Metal Fatigue

by Sean Williams

  Roads was halfway up the alley before she even reached it.

  "Shit." Nuggets of fallen concrete threatened to trip her. "Phil — wait!"

  But Roads had already turned left at the end of the alley and disappeared.

  When she reached the intersection, he was gone altogether. Even the sound of his footsteps had faded.

  The three officers burst from the alley behind her.

  "Split up," she told them, and picked a side street at random. She could see no-one, nor anything to suggest that Roads had been that way recently. The streets, still damp after the rain, were empty.

  Reinforcement arrived, in the form of Komalski and two other men, and the search widened. Barney chose another side street and followed it to its end. Apart from a feral cat looking for food scraps in the gutters, she found nothing. Stony-faced houses stared solemnly back at her, any one of them potential harbour for a fugitive. The clicking of her soles echoed on cracked pavement as she followed another lane back to Old North Street. The flashing light of a second RSD van strobed the area in blue: more back-up had arrived. She thought of Raoul's cold eyes reflecting the blue from the safety of 114, and repressed a shiver.

  Heading back into the maze, she recalled the officers assisting her.

  "Anything?" she asked when they had regrouped.

  "Not a trace," said Komalski. The heavy-set cop was sweating. "Of Roads, or anyone. Any idea who he was after?"

  "No, I only caught a glimpse." She glanced nervously at her watch. "Where the hell is he?"

  "Should we buzz HQ, get another squad? If we quarter the area — "

  "No, let's give him a little longer. He'll have to come back this way. Four of you, go back to the house and keep an eye out. Komalski, Vince, stay here with me."

  "Yes, sir."

  The minutes crawled by. Komalski eyed the dark buildings that surrounded them.

  "Do you think he's — ?"

  "No. He'll be okay," she said as much to reassure herself as him.

  The other officer cocked his head. "Listen."

  Footsteps approached. Barney tensed as the sound grew nearer. The steps were unevenly paced, not Roads' steady plod. She held her pistol at the ready.

  A shadowy figure stepped out from behind a fence not far from them. She almost took a shot at it, then, turning the reflex into a wave, flashed the torch to attract its attention.

  Waving back, Roads limped to join them. His breath came heavily, as though he had only recently stopped running. His trousers were torn, and a small amount of blood showed through the opening.

  "Are you okay?" asked Barney.

  "Been better." He came to a halt with an audible sigh. Barney offered him the receiver, which he put into a pocket with a sheepish expression. "Sorry to keep you all waiting. I'll take this with me, next time."

  "Good idea. Where did you get to?"

  "I lost him four blocks down. He went up a ladder and onto the roof. I tried to follow, but the ladder collapsed when I was halfway up." He winced, flexing his leg. "I don't think it was an accident."

  "Should we try and go after him?"

  "No. He'll be miles away by now. He's one fast sonofabitch, that's for sure."

  "Was it the Mole?"

  "No, someone else. Bigger." He tapped a button on his overcoat. "It's lucky I had this. Didn't get a good look at his face, but I managed to tag his profile a couple of times. If the shots turn out, we might be able to work out who it was, and if he's relevant."

  Barney nodded. Roads had maintained a longstanding dispute with RSD supplies for the disguised camera. Miniaturised equipment was at a premium, of course, but he had argued that on occasions the right tools were a necessity, not a luxury. If he did get a good picture of the man he had chased, then the effort would have proved worthwhile.

  "Could be a coincidence, you think?" she asked, following on from his last comment.

  "Maybe." He glanced up and down the street, as though making sure they were alone. "Komalski, go back and help secure the cordon. Vince, go with him. I don't want anyone else getting in. Barney and I'll be at the house in a few minutes."

  "Yessir." The two men jogged up the street and turned a corner.

  When they were gone, Roads sighed again, this time in annoyance. "I was this close, Barney. I can't believe he got away so easily."

