by Isaac Asimov
The weapon went off, and Masid felt a wash of heat over his right foot; then the gun hit the floor and Masid had Filoo on his back.
“No time to debate,” he said. “I’m going. You try to stop me, I’ll finish this right now.”
Hatred flared in Filoo’s eyes. “Postponed,” he said. “That’s all it is.”
“Here’s hoping,” Masid said. He released Filoo, picked up the gun, and ran out into Gernika as distant thunder sounded.
His message had gotten out. All around there were carts piled with belongings, and the few working transports groaned under the weight of passengers in numbers far exceeding the vehicles’ capacities. Still the citizens of Gernika forced their children aboard the transports, reaching through the windows to tear bags and parcels out of passengers’ hands and make room for more children. Groups of cyborgs argued violently, divided over whether Basq had deserted them. Adults shouted; children cried.
Thunder sounded, much closer.
Not orbital, Masid thought. They’re going to come in close.
A group of arguing cyborgs caught sight of him. “He lies about Basq!” one of them shouted over the chaos, and the group started toward Masid. He thought he saw something like gratitude in their eyes — the gratitude of the terrified for a way to displace their fear.
They would kill him on the off chance that it made them feel safe.
Filoo’s gun was in Masid’s hand, but he couldn’t shoot people for being frightened and confused.
“They’re coming!” he screamed, and ran.
As he was turning, he saw the group of cyborgs break into a run, and Masid knew he was going to die. Then the thunder over the horizon turned into a deafening roar, and something black and shining reared up over the trees, holding its position like a mantis poised to strike. A line of explosions obliterated the end of the main street, and the concussion came to Masid as a series of staccato hammer blows that went on even after he’d felt his eardrums give way. He tripped, and before he’d hit the ground another line of bright fire incinerated the cyborgs pursuing him, together with the nearest two heavy transports and everyone inside. The after-image seared his eyes, and something was wrong with one of his feet; still he got up and ran through a rain of falling debris, not sure where he was going except that it was away from the rolling line of destruction.
As his vision cleared, he saw two more attack craft coming up, forming a triangle over Gernika. A stand of trees disappeared in a bloom of smoke and fluttering leaves, and Masid realized that the Terrans were strafing the cyborgs who had managed to get out of the settlement. The three attack craft were long and jointed, with pivoting engines at the ends of their four stubby wings and ordnance bubbles like the heads of mosquitoes, swiveling faster than his eye could track in seach of new targets. He looked toward the hut where he’d left Filoo — it was gone. He looked to his right; where Basq’s headquarters had stood was now a partial skeleton of beams, burning fiercely in the midday sunshine.
The dormitory complex exploded with a wave of heat that dried Masid’s eyes in their sockets. He stumbled and sat down, realizing only after he’d hit the ground that something had knocked him over.
Fighting to get his breath back, to get out of the open before the Terrans got to him, he turned over onto his hands and knees and saw what had knocked him off his feet: a small torso, part of one arm still attached. During the interminable moment it took him to get to his feet again, Masid saw the gleaming alloy of the rib cage, within it the burst and bleeding lungs, and below it the ribbed spinal column, shining with blood and ending in a tangle of charred and curling filaments. He fled.
Running wherever he found a path clear of fire and rubble, Masid came to a crouch under a partially collapsed wall. Smoke stung his eyes, and he still couldn’t hear, although each new explosion came to him as a thump he felt through the soles of his feet, one of which was badly burned, the blistered toes sticking out through a charred hole in the boot. If Filoo had gotten out of the hut and survived, Masid was going to find him.
A trickling in his ears irritated him. He dipped blood from each ear with the tip of a pinky, felt nothing but a wave of passing annoyance at having to have his eardrums put back together. Time to get moving again, he thought; the thud of explosions was lessening, possibly coming from farther away as the three Terran craft tracked survivors into the forest. Masid looked up, didn’t see anything but sky and smoke. He scampered, limping. from rubble to pile of burning rubble, relying on smoke to scramble the Terrans’ visuals and the fires to disguise his infrared signature. If they had oxygen-exchange detectors on board, the fires might confuse those, too.
From the shelter of a caved-in roof, Masid peered along the length of Gernika’s main street — it was all craters and wreckage, fire and smoke, bodies and parts of bodies. Masid had the feeling he was present at an extinction, and rage filled him. He had seen too many desperate people killed by the pressures of history.
He ducked back into the wreckage as one of the Terran craft appeared again. Stuttering lines of energy reached up from the trees, and in a glittering burst of metal one of its wings was torn away, falling into the forest trailed by an arc of black smoke. The craft heeled over, righted itself, and returned fire.
Where had the cyborgs gotten heavy energy weapons? Masid didn’t have time to consider it. The diversion was buying him some time, and he used it to get across the street to the side nearest the river, and from there into a hollow in the side of a hill made by a fallen tree. The Terrans wouldn’t drop troops; they knew that even hardsuited soldiers wouldn’t be more than an even match for a cyborg, and the last thing they needed was casualties to complicated what was already a delicate political calculus. So the ships would come back, and they would pound the remains of Gernika until no sign of life remained on their scanners. Collapsing walls weren’t enough to kill a cyborg.
Masid, gato, you might just live through this, he thought. Stay here in the trees, don’t move too much, wait for them to flatten everything and hope they mistake your signals for a large mammal. They’re not looking for plain human signatures, right? Right. They’d only have automated subroutines looking for an electronic signature, too.
