Tin Men

by Christopher Golden

  “Son of a bitch,” he whispered, just loud enough for them to hear.

  North let out a huff of breath. “We’ll get the bastard, sir. You give the word and I’ll put a gun to every head if I have to. Whatever it takes to figure out who’s behind it.”

  The ice returned to Major Zander’s eyes. “I don’t condone that cowboy shit, Private. You could’ve been more help in the field today with your platoon instead of leaving your bot to gather dust because you soiled your canister. I’m sure they could’ve used you. Can I assume you were assigned a task?”

  Aimee saw North’s jaw working as he tried to contain his reaction—embarrassment or anger, maybe both—but then he nodded.

  “Inventory, sir.”

  “Then get back to it. We have an entire security team to handle this. I’m going to put them onto it. They may want to speak with you, but otherwise you are not to discuss your suspicions with anyone else. We have enough goddamn problems down here.”

  With a short nod toward Aimee, Major Zander turned and strode back toward the Hub. Aimee didn’t even have to look at North to know he was fuming; she could practically feel the anger emanating from him.

  “I don’t expect him to kiss my ring,” North muttered, “but Jesus.”

  “Pretty sure he’s got other things on his mind,” she said.

  “He’s still a dick.”

  Aimee shrugged. “But he’s right. We’ve all got jobs to do and mine isn’t to play Nancy Drew. I’m supposed to be at my station, trying to find an open channel.”

  North shot her a dark look. “What’s stopping you?”

  She held up her hands. “Okay. I guess we all have a right to be assholes today, but you go be one somewhere else.”

  With a scowl, North turned on his heel and started along the corridor away from the Hub.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be doing inventory?” Aimee asked. “You’re not going to get to the kitchen or the storerooms that way.”

  North paused, his back to her, but he had his head cocked slightly so she could just make out his profile. She didn’t like what she saw there. Whatever had happened in the field to change him, North had developed a dark streak, a twisted knot of fear and self-loathing that seemed to run deep.

  “Need to clear my head,” he said, and then off he went, without looking back.

  “I’ll say,” she muttered to herself.

  But as she walked away, the image of his profile lingered in her mind and she found her thoughts following a path that made a chill grip her spine. Just how dark was North’s dark streak, really? It would have embarrassed her to admit how little she really knew a guy with whom she’d had sex several dozen times.

  Don’t be stupid. You know him well enough. You saw him grieving.

  Still, the look on his face began to haunt her, and he had ignored Major Zander’s order to return to inventory. Even the most disgruntled soldier did not disobey a direct order without a better reason than a need to clear his head.

  Her skin felt flushed as she hurried along the catwalk, moving so quickly that she had to keep herself from breaking into a run. Several soldiers cast odd glances her way as she passed but by the time she reached the stairs that led down toward her station there were very few people around.

  Quieting the panic in her heart, she rushed to her station. Focused on their own tasks and worries, her fellow tech-monkeys paid little attention to her. Aimee sat down, ignoring her headset and the job she was supposed to be returning to—the quiet crackle of what might have been an open channel to Vancouver would have to wait. Instead, she tapped at her keyboard, plugged in her access code, and started to scan the live surveillance video of the corridor where she and North had parted ways. That particular spoke led to the Staging Areas for the 8th Battalion and the expansion currently under construction for the 13th.

  Shifting from camera to camera, she was able to search the corridor but saw no sign of North. Who did he know in the 8th Battalion?

  “Where the hell are you?” she whispered.

  A commotion began to stir several stations away and she glanced over to see people gathered in front of a screen, watching the battle that continued aboveground. Either Major Zander had changed his stance on confining the video feed to the Core or someone was breaking the rules. From the troubled expressions on the pale faces of her colleagues, she knew the attack had not been repelled, but the tension in them also told her that the fight had not been decided yet. People were dying up there, both allies and enemies, and the knowledge fueled her grim purpose. People had died down below as well, and if there were enemies here, she wanted them exposed.

  Surfing through camera feeds from the 8th Battalion’s staging areas, she saw no sign of North, but he could have been in the bathroom or something.

  But she kept coming back to that look on his face, that grim profile. As much as it had been full of fear and frustration, there had been purpose in it as well. Purpose and pain and something else as well—regret. Perhaps even guilt.

  Someone cheered over at the other station, people not doing their jobs but instead focusing on the topside battle. She glanced at her headset—they weren’t the only ones ignoring their duties, but she couldn’t shake the fear that had taken hold of her. Paranoia? Perhaps, but so be it. If there was ever a day to be paranoid, this was it.

  She scanned the corridor again. The one other place he could be was in one of the unfinished Staging Areas for the 13th Battalion, and there were no slumbering soldiers there, nobody he could hurt…if he had been the saboteur. What harm could he do?

  Aimee felt sick. No way. He has no access. He’s a Tin Man, not a tech.

  Still, she switched over to view the unfinished Staging Areas. All work had stopped this morning when the shit had hit the fan and so the place was truly empty, the lights dimmed. All three of those sprawling rooms looked the same, full of the tech that would be the foundation for the new canisters that would be brought in, but each with several monitoring stations already in place.

