by Allen Steele
“I will attempt to disarm it,” Grag said, as calmly as if he were discussing a routine housekeeping task.
“No! Don’t even try! We don’t know how much time you have! Get back down here now!”
Grag stopped. A moment of hesitation, just long enough to make Simon Wright realize, in an oddly detached moment of appreciation, that the robot’s intelligence exceeded normal cybernetic parameters; it was capable of questioning and even disagreeing with its orders. Then it lurched out of sight, leaving the camera range in the direction of the vertical tunnel leading to the underground lab. Simon slapped the button that unlocked the egress hatch from the inside, and hoped that Grag would remember to seal it shut behind him.
For several seconds, Simon Wright regarded the bodies that laid on the floor. He cared nothing for the dead killers; it was Roger and Elaine who held his attention.
In those seconds, he remembered them as they’d been. As students who’d met each other in the same place and time they’d met him, in his lecture hall at MIT. As colleagues who’d often come to his house for dinner, and with whom he’d decided to form a partnership to develop the first otho. As close friends who’d determined not to let death take their mentor—only, in the end, to have it take them instead, even as they sought to protect him as if he were a member of their own family.
Victor had obviously been planning their liquidation all along, with the bomb to wipe out all trace of their murder. No one would know what he did; so far as everyone else was concerned, Roger and Elaine Newton had perished several months earlier, and now there was no chance that the killers themselves would ever talk.
But Simon knew. And while he was no longer what most people would consider human, nonetheless he still retained human emotions. And just now, what he felt was rage.
“I’ll avenge you,” he swore to Roger and Elaine. “However long it takes, I promise, I’ll…”
From somewhere far above, a hollow boom that shook the walls. A brilliant flash on the screen, then the image went dark, followed by silence from the world above.
VIII
“You’ve seen their graves, of course,” Simon said. “I’m there, too. Grag took your parents out there a couple of days later and buried them. A couple of weeks later, after Otho came out of the bioclast, I had him do the same for me.”
Sitting on the end of his bed, Curt slowly nodded. He’d visited the little graveyard at the western end of the crater many times. Three mounds, each with their own small marker, as fresh as the day they’d been dug. Six feet below were pressurized shipping containers holding the remains of Roger Newton, Elaine Newton, and Simon Wright. But he had only hazy, impressionistic recollections of his parents, and none at all of Simon when he was still a man; his feelings for them were abstract, largely based on what he’d heard.
And now he knew that he hadn’t been told everything.
He looked over at Otho. “When did you know? I mean, the whole story of what happened to my parents, not just the partial version.”
“When I was five.” Otho was leaning back in his chair, arms folded across his chest. “You’re almost a year older than me, but that’s only in biological terms. I came out of the bioclast a full-grown adult physiologically similar to Simon’s original human form, but with a brain many times more developed than yours—”
“I’m surprised that you didn’t scan yourself into him,” Curt said to Simon, interrupting Otho.
“Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t,” the Brain replied, his eyestalks twisting from Otho to Curt. “I couldn’t have performed the transfer procedure on myself, and it was too complicated to trust to Grag.” His voice became bitter. “But it wasn’t what they wanted. Perhaps if we’d had a little more time together, I might have changed their minds, but…”
His voice trailed off, and Otho continued, “After it became apparent that I was going to … well, be my own man, so to speak, Simon put me on an accelerated learning pattern, much the same heuristic method with which you’d program an AI. When I was intelligent enough to join him and Grag as your teachers, he took me aside and told me the whole story.”
“And swore you to silence.” Curt’s voice was accusatory.
Otho closed his eyes and let out a quiet sigh. “Curt, it had to be done. We needed to keep you hidden until the time was right, when you were old enough to not only understand what happened, but also be able to do something about it.”
“And meanwhile, the man who killed my parents not only escaped justice, but prospered.”
“I hate to admit this,” said the Brain, “but yes, that’s what happened. Victor Corvo got away with murder. Because Grag killed his bodyguards, there were no witnesses other than it and me, and because the explosion left nothing of your parents’ killers that could be identified, it was assumed by those who discovered the site later that they were settlers who’d been killed in some kind of accident. The IPF investigated the scene and removed the remains, but Corvo was never linked to anything.”
“Sure,” Curt said. “He just got richer and richer, and eventually went into politics and became a senator.”
“An old story, I’m afraid. Many crooks have discovered that politics is better than crime … you can accomplish much the same thing, and if you’re careful enough you’ll never be caught or spend a day in jail.”
Curt slowly let out his breath. “He got everything he wanted, and I got … well, a life alone, without my father and mother.”
He didn’t look at either Otho or Simon as he said this, but Otho’s green eyes narrowed in anger. “That’s not true, Curt, and you know it. Simon, Grag, and I have been your family. Perhaps we didn’t raise you as well as your parents might have, but you haven’t lacked for companionship.”
Curt snorted, and Otho lapsed into an uncomfortable silence. They both knew the truth: Curt had spent the first ten years of his life in this underground laboratory, rarely seeing anyone else except for the three beings who’d raised him. He didn’t even know that Otho was an android until he was eight years old, or that Simon had once been something else other than a machine that talked and flew about the room. It had been many years before his guardians allowed him to even leave Tycho, and then only under the strictest supervision.
