Tin Men

by Christopher Golden

  “What can I do for you?” the fat man asked.

  “I’m looking for Ashur,” Danny said, using the Watermelon Man’s name.

  The man behind the counter shifted in his chair. He had enormous sweat stains under his arms and a damp patch at the front of his shirt. The man frowned, deep furrows appearing on his forehead. For a second, Danny wondered if the onboard translator had malfunctioned or if the man was just surprised to hear Arabic coming out of an American robot soldier.

  “Not here,” the fat man replied in English. If he was trying to prove something, he was failing.

  “I can see he’s not here. Where is he?”

  “Away,” the man said in Arabic, having apparently exhausted his English skills.

  Danny didn’t like it. He walked through the shop, examining the produce. On any other ordinary day, the Watermelon Man would have had three times the fruits and vegetables that the fat man had on display. More than that, Danny saw wilted leaves and bruised pears and dimpled cherries. There were watermelons, of course, but far fewer than he had ever seen in the shop.

  “I’m going to need more than that,” Danny said, letting the threat tint his voice. “Where has he gone, and when will he return?”

  As he spoke, Danny moved deeper into the shop. He pulled back a curtain and peered into the back room, which was full of empty wooden crates and not much else. No sign of a struggle, though with Damascus turned into some kind of ghost town he didn’t really suspect the fat man of foul play.

  “He has taken his daughter and gone to visit his sister in Palmyra.”

  Danny froze, thinking. He let the curtain drop and turned to study the fat man a moment, then headed for the door. The fat man said nothing, only watched him go.

  “What’s up?” Torres asked when Danny emerged.

  He snapped his gun from its holster, keeping it down at his side, warily scanning the weathered old faces around them.

  “We’re going,” he said.

  Torres straightened up, her hand dropping to her own weapon and drawing it, following his example and keeping the gun low.

  “You find out what the weirdness is about?” she asked, falling in beside him as he marched out of the fruit market.

  The two old men smoking cigarettes took notice of them now, gazes flickering toward the guns before they muttered to one another, their expressions remaining stoic as ever.

  “Ashur…that’s the Watermelon Man…he’s not here. Neither is his daughter. The guy in charge of the shop right now is someone Ashur fucking hates—he thinks the guy is a total scumbag—and the guy claims Ashur and Yalda have gone off to Palymyra to visit Ashur’s sister.”

  “Why is that so—“

  “Ashur did have a sister, but she died in an uprising like ten or twelve years ago. He’s got no immediate family left except for Yalda. The thing is, any other day I’d think this bastard had cut Ashur’s throat so he could take over the business. But not today.”

  Torres arrived at a street corner. She put her back against the wall and took a quick glance around, checking to see that no ambush was in the offing.

  “Today,” Torres said, “you’re thinking Ashur got himself and his daughter the fuck out of here.”

  As they started down the street, weapons out, watching rooftops and alleys, windows and doors, Danny nodded. “We’re screwed, Alaina. I don’t know how, but somehow they’ve figured out a way to fuck us up.”

  His heart was thousands of miles away, safely inside his body. Safe underground, in the Hump. But even at that distance Danny felt like he could feel it pounding in his chest, pulse thumping at his temples. He had no throat—no sense of taste, even, in the robot frame—but still he felt it constrict, dry and tight.

  “Private channel, Lieutenant Trang and Sergeant Morello,” he said, listening to the clicking that switched his commlink into privacy mode. “Sarge, this is Kelso. I’ve brought the Lieutenant into the channel as well. Do you read?”

  Static. “Sergeant Morello, do you—“

  “—dropped out for a second, but I read you,” Morello said, his voice so close it seemed as if the Sergeant was standing right beside him.

  “The Watermelon Man hit the road. The only way he’d do that is out of fear for his daughter, and the only way he’d do it without warning me is if the danger was imminent.”

