Tin Men

by Christopher Golden

  “What is it, Kate?” Danny asked.

  “Sergeant Wade?” Finch said. “Something you want to—“

  “Sorry, Captain,” Kate said, her voice sounding more robotic somehow. Hollow. “I’m going to need a minute.”

  As Trang began to harangue her about protocol and chain of command, she threw open the door and vanished into the corridor. Danny didn’t hesitate or ask permission, just rushed out behind her. Alexa remembered the moment of tenderness she had witnessed between them and quietly prayed they would be all right.

  Lieutenant Trang directed his tirade toward Captain Finch as Winslow shut the door behind the departed robots. Through the gap between the kitchen door and its frame, Alexa watched her father return to his seat. He leaned back in the chair and stared at the ceiling as if he expected answers to come down from Heaven.

  None were forthcoming.

  Danny knew where Kate was headed as soon as she hit the stairs. He followed her down the darkened stairwell and into the waiting area outside the brig. There were oil lamps and candles that threw long, shuddery shadows upon the walls and it occurred to Danny that they wouldn’t last very long. Plan B for a power outage was to use the generators, but they were just as fried as everything else. How much oil could they have stocked up for those lamps?

  “Kate,” he said as he caught up to her, just outside the brig.

  The two MPs gazed at them curiously as Kate reached for the door handle and Danny tapped her shoulder.

  “Wait a second,” he said.

  She rounded on him, inhuman eyes blazing brightly. “You don’t understand!”

  “No,” he said, “I don’t. Clue me in?”

  She was still for a moment. Then, with a glance at the MPs, she took his arm and walked him back toward the bottom of the steps, where they could speak with a modicum of privacy.

  “Today’s August 30th,” she said.

  Danny shrugged. “And?”

  “It’s the first day of the G20 summit in Athens,” she said. When she spoke again her voice seemed quieter, smaller somehow. “I thought my dad was home, Danny. Not safe—nobody’s safe, if this is global—but home where he’d have friends around him. Instead…”

  It took a second for her words to click. Then he remembered. “Your dad’s in Athens.”

  Kate nodded. “And I don’t think that’s the worst of it.”

  She spun away from him and strode straight toward the brig. One of the MPs—a thin Asian man—opened the door for her. The soldier looked up at her, this seven-foot robot with devil horns and a pitchfork painted on its cheek, and Danny could see he was intimidated. A healthy response to encountering Kate, Danny thought.

  Queen of the Tin Men, they often joked. But it was no joke.

  “Sorry, Sergeant,” the MP said. “I can’t let you through without Lieutenant Winslow or Captain Finch. I wouldn’t have opened the door if the intercom was still working.”

  Kate shoved him aside effortlessly. The MP snapped at her and started to draw his weapon. Danny grabbed his wrist as, inside the small cubicle that passed for a guardhouse, the other MP did the same.

  “Don’t,” Danny said, lifting his arm straight up, forcing him to aim his weapon at the ceiling. “You’re not going to hurt us, pal. More likely you’ll kill your partner with a ricochet. She just wants to talk to the prisoner. You guys can listen in, report whatever you hear if you’re worried about what she might say.”

  “We have our orders,” the MP said.

  Danny glanced at the man. “I’m not sure orders mean much anymore.”

  The MPs exchanged a glance through the cubicle glass and then the one Danny had grabbed gave a nod. Danny felt the guy’s arm go slack and released him. Moments later, all three of them were catching up to Kate, who had arrived at the door to Hanif Khan’s cell.

  The anarchist had moved the mattress of his little cot onto the floor. He lay there staring at the ceiling, not acknowledging their arrival.

  “I want to ask you something,” Kate said, anger boiling in her voice.

  “More questions?” Khan asked wearily.

  “About timing,” Kate replied. “The G20 summit—“

  “Yes.”

  Danny stiffened. He moved nearer to Kate so that he could get a better view of Khan through the bars. The asshole just lay there, still not bothering to look at them.

  “What do you mean, ‘yes’?” Kate demanded.

