemy, intelligent enough to understand – and to dread what you see. And my reward will be to see the depth of your desolation transformed by my hand into the glory of your apotheosis.”

  “No… don’t. For the love of God, don’t! Please.”

  “It is for the love of godhood that I do it.”

  His hands again began to play over his desk and her wide eyes watched silently. If only I can find some place to hide, perhaps some piece of my soul will survive where you can’t reach it. And if it does, one day I’ll come for you, you son of a bitch! The world won’t be big enough for you to hide.

  At last his hand stopped and hovered over the desk like a vulture about to descend, and he looked up at her one last time. But his faint smile vanished at the sight of her face, fell into the stare of her dark eyes. He thought it was hate, then he knew it was more: the face of a terrible justice or vengeance that would never forgive or forget. For a moment he hesitated. Then his smile returned as if he knew the futility of her thoughts, forever too little and too late.

  “Goodbye, Detective Hunter.”

  Then she saw a white light shining in his eyes. It grew to fill the world until nothing was left but its splendor, and she vanished into the light.

  Chapter 45 – Strangers and Friends

  The light wavered at the edges, shredding like paper burning with a dark fire. The world resolved into a dimly lit room containing strange electronic devices and three people standing, staring at her.

  For a while, she did not know what she was seeing. It was if there were two worlds in the same space, two contradictory worlds competing to be the true reality. Three strangers looked at her, yet they were also three friends whom she knew, or would know, if only she could remember their names. The strangers or friends appeared to be in their own dual realities, with expressions that could not decide what they should be feeling.

  She examined her own body, familiar yet alien, transfixed. Then finally she found her voice. Or someone spoke with her voice.

  They had seen the machine studying them, and then it had made a strange sound, like a cross between a sigh and a gasp. It had jumped back as if stung, folded in on itself, then sat perfectly still for long minutes, as if pinned by some inner vista that blanked out the external world. They feared the result of its inner conflict, but they did not know whether to fear an eruption of violence or the death of whatever life lay within. All they knew was that they dare not move; would not move; could not move.

  Finally it stirred. It looked around slowly, extended one of its arms, rotated it, opened and closed its claws. It stared at it for long moments. Then it looked at its visitors and let out another of its strange moans.

  “Rianna? Jack?” asked the machine in a whisper. “Alex?”

  For a moment the three stood silently in fear and awe. Then Rianna stepped forward and asked, “Who are you?”

  “I am Kali,” she said in a voice of wonder. Then after long seconds she added, “And I am Miriam Hunter.”

  “It is you? You’re still alive? In there?”

  The machine examined its hands again. “Yes, Rianna. It’s me. I remember you. I remember it all.” She shook her body. “But I also remember being Kali. Oh my God…” she whispered. “What have I done? What have I become?”

  Beldan shook his head. “None of those things Kali did… none of it was you. None of it was Kali either, for that matter. You were just a tool under another’s power. When Kali woke up – when Lyssa managed to touch some core of the essential you inside her – all that stopped. That was you, not the other.”

  “I… I suppose so.” She felt the scar where she had ripped the chain of fingers from her chest. “Yet I was a thing of death. Can Death ever expiate its guilt?”

  The others made no reply, still struggling with their own thoughts, staring at what their friend had become.

  “But why didn’t you look for me? Why did everyone think I was dead?” she asked at last. “Kali had studied Steel and knew I had… killed him, and that I – that Miriam –was now dead too. But she was interested in Steel not me, and had so much to learn: she never had the leisure to look up the details. What happened? Why were you so sure? You couldn’t have had a body.”

  Jack and Rianna looked at each other, and Miriam did not like their expressions. She liked it even less when Rianna’s expression, which had staggered its confused way back towards joy, now threw itself into reverse and went back through dawning horror to curious examination. Jack was about to speak when Rianna held up her hand to silence him. “Wait,” was all she said.

  She walked over to the machine then stopped. “The most important thing first,” she whispered, and embraced Kali’s metal body. “I’m so glad you’re alive,” she continued. “Words can’t express how glad I am.” Kali held her gently as she wept.

  “There’s more, isn’t there?” Miriam finally asked.

  Rianna stepped back, ran her hands over Kali’s shell, studied her form carefully. “Yes, there’s more,” Rianna said at last. “The reason we thought you were dead is your car went over a cliff. But it wasn’t empty. There was an arm in it – your arm.”

  Kali gasped. Looked at her arm again. “But… oh. Ohhh,” she moaned.

  Rianna nodded. “Those metal arms are just metal. And… your shell. It is too small. You couldn’t fit in it. At least… not all of you. Oh Miriam. They didn’t just cram you into that thing. From the form of it, and from the medical aspects, your body is inside it. But your arms and legs – they must all be gone. Maybe more of you.”