  She studied him closely, noting the bunched crow's-feet and sweat on his brow. "You can quit playing the tough guy now. It hurts, doesn't it?"

  He sagged. "Like hell. Want to have a look?"

  She knelt and peeled back the ripped fabric. The wound was shallow but long, from the back of his knee to halfway down his lower leg. Blood seeped steadily from it. She brushed away dirt with her fingers and used spit to clean the rest.

  Roads handed her a handkerchief without looking down, and she covered the gash as best she could. As strange as she found his phobia, she had to feel sympathy for him. A cop afraid of blood was like a surgeon afraid of sharp knives.

  She stood, wiping her hands on her coat. "There. Nothing serious. All you need is a tetanus shot and you'll be right as rain."

  "Thanks, Barney. I owe you one."

  "One what?"

  He smiled, obviously back to his old self. "That's up to you."

  She was about to reply when the streetlights suddenly came on. Pale yellow light, too weak to dazzle but bright enough to illuminate, flooded the suburb. The road lit up as though it were a stage and the two of them actors frozen in a tableau.

  Barney stood, her words forgotten. His eyes caught hers, and she stared back, fascinated by the grey swirls and patterns of his irises. Although he had the best eyesight of anyone in RSD — had she doubted it, the way he'd caught sight of the man in the alley would have convinced her — the orbs themselves were reassuringly human. Nice eyes, kind eyes, eyes a girl could fall for as an old friend had once said, but otherwise nothing out of the ordinary. They were even slightly bloodshot.

  She shivered, remembering yet again the artificial lenses of Morrow's consultant. If Roads had had eyes like Raoul, Barney doubted that she would have liked him half as much as she did. Which was more than enough for the time being, maybe for both of them.

  Roads broke the moment by reaching for a cigarette. The pale, short-lived flame sent shadows flickering across his eyelids and forehead. When he looked back at her, he smiled gently.

  "Want one?" he asked, offering her the pack.

  She shook her head. Anti-cancer vaccine bred into tobacco plants had effectively made smoking a safe practice, but cigarettes were prohibitively expensive due to short supply. Maybe that explained Roads' involvement with Morrow: nothing more serious than black-market smokes. The thought came as something of a relief after her earlier fears.

  "Let's get back," he said. "We've got work to do."

  "Yes, boss." She took a deep breath to gather herself. "A thief to catch, et cetera."

  "And don't you forget it."

  The short walk back to the house passed in silence.

  CHAPTER THREE

  6:00 a.m.

  Dawn came suddenly, dissolving the claustrophobic thickness of the night and replacing it with a weak, orange sky. As it lightened further to yellow, then blue, Roads started to feel tired. The city was stirring at a time he was normally getting ready for bed. The thought depressed him, as it always did.

  From his position by the patrol van, he watched as old solar sheets, most of them salvaged from abandoned buildings and passed from owner to owner down the years, unfurled from windows and rooftops like silver banners. Old North Street looked as though it was about to receive a ticker-tape parade for celebrity robots.

  Roads had to remind himself that this greeting of the dawn was a photovoltaic phenomenon, not a poetic gesture — and that it was a symbol of the fight for survival, not of the love of life. For every two or three solar sheets there lived one person unable, or unwilling, to pay for power. It was, like Kennedy itself, a reminder of everything that had been lost.<
br />
  Barney emerged from 114, where she'd been helping Raoul catalogue the wreckage, looking as tired and dirty as he felt. Her clothes and hair were rumpled, and there were bags under her eyes.

  "You look like shit, Barney."

  "Ever the smooth talker." She came to join him by the van. "Top of the morning to you, too."

  "Any news?" he asked.

  "None that I'm aware of. But that's hardly surprising. Morrow's little friend is having a ball down there — too busy ordering us around to actually tell us anything."

  Roads grunted, understanding her resentment. It hadn't been an easy decision to make, to approach Morrow for aid, but he'd only made it when every obvious avenue had been closed. Just one set of new data would make the risk worthwhile — and justifiable, when the time came.

