Metal Fatigue

by Sean Williams

  He dropped to the blood-stained concrete with his hands over his ears, screaming inaudibly through the noise. The shockwave buffeted him, scorched his skin. Shattered bricks rattled around him, making him flinch. One fragment struck a glancing blow to the back of his head as he turned to crawl for shelter.

  The last thing he saw was a ghostly shape silhouetted against the fire: an eerily translucent cloud of grey, with five shining points arrayed in a rough pentagon at its centre.

  Then it too burst into flame, like a new-born star, and he passed out.

  PART TWO: THOU SHALT NOT KILL

  INTERLUDE

  Tuesday, 18 September, 12:15 a.m.

  The fire in Roads' building burned for two hours before the entire structure collapsed. With a roar of tumbling masonry, it fell outward and across the road, narrowly missing the Emergency Services vehicles assembled around the site. Peripheral fires lapped at the buildings to either side, but barely attained a foothold before powerful jets of water forced them back. None made it as far as the building directly across the road, where one red-skinned gargoyle larger than those around it crouched on the roof, watching.

  In infra-red, the scene was a nightmare of colour. Orange and yellow heat blazed from the remains of the central fire, casting a furnace's breath along the street, reflecting off buildings, fences and the road. The generators of fire engines, ambulances, and police vehicles burned brightly in neon blue. Tiny green point-sources were people, scurrying to and fro like luminous ants, almost lost among the rest.

  He switched to the visual spectrum and watched with detached interest as they cleaned away the bodies. He knew they would find more once the fire was out. Twelve people had entered the building after Roads, but only three had emerged.

  Why they had died, why they had sought to kill Roads, and why the thing had killed them ... did not concern him. He was beyond caring what happened to ordinary people, the ones who would find him wanting and hunt him down, if they only knew who he was.

  Besides, the one called Lucifer had told him to hide — to keep out of the way. With what had happened to him in the harbour the previous night still fresh in his mind, he was happy to obey for once. It had been foolish to become involved in the first place — although he was involved, whether he liked it or not. He had become entangled in a series of events that threatened both his Peace and his life.

  Searching Roads' apartment had been risky, but worthwhile in putting his mind at ease on one score. Curiously enough, the policeman did not appear to know who he was. Perhaps it was not too late, after all, to return to the life he had known — free from his controller, Roads and the thing.

  Angry heat ebbed slowly from the street below. As the fire retreated, a swarm of police searched the area. A pair of ash-flecked officers combed the roof of his building, but did not find him. He lay curled in the womb-like spaces of a ventilation shaft, obeying orders.

  Hide, his controller had said, so he did just that. There was a sense of security to be gained from the act of concealment, an illusion of safety, however shortlived. It was exactly what he had been doing for more years than he could number.

  When the police officers were gone, he remained in his cocoon of metal. For the first time in two days, he truly slept.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  2:45 a.m.

  Barney paced the length of her study, unable to rest. Alternating between hope and despair, and with one word turning constantly through her mind, she stopped to make herself a cup of herbal tea, going through the familiar motions automatically, hoping against hope that a retreat into routine might ease her disquiet and allow her to sleep.

  It didn't.

  Outside, a sudden change brought rain to the city. It flurried at the kitchen window like a thousand tiny fists, beating to be let in.

  The word was metamale.

  Her hands were shaking.

  The call from HQ had come two hours earlier, three hours after she had returned home from RSD. When the terminal had bleeped, she had rushed to answer it, only half-hearing sirens wailing in the distance as she did. The call hadn't been Roads, as she had half-expected, to apologise for his lateness. The reality had been far worse.

  Emergency Services had been called to Roads' home in response to reports of an explosion shortly after nine o'clock. The building had been totally gutted, and had later collapsed. A number of bodies — four, at last count — had been found near the scene; the genetic fingerprint of each had produced a match with the RSD datapool: Danny Chong, Ingrid Toffler, Jamie Bazz, and Mark Johns. All were known criminals wanted on old charges of murder; two of them — Chong and Bazz — were on the Most Wanted list. A preliminary search of the wreckage had found two more bodies, as yet unidentified. Of Roads himself, or of his body, there had been no sign.

  Margaret Chappel had then called Barney personally, telling her to stay at home.

  "There's nothing you can do, Barney. Emergency has it in hand; you'd only get in the way. I suggest you try to get some sleep instead."

  "But I want to help," she protested. "I want to know what happened."

  "You'll know as soon as we do, I promise. I'll make sure you're the first to be told."

  "But — "

  "Stay there, Barney. How else will we know where to call you?"

  She almost cried then, and hated herself for holding it back. She needed to do something. If Roads was dead, then part of her would always blame herself for not going with him, until she found a suitable scapegoat.

  "Who?" she asked, the lump in her chest half-strangling her. "Who would do this?"

  Chappel shook her head, and told her about Morrow's warning.

  "He knew?" Barney couldn't believe it. Roads had known that he was in real danger but had still gone after the assassins on his own. It was exactly the same brand of heroics that had robbed her of her father, years ago.