  In Staging Area Thirty-Two, one of the monitors glowed blue in the otherwise shadowy room and a figure sat before it, tapping away at the keyboard. Aimee zoomed in on the live feed to confirm what she already knew.

  North.

  How the hell had he even accessed the station? He’d have needed an authorization code and, from there, at least a fundamental knowledge of how to navigate through the Hump’s operational systems. The USARIC didn’t train their soldiers for that. And what was he up to?

  “Okay,” she whispered. “You want to play?”

  She had seen the anguish in him when he realized that his platoon had been cut off, that their minds were trapped inside their bots, and his pain when he’d discovered that four of them had died after that sabotage had clearly been real as well.

  But did that mean he hadn’t been the one responsible?

  There weren’t a lot of things Aimee Bell was good at. She’d tried sports and musical instruments and dance and theatre as a little girl and sucked at all of them. She couldn’t really even tell a story or a joke without fumbling along and blowing the punchline. Her flirting skills were painful. But this? Making a computer do her bidding? She was a virtuoso.

  Her fingers worked the keyboard. With a final tap, she summoned an image to her top screen—live video showing North’s face, hard at work. Every monitoring station had a camera for face-to-face communication, but they could be made to work in one direction if you knew the right codes. She slipped on her headphones and listened to him cursing quietly to himself, staring at the pained expression on his face. North looked frightened and loaded with regret, so pale she thought he might throw up.

  “I’m going to hell,” she heard him whisper. And on screen, she saw a twisted, frantic smile part his lips. “Fuck, I’m already there.”

  Working fast—knowing speed had to be everything right now—she hacked his station. It was the sort of thing she had been doing since the age of twelve and it would’ve scared the s
hit out of her bosses. If her superiors had ever had any idea how easy it was for Aimee and people like her to manipulate their systems, they’d never have hired her. Historically, governments and armies did not like to place their trust in people who were so obviously smarter than they were.

  Her lower screen showed every one of North’s keystrokes. Aimee frowned as she studied the unfamiliar options on display, but it took her only a moment to understand what North had been doing instead of trying to clear his head. The Hump had been on lockdown since the Pulse. Now, with the airfield under attack by what the C.O. had estimated to be as many as six hundred heavily-armed anarchists, the son of a bitch was trying to cancel the Phoenix Protocols so he could release the door locks and make the elevators function again.

  She held her breath, staring at the screen, then lifted her gaze to study the desperation etched in North’s face. However many anarchists were out there, he intended to let them in.

  Not a fucking chance.

  The stale underground air seemed to fuzz with static. She ignored North’s desperate eyes on her top screen and focused on the bottom. Wings of panic spread and fluttered in her chest but she forced her hands to remain steady as she typed in codes that broke a dozen rules. She’d already hacked the monitoring station North had commandeered, and it wasn’t difficult to take it one step further.

  With a final click of the mouse, she took over his station, slaving its functions to her own.

  She glanced at the upper screen, taking grim satisfaction in the bafflement on North’s face. Frowning, he glared at his workstation and kept typing and trying the mouse. The screen he had been looking at would be frozen. When he attempted to start the process over again or reboot his workstation…

  North slid back from the station and threw his hands in the air. She couldn’t hear him swearing but she could read the words on his lips and knew what he had just seen. His screen had gone dark.

  “Bastard,” Aimee whispered, dropping her gaze to her lower screen.

  It took her thirteen seconds to abort the complicated process North had begun. Even as she did so, her thoughts whirled. However North had gotten into the system, he’d had access codes—some kind of authorization. As fast as it occurred to her, Aimee quickly reset the administrative passwords for the Hump’s defensive and surveillance systems. With every keystroke, she felt the weight of her actions closing in around her. She’d done the only thing she could think of to safeguard the base. She’d have to face the consequences later.

  “Choudhry! Parker!” she called, barely looking up. “Get over here!”

  Heart pounding, she stared at the lower screen and forced herself to calm down. Had she done everything possible to keep him from trying again? Breathe, she told herself. Think.

  Her fingers rested on the keypad and she stared at them for a second or two as a terrible question occurred to her. What if he hadn’t had a real authorization code at all? What if he’d found a backdoor in the system?

  North? she thought. Even if there is a backdoor, how could he have found it?

  She glanced to her right, over at the distant workstation where people had gathered to watch the battle raging topside, made her question her doubts. Whoever the anarchists were out there—the people killing Americans practically over her head—North had been working with them.

  She swore loudly and started typing again, blinking, thinking too fast. If the system had a backdoor, she had to find it and close it or at least alter it enough that nobody else would be able to use it, not North and not the killers assaulting the airfield right now.

  “Choudhry!” she shouted, with another quick glance.

  This time, Warrant Officer Arun Choudry seemed to hear her, even turned her way, but something caught Aimee’s eye and she pulled her attention away from him. She ceased breathing a moment as she gazed at the upper screen, which showed the workstation North had commandeered. The chair he’d been sitting in was empty.