  “To your question,” Khan replied. “You want to know if part of the plan was to assassinate the world leaders gathered in Athens. The answer is yes.”

  “Son of a bitch,” one of the MPs said, exhaling the words in a rasp.

  Danny studied the anarchist. Maybe he truly had no idea who had masterminded all of this chaos, but he knew more about the plan than he’d admitted and now he was taking pleasure in their dawning horror.

  “There’s more,” Danny said, certain of it.

  Khan sat up with a jaunty grin. “Of course there is. Someone willing to go to this extent to obliterate the global power structure is going to make sure they’ve taken away the ability of that hierarchy to reestablish itself.”

  Where the hell did this guy go to school? Danny wondered. He didn’t talk like some desert warrior.

  “You going to tell us?” Kate asked. “Or you want to keep playing games?”

  Khan managed to look insulted. “I think I’ve been very forthcoming. I’m happy to tell you because there is nothing you can do to prevent any of it from happening. The knowledge will increase your suffering, and that pleases me.”

  “Go on, then,” Danny said. “Increase our suffering.”

  “There are strike teams in Athens, yes,” Hanif Khan said. “And, as you know, strike teams everywhere there are Tin Men deployed. But it’s not enough to destroy the Tin Men if you leave alive the possibility that they will ever be utilized again. It isn’t enough to destroy the hardware. You must destroy the software, too.”

  Danny stared at him, a chill racing up his spine. Robot frame or not, he could still feel horror.

  “They’ll destroy our bodies,” he said numbly.

  Khan did not smile.

  “One way or another,” the anarchist said, “this day will see you dead.”

  ~12~

  Aimee tried not to let herself think too far ahead. Major Zander had instituted something called Phoenix Protocols, and she didn’t like the sound of that at all. According to legend, the phoenix rose from the ashes of its own demise. Maybe calling their plan of action Phoenix Protocols had been intended to inspire hope for the future, but to Aimee it was just confirmation that as far as Major Zander and the other officers sitting up in the Command Core were concerned, they were all fucked.

  Soldiers hustled back and forth along the catwalks. Some of them were standing guard but the rest were engaged in the one part of the Phoenix Protocols that actually seemed to make sense—inventory. All food and medical supplies were being cataloged and Major Zander had issued an order that rationing would begin immediately. Chief Schuler and his staff were organizing shifts and sleeping accommodations.

  They were all thinking long term, and Aimee couldn’t wrap her head around that yet. Her thoughts kept going back to her friend Julissa, who lived in New Orleans with her wife and son. They’d arranged to vid-chat tonight after Aimee’s shift and she knew they would’ve talked about nothing much important. Julissa had been slogging her way through law school, so that and her son were pretty much all she ever talked about.

  “Damn it,” Aimee whispered, burying her face in her hands.

  The main screen of her monitoring station glowed a soft blue. She sighed and turned her attention back to the task she’d been given, to the list on that screen. Thirty-one locations where there were bases she was reasonably certain were shielded from EMP attacks. Some were American, but there were other nations represented on that list, from Britain to South Africa to China. The list had been broken down into five subsets and those smaller lists as
signed to five techs. Aimee stared at the full list, but only the first six of the locations were her responsibility.

  She put on her headpiece and tapped the fourth name on her list. A small map appeared onscreen and a light began to blink over Vancouver, British Columbia. The line crackled and she straightened up in her chair. No buzz to indicate an attempted connection, but that crackle surely meant an open line, didn’t it? The Phoenix Protocols included a continuous effort to make contact, to attempt to establish a network. Whoever had loaded nineteen Monteforte Corporation satellites with EMPs had certainly intended to wipe out any possibility of contact, but the first communication satellite had been launched in 1963, so there was no way to know for sure what was still floating around up there.

  Tech changed so quickly that the last few generations of satellites had been low-orbit products, meant to be multitudinous and disposable, with enough fuel cells to stay at the edges of the atmosphere for four or five years before burning up. Most of the older, still active satellites would have been taken out by the Pulse—military geosynchronous tech included—but it was possible that some of the aging, abandoned geosynch satellites had been out of range of the EMPs, perhaps in a more distant orbit.