  “No…”

  “I’m sorry, Miriam,” Rianna whispered. “So sorry.”

  Miriam stroked Rianna’s hair with her claw, but couldn’t find her own words to say. There seemed none that could be said. But there were so many questions. Perhaps they would distract her from the answers she already had.

  She turned to Beldan and Stone. “So. Back to cases,” she said briskly; though there was a quaver in her voice she could not put away. “You’re here, and you knew something. How did you know I was in here? I didn’t!”

  Beldan replied, “The image from the ultrasound – we realized that what we were seeing was inside a person’s mouth. I made as detailed a picture as we could get of your teeth, and sent them to Rianna to identify. Given your – Kali’s – strange behavior, her desire to seek me out, I had a terrible feeling what she would find. She found it.”

  “I see.” She paused, her mind swimming, losing its fight against drowning in the enormity of what had been done to her and of her journey out of it, only to end in this different horror. “But, all of you,” she added, gently touching each of them in turn, “Thank you for finding me. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being my friends.”

  The machine began a strange vibration. Then they realized that the glass eyes
of Kali could not cry, but somewhere inside it the person who had been Miriam Hunter could.

  Chapter 46 – Aid From an Enemy

  Beldan’s team spent the next couple of days carefully drilling, probing and examining, building up a picture of what lay inside. Kali bore it all patiently. She did not expect the final answer to be one she would like, but she knew other people had lived through worse ordeals. They, like her, had never anticipated it would happen to them: but once it had, once they got over the shock and trauma, they had adapted; as humans do. And if not herself in body, at least she was once more herself in mind, and she was not alone any more. Her friends, or those of them it was considered safe to know the news at this stage, visited her often.

  Darian had stared at her, unable to fully believe it. To find that Miriam was still alive after that day when her friend’s death had appeared so irrevocable was a joy almost impossible to bear. She did not know what future lay ahead of Miriam. But for now, it was enough that she lived and had any future at all.

  At last, Beldan and his team met in conference with Kali, with Jack and Rianna providing input from the police perspective.

  “OK people, here’s a composite image of what we’ve found,” announced Beldan, bringing up a holographic diagram. “There are places like the eyes where we didn’t dare look too closely, but even there we have a pretty good idea. Things we know are in green; things we guess shade from blue through red, where the redder they are, the less certain we can be.”

  He allowed them a few moments to gaze at the image as it slowly rotated in the air before them. “Basically, what we’ve found is pretty much what we guessed. The body is intact except for the limbs. They have been sliced off just past the shoulder and hip joints and some kind of interface has been attached to them: presumably that is how Kali controls her limbs and receives sensory feedback from them.”

  After a minute or so when they analyzed the image in the light of those conclusions, he continued. “Fortunately, that appears to be the main damage inflicted. We guess they wanted the limbs to go partly to make the entire package smaller, partly to allow them a direct interface to the nerves, and partly to avoid having to support all that – to them – unnecessary tissue. For the rest they appear to have taken the easiest route: rather than attempt direct neural connections to her other senses they simply interfaced with her intact sense organs. For example,” he said pointing to the head region, “we think these cuplike structures over the eyes effectively play a video feed from her enhanced machine eyes into the eye itself. It looks like they did the same for hearing. As for taste and smell, they don’t need the first, and smell is pretty much exposed nerve endings anyway. They appear to have left much of the olfactory system as is, with a few specialized feeds that can stimulate some nerve endings directly.”

  “In other words,” Jack put in, “rather than replace her eyes and ears they just used her own, letting them do all the hard work of translating video and other inputs into nerve impulses?”

  “That’s what it looks like. Their design philosophy seems to be why repeat what nature has already achieved if you don’t have to. It’s what they said they were doing, in fact: just in a far more complete and terrible manner than anyone imagined. We can also see that in the rest of the body. They seem to have left all the organ systems in place. Really, all they care about is the brain: but the brain needs life support. So they left the natural life support systems in place. They could have removed various bits, truncated the digestive system etc., but would have achieved little benefit at the expense of quite severe trauma. So fortunately for Miriam, they not only used things that could be used, they left things that weren’t worth taking. She had new arms and legs and the old ones were just dead weight, so that’s what they took – but it was all they took.”

  “So,” Miriam asked, glad that she could set her voice to a more businesslike timbre than her own would have had, “what this means is that if we wanted to we could get my body out of this without killing me? I’m not stuck in here forever? I could still eat and breathe on my own, live outside again?”

  Beldan nodded. “So we believe. We’d want to find out a lot more details before we tried anything like that, but it’s looking likely. It’s not as if they just chopped your head off, or so infiltrated your body with electronics that we couldn’t safely extricate you. All your vital systems are in place and all the interfaces are just interfaces, not invasions. It looks like they’ve simply adapted their medically oriented technologies, which are obviously designed to be minimally invasive and safely removable. Even the brain control circuits.”