  She found herself reliving the painful months following her father's death. The last berserker Kennedy Polis saw had systematically hunted down over a hundred and forty-five people before RSD had cornered it in an old downtown building, where it held a woman hostage. Nothing had driven it out, and the four volunteers who had offered to go in after it had been killed.

  In an attempt to neutralise the threat, radio-triggered explosive charges had been laid around the foundations of the building. The berserker, aware of RSD's plan, had made an unexpected offer to negotiate. It would hand over the woman if it was allowed to leave the city. Three officers, one armed with the trigger for the explosives, had entered the building to negotiate. The officer with the trigger had been her father.

  Barney had been seventeen and not yet a member of RSD, but Roads had been there. He had been in charge of one of the parties which searched through the rubble of the demolished building. The body of the hostage had been found the following day. The autopsy was inconclusive, but suggested that she had been dead for several hours before the explosives had gone off.

  That had been enough for Roads to piece together a picture of what had happened to the negotiators. The berserker had wanted to go in style, not cornered like an animal. It might have waited until the negotiators had seen the body of the woman before attacking them, or it may well have attacked immediately. Either way, Barney's father had pressed the trigger, killing the berserker and himself in the process.

  When Roads had told Barney of his theory, years later, she had disagreed. The berserker hadn't killed her father; machismo had. If he hadn't gone into the building in the first place, he would still have been alive.

  And now, years later, she was in the same situation.

  "Don't blame him, Barney," Chappel had said, "or yourself. If he wants to do things alone, he will. That's just the way he is. Nothing you or I could say would make him change his mind."

  For the first time Barney noted the grief in the eyes of the Director of RSD: hidden behind the usual mask of efficiency, but inescapably there, and deep.

  "You've known him longer than I ha
ve," she ventured, unable to put into words the question she wanted to ask.

  "Yes." Chappel's expression softened. "But only just."

  "And you were close, once."

  "We still are." Chappel frowned at that. "But we weren't lovers, if that's what you're driving at."

  Barney felt herself blush.

  Not long after that conversation had come the reply from the RSD mainframe. The search program had finished. Barney had settled down to read the results, glad for something to make her feel useful.

  * * *

  Between the list and the combined Kennedy/RUSAMC datapool three matches had been made. The first frightened her, the second seemed irrelevant, the third ...

  She tried not to worry about Roads. He could look after himself. Only now did she know exactly how true that was.

  That was when she had begun to pace.

  In the kitchen, with the mug held tightly between both hands, she stared out from the confines of her claustrophobic, complicated world. She wanted to go outside and stand in the rain for a while, to literally drown her sorrows. Instead she turned out the kitchen light and watched the rain through the window.

  She drank the tea without noticing it, remembering her father standing in that very spot, years ago, bemoaning the loss of smart cards. They had argued often when she was a teenager; so much that he had valued had seemed trivial to her, then. Who cared if e-money went the way of biochips and the World-Wide Web? Was technology really that important? The tragedy was that he had died before she could ever tell him how right he had been.

  The tea wasn't helping. She was tired, worried despite herself — both about Roads and the Reassimilation, despite her intellectual acceptance of the latter's inevitability — and alone.

  Putting the mug upside-down in the sink, she turned around just as someone ran past the window.

  She gasped and jumped backward, almost tripping over her feet in surprise. The figure had only appeared for an instant — vaguely man-shaped, unrecognisable in the shadows. But it had been there, in her yard.

  She ran to the study and grabbed her gun from the bottom drawer of her desk. Checking the windows in every room to ensure that they were locked, she tried to still her hammering heartbeat. If Roads' killers had come for her as well, she would put up a fight; she would not go down easily.

  Back in the hallway, she listened to the hiss of the rain and pressed the pistol to her lips. Had she really seen light glinting in crystal eyes, or had that been her imagination?

  Raoul's face came unbidden to mind, and her fear doubled.

  Then a muffled thump at the door made her jump again. Something slid damply along the thin wood veneer, and the handle turned.

  Unconsciously deepening her voice, she called: "Who is it?"

  The reply, when it came, was as unexpected as any she could have imagined:

  "Open up, Barney — it's me. Phil."

  She was halfway to the door before she stopped, struck by a sudden doubt. "How do I know it's really you?"

  "How... what?"

  "I need to know you're not the Mole before I let you in."

  He uttered a sound that might have been a laugh, then said: "Ask me a question that only the Phil Roads you know could answer."

  What had she told him and no-one else? Nothing sprang to mind immediately. Her real first name was on file, as was her birth-date.

  "Barney, it's raining out here, for Christ's sake." He sounded as though he was leaning against the door.

  "Okay." She held the gun in both hands, steeling herself to fire if she had to. "Tell me what the search found."

  "The search?" At the tone of his voice, she took a deep breath and raised the gun. "Do you mean the search through O'Dell's datapool?"

  "Yes." She gritted her teeth to keep her response level. "Tell me what it found, and I'll let you in."

  A silence followed, then Roads said: "It found me, Barney. Now, are you going to open the door or not?"