  “This is Wiesbaden Army Airfield hailing Barker’s Victoria Cross,” she said. “Wiesbaden hailing Barker’s Victoria Cross. Please respond.”

  Pause. Holding her breath. Listening to the crackling.

  “Please respond.”

  Aimee stared at the blinking light over Vancouver on her screen map and a terrible old joke swam up into her thoughts. Grim and ugly, but she had laughed the first time she’d heard it.

  Knock, knock.

  Who’s there?

  No one. You’re going to die alone.

  Here she was knocking, but if she had indeed found an open channel, a satellite relay, it seemed nobody was home.

  “This is Wiesbaden Army Airfield hailing Barker’s Victoria Cross,” she said again, wondering if someone was on the line, listening. Barker’s Victoria Cross was a secret installation north of Vancouver, an underground research facility sponsored jointly by the Canadian government and the British. She pictured someone just like her, a young soldier with strict instructions, unable to answer a hail to an installation that wasn’t supposed to even exist.

  Aimee held her breath a moment, glanced around, and lowered her voice. “This is Humphreys Deep Station One hailing Barker’s Victoria Cross. Can anyone read me?”

  The crackle on the line grew worse and for a second or two she thought for sure someone would answer, but still there was nothing. Maybe nobody was there after all.

  Hope could keep a person going. She knew that. But right then hope felt like poison.

  Her finger hovered over the screen, ready to tap the eighth location on her list.

  “Bell!” a voice called.

  The suddenness of it made her jump in her seat and then she swore under her breath. For half a second she’d allowed herself to imagine the voice had been coming through her headset.

  She spun her chair around. Steve Mendelsohn beckoned to her from two stations away, but it wasn’t Mendelsohn’s waving that had her attention, it was the monitors on the screens in front of his station. On the largest one, soldiers used metal dollies to hustle crates of supplies across the parking lot of Wiesbaden Army Airfield. On one of the other screens, several officers stood in conversation, grave expressions on their faces. On a third…

  Aimee had barely realized she was in motion and then she was beside Mendelsohn and the two other techs who had rushed over at his summons. She stared at the third screen, upon which troops were busy pushing cars and trucks with dead engines across green grass, lining them up as a barricade against the airfield’s inner fence. Cover, she thought, in case of attack.

  “Is this now?” she asked. “This is live?”

  Mendelsohn nodded. “Live.”

  “How the hell did you get them working?” one of the others asked. Half a dozen of them had been at it for over an hour, trying to get images from the external cameras.

  “I didn’t,” Mendelsohn said, gesturing at his computer. “I rebooted the whole system about twenty times before I remembered we had five of them offline for repair. What you’re seeing are the three I was able to repair quickly—“

  “You went topside?” one of the techs—Lazlo, she thought—said.

  Aimee stared at the guy. “The Hump is fully shielded. That includes the systems that operate the cameras. The EMP fried the mechanism that made the damn things rotate. That has to be what burnt them out.”

  “Has to be,” Mendelsohn agreed. He gestured to the images on his monitors, to the soldiers rushing about in crisis mode. “We’re not going to get any movement from these cameras either, but the fact they were shut down during the EMP saved them any further damage. What you see is what you get, but at least it’s something.”

  “Damn right it is,” she said. “We can’t open the doors yet, but at some point—“

  Boots came running. Aimee turned to see Chief Schuler and half a dozen soldiers racing toward them from the Command Core. Mendelsohn had reported the working cameras and they were coming to see for themselves.

  “Steve,” she said, and he turned to her. “Well done.”

  Mendelsohn nodded. Small victories, Aimee thought. They might not fix anything, but they were a happy distraction.

  “Warrant Officer Mendelsohn,” Chief Schuler began.

