“Her eye going to be all right?” he asked, nodding at Torres.
Birnbaum gave him a look that told him how stupid the question had been. “Other than the fact that it’s gone? Nothing I can do for her, Kelso. If I had a spare I might be able to wire it in, but we left all our spare parts littering the street downtown.”
Torres gave him a nod. “I’ll be okay. Thanks.”
Movement on the dock caught Danny’s attention. He glanced over and saw an old woman with three children, an older boy and two little girls, coming off the dock and staring anxiously at the fire spreading along the pier. He realized they had been out there the whole time amongst the slips and dead-engine boats, and he had never seen them.
“Ma’am, are you all right?” he called.
The Tin Men all turned to look at her but she ushered the kids away, shaking her head as tears went down her face. He wondered if they had frightened her into tears or if she had left someone behind out there on the dock, or at sea. Whatever it was, she couldn’t wait to get those children as far from the fire and from the Tin Men as she could. Danny silently wished her well.
“Why don’t you just kill me?”
The voice rose weakly from below Danny. He glanced down to see Khan staring up at him, teeth bared.
“You killed all of my men and yet you want to keep me alive,” Khan said. “Why not kill me or just let me die here?”
“That’s going to be the President’s decision,” Danny replied. “Whatever you know, he’s going to want to know.”
Kate strode over and stared down at him. “That’s right, Khan. You’re our gift to the commander-in-chief.”
Khan spit on the ground.
“Hey,” Torres said, crouching beside him, her ruined eye ghoulish in the long afternoon light. “Don’t poke the bear.”
“Sergeant Wade,” Travaglini called.
Danny and Kate turned to see him standing beside Alexa. The girl’s expression seemed carved in stone. Danny thought no seventeen-year-old girl should ever come to wear that expression on her face.
They walked over to Trav and the girl.
“Alexa and I have been talking,” Trav said.
They glanced at the girl, who met Kate’s eyes with a grim, steady gaze.
“I know we need to hurry,” Alexa said, unblinking. “But it’s not right, dragging my father’s body all over the place. Before we go I’d like to bury him here, if you’ll help me. I’ll come back for him when I can. When the world is better.”
The girl took a deep breath and let it out, and in that moment Danny could see all the little broken pieces of her heart, right there in her eyes.
“Can we do that?” Alexa asked.
Kate nodded slowly. “Yeah, we can do that.”
~21~
Felix knew they were making progress, but in the dark the shadows all looked the same. He felt like screaming. He dared not ask how much further to Piraeus, afraid the answer might break whatever remained of his spirit. Instead he just shuffled along in the wake of the two presidents, muscles as taut as violin strings. The tunnels were so dark that even with the splashes of light provided by the Tin Men he stumbled again and again over the tracks. Twice he fell and skinned his palms. Others had it worse. People walked in columns, one hand on the person ahead, or they walked side-by-side in a prison-road-gang shuffle as they tried not to fall. With one robot in front and one in back there wasn’t a lot of light to go around, but they made do.
They had passed four underground stations thus far. Each time, the passengers they had gathered along the way had flooded the subway platforms and rushed up the steps in a frantic struggle toward daylight. Each time, Felix had been tempted to go with them. But he stayed in line behind President Matheson and President Rostov, following Chapel’s guidelight as if it had mesmerized him, and perhaps it had. He thought of Moses leading his people out of Egypt, but he knew the comparison was flawed. Matheson and Rostov might not wish these people harm but neither president showed much interest in their welfare. Leading them to an exit had simply proven to be the most expedient way of dealing with them.
“Platform ahead!” President Matheson called.
Chapel repeated the words, translating into Greek. A cheer went up from the latest congregation of passengers who had marched through the darkness behind them. Felix could hear several people break down in sobs. Others picked up their pace, physically urging the pack onward.
“Don’t push!” he shouted. “You’ll be there in a minute or two. If you push, people are going to get hurt and I promise you that you’ll be one of them.”
The crowd subsided a bit. The two presidents remained in the lead with Chapel and two Secret Service agents and the Russian president’s bodyguard, Grigori. The bodyguard’s shoulder wound had been bandaged, but he’d lost a lot of blood. Somehow he kept walking, refusing to give in to the injury.
Ahead, Chapel stopped and turned to face the train platform so that the guidelight from his chest plate would illuminate as much of the route to the surface as possible. Grigori and the Secret Service agents moved the presidents out of the way as dozens of passengers hauled themselves off the tracks and began to rush toward the exit stairs.
Felix felt a hand on his arm. In the dark, with only the dimmest peripheral illumination coming from Chapel’s light, he turned and saw Maggie. Beyond her, Jun tried to stare through the darkness at his feet, picking each step carefully.
“Hey,” Maggie said, linking her arm in his and snuggling up beside him as they walked, almost as if he were taking her on some old-fashioned promenade. “We’re going.”
Felix glanced at Jun, who gave him a nod, eyes alight with urgency.
“You’re going to stay in Athens?” Felix asked. “Without the President, you have no way of getting home. It may be weeks or months before the situation normalizes enough for you to find safe passage back to the States.”
