Tin Men

by Christopher Golden

  Twenty-eight, he reminded himself, thinking North picked a very lucky day to have a hangover. Danny intended to knock him on his ass when they made it back to the Hump.

  Birnbaum hustled toward them, the stylized bird-in-flight painted on her robot’s chest somehow very dark in the sunshine.

  “What’s wrong with you assholes?” she said. “Get to cover.”

  “No point,” Private Rawlins said. “Out here we can cover all angles. We see another rocket launcher, motherfucker’s dead before he can pull the trigger.”

  Torres glanced up at a nearby rooftop. “Better be sure of it, ‘cause these new rockets are deadly. The way the Sarge went out—I don’t think it was just the rocket exploding. I think it caused a reaction in his power core.”

  “I heard a kind of whine, just for a second, right before the rocket hit him,” Birnbaum put in. “You could be right.”

  “Forget that shit, what the hell happened?” Mavrides demanded. “The chopper fell out of the damn sky! My uplink’s frozen, no comms—“

  That started a barrage of questions and commentary. Kate, Trav, Hawkins and Torres took up positions around the lieutenant, weapons ready as they scanned rooftops and windows.

  “We’ve got to get cover,” Birnbaum said.

  Rawlins barked laughter. “And then what?”

  “We go to ground, wait for the uplink to be reestablished,” Hartschorn said.

  “An hour or two at most before another satellite comes into range,” Travaglini said. “What do we do in the meantime?”

  Danny stared at Lieutenant Trang. His robot features looked smooth, as if no human intelligence lurked behind that face. The infinity symbol on his chest had become pitted and scarred, shrapnel from the destruction of Morello’s bot. Trang still held his sidearm, but it dangled at his side as if he’d forgotten all about it.

  Danny moved up beside him. “Lieutenant, I suggest we fall back to the embassy. Whatever this is, the people there are going to need our help.”

  Mavrides laughed at him. “Screw those guys. At least they’re in their own bodies. I say we—“

  “No one gives a shit what you think, kid,” Hawkins called, still watching the rooftops, ready for a renewed assault. “You’re nineteen. You follow orders.”

  Mavrides threw up his hands. “We don’t have any fucking orders!”

  Danny nodded at Hawkins, finding a new respect for the guy. Mavrides was his pal—his sidekick—but under fire, things had changed. Ted Hawkins was an asshole, but he wanted to live.

  “Orders, Lieutenant?” Danny asked.

  “I…I’m awaiting instructions,” Trang replied.

  “Comms are down.” Travaglini said. “We can’t just sit here with our thumbs up our asses. Who knows what those fucking Bot Killers are up to now, or what else is going to happen? Half of Damascus didn’t skip town just for that little ambush.”

  “Not another word, Trav,” Kate ordered.

  The rest of the platoon fell silent, as if she’d been talking to all of them. With Morello dead or at least out of commission, Corporal Kate Wade had just become second in command.

  The sun baked them. A plume of black smoke rose from the downed chopper. The air stagnated, barely a breeze to stir it, and in that moment the city seemed not just quiet and deserted, but dead.

  “Kelso’s right,” Kate said. “This wasn’t just an attack on us. I don’t know what the fallout’s gonna be in the long run from this EMP, but it’ll have to wait. We head for the embassy, full court press. Eyes on every window, door, alley, rooftop. You see anyone with a weapon, you light ‘em up.”

  Half of the platoon stared at her and the other half at Trang.

  Kate turned toward him. “If that’s all right with you, Lieutenant.”

  Trang swiveled his head slowly to look at her, a robot waking from a dream, and then glanced around at the rest of the platoon.

  “You heard the corporal,” he said, his voice a monotone. “Back to base.”

  Felix Wade stood on the balcony of his room at the Hotel Grande Bretagne and watched the city of Athens falling apart. Pillars of smoke rose from various spots and screams echoed in the streets. In the sky to the north, a jetliner careened downward in total freefall, engines on fire. Felix shuddered, filled with horror more profound than any he had ever imagined. How many people on that plane? Three hundred? And he had seen others falling as well.