  Even if Old North Street proved another dead end, there was still the data fiche Morrow had given them. Whether that proved to be a dead end too he wouldn't know until he managed to get access to a card reader. At the rate the current investigation was going, that wasn't likely to be until late that afternoon.

  Roads wasn't by nature a fatalist, but on mornings like this, after a night of insufficient sleep, reality was sometimes hard to fight. There was no denying the past, no matter how hard he tried to avoid it; the present had its own perils, and the future promised nothing but uncertainty. He felt as though he had been trapped in amber for the last forty years — secure in the knowledge that nothing could get in, but increasingly conscious that he was unable to get out.

  He grimaced. The metaphor was one that came to mind whenever he thought about Kennedy.

  "Are you okay?" asked Barney, peering at him.

  He nodded. "Just tired." Like everything else, he added to himself.

  The War had been both vicious and sudden — yet many forecasters had been predicting it for decades. Prolonged environmental disturbances early in the twenty-first century had led to crop failures and water shortages, exacerbated by pollution of what little resources there were available. As new diseases and old reappeared in countries barely able to feed their many millions, let alone heal them, many regimes had turned to violence in order to quell uprisings of people educated to expect better by the World-Wide Web. Internal distraction had become civil war, or encouraged invasion from without, while affluent countries had continued to pay lip-service to the United Nations. An already inequitable distribution of resources and justice had worsened — until finally the pressure became too much.

  The first atomic bombs exploded in anger for almost one hundred years burst a symbolic dam. Fighting erupted overnight in South Africa, South America, Eastern Europe, Indonesia and China — the countries most in need of resources. United Nations peace-keepers were fired upon and executed in defiance of one last effort to restore order. Mediation was seen as intervention, and prompted violent backlashes. Fighting spread to the Middle East and Europe.

  Soon, no continent was free from conflict. Refugees — and invaders — poured into the United States of America, Western Europe and Australia. The border between the United States and Mexico was pelted by missiles launched from the Alpha-2 Space Station — the first time war had ever been conducted from space — but sophisticated weaponry had little effect against sheer numbers. When Alpha-2 was finally shot down by a ground-based laser in Argentina, the southern defences of the United States began to crumble.

  Around that time, five years after the beginning of the War, the Dissolution began. In the United States, it coincided with the recall of the Armed Forces to halt widespread looting in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and a dozen other major cities. Whole battalions refused orders to fire on civilians, or simply rebelled against their superiors. Simultaneously, the internal revolt which had been building for a century reached flashpoint. Armed demonstrators stormed the Pentagon, and the new President disappeared in the process of evacuating — or, as some believed, retreating to a more secure stronghold to leave the fringes to battle it out among themselves.

  The fighting lasted a further five years, in which time the army itself disintegrated. Local governments formed and fell in violent clashes that tore the Union to tatters. Gangs of predatory nomads spread from town to town, pillaging for food rather than working for it themselves. In the anarchic chaos that enveloped North America, anyone with even the slightest advantage was either a beloved ally or a feared enemy.

  Kennedy had survived the Dissolution purely because it was designed to be as self-sufficient as possible. The city had remained able to feed, house and heal its million-odd citizens when crops failed or were left to rot unharvested outside, or when threatened by the many diseases that rocked the collapsing United States. At first the Mayoralty had welcomed refugees with open arms; later, with a population inflated to five million people and several million more storming its walls, it had been forced to adopt a harder policy. It had closed its doors, physically and metaphorically, purely to remain a viable enclave of civilisation.

  Isolation had saved it from the worst of the Dissolution. Reversing that policy was not just a matter of writing a new clause in the Mayoralty's Constitution, but rewriting the entire city's psyche.