  Rianna and Jack looked hopeful, but then Jack quoted, “‘If we wanted to’? What do you mean, if we wanted to?”

  “Think about it, Jack,” Miriam sighed. “In this thing, I’m a monster but I have a lot of power and can move around. Out of it, I’m basically a human slug. I’m not sure that would be an improvement.”

  “Remember this machine is just one application of what AC have been doing,” Beldan pointed out. “You can have nerve-controlled prosthetic limbs without an entire prosthetic body. It would need some kind of exoskeleton and wouldn’t be pretty or convenient, but at least it would be more human.”

  They were all quiet as they contemplated what that would mean. Then Rianna’s face changed.

  “Wait! Wait!” she cried, looking thunderstruck. “There might be a better way! You know how stem cell therapies have been advancing, how they’ve even grown someone new fingers! But that’s nothing! I’ve read of amazing advances, at least in research, in the lab… the lab of… of…” Her voice faded with her excitement, then she added dejectedly, “Oh no. Oh crap. Crap. Crap!”

  “What is it?” asked Miriam. “What’s wrong?”

  Rianna looked up at her, laughing bitterly. “Nobody in the world can do more than regenerate fingers and simple organs. Except one man who now claims to be able to regenerate whole limbs. But he’s sworn his work will never be used to treat an agent of the US government or any of its law enforcement arms. Even if he hadn’t, Miriam is the last person on Earth he’d help. God help us, Miriam; the one man who could help you is Daniel Tagarin!”

  Jack frowned. He had worked with Miriam on the case that had made her name. Tagarin had once been the world’s greatest genetic engineer, until all work on the genetically engineered humans known as genehs had been banned. He had sought his revenge on a world that had destroyed his career and his creation; but not only had Miriam almost stopped him, his beloved geneh Katlyn had been shot in the process. Though Katlyn had survived and the two had fled to the safe haven of Capital, Jack knew that in Tagarin’s mind this was a crime beyond hope of pardon or mercy.

  Beldan looked at Rianna; looked at Miriam. She had not told him much about that case and he had wondered why; but the way she had talked about it now made him wonder even more what she had left out. “But you really think he could do it?” he asked.

  She looked at him helplessly. “He’s the one man who might be able to: but he’s the one man in the world who wouldn’t.”

  “Alex, I’m afraid Rianna’s right,” Jack confirmed. “Tagarin is as pitiless as he is brilliant. He does not forget, and he certainly does not forgive. And he hates this country, he hates the police in particular, and above all he must hate Miriam personally, not only for what she represents but for what she did.”

  But Miriam surprised them. “I’m not so sure. Oh, you’re right about one thing: he surely does not know how to forgive. But he does know how to play the long game. I think I can give him a reason he will understand. Even more than revenge, he wants to win. So I think he might.” Her voice lifted with an undercurrent of laughing relief. “Oh yes, I think he just might!”

  Then she raised herself up like a threat, her claws flexing. “But there’s something I have to do first,” she added. Her tone was so flat and deadly that her friends wondered how much of Kali remained inside her.

  Chapter 47 – Judgment Day

&nbs
p; Judge Thompson was not in a good mood. He had just returned from a week’s holiday in the Caymans with his family. Anyone would have thought that should have left him in a good mood, but only if the anyone was unaware it had rained all week. Which was bad enough without stirring two bored teenagers into the mix.

  At the best of times he looked down his impressive nose at lawyers who thought to impress him with dramatic tricks. So when the request for a search and arrest warrant was accompanied by a special request that he leave his comfortable chambers and descend to the parking basement to examine “critical evidence necessary to fully apprise Your Honor of the facts of the case without causing undue public alarm”, he was singularly unimpressed. But his look of dour skepticism was met with a serene look of confidence that even his nose could not puncture, as if the lawyer actually believed these histrionics were justified.

  Now he stood in that basement with its uncomfortable temperature and smells, looking at the locked rear door of a large truck. He had already prepared the scathing response he would unleash upon the lawyer when his show proved hollow. But when he saw what was in the truck and heard what it had to say, he forgot all that.

  He even forgot about the Caymans.

  ~~~

  Aden Sheldrake jogged along the path that wound around the estate surrounding his headquarters. He was an aggressive businessman, who valued physical strength and endurance. Besides which, he simply enjoyed running, the feel of the air in his lungs and the wind through his hair. It was early but he had been at work for some hours already. This was his break, to clear his mind with oxygen and pure physical activity. He was most of the way through his circuit and soon he would be back at the entrance to his domain.