“You may be right,” Maggie said sadly, “but we’re focusing on staying alive, not getting home. It’s dangerous for anyone in Athens right now, maybe Americans especially, but we’ve got a better chance of being killed with him than on our own.”
“You should come,” Jun said.
Felix took Maggie’s hand. Her skin felt soft and warm, so comforting that it nearly persuaded him.
“Living doesn’t matter much to me right now,” he said, unsettled by the realization that he meant it. “All I want is to see my daughter again. The only hope I have of doing that is if I can make it to Wiesbaden. But you go, and try to stay safe.”
Maggie squeezed his hand, stepped up and kissed his cheek the same way his daughter had always kissed him good night when she was a little girl. Those days were long gone, but it was nice to remember.
“Good luck, Professor,” Jun said.
“And to you, my friend.”
Most of the passengers had already made their way onto the platform and through the exit. Only a few stragglers remained as Jun and Maggie walked over to President Matheson to explain their decision. They hadn’t gotten more than a couple of sentences into it when the President reached out to take Jun’s hand, shook once, and then offered his hand to Maggie. She hugged him instead.
Felix moved nearer to them. Chapel and Bingham still faced the platform.
“Let’s move, Mr. President,” Syd said. “The more passengers we return to the surface, the more people there are who have seen your face and know you’re alive. Any one of them could point your enemies in the right direction.”
“I agree,” President Rostov said. “These delays could be fatal to us.”
President Matheson ignored them, clasping Maggie’s hand one final time. “Thank you,” he said. “I hope I’ll see you both again one day.”
“So do we, sir,” Maggie said.
Jun tugged her arm and she turned. Chapel turned away even as they hurried for the platform, leaving Bingham to light their exit. Chapel’s light dispelled some of the darkness ahead, further along the tunnel. Fe
lix felt a twist in his gut, knowing that they still had miles to hike through the dark. He told himself—again and again—that Kate waited for him at the end.
“Wait,” a gruff voice called.
Grigori had spoken, but not to Chapel or to Syd. Felix stared at Rostov’s bodyguard, at the blood soaked into the fabric of his shirt around the left shoulder and the hollows around his eyes. Perhaps he was not invincible after all. Grigori took two steps toward the platform. Maggie had already scrambled up onto the concrete ledge but Jun paused with his hand on the painted concrete edge and turned toward Grigori.
“I’m coming with you,” the bodyguard said.
He lowered his gaze, but could not hide the shame he felt.
Rostov took two steps toward him, features contorted with anger and a kind of revulsion. “Worm,” Rostov said in Russian. “You have a duty to your country.”
Grigori hung his head a moment longer, then lifted his gaze. “If I stay with you, even if I live to see the end of this tunnel I will be of no use to you. Another hour or two of this and you will need to carry me out of the station at Piraeus. Every step I take, I feel the bullet in my shoulder grinding against the bone. It must come out.”
Rostov stared at his bodyguard, but after a moment the anger leeched from his face.
“Go, then,” Rostov said, exhaling loudly. He brushed a hand at the air, ushering his bodyguard away. “Find a doctor. Live, you bastard. I hope you have a long life full of children who break your heart.”
Aimee sat on her hard bunk in the Hump’s stockade, a sterile concrete corridor that would have reminded her of a hospital ward if not for the steel doors, each with its own mesh grill window. Her cell had a small toilet in the corner and she felt the need to use it. It was clean enough, but part of her felt that if she used it she would be accepting her position as a prisoner.
The cell had no mirror, otherwise Aimee would have been staring into it, wondering what Zander had seen that he could have mistaken for the kind of person who would betray her country, her battalion, and the whole damn world in the bargain. Her version of events sounded so much more rational, at least to her own mind. How could Zander not listen to her and North and know that? Did the guy have some racial or gender prejudice that she hadn’t picked up on before or had North been that convincing?
Don’t be stupid. North used your access code to get into the system. He can’t just assume you’re not involved because you have an innocent face.
“Hey,” a voice called from the corridor. “Hey, Aimee.”
She clutched the edges of the bunk, bilious hatred burning up the back of her throat. North. She half-thought that he’d somehow managed to get out of his cell but realized he wouldn’t have been able to do that without her hearing it.
Aimee rose and walked to the door, placing her hands on the cold steel. She stared out through the metal mesh, shifted her head to look up and down the corridor and saw that it was empty. Diagonally across from her, North had his forehead pressed against the mesh of his own cell door. With his face framed by the small window, his blue eyes were as bright as ever. Images fluttered in her mind like photographs scattered by an errant breeze. Those eyes, when North had first flirted with her. Those eyes, when things ended between them. Those eyes, on a surveillance camera, revealing his true nature.
“I should tell you—“ he began.
“There’s nothing I want to hear from you,” she said. “If you have something to say, tell it to Major Zander when he comes to question us.”
“That’s not…” He pressed his eyes closed for a second and then reopened them, gazing at her across the space between two cells. “I didn’t know, you understand? I just wanted to say that to you before things get uglier than they already are.”
“Didn’t know what?” Aimee said.