  Roads himself felt it. Even though he agreed with the Reassimilationists — who believed that the arrival of an envoy from the Reunited States, six weeks ago, couldn't have come at a better time — the thought of living without walls around the city bothered him. He had become used to isolation, and the illusion of safety it gave. That was why the conservative members of the Council that had held the upper hand ever since the War had initially been reluctant even to acknowledge the existence of the RUSA. Only at the last moment, when it became clear that the envoy wasn't going to take no for an answer, had they backed down and allowed negotiations to take place.

  And now, if one believed the rhetoric, all the city's problems would soon be solved. General Stedman and his convoy were due in a matter of days, and Kennedy would join the Reunited States of America within a month, at least as a partner if not as a member. Trade routes would open, allowing an influx of resources the city desperately needed. People would be able to leave and enter at will — maybe not at first, but certainly within a few years. And if all went well, within a generation or two the damage caused by the Dissolution would be erased forever.

  If all went well...

  Roads wasn't so naive as to believe that it would happen so easily, but he was certainly a long way from the assassin's point of view — who had killed, and would certainly kill again, in order to prevent it happening at all.

  Eventually the vividness of the day became too much for him.

  "My turn to help out, I guess," he said.

  "Just get a straight answer out of him," Barney said, "and you'll have done well."

  He entered the house and descended the steps to the cellar like a vampire returning to its crypt.

  The scene was one of organised turmoil. Raoul, still wearing dark-tinted glasses to hide his eyes, sat on a desk and directed the efforts of the four officers he had been assigned. As they rummaged through boxes and cupboards, he wrote down the serial numbers of any parts they found. If the part had no number, he wrote a brief description of what it appeared to be instead. Once each part had been catalogued, it was returned to its original place. Without a genuine reason, RSD was unable to impound the contents of Morrow's underground operation.

  "How's it going, Raoul?"

  The black man looked up from his hand-held terminal. "Slowly. Give us a few more hours, and we'll have the first list ready for you. Then another hour to run it through the inventory."

  "What about the data?"

  "I've patched a link through to the Head. He's scanning the system now. An hour, tops."

  "Good." Roads stepped gingerly to a pile of electronic components and studied them thoughtfully. "What exactly was this place?"

  "None of your business." Raoul added another number to the list and looked away.

  Roads didn't press the point.
r />   "Phil?" Barney's voice floated down from the floor above.

  "Yes?"

  "Call from HQ."

  "On my way."

  He took one last look around before heading back up the stairs. Barney was waiting for him at the top.

  "Can't help bad timing." She gave him a mobile phone. "It's Chappel."

  "Oh, hi, Margaret," he said into the phone. "To what do we owe the pleasure?"

  "Good morning, Phil." Her voice was crisp and freshly-ironed; he hated her for sounding like that. "This is more than just a social call, I'm afraid. We need you at the office."

  "Now? I'm a little tied up — "

  "The MSA has requested your presence for a meeting in half an hour. You don't have any choice, I'm afraid."

  Roads cursed automatically. "Damned soldiers." He reached for a cigarette. "Always sticking their nose in."

  "And meaning business, unfortunately," said Chappel. "Time's running out on us."

  "Tell me about it." He dragged deeply on the smoke, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Okay, Margaret, I'll be there ASAP."

  "Good. I'll make sure there's coffee ready," she replied, and cut the connection.

  He gave the phone back to Barney.

  "What is it?" she asked, noting the expression on his face.

  "Some military bigwig wants a bullshit session. You're in charge until I get back — which won't be long, I hope."

  They left the house, blinking in the razor-sharp daylight, and headed for the patrol car. Roads climbed into the driver's seat.

  "If I'm not back by ten," he said, "I'll make sure they send you a replacement."

  "That's okay. I don't mind waiting. Just keep the car-phone with you, in case I need you urgently."

  Roads revved the engine and drove away, watching Barney recede in the rear-vision mirror. She stood alone, waving, silhouetted against the street-haze of the rising sun. He had a brief vision of her, the crowd, and him — the parade of robots — being separated by a wash of yellow fire from the solar sheets ... And then he turned the corner.

  * * *