  She let free the breath she had been holding and unlocked the door. When she opened it, he fell forward and slid to the floor before she could catch him.

  Lying on his back in a growing pool of pink-stained water, he managed a weak smile.

  "Philip G. Roads ... reporting for duty," he said.

  She didn't know whether to laugh or to cry, so she took his head in her hands and did both.

  * * *

  She helped him to the bathroom, trying all the while to avoid looking at his eyes. The one glimpse she'd had was more than enough to confirm her fears.

  Roads' eyes were like perfectly transparent marbles filled with lenses: miniature glass onions, with layer upon layer of concentric skins that retreated or advanced as his gaze roved. When he looked at the light, half-seen processes occurred in each orb to focus and dim the glare; when he looked at her, they occurred again, but differently.

  She was afraid that she would see the backs of his eye-sockets if she looked into them too closely, they were so amazingly clear. All she saw was darkness, however, like the heart of a zoom lens, and a faint hint of blue.

  Roads was biomodified. He had broken the Humanity Laws. He was a criminal, and it was her duty to turn him in.

  But he was still Phil Roads, and he needed her help. That more than anything convinced her to give him the chance to explain.

  She turned on the shower, then peeled off his clothes layer by layer, exposing the wounds beneath. He shivered uncontrollably while she stripped him, but not from the cold.

  "It's shock," he said, eyelids flickering closed. "Blood loss."

  "I'm not surprised." The wound to his shoulder was viciously deep and had bled profusely. It would require stitches to heal cleanly. A variety of gashes and minor lacerations marred the skin of his face and hands; bruises scowled at her from the rest of his body. "What the hell happened to you?"

  "They were waiting for me at my place, Chong and his buddies — "

  "Waiting to kill you?"

  "Yes. I was hoping to catch the assassin; instead, all I got was that bunch of goons."

  "Don't be so quick to judge. They surprised you, didn't they?"

  "No, I saw them before they saw me. I went in anyway."

  "Typical."

  "I had to get something." He opened his eyes and looked feverishly around. "The bag — I was carrying a bag, wasn't I?"

  "It's inside, in the hall. Do you want me to get it?"

  "No. Just so long as I haven't lost it."

  She finished stripping him and tested the stream of water. Not too hot, and fairly clean; the rain of the last few days had flushed the city's reservoir of its recent brown colour. She stepped back and gestured.

  "Get in."

  "Why?"

  "You're filthy, that's why."

  He stepped naked into the cubicle, winced as the jet of hot water stung his wounds. The water ran down the drain in a swirl of deep red as it scoured away old, dried blood, then slowly lightened. He stuck his head under and rubbed at his face with his hands.

  She stood outside with a towel, waiting for him to finish, studying him. He was even fitter than she had suspected; what he lacked in size he more than made up for in strength. His musculature was near-perfect: little excess body-fat, no lack of tone beneath it. From the neck down, at least, he might have been twenty-five, although his skin did have the minor blemishes of a man in his late forties.

  But even so, she thought, he didn't look his age. Not his true age ...

  He shut off the taps and stepped out of the cubicle. The shivering had stopped. As he patted himself dry, she noticed that he was more than simply favouring his right arm. The knife-wound in his shoulder had obviously touched muscle — or, worse, a tendon.

  "We're going to have to get you to a hospital."

  He shook his head. His eyes glittered in the bright overhead light. "Not necessary. All I need is food."

  "Why?"

  "I'm starving, that's why."

  "At a time like this?"

  He
held out his left hand. "You wouldn't know I'd shot my thumb off in the War, would you?"

  She checked automatically, even though she knew the hand was whole, no fingers missing. "No. And if you told me you had, I wouldn't believe you."

  "Well, I did. And here it is, thanks to the wonders of tissue regeneration and micromachine technology. That's what keeps me looking so young. But you need to feed the process with raw materials, like carbohydrates, and fuel it with glucose. Do you have any chocolate?"

  "No, I — " She stared at him. "Are you telling me you grew it back?"

  "It took me a week or two but, yes, I did."

  "That's impossible — isn't it?"

  "No, but I'm not sure I can explain it properly. Maybe later." He handed her the blood-stained towel. "Do you have anything I can wear until I stop bleeding, or would you prefer me naked?"

  "I'll get you something." She found an old cotton sheet that had narrowly escaped recycling and wrapped it around him. Directing him to the kitchen, she sat him on a stool and tore strips off another sheet to use as makeshift bandages. While she tended his injuries, he ate a plateful of soya-steak leftovers.

  "You haven't finished telling me what happened," she prompted. Between mouthfuls of food, he filled her in on the rest.

  He had only blacked out for a few minutes after the explosion, and had woken to find himself lying under one of the bodies. Disoriented by the shock, he had staggered from the scene and fled the approaching sirens. He had become lost and wandered for an indefinite time before recovering his senses to find himself near Barney's; part of him must have been keeping track of where he was, and looking for shelter. Although convinced he hadn't been followed, he had been cautious enough to check Barney's building before knocking on the door.

  "You scared the living shit out of me," she said, the annoyance in her voice half genuine.