Lately, this lack of normal human relations—of ordinary friendships, really—had come to chafe at him. The reception at the Straight Wall had been a disaster. He didn’t even know how to talk to a girl without making a fool out of himself.
“We’ve done as best as we could,” Simon said. “I’m sorry you don’t agree, but considering the alternative … well, you could be grateful for still being alive. More to the point, though, Victor didn’t get what he wanted either.” His eyestalks moved toward Otho. “His ultimate objective was to have your father and mother create a slave race, an army of creatures who would’ve looked like Otho but lacked minds and souls of their own.”
“I’m the only one of my kind,” Otho said quietly. “All things considered, I’m rather glad that I am.”
“So Corvo is still out there,” Simon continued, “and now that you know the truth about him and what he did to your parents, the decision falls to you. Do you want to avenge your father and mother, Roger and Elaine, knowing what the consequences may be?”
Curt didn’t answer at once. He continued to gaze away from Simon and Otho, his mind’s eye opening again to the past. This time, though, the memory was something he himself could recall. A day from his childhood, one not quite like any other …
IX
When Curt was a child, he’d play in the tunnels that connected the main lab with its adjacent rooms. He had no playmates except Grag and Otho, and while they were willing to keep him company, neither of them were the right size to be good companions for an eight-year-old boy. He had an active imagination, though. Tycho’s data library had a bottomless supply of books, vids, and games, and the Brain had encouraged him to download them whenever he was bored. As a result, Curt had a rich fantasy life, a wor
ld filled with people only he could see and hear, in which he was a hero.
In this world, he was Captain Future.
He was a laughing, red-haired adventurer, a corsair with sword in hand, roaming the corridors of mysterious castles in search of villains to slay and princesses to rescue. Stacked storage containers became guards to be surprised and overcome, and ceiling light panels were disintegrator beams that needed to be avoided. He obediently stayed out of the hydroponics room where the base’s food crops and aerobic algae was cultivated, and likewise avoided the hangar and airlock, but otherwise the rest of the base was his.
Curt took his name from Captain Blood, an old Errol Flynn pirate movie from the twentieth century that he loved, but also from something the Brain often told him: he had a destiny that, one day in the future, would be fulfilled. Anyone watching him play would have seen a little boy in baggy shorts and shirts made from adult clothing cut to child size, running back and forth seemingly at random, waving his arms and yelling at people who weren’t there. Grag or Otho tried to join in, but they couldn’t keep up with the story going on in Curt’s mind, so after a while they left him alone, and Captain Future had his adventures all by himself.
One day, that changed.
Curt was stalking the invisible alien who’d abducted the colonists of Pluto’s companion Charon when the Brain’s voice came through the headset he always wore:
“Curtis, go to Storeroom Three, please. You’re needed there.”
Curt sighed, his shoulders slumping. While Simon Wright didn’t seem to mind the nickname Otho had recently given him, he never tolerated disobedience. When the Brain told the boy to drop what he was doing and go somewhere, there was no argument.
“Coming, sir,” he mumbled. In his hand was a discarded broom handle, which he imagined to be a magic sword he’d found in a forest on Earth, the distant world he could see through the ceiling window but which he’d never visited. One day, the Brain told him, he might go there—but only if his body became strong enough to withstand its higher gravity, which Simon assured him would crush him to the ground unless he worked out for at least two hours every sol.
Fortunately, playtime was considered a form of exercise, and the Brain was happy to give Captain Future a chance to save the universe when Curt was done with his lessons. Which was why it was a little unfair to be summoned to one of the storerooms. It held supplies that Otho purchased during occasional trips to distant settlements, and Curt had seen Grag removing spare machine parts and cartons of freeze-dried food from there just a few hours earlier. He’d told Curt that he was consolidating their supplies; perhaps the robot wanted his help.
When he arrived, the door was closed and the robot was nowhere to be seen. Curt didn’t hesitate; he opened the door and stepped in. The room was dark, but when he called for the lights, they didn’t come on.
Annoyed, the boy stepped farther into the storeroom, his right hand searching for the wall switch. He had just begun to grope for it, though, when the door slammed shut behind him … and before he could turn, a pair of hands laid themselves upon his shoulders and shoved him forward.
“Hey!” Caught off balance, Curt went sprawling on his hands and knees across the polished mooncrete floor. “What … who did that?”
No answer. In the darkness, the boy picked himself off the floor. “Lights on!” he snapped, but the ceiling panels remained dead. “Lights!” he repeated. No response … except for the soft rustle of cloth, followed an instant later by a rough hand against his chest that shoved him backward.
Again, Curt fell to the floor. The back of his head connected with the mooncrete. Amid the flash of pain he saw a brief sprinkling of stars, and again he cried out. “What’s going on? Otho, is that—?”
Directly above him, a single ceiling panel came to life, causing him to wince and raise a hand against the glare. From seemingly nowhere, there came a voice he’d never heard before:
“Defend yourself!”
