Tin Men

by Christopher Golden

  “Chapel…” Syd said, his name some combination of question and warning, like Whatever you’re going to do, make it smart and make it now.

  “Sir, let’s gather the other passengers so I don’t have to repeat myself,” Chapel said. “I can light the way if you can lead me to them.”

  The Greek squinted, trying to make out the rest of them in the darkness, perhaps taking a head count. But he had been down in the dark underground for hours, so he did not question the offer of help. The old woman rose with aid from another man, and then ambled along behind Chapel. Maggie and Jun passed by Felix and President Matheson and that was good—human camouflage for the two presidents. Bingham brought up the rear, making sure to angle her guidelight so that the two presidents remained in shadow.

  As they neared the stalled train, Chapel’s light picked out dozens of others camped around the rear of the dead subway train. People glanced up hopefully when bathed in that light, and many of them started talking, grateful that the dark had been pushed back even a little. A quartet of children cheered.

  “Everyone please stay calm,” Chapel said. “We’re going to do a head count and examine the train and will have instructions for you in just a few minutes.”

  Felix felt sick. He caught the ghosts of faces in that subterranean purgatory, and it was not the anger or desperation or even the suspicion that made his stomach roil with self-loathing and doubt—it was the hope he saw. The deception made him want to stop, to help, to speak the truth, but he knew that he would be jeopardizing the president if he did any of those things—not to mention imperiling his own chances of seeing Kate again.

  Maggie came up beside him and whispered his name. Felix shushed her. In the glow from Bingham’s chest plate, he glanced over at Jun and saw grim acceptance. As they began to make their way around the train, asking passengers to move aside, they all knew precisely what they were doing. Chapel began to count aloud, even stopped to speak to a woman with a broken leg and a man who held his squalling infant in his arms.

  Felix had always been a bit claustrophobic and he had worried from the moment they had descended into the subway station that this would be too much for him. So far he had surprised himself. Despite the oppressive Athenian heat aboveground, here a cool breeze moved through the tunnels, which were high and wide enough that he never felt like the earth was caving in on him. The air was thick and moist and in many places it smelled of urine and worse, but it moved enough that he never felt as if it might choke him.

  Not until now.

  He slid past people, brushing arms and backs and shoulders in the narrow space between train and wall. Blinking, trying to control his fidgeting heart, he avoided the faces of the passengers. He began to focus on the idea of fresh air and freedom.

  Matheson and Rostov kept to the shadows. Syd and Kirkham, the other surviving Secret Service agent, closed ranks with the two presidents and with Rostov’s bodyguard. The bodyguard had been shot in the shoulder as they escaped down into the underground. At some point he’d torn up his lightweight gray suit jacket to bandage the shoulder; he had lost enough blood that he had grown pale, but he did not seem any weaker.

  As they reached each new cluster of people gathered alongside the train, Chapel blinded the passengers for a moment with his light, got them blinking, and they all kept moving. Bingham counted heads aloud as she moved, another distraction, and in that way they passed four of the five subway cars.

  Felix saw the recognition on the young woman’s face before she had even spoken. A college student, he thought, gauging by her age and clothing. She stared at him, mouth hanging wide, and she whispered a Greek word that he had always loved. Archimalakas. It meant “Chief of assholes,” as in the worst asshole in the world.

  “Oh, you bastards, what are you doing?” she said in English.

  He could not make the argument that they had come to help. He could not tell that lie to her face when he had seen the recognition in her eyes. The presidents of the United States and Russia were ten feet away, but this college kid had just recognized Peter Matheson’s chief global economic advisor in a near-pitch black subway tunnel.

  “Please, don’t—“ Felix began.

  The girl shoved him out of the way, cursing as she shouldered past. She scanned the others with him, dismissed Jun and Maggie in an instant and focused on the two human Secret Service agents and the men behind them.

  “Fuck,” the college girl said, her accent noticeable even in that one word. “What are you doing down here?”