  The airliner crashed several miles away and the whole city seemed to shake with the impact. Dust bloomed into the air as the plane brought buildings down on top of it.

  In the street below, Athenian police, Greek soldiers, and the security teams of twenty different nations were shouting and arguing as they attempted to cordon off the two square blocks where the G20 summit had just been getting under way. From his seventh floor perch, Felix could see people beyond the barricade, standing around their cars in confusion. Athens had long been a city clogged with automobiles and the smog of their exhaust, but not this morning. Not now. All of the cars were at a standstill, leaving their drivers mystified and fearful.

  There were no alarms. No growl of running engines. Only human voices raised in anger and terror in the face of catastrophe. They were frightened, Felix knew, because they did not understand what was happening around them. But once they understood their terror would only deepen.

  Felix had spent his life studying international affairs and attempting to help his country navigate the perilous waters of global policy. Ever since his days at the Fletcher School, he had been aware that a nightmare like this could be triggered at any time, but the world community had been able to stave off cataclysm so often that he had come to believe that humanity would never allow the worst to happen. Yet here it was.

  Someone pounded on the door to his hotel room. Felix took one last look at the city. He had always hoped to pass away quietly in his bed at home with a baseball game on the television, some time shortly after celebrating his hundredth birthday. Of all the places he had thought he might die, Athens wasn’t on the list.

  Gunfire erupted somewhere out in the streets, and a volley of shots answered from another direction. The pounding on his door grew more insistent. Felix left the balcony and hurried to answer it.

  “Professor Wade,” a voice called. “Are you in there?”

  He opened the door to find two Secret Service agents in the hall. Other people were out there, hustling one way or another, most trying to get their cell phones to work. It amazed him how slow they were to catch on. Nobody’s phones would work today.

  “Please come with us, Professor,” said the taller of the two agents, a slim, dangerous-looking man, so pale he seemed almost ivory. He spoke with the cold professionalism his job required, but there could be no hiding his urgency.

  “Is there a planned escape route?” Felix asked.

  “Professor,” said the other agent, broader and shorter, with the look of a Pacific islander. Stone-faced, just like the ivory man.

  Felix stepped into the hall and pulled the door shut. The agents started hustling him down the corridor past other closed doors. He thought he heard someone sobbing behind one.

  “What did you take?” the ivory man asked.

  “Take?”

  “Meds,” the islander said. “Something for anxiety, Professor? Or sleeping pills? You seem too calm.”

  “I haven’t taken a blessed thing. I’m in shock. And if you’re not in shock, well…you ought to be.”

  The Secret Service agents said nothing. They were trained to say nothing, but it still irritated him. On the other hand, he took his irritation as a positive sign that his initial shock might be diminishing. Curling up into a fetal ball in the corner of the President’s suite would be unproductive.

  They took the darkened stairs up one floor and hurried down the hall, Felix thinking nonsensical thoughts, wondering how many Presidential suites had ever had actual presidents residing in them. One of the Tin Men stood outside the suite and he rapped three times o
n the door when he saw them coming. The door swung open and then the two agents hustled Felix inside.

  President Matheson had a glass of whiskey in one hand. He glanced up, exhaled loudly, and gave a nod.

  “Good,” he said. “You’re all right.”

  “Debatable,” Felix replied.

  Matheson shook his head. “You’re alive, and I intend to keep you that way.”

  Felix gave him a dubious look, still not completely in synch with reality. The world felt like a dreadful dream, but he knew it was not. He took a deep breath.

  “I’m glad you needed me here this morning,” Felix said. “The organizer of the International Financial Architecture panel was irritated when I canceled on him. I felt guilty about it. But if you hadn’t asked me to stay for the meeting with Kabinov, I’d be over at the conference center right now and it’s got to be chaos—“

  “Felix, stop.” The President stared at him.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “If you can’t get your head together—“

  “I will. I am. It is.” Felix waved his hands. “Please continue.”