“What you saw before…me mourning those guys…that was the real me. I had no idea that they were going to be trapped in the bots. Until you told me, I thought we were remote piloting, just like everyone else. If I’d known—“
“You wouldn’t have betrayed your country?”
North hesitated. Even through the mesh, she could see that he looked a little sick. “You haven’t seen the things I’ve seen. When we’re in the tin, we’re not human. It’s too easy to do ugly shit. You take away the risk and you’re not a soldier anymore, you’re just a killer.”
Is that what this is about? she thought. Is that what changed you?
“So who did you kill?”
“Her name was Sabeen. Six years old. I don’t know what she looked like because I never saw her face,” he said, voice a rasp of pain. “Just what was left of her.”
Aimee tried to make sense of it.
“You know how many soldiers come out of the army haunted by shit they did?” she said. “They get help, if they can. Or they end up topping themselves. But what you’ve done—you want me to feel bad for you? I don’t give a shit who put you up to this or why you went along. After you found out that your platoon were trapped in their bots, you sabotaged their canisters. You killed some of them with your own damn hands.”
North practically snarled at her. “You think those guys are gonna make it back here? Their bodies are just going to rot. They’re vegetables now. The ones who died are the lucky ones. I was trying to do them the same favor I’d want them to do for me if I was as completely fucked as they are.”
Aimee couldn’t reply. She wanted to argue, to tell him that all of the Tin Men based out of the Hump would find their way home, but she knew the odds were slim. The world outside would be one of destruction, at least for a time. Chaos would rage, killing indiscriminately.
“We’ll see,” she said at last.
“I don’t think we will,” North replied. “Even if some of my platoon make it back here, they won’t find a friendly reception. Not once the people upstairs get in here.”
“They can’t get in. Not with you in a cell.”
“Yeah,” North said quietly. “I guess you’re right.”
Aimee shivered at the hollow chill in his voice.
“I don’t get any of this,” she said. “How did the anarchists even find you? Or did you go looking for them?”
“It wasn’t like that. A lot of people knew what I did…how much it fucked me up—“
“I never knew. You never told me, all that time you were rotting inside.”
North slammed a hand against the inside of his cell door. “I never told anyone. But people knew, get it? There were other people there and someone talked about it, talked about how I’d been unraveling. Word got around that maybe I thought the Tin Men were as bad for the world as so many people said we were, that maybe I no longer believed in our cause—“
“Someone offered you a different cause,” she said quietly.
His blue eyes stared at her through the mesh.
“In a bar. Over a lot of whiskey. That little girl haunted me. This guy told me they had a way to put a stop to the Tin Men, put the world back on an even keel. Make war matter to Americans again. Give them something to lose.”
The gate at the end of the hall clanked as it was unlocked and then swung open. Aimee twisted her head to see Major Zander entering the stockade, followed by a pair of MPs.
North spoke so softly she could not be sure of the words, but she thought she had understood them. “I thought they’d all just wake up in their canisters. At least they’d have a chance.”
Aimee felt North’s pain, but that didn’t make him any less of a traitor.
The tread of the MPs heavy boots echoed off the walls. Major Zander strode ahead of them and stopped in front of Aimee’s cell. He looked in at her.
“I don’t have time to be anything but blunt,” Zander said. “Most of what you told me checks out. But North had your access codes. I roll this around in my brain and there’s a version of it where you were in on this with him and changed your mind when you saw the massacre going on outside, so you shut him down before he could unlock the
doors. What happened to Platoon A—you’d have had an easier time getting that done than North.”
“Major—“
“The problem for you, Warrant Officer Bell, is this version I’ve got cooked up in my brain? The one where you and North have been in cahoots this whole time? That version paints a picture that makes a hell of a lot of sense to me. So you are staying right where you are, for now. We’ll get to you in a while.”
Aimee stared at him, her mouth open. How could she argue when she agreed with him? His version seemed more plausible than the truth.
Major Zander turned his back on her and nodded to the MPs.
“Cell Six!” one of the MPs called. “On the gate!”
A loud buzz sounded and North’s cell door unlocked.
Aimee watched as Zander and the MPs went in, slamming the door behind them.
North had said things were going to get uglier. It turned out he’d been right.
The wind whistled past Kate’s head and the last light of the sun glinted off the robots on board l’hydroptere, and on the ship itself. The trimaran sailed above the water so smoothly it felt more like flying, with almost none of the roll and pitch of the sea. As fast as the Tin Men could run, Kate still felt as if they were hurtling out of control across the water and that any second the hydroptere might spin off into the air or tip a wing into the waves and tear itself apart.
She held her scorched and severed arm in her lap and smiled morbidly to herself. If they were going to be torn apart, at least she had a head start.
The smell of the sea pleased her and made her wish she could breathe it in, but of course lungs were part of her original body, not this one. From the first moment she had inhabited a Remote Infantry bot, Kate had known that she had reached a stunning technological horizon—that nothing would ever be the same. After the Pulse, when she finally understood the true genius of the bot’s designers, she had found herself even more impressed. In comparison, the hydroptere was elegantly simple, and yet she found herself caught up in the magic of it. She felt like Aladdin on his flying carpet.
Tin Men Page 27