  “Agreed. Reports we’re getting from the rest of the platoon say the whole blue zone is abandoned, except for the kind of hardasses and old folks who won’t go anywhere. Come on in, Kelso,” Morello said. “You and Torres watch your asses.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, switching over to external voice and turning to Torres. “We’re going in.”

  As he turned back—he and Torres moving around a cracked and broken fountain—Danny caught a glimpse of something moving on a rooftop back the way they’d come. He raised his weapon, sighting along the roofline.

  “What is it?” Torres asked.

  “Don’t know.”

  “A sniper?”

  “Could be. But what’s the point? Even if he’s good enough to destroy one bot, the rest of us will track his ass down.”

  The expression on Torres’s face was the closest the bots could come to a smile.

  “Got that right,” she said. “Still, watch the roof.”

  A bit of static whispered through the comms, followed by the Lieutenant’s voice. “This is Trang. Return to arrival zone. Use all speed.”

  Danny and Torres glanced at each other.

  “All speed,” Danny said.

  Torres took off at a run, slicing the air, racing so quickly that no human could have followed. Danny ran in her wake, watching her six, wondering if anyone was watching his six…someone who wanted to do him harm. Do all of them harm.

  Where’d you go, Ashur? he thought.

  Wherever it was that had spooked him, the Watermelon Man had left Damascus fast. Last night, probably. Kelso had lied a bit to Torres—at least by omission. It wasn’t the sweaty guy manning the Watermelon Man’s shop that had convinced him they needed to regroup, or the certainty that Ashur would have warned him if there’d been time.

  It had been the soccer ball. No way in hell would Yalda have left it behind. Not by choice.

  Danny picked up speed, passing right by Torres. In the midst of all of this tension, he’d been so occupied with trying to figure out what the enemy was planning that he hadn’t spared a thought for who else might be in danger.

  Now that he had, he found he couldn’t think of anything else but Kate.

  ~5~

  The Grand Bretagne was perhaps the finest hotel in Athens, as renowned for its service and its extensive wine cellars as it was for the luxury of its appointments. The nighttime views of the Acropolis and the Parthenon, so beautifully lit after dark, were enough to make hotel guests believe there was still be magic left in the world. With its butler service and Thermal Suite, and with the unlimited budget provided to all of those in the President’s entourage, Felix Wade told himself that he might never leave the Grand Bretagne.

  Unfortunately, he was all too aware of the illusory nature of his bliss. Along with the luxury of the hotel came intense security, including armed guards at the entrances, on the roof, and on every floor of the lovely old hotel. Security for a U.S. President traveling abroad had always been a logistical nightmare, but Felix believed the protective measures taken on this trip to be the most extensive ever. President Peter Matheson had not begun the Tin Men program, but he had voted in favor of it while he’d still been the junior senator from Massachusetts and he had only furthered the interventionist policies of the previous administration since his election to the Oval Office. Now he’d come to Athens for the G20 summit and all eyes were on him, many of them filled with resentment.

  Despite the elegant cigar bar, the incredible politeness of the hotel staff, and the majesty of the sun as it set behind the Acropolis, Felix could not relax enough to enjoy it all. Not with the hotel locked down as if it were the world
’s most beautiful prison.

  He rode the elevator to the fourth floor, happy there was no music to accompany his ride. Something about the hum and clank of the old apparatus comforted him. When the doors slid open, the blond Secret Service woman guarding them glanced at him with her chin high. Her name was Sydney Travers, though everyone from the president on down just called her Syd. Felix found it a strangely casual appellation for a woman whose face was often so expressionless she might as well not have been human. Down the corridor, a pair of Tin Men stood on either side of the double doors to the President’s suite. They moved without sound, and their silence did not comfort him at all.

  Felix nodded to the Secret Service woman and she replied with a single tilt of her head.

  He strode along the corridor, passing rooms he knew to be empty. The President was the only resident of this floor, though he was never unaccompanied by members of his protection unit.

  “Good morning, Professor Wade,” one of the Tin Men said as Felix approached the double doors. “He’s expecting you.”