Something was tossed into the light; it struck the floor with a metallic rattle. An aluminum staff, three feet long and solid.
“Pick it up and defend yourself, Captain Future!”
The voice had a mocking edge to it. Curt crawled to his feet, but he didn’t lay a hand on the staff. “What’s going on here? Why are you…?”
A figure stepped into the light: a full-grown man, dressed head to toe in loose black garments. Not even his eyes were revealed; opaque goggles concealed the one part of his face that wasn’t hidden by a cowl. In his gloved hands was another rod identical to the one on the floor.
“Otho?” Curt peered at the figure. His build was the same as the android’s, but … “Otho, is that you?”
The figure didn’t reply. Instead, he swung his rod in a broad, one-handed arc that would have hit the side of Curt’s head had he not ducked in time. Curt squawked in surprise, and the rod traveled back to strike him in the ankle, just hard enough to hurt.
“In this room, you have no friends.” The disembodied voice was neither amused nor menacing; it simply stated a fact. “Today, you’re no longer a child. If you truly want to be a hero, then pick up the rod and defend yourself!”
The figure stood before him, his rod held before him in both hands. Waiting, but not for much longer. It was Otho, of that much Curt was certain … but suddenly, Otho was no longer his best friend, but someone else entirely. An enemy.
Curt reached forward and picked up the rod. And twenty years later, he gazed at the man who’d disguised himself that day to become his lifelong instructor in the martial arts, and the hovering cyborg who’d set him on a course for revenge, and slowly nodded.
“Yes, I do,” he said, answering the question Simon had asked a few moments earlier. “Now let’s go kill Victor Corvo.”
PART THREE
The Senator of the Lunar Republic
I
At the southern edge of the Mare Tranquillitatis, just above the lunar equator, lay three small impact craters: Aldrin, Collins, and Armstrong. Named after the three Americans of the first expedition to land men on the Moon, they were located in the Apollo System Monument. But while hundreds of people every day made the pilgrimage to the Apollo 11 landing site, where the footprints of the first men to walk on the Moon lay preserved beneath a lunaglass dome, only an invited handful visited Armstrong Crater just thirty miles away.
Armstrong Crater was the official residence of Senator Victor Corvo. One of the first things Corvo did upon taking office was to push through a bill allowing Senate members to purchase small parcels of government property as private residences so long as the Coalition was properly compensated. Although conservationists protested and the press criticized the bill as a particularly self-serving piece of legislation, Corvo had enough political clout to trample the resistance, and in the end, the senator got what he wanted: his own little island in the Sea of Tranquillity.
Corvo was the sort of man who always got what he wanted. A life devoted to accumulating wealth and power tends to have that result. So it wasn’t a surprise that the senator lived better than even his current houseguest, the president of the Solar Coalition.
Joan Randall considered these things as she slowly drove a three-wheel flivver around the crater, a last-minute inspection before calling it a day. The flivver bounced on its massive balloon tires as it trundled across the pitted gray regolith. Floodlights illuminated the crater’s outer wall; between them stood elevated mirrors that reflected sunlight toward a skylight in the regolith-covered dome that made Armstrong the largest privately owned craterhab on the Moon.
Through the cab’s lunaglass canopy, Joan observed the presence of IPF officers in moonsuits every few hundred feet around the outer wall, particle-beam rifles cradled in their arms. She’d already passed the crater’s main entrance, where a security checkpoint had been set up at the end of the ramp leading down to the underground garage. On the other side of the crater, an antimissile laser emplacement had been set up along with a radar dish that m
onitored the sky.
When Joan and Ezra met with the senator’s staff to set up the presidential visit, they were told, with just a hint of condescension, that their precautions would be redundant: Corvo had his own security team, the best money could buy. The senator liked his privacy. But Joan and Ezra weren’t satisfied, and neither was their boss, Halk Anders, the commandant of the Interplanetary Police Force. I don’t care if Corvo has the entire Lunar Republic Army on his side, Anders had said. Our job is to protect the president, and damned if that’s not what we’re going to do.
Joan glanced at her helmet’s heads-up display: 2209 GMT. Carthew and Corvo were probably having an after-dinner nightcap, if she recalled the schedule correctly. But once they’d had their drinks, the two men would be in bed and things could let up a little …
That’s what bothered her. She had a feeling that this was the wrong time to relax.
The incident earlier that day at the Straight Wall had been on her mind ever since. True, neither Rab Cain nor his companion had done anything for which she or Ezra could have legally detained them. Cain had even been rather charming, in an eccentric sort of way. Nonetheless, Joan scowled at the memory of the kiss he’d given the back of her hand. She’d received nothing but snide remarks about that from her colleagues, and the fact that he’d managed to elude her over Tycho hadn’t helped either.
And Ezra … Ezra Gurney had been particularly unforgiving. Dammit, girl, he’d snarled, an IPF officer in pursuit of a suspect never gives up! Nor was he about to accept her explanation that Cain’s craft had simply disappeared. So far as the old marshal was concerned, there must have been some logical reason for this, the most likely being incompetence by his protégé, who’d suddenly become a little less promising.