  Aimee felt as if some kind of bubble had formed around her. Caught up in the shock of North’s treason, frantic to stop him, she’d ignored everyone else. Parker and Choudhry and the rest were focused on the enemy attacking from outside while she had been fighting the one within.

  “Goddamnit, Choudhry!” she screamed, hating the edge of panic in her voice.

  Thoughts in chaos, she snatched up the headset from her station, tapped a key to open an internal line, and stared at the empty chair on her upper screen. How long since he’d been gone? Where would he hide?

  “Command Core. Corporal Collins.”

  Aimee tapped the side of her headset. “Collins this is Warrant Officer Aimee Bell. I need Major Zander immediately.”

  Something shifted beside her and she glanced up to see that an irritated Choudhry had at last torn himself away from the combat-spectators down the row. He looked pissed, but must have seen the sincerity of her panic because his expression softened and he mouthed a question: what’s going on?

  “In case you didn’t know, Bell,” Collins said, “we’re a little busy up—“

  “We’ve got an enemy inside, Corporal. Put him on.”

  “I think Command Core would know if there’d been a breach.”

  “I’m not talking about—“

  “Look, he’s in the middle of something. It’ll take you two minutes to walk over here. You want his attention, you’re more likely to get it face to face.”

  She whipped off her headset and threw it at the workstation. Rising, she turned to look at the surprise on Choudhry’s face. His rich brown eyes were narrowed.

  “What?” he asked.

  “We’ve got a traitor down here. Private Tom North.”

  “North?” Choudhry echoed dubiously.

  She pointed to her station, already moving away. “Start tracking back the surveillance on Staging Area 13 and you’ll find it. And watch that screen! You see anything weird, report it to Command Core.”

  “You were just on with them and they weren’t listening,” he said as she raced away.

  At the metal stairs, she turned to call back over her shoulder. “They’re going to have to listen.”

  A hundred thoughts filled her mind as she ran along the catwalk. Faces turned to watch her go, brows knitted in concern. If enough time passed, some of the people down here were going to unravel, no matter how well-trained. She wondered if they thought it had already happened to her.

  Fifty feet from the Command Core, she spotted Chief Schuler standing in front of the doors with Kenny Wheeler and a security officer she didn’t recognize. When Schuler spotted her approaching, his back stiffened and his eyes went cold. She’d always had the impression he didn’t like her very much, but there was something different about this. A tiny alarm began to jangle in her head.

  “That’s close enough, Bell,” Chief Schuler said.

  Aimee froze ten steps away from them, reading his tone and the body language from the security officer. Kenny Wheeler’s facial expression told the rest of the story.

  “I know the identity of our saboteur, sir,” she said.

  “Yes,” Schuler said. “So do we.”

  The doors to the Command Core slid open and Major Zander stepped out with North right behind him. North looked at her with a mixture of pity and disgust that made her scream inside.

  “Corporal,” Major Zander said to the security officer, “put Warrant Officer Bell in a hole so dark that mushrooms will grow out of her goddamn eyes.”

  ~17~

  Felix heard the first cries from the darkness a full two minutes before Chapel’s guidelight illuminated three figures sitting on the subway tracks. All three were adults, which meant that the plaintive cry could not have come from them. That had been a baby, no question in his mind.

  The people on the tracks stirred excitedly, muttering to each other as they shifted and sat up. They shielded their eyes from the sudden glare even as they tried to see past it, to identify the shadowed faces of the new arrivals.

  “Oh,
thank God,” one of them said in Greek. The man shot to his feet, cocking his head and trying to see into the shadows around Chapel. He squinted against the brightness of the robot’s light. “Who are you? Are others coming?”

  An old woman who’d been sitting beside him glanced up with terror in her eyes. “What’s happened?” she asked, also in Greek. “They kept telling me someone would come but no one was coming, and so I told them something terrible must have happened for the police and the train people to leave us down here like this.”

  “Even the flashlights—“ the man began.

  He cut himself off mid-sentence, his words ceasing because he had realized that he was not talking to another man—at least not the way he saw it.

  “Sir, please step aside,” Chapel said.

  Felix frowned. He had never liked the translation program used in the Tin Men. Their voices were inhuman enough when speaking English, but at least then the voices were patterned after their own. Run through the auto-translate program that allowed the soldiers to respond in whatever language they had last been addressed, their voices sounded oppressively technological.

  “Tin Men,” the old woman said, this in English. She spat on the subway tracks.

  “What are you doing here?” the man said, also shifting to English. “Have you come to help? Did your government send you?”

  In the darkness, Felix knew he and the others must be indistinct, faceless shapes to these people, and he thought it best to keep it that way—at least for the two presidents.

  “Step—“ Chapel started.

  “We’ll do what we can,” Felix said, moving into the light, drawing the track-sitters’ attention.

  “We don’t have time to—“ Syd began, stepping out of darkness.

  By then voices had begun to rise further along the tracks. Others had seen Chapel’s guidelight and were calling out, some stumbling toward what they believed to be their rescue. Syd’s right, Felix thought. We don’t have time for this. But they had little choice. The tunnels were their path to survival and they had known from the outset that they would encounter stranded passengers.