  He never completed his thought. Lazlo cursed loudly and grabbed Aimee’s arm, spun her back around to face the cameras. Others swore and shouted and they all crowded around Mendelsohn’s station to stare at the monitors. The cameras revealed many more soldiers now, most of them taking cover where they could. They shouldered their weapons and fired in a strange, silent pantomime. Atop a Jeep that had been shoved over in front of the fence, one soldier jerked three times and then fell backward. The airfield was under attack, but down in the Hump all they could do was watch the battle begin.

  Aimee felt a shroud of sorrow enfold her. Nausea roiled in her gut.

  Part of her wished that Mendelsohn had never fixed the cameras.

  “Go, go, go!” a Secret Service agent shouted.

  A hand took Felix’s arm and hustled him forward and he shook it off. Running down an inside stairwell in near darkness without letting panic defeat him—without puking or screaming or crying—was hard enough without anyone shoving him.

  “Don’t try to help me!” he said, shaking free.

  He had no idea who had grabbed him, but they didn’t try it again. Here in the stairwell, with only the emergency torchlight that shone from the chests of the three Tin Men who guarded the President, the gunfire and madness outside the hotel seemed muffled and distant but there were shots that were closer, inside. Nearby. Those were the ones that worried him the most. Seconds ago, the building had shaken with a thump that could only have been an explosion somewhere in the hotel’s corridors, and that was most definitely a problem. Anarchists on staff, he figured, or working for one of the foreign dignitaries on site.

  How many? he thought now. How many people inside the hotel wanted the President of the United States dead?

  One of the Tin Men—Chapel—was coming down behind Felix. The shaft of light that shone from his chest bounced as he descended the stairs and, in that light, Felix could see the backs of the heads of those racing downward in front of him. A handful of Secret Service agents, four aides, and the President, with the other two Tin Men in front of him. As they rounded a landing, Felix stared at the back of the President’s head and hated him. Absolutely hated him. Peter Matheson had neither conceived of the Tin Men nor given the order for their initial deployment, but he had made them into his bullwhip, his punishment for flouting American demands.

  Did it matter that his intentions had been good?

  Felix could barely hear the thunder of human and robot feet upon the stairs thanks to the terrified pounding of his heart, so today? Now?
It did not matter at all.

  Someone bumped him from behind, one of the other agents, and Felix stumbled. He reached out to grab the railing and his hand missed and for an instant he felt free of all gravity, as if he might float away. That same hand caught him again and tugged him back. The Secret Service agent was doing his job, keeping the President safe. Right now that meant keeping them all safe, but only as long as the needs of the group didn’t compromise Matheson’s safety.

  Still he was grateful.

  “One more flight,” said one of the Tin Men at the front—Bingham, the female—and he wondered why they hadn’t been Tin Soldiers instead of Tin Men and knew it was because Tin Men made people think of The Wizard of Oz and people liked The Wizard of Oz.

  Stop, he thought. Be still.

  His mind felt slippery. Terror had pushed him to the edge of a kind of panic he had never experienced. He breathed and forced his thoughts to be still and kept moving. The aides were ahead of him on the stairs. They were the only other people in the group who hadn’t taken an oath to die in order to keep the President alive. He knew two of them by name—Maggie and Jun—and he hoped they lived to see home again. Bingham and the other robot stopped at the bottom of the steps and they all halted while she put her hand on the door. Felix could hear nothing but his own breathing now—even his heart had been silenced—and then Bingham opened the door and stepped out, leaned back in and beckoned to them…and then they were running again, moving through a service corridor. There were offices and bulletin boards with notes and notices tacked all over them…

  Again he thought of Kate. Chapel had suggested they head for Humphreys Deep Station One. It was the nearest truly secure location for the President that he knew would have been shielded from the EMP. Felix’s heart had leapt with the hope that they would arrive to find Kate alive and well, and perhaps they would. But Germany was far away and his daughter was a soldier—she would be fighting. Even if Felix got there alive it wasn’t likely she would be there waiting, and how likely was it that he would get there alive in the first place? He was just an advisor. The Secret Service agents had not made a vow to take a bullet for him.