  Unlike other Tin Men, these soldiers were not allowed to deface their robot frames with images or symbols. Each of the three robots on the President’s protection unit had a small American flag painted over the left breast but were otherwise indistinguishable, except by their voices. Felix had failed miserably in his attempt to keep track of which soldier was in which frame during which shift, resulting in him being constantly embarrassed until he at last gave up trying.

  When the other Tin Man opened the door for him, he could manage nothing more personal than, “Thank you.”

  Felix found President Matheson pacing the living room and muttering quietly to himself. American roots folk music played softly through hidden speakers. Felix had seen this behavior before—Matheson was trying to memorize the speech he intended to make to the other world leaders at the summit tomorrow—and he knew better than to interrupt. Instead, he leaned against the wall with his hands stuffed in his pockets and tried to remember if he’d heard this particular song before.

  “Got it, I think!” President Matheson said happily, his blue eyes bright as always. He went to a sideboard and poured himself a glass of scotch from a crystal decanter. “Want a drink, Felix?”

  “I wouldn’t say no.”

  “Want to hear my little monologue?”

  “I’ve heard it.”

  The President turned to face him, leaning against the sideboard. He sipped his scotch, a strong-jawed Irishman of the sort the United States had stopped electing a long time ago. His hair had begun to gray and thin and the skin at his throat sagged in a slight wattle, but still Peter Matheson always maintained the air of the man in charge.

  “I’ve improved it.”

  “I’ve no doubt. But unless you’ve changed your mind—“

  President Matheson’s blue eyes iced over. “Let’s not start that again. This was your plan and it’s a good one.”

  Felix felt his stomach curdle. The new American economic policy the President intended to deliver to the G20 leaders tomorrow had indeed been Felix’s plan. He had conceived it and written it down and presented it to Matheson at a private meeting in the Oval Office as the result of a question the President had posed to him: What would Europe have to do to save its economy from the total meltdown to which it was otherwise surely doomed?

  Presuming it a hypothetical, Felix had looked at all of the numbers and disregarded such things as political impossibility and the will of the people and come up with an austerity program like no other. In order to come back from the brink of total economic collapse, the European Union would have to institute unprecedented austerity measures that would dismantle social programs and abandon the poorest and weakest in favor of goals that would help everyone in the long term, if they survived. The austerity measures would pay back some of the debt accumulated by the more irresponsible members of the E.U. and keep their governments afloat. The United States had been weathering the economic storm thanks in large part to the jobs provided by the Tin Men program, but if Europe completely collapsed, America might follow.

  Felix’s plan included what was essentially a hostile takeover of the International Monetary Fund and huge punitive measures against governments and corporations that broke the rules established by the World Trade Organization. It had been pure fantasy. Even as he wrote it, he had known that none of the nations involved would agree to the measures he outlined, but he had wanted to give the President an answer that would outline the true depths of the approaching global economic catastrophe.

  Trouble was, the President hadn’t been posing a hypothetical question.

  “I devised the plan,” Felix admitted. “But I never imagined that you would present it to them at gunpoint.”

  President Matheson chuckled and took a sip of scotch. After a minute: “You’re full of shit, do you know that?”

  “Mr. President—“

  “No,” he said, raising a hand. “Let’s not pretend we don’t both know what you’re doing. The United States has been making unilateral decisions for the world since we first deployed the robots. We made the United Nations irrelevant. In the interest of safeguarding the future for our people, we took it upon ourselves to defuse the world’s hot spots. This is just an extension of that, and for you to pretend that you hadn’t so much as contemplated the possibility that I would use the Tin Men to enforce it is disingenuous and insulting.”

  Felix said nothing. He wanted to refute the argument—he believed in influencing the world with economic rather than military force—but Matheson was the President of the United States and there would be no debate.

  Noting his silence, President Matheson set aside his drink and poured one for Felix. When he handed it over, Felix drank half the glass in one burning gulp.