  The edge in her tone made it plain she understood already. Maybe she didn’t have the whole answer, but their presence told her enough that she reached up with a shaking hand and her breath hitched in her throat. In the reflected glow of Chapel’s guidelight, her eyes filled with tears.

  “What’s happened?” she pleaded in Greek, glancing upward as if she could have seen through thousands of tons of concrete and earth and stone. “What’s happened up there?”

  The man they’d first encountered tried to comfort her but she spun on him. “Are you an idiot? Don’t you see who this is?”

  Chapel pointed his weapon upward and fired twice, the gunshots so much louder in the echoing cavern of the tunnel. People screamed and pushed themselves against the wall or the train or dropped to the ground in a cowering crouch.

  “Move aside! Move aside, now!” Chapel roared, first in Greek and then in English.

  Syd shouted to Matheson to move and then they were all hustling through the terrified passengers. People were shoved and knocked aside. A young boy began to scream.

  Felix fell into step with Matheson and Rostov and the rest of them, trying to stay ahead of Bingham. Felix felt a deep well of guilt, wanted to cry out his regret to the passengers, but he was also grateful. The gunshots had cleared the people from his path, had driven away the suffocating press of human flesh around him.

  “What now?” he asked Syd as they reached the front of the train.

  He bumped into Chapel and the robot soldier shoved him out of the way. Felix staggered into some of the passengers who had been camped in the darkness at the front of the train. His fingers touched cloth and skin, the soft, giving flab of someone’s arm.

  No, Felix thought. No, don’t leave me.

  “I’m sorry,” he said to the doughy woman beside him, whose features were only partly visible here on the periphery of Chapel’s light.

  “All of you, keep back and pay close attention, because I’m only going to say this once!” Chapel announced.

  Felix watched the others gather around him—Maggie and Jun, Syd and Agent Kirkham, Rostov and his bodyguard, Matheson and Bingham and Chapel. It felt as if they had moved away from him, as if they had stepped through some wardrobe into a Narnia called survival and left him behind.

  “You can’t leave these people here!” Felix said.

  Somehow his voice quieted a dozen others. Many of the people in the shadows held their tongues, shifting to look at him. Taking a deep breath, Felix recovered his bearings. The presidents and the Tin Men and the others had moved beyond the stranded passengers now, west of the broken down subway train.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we did not come here to help you,” Chapel began, as the people along either side of the dead train cars began to fill in those tight spaces.

  “Peter, don’t let him do it!” Felix said.

  In the shadows, President Matheson said nothing. The college girl who had identified him began to shout his name, pushing past a few others and demanding answers about what had happened to the world today.

  “We did not come here to help you!” Chapel said again, and he glared at Felix with those robot eyes, his tone brooking no argument. “Catastrophe has struck. Your whole city is in crisis. Maybe the world. We have hard decisions to make and no time to see to the needs of so many people while we’re making those decisions.”

  “Goddamn it, Chapel!” Felix growled, hands curling into fists.

  “But we can’t just lea
ve you here,” Chapel continued.

  Felix exhaled, fists opening.

  President Matheson stepped out of the shadows. Bathed in the illumination provided by Chapel’s guidelight, he gestured for Rostov to do the same. When people saw the two presidents together, Felix thought that at least some of them would curse the two men, but no one did.

  “We’re continuing on immediately,” President Matheson told the crowd, and Chapel repeated the words in Greek. “The only lights we have are from the robot soldiers who are with us. I am sorry we can’t provide more for you or make the journey safer, but anyone who wants to follow us please gather your things and leave with us now. We will guide you as far as the next station, where you will be able to reach the surface. From there, you will be on your own.”

  Matheson surprised Felix. Even if the immediate, major effects of his concussion were wearing off, he had to still be disoriented. He had to be holding himself together through sheer force of will.