  President Matheson nodded again, knocked back the entire glass of whiskey, and then turned toward the windows, in front of which the other two Tin Men in his personal security detail were standing guard.

  “This is happening fast and it’s happening now. We have no communications,” he said. “Zero.”

  “EMP,” Felix replied. “You wouldn’t—“

  “I have other policy advisors along on this trip, but none of them are still inside the hotel, and my protectors here…well, they’re not letting me leave the building just yet. So you’re all the counsel I’ve got. You with me?”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  “I don’t know how widespread this is yet, but that’s a long term question. The short term question is, what kind of danger are we in? Until we know differently, we have to assume there’s more chaos to come, that every world leader at this summit is a target. There’s a damn army’s worth of security in the neighborhood, but I’m not taking anything for granted. As soon as we can, we’re getting out of here. What’s our worst case scenario?”

  Felix glanced at the two agents who’d brought him in, then back at the President. He felt suddenly like he could breathe; his senses seemed back online.

  “Worst case is that this is global. We can’t be certain—your Tin Men are still functional, so I don’t know—“

  “We’re shielded, Professor,” Chapel cut in. “We’ve been prepped for what an EMP means for us. Protecting the President is our only concern.”

  Felix nodded. “If this is global…” He fixed President Matheson with a dark glance. “What we’re talking about is total societal breakdown.”

  Matheson frowned, shaking his head.

  “I have a daughter, Mr. President. She lost her legs in combat and I tried to help her build a life for herself. I nearly lost her, after which all I have wished for is that I could keep her safe. When she joined the Remote Infantry Corps, it seemed like the perfect compromise, but somehow did not improve our rapport.”

  Felix cast a glance at the two Tin Men by the windows. “We’ve never really understood each other, but over the past couple of years…” He took a breath, and shrugged. “The point is, there’s a great deal of tension and resentment there. I need to see her again, you understand? I need to make it right. So believe me when I tell you that I know exactly what I’m saying. And what I’m telling you is that if this is global, then the whole world has just lost power and communications and the ability to travel with anything other than their feet or a fucking bicycle.”

  The President stared at him. “For how long?”

  Felix met his gaze firmly, though he wanted very badly to look away. “Until it can all be rebuilt. Every fried circuit is going to stay fried. They can’t be repaired, only replaced and that’ll take years.”

  President Matheson ran his free hand over his face, covered his mouth a moment, and then swore.

  “In the meantime—“ Felix continued.

  “Hospital patients die, refrigerated foods go bad, no new food is shipped,” the President interrupted. “We could see civil unrest on a scale we can’t imagine. No…”

  “Worst case, Mr. President,” Felix said, “is the twilight of human civilization. You know Yeats. ‘Things fall apart. The center cannot hold.’”

  The President closed his eyes and reached up to massage the bridge of his nose. “Jesus Christ.”

  The tall, pale Secret Service agent cleared his throat. “It may be localized, Mr. President. There’s no sign that—“

  “It might be, Julian,” the President replied. “But go look out the window. It’s been fifteen minutes since the power went down. If this is just Athens, or even just Greece, we’d have fighter jets here in twenty-six minutes. So, another eleven minutes and we’ll know how local it is. An hour, and we’ll know if it’s global. But I don’t have a good feeling about it, and I get the idea Professor Wade doesn’t, either.”

  Felix glanced away.

  “All right, back to the worst case,” President Matheson said. He gestured toward the Tin Men. “These guys are still upright. Whatever shielding they have kept them ticking, so I’m guessing the NORAD base at Cheyenne Mountain is still operational. Maybe a few others—“

  One of the Tin Men by the window took a step forward. Felix flinched—sometimes they seemed like statues, or the suits of armor that stood in the dusty corners of old castles. The robot’s eyes flashed with intelligence.