  “The time for pulling our punches is in the past, my friend,” the President said. “These guys—the whole G20—they’re going to sign onto our agenda and then turn around and pretend to their people that we all huddled in a room and came up with this plan together. They’re going to do that because they have no choice.”

  “There must be some other way,” Felix said. “Some more ameliorative approach.”

  President Matheson sighed, moving toward Felix until they were face to face, practically nose for nose.

  “You’re my number one global economic advisor, so you tell me: is there another way? Given the crisis they’re in? Given the way austerity measures have met with such a resounding welcome in the past? Is there any way in Hell the governments we’re talking about are going to make the hard decisions necessary to save the continent from freefall without forcing their hand? Without promising them that any rebellion will be put down by our forces? Without taking over the IMF and forcing the whole world to toe the line where the WTO’s rules are concerned? Is there another damn way?”

  Felix swallowed hard, meeting the President’s gaze, and tipped up his scotch glass for another gulp.

  President Matheson nodded. “Exactly.”

  “It will work for now,” Felix said. “I have no doubt. But it won’t work forever. No matter how benevolent the motive, we can’t subjugate the whole world—financially or otherwise—without consequences.”

  The President sniffed in disgust. “Felix, we’re not subjugating the world, we’re freeing it. Freeing them from war and oppression. Freeing up their time so they can figure out how to adapt to the flooding and food shortages. It’s been ugly for a long time, but we’re giving them the breathing room to build their own futures.”

  “They don’t see it that way, sir. Someday, perhaps soon, somebody’s going to invent something that makes the Tin Men look like toy soldiers, and there’s going to be Hell to pay.”

  President Matheson clinked his glass against Felix’s and then raised it in a toast.

  “Let’s hope you’re wrong for once.”

  The tech Danny Kelso thought of as Aimee Something did, in fact, possess a full name. Twenty-three year old Aimee Felic
ia Bell hailed from Dobbs Ferry, a little town along the Hudson River in Westchester County, New York. The world had moved into the 21st century long ago, but one look at its main drag showed how stubbornly Dobbs Ferry had held onto the 20th. Pizza parlors and pubs, little boutiques, a comic book shop—and plenty of empty storefronts, of course. Soaped up windows with FOR LEASE signs prominently displayed: the hallmark of America’s main streets these days, and the only sign that Dobbs Ferry even knew the world had moved on.

  Dobbs Ferry had bored Aimee. An old story, really. Her parents didn’t understand her interest in technology and did not approve of her joining the army to finance her education. They were afraid she would end up dead in a ditch in the Middle East somewhere. And what was she supposed to tell them? That she loved technology because it represented the future she longed for, and that the army was her ticket out? That she loved them and all but, you know, see ya. Now she was in Germany, working on mindcasting and VR tech that she understood better than her supervisors, building the future she had dreamed about.

  So when Private North sidled up beside her at her monitoring station, full of blond-haired, blue-eyed swagger and smelling faintly of vomit and whiskey, Aimee Bell did her best to ignore him. They’d had a thing for a while, and she’d thought it a good thing. Then something had happened to North in the field—something ugly that he didn’t want to talk about—and he’d changed. The relationship had never been one of candlelit romance, but it turned into torrid sex in maintenance closets. North had vacillated between manic enthusiasm and sullen drunkenness, and for her own sake Aimee had ended it. The one time she had shared her feelings about it with someone else at the Hump, all it had earned her was a shrug. The shit they see out there, her friend had said, you can’t expect it not to change them.

  North could be a total ass, but she tried her best not to hold it against him.

  Aimee had always had a difficult time with relationships. She had a vague awareness that men found her attractive, but with a few unpleasant exceptions, she had managed to escape the ugliest of their attentions. When she felt interested in a guy, it came in handy to be pretty, but usually once she started talking about hacking or bioengineering or robotics, they veered off fairly quickly. There was one guy in Platoon A she had her eye on now, but it sure wasn’t Thomas North.