  When Chapel finished translating, people began talking anxiously as they gathered whatever they had with them. Felix saw a man half-shrouded in darkness slip his laptop case onto his shoulder, then look down at it for a moment before discarding it completely. Trapped underground, these people could only have suspected what had happened, but this man knew that his laptop had become so much slag.

  “Felix!”

  He turned to see the president staring at him.

  “You coming?” Matheson asked.

  Felix exhaled and slipped away from the passengers. Rostov and his bodyguard were talking quietly as Felix passed them and the bodyguard gave him a disdainful glance.

  “Screw,” Felix muttered to them.

  Then he was beside the president, with Chapel, Syd and Kirkham closing in around them. President Matheson looked him over a bit warily.

  “You seem a bit shaken up, my friend, but we’ve got to move. You going to be able to keep up?”

  Felix tried to read the President’s tone. Was that genuine concern or some sort of warning?

  “I guess we’ll all have to,” Felix said. He glanced at the shadowed crowd. “One thing worries me, though. When we reach a station and these people actually get outside, they’re going to tell anyone who’ll listen that they saw you down here. You and Rostov. Chances are pretty good that the anarchists will figure it out. If they’re not already tracking us down here, they will be.”

  Matheson stared at him. He winced and massaged his left temple as he sagged a bit, then only shook his head as if he had been trying to send a message Felix had not received.

  Rostov had been eavesdropping. Now he sneered, half his face lit by Bingham’s guidelight and the other half cast in deep blue shadow.

  “You just insisted they not be left behind, Professor,” Rostov said. “You can’t have it both ways.”

  “I thought you’d have left them,” Felix said.

  Rostov shook his head. “I am a practical man.” He pointed to his bodyguard. “Grigori, though…he would have been very happy if we had chosen to simplify matters by shooting them all.”

  The bodyguard—Grigori—smirked at Felix and then broke into a grin that revealed a broken front tooth and stretched the white scars on his face. Then they all began to march onward. Careful not to stumble on the tracks, Felix cast a sidelong glance at Grigori and then at Rostov. The Russian president had just made a joke.

  Felix swallowed, his chest tightening. He thought it was a joke.

  Somewhere on the road to Haifa, Danny began to daydream. Sitting in the passenger seat of the Humvee-TSV, he stared out the window and his mind began to drift. He ought to have been working hard to stay alert. There were more Bot Killers out there—at least two more TSVs, he figured—and Hanif Khan had made it clear they would keep after the remnants of Platoon A until they had destroyed every robot they could find. It made him wonder about Trang and the others they’d left behind in Damascus, but he couldn’t think about those guys, now. The Bot Killers would have to get through the embassy walls and the Marines guarding those walls before they could even take a shot.

  No, he had to focus on his squad. Kate’s squad, really, since she was leading them. The Bot Killers might not be pursuing them solely to rescue Khan but it seemed clear they weren’t going to risk the life of their chief unnecessarily. If they could destroy the squad and keep Khan alive, they would do it…otherwise they would have blown the Humvee apart with rockets or an IED on the road.

  On the road? Only if they can get ahead of us.

  Unless they’re already ahead of us.

  Danny sat in the passenger seat and stared out his shattered window at the sun-baked hills. He felt trapped, he felt like he was sweating, but of course that was impossible. The Tin Men weren’t knights in armor. They had nothing but thoughts and data inside them.

  Bullshit. Everything I am is inside this thing.

  Tattoos didn’t matter. Scars didn’t matter. This was the naked substance of him. He had never been harder to kill, but he had never been more afraid.

  God, he thought, I’m so tired.

  He flinched—a small tick in the function of the robot he inhabited. What was he thinking? Tin Men could not sweat and they definitely could not get tired.

  And yet he was. He stared out the window, pushing away the groan of the engine and the voices of Torres and Birnbaum, the only people still talking inside the Humvee.