  “Mr. President, sir,” it said, its voice identifying the soldier as male.

  “Speak, Chapel. No time for protocol.”

  “Humphreys Deep Station One, sir. It’s entirely secure, and shielded.”

  “What’s this place?” Felix asked.

  “Basically Tin Men Central,” President Matheson replied. “Under Wiesbaden Airfield in Germany.”

  The spark of hope that had risen in Felix flared brighter. Could the one safe place for them really be the same place his daughter was stationed?

  “Germany,” he said, hating the hopeless plea in his voice.

  “We need to get you there, Mr. President,” Chapel said.

  Felix tuned out the conversation that followed. The Secret Service were off and running now that he had confirmed the President’s fears. He tried not to imagine the chaos outside, even as he wondered about the nineteen other world leaders who had gathered for the summit. Some of them would already have begun making accusations, pointing fingers, not realizing that blame meant nothing. All that mattered were the consequences.

  Katie, he thought.

  The last time they had spoken, he had told her that he wanted to be there for her and her response had been succinct: Why start now? The words still stung—the truth always did. Now all of his regrets came back to haunt him, but his failings as a father were the worst of them.

  “All right, Professor,” President Matheson said, drawing Felix out of his reverie. “A couple of hours, and we’re getting out of here. I’m going to make sure you see that daughter of yours. I want you to help Julian go through the hotel and gather any of our people who weren’t over at the convention center when the EMP hit. Bring them up here and Agent Chapel and I will brief everyone on our exit strategy. It’s almost half past nine. At eleven-thirty, we’re leaving.”

  Felix had always known there were risks traveling with the President, but never let himself ponder them too deeply. The temptation to hide under a bed or in a closet was strong, but this crisis wasn’t going to vanish while he buried his head.

  “All right,” he said, turning to Julian. “Lead the way—“

  The sky erupted, blowing in the windows and shaking the entire building. Felix cried out and clapped his hands over his ears as tiny glass shards showered across the room. He ears buzzed, the shouts of the Secret Service agents muffled, and he lowered his hands. The curtains blew around the two Tin Men in the room. They had blocked
much of the glass and had drawn their sidearms, standing by the windows and sighting on anything moving in the street below.

  Julian and the others were yelling about bombs.

  “Mr. President!” Felix said, running to grab Matheson’s arm. “We’ve got to get out of here!”

  One of the Tin Men—maybe Chapel, maybe not—turned toward him. “We’re not going anywhere. That wasn’t here in the hotel, it was the conference center. Just stay back from the windows!”

  Felix had drifted close enough to the windows to get a glimpse of the flaming ruin on the next block, but now he backpedaled. His shock had been abating but now it seized him completely, a terrible numbness enveloping him as he forced himself not to think of the faces of friends and colleagues who had just been incinerated inside the conference center.

  President Matheson had a hand over his mouth, his eyes wide, as if he might scream. Then he shook himself, visibly gaining control.

  “I thought we had shooters on the roof looking out for snipers,” the President said.

  “We do,” Julian said. “And plenty of people and equipment scanning for bombs, but someone got those explosives in.”

  “So weird,” Felix whispered. “Not to hear any alarms.”

  President Matheson gave him a curious glance. Felix wanted to tell him to listen, that he would realize that all of the usual city sounds had vanished. No sirens, no car alarms, no engines, no fire alarms…just screaming and shouting and the roar of the fire engulfing what remained of the conference center.

  “Felix,” the President said.

  So strange, Felix thought, staring at the Tin Men. He blinked slowly. “The world isn’t ending,” he said. “It’s already over.”

  The President marched over and grabbed him by the shirtfront.

  “Freak out later, Felix. Right now I need you thinking, otherwise you’re no damn use to me. You’re a good man, but I’m not going to carry you over my shoulder to get you out of here and neither is anybody else, so you’d better wake up.”

  Felix shook his head to clear it. He took in the room, heard the screams as if for the first time, and held up his hands in surrender.