  There hadn’t been a lot of talk since Ambassador Day had been killed. The man’s body had been wrapped up tightly in blankets taken from some villager’s clothesline and they had brought the ambassador with them at the request of his daughter. How long, Danny wondered, before the corpse would really begin to smell? They would reach Haifa soon, and then if all went well they would be at sea and the breeze would take some of the stink away, but at some point that seventeen-year-old girl was going to have to fight to keep from throwing up because of the smell of her father’s corpse, and that was the sort of thing that Danny didn’t ever want to see.

  Alexa had lost her father. Danny had lost his father, too, but he still remembered when he had reached out to a friend’s wife after she’d lost her mother, to say that he understood.

  “It’s not a fucking club,” his friend’s wife had said. “Your grief doesn’t make my grief any easier, so keep it to yourself.”

  Later, he’d wished that he had told her off. Later still, he’d been grateful that he had been too shocked to even consider doing such a thing, because the friend’s wife had been right. Danny couldn’t remember her name—his friend, Brossi, had been married twice since then—and the woman had been exhausting, but she had been right.

  His grief wasn’t going to make Alexa Day’s grief any easier, so while she wept in the seat right behind his, he kept silent. When she drifted off to sleep, he wished he could tuck a blanket over her. Stupid, in the middle of Syria, but the urge was there. He couldn’t take away her grief, but somebody had to look after her.

  The tiredness settled more deeply inside him. If he could have breathed, could have felt a real heart beating inside of him, he knew he would have felt more alert. Instead he began to think about the original Tin Man, rusting in the woods alongside the yellow brick road.

  “Oil can,” he whispered, and laughed softly to himself. The laugh troubled him. He felt detached from it, as if it had issued from someone else’s lips.

  Out across the brown scrubland, a lone man stood watching them pass. Danny frowned and stared at the distant figure. Against the rise of the hill behind him, the man seemed very small, but as they rounded a turn in the road Danny realized that they were going to drive within fifty yards of him. He almost opened his mouth to warn the others, thinking it might be one of the anarchists with a roadside bomb. Something stopped him from bringing it up, a strange familiarity, as if he knew the distant man by his silhouette alone, by his long, thin arms and the sad stoop of his shoulders.

  Mesmerized, Danny stared at the man as the Humvee-TSV drew nearer. Then they wer
e passing by and he stared at the tall, angular man with his librarian spectacles, and Danny felt paralyzed.

  The man smiled and raised a hand in a laconic wave.

  Danny lifted his own hand to return the wave and a violent shudder went through him. The twitch made him blink several times. When he focused on that brown scrubland again, he saw that the man was gone.

  Impossible, he thought. His father had been dead nearly a decade, and yet…

  “You all right?” Kate asked from her seat behind the driver.

  Danny glanced back at her and gave another soft laugh. “Are you?”

  She studied him a bit more closely, but didn’t inquire any further. Danny glanced out at the scrubland again but there was nothing.

  What the hell was that? he thought—but then he thought he knew. The robots might be indefatigable but the human mind was not. If this was the result of his mind being overtaxed, what would happen when they were unable to end their shift, to cycle out of the bots? The Tin Men would need to find some way to rest, to shut down. Questions swam into his head, fears about the long-term effects. Hallucinations, for one—that was pretty clear. With time, would their minds go on the fritz? Danny wondered how long they had before their memories or cognitive functions would begin to deteriorate.

  Leaning his head against the frame of his broken window, he tried to let his thoughts drift the way he did when he put his head on his pillow at night. He didn’t fall asleep, but it calmed him enough that twenty minutes later, as they rolled into Haifa, he felt more alert and the world around him no longer seemed quite so surreal. When he thought of his father, of the vision of the man he’d seen on the side of the road, he felt haunted.

  Ping.

  Danny blinked and sat up. Had any of the others heard that or was it just inside his head? They drove around a van that had died in the road and he saw there were many other cars ahead. Weaving amongst them would be a challenge. He spotted people sitting on balconies and old men in folding chairs in front of residential buildings as if they were standing guard.