He thought it would work. The damaged craft wiped out whomever had been firing at it, and swept back over the trees to station itself over the ruined settlement. Then it methodically began bombing every square centimeter of Gernika. Huddled against the hillside, Masid could see nothing, and he still couldn’t hear, but dirt rained down around him and the earth shook as if convulsing. When the pause came, he opened his eyes, and only then noticed that he’d closed them.
A low thrum reached him, and he peered upward through the trees.
The Terran ship had interrupted its bombing, and was moving slowly in Masid’s direction. Can’t be looking for me, he thought, but his hand went to the gun anyway. Like a slingshot against an asteroid, but he’d be damned if he just sat there.
The ship paused directly over him. Masid looked down, realizing that what he had in his hand wasn’t Filoo’s gun; it was Masid’s own datum, and its screen was blinking with the message INCOMING CALL FROM DEREC AVERY.
Oh, Avery, you dumb son of a bitch …
Chapter 36
DEREC WAS CRUISING as fast as he dared along the Bogard’s western bank, dodging overhanging trees and keeping himself as unobtrusive as possible after having seen a flier zip past him near Gernika. Then he saw the three military craft coming in from the north. They split up and dropped out of sight to the east.
The strike was happening.
Call Masid, he thought. Then he saw smoke in the distance and realized he couldn’t tell Masid anything he didn’t already know. There would be time to compare notes later.
A renewed sense of urgency came over Derec; he gunned the flier away from the riverbank and covered the remaining kilometers to the Nucleomorph lab complex in a few minutes. Hovering just outside the fence line, he debated his approach. There was a front
gate, and a road snaking away from it into the forest; between the fence and the buildings was an open space patrolled by what he assumed were armed guards. Not the kind of place he could just walk into.
Then again, he wasn’t walking. Outside the fence, on the far side of the complex, Derec saw a flier parked. A section of the fence was down, and technicians were working on it. So someone had already made an unauthorized entry. Who?
Parapoyos? No. He’d been created here, and if his robot chassis was still functional it would be here already.
Masid. The flier must have been his. After all, he knew where Ariel was, and had told Derec to go there, and he wouldn’t have been able to call Hofton’s datum and let Derec know he’d gotten out of Gernika.
Derec called him to see where in the complex he was. They had a better chance of getting Ariel out together than either of them did individually.
Damn the interference around here — at first it looked like he was getting through, and then a few seconds later the infuriating CONNECTION FAILED blinked on the datum’s screen. Nucleomorph’s countermeasures were nothing to trifle with, if they could block all data traffic into the complex.
The direct approach, then. Derec lifted up to a hundred meters and simply flew over the fence, planning to land at the closest doorway and break it down if he had to.
Right away he knew he’d underestimated the countermeasures. The flier’s controls locked in his hands, and its power cut out, setting him into a glide that led straight at a broad glass wall between two of the outer buildings. Derec just had time to put his hands up before he hit the wall with a boom that echoed down after him into unconsciousness.
He couldn’t have been out for long, because when he was able to register his surroundings again Derec could see people running through the spacious room he’d crashed into. A voice came from the flier’s console: “… this facility will be evacuated within the next five minutes. All personnel evacuate immediately. Terran Military Command assumes no responsibility for loss of life or property following five minutes from the broadcast of this message.”
Derec tuned the rest out. He’d gotten the important number. Ten minutes. He found the flier’s harness release and sprung himself to topple out of his seat into the tiny cabin space behind the cockpit.
The flier was largely intact, and all of its inertial dampers had triggered, saving Derec’s life and keeping him from serious injury.
His nose felt broken, and he had a feeling that in the morning he wouldn’t be able to turn his head, but he was breathing and ambulatory.
It took two hard kicks to spring the flier’s hatch, and then Derec had to drop two meters to the floor. The Terran military’s message droned from an intercom system, echoing over the commotion in the room as Nucleomorph staff ran for their lives. The flier had shattered most of the glass on the side of the hall he’d impacted, coming to rest in a system of girders that supported the transparent domed ceiling.
The upper half of the atrium’s internal walls was ringed with office facades, through which Derec could see people moving around. Exactly the kind of commanding position an executive would consider his due; Brixa would be up there if he was anywhere.
Derec saw a stairwell and ran toward it, banging into a portly woman on the bottom step. “Where’s Brixa?” he shouted at her.
She waved up the stairs and ran. Derec bounded up the stairs and turned left. Hologrammed plaques identified the occupant of each office, and the fifth door said ZEV BRIXA. He opened it and went in.
Brixa lay in a heap behind his desk, as dead as any one man could be. At least Derec assumed it was Brixa; he’d never met the man, and the corpse was disfigured by the force of the assault. Whoever it was had been beaten with the kind of savagery and monstrous strength that could only come from a cyborg; arcs and spatters of blood were strung across the furniture and the flatscreens that took up the office walls. On each screen was a view of a different part of the complex.
Leaving the dead man, Derec went from one to the other, looking for a clue about Ariel’s whereabouts.
He didn’t see her, but one thing Derec saw did catch his attention.
The cyborg leader, Basq, was bulling his way through a tide of fleeing technicians in what looked like a research wing. People bounced away from him like hailstones.
Derec checked the caption of the view as Basq passed from it. He pressed his hand against the screen and said, “Directions to this location.”
The facility RI was apparently still functioning; a holographic map appeared next to the display. Derec took it in, and then he ran.
When he got there, Basq was gone, and the area was deserted. He’d been wrong about it being a research wing; it appeared to be a medical area, set below ground level. Doors stood open, revealing what were unmistakably operating tables.
Derec wondered what Basq had been doing in the area, or if the cyborg had just happened to be passing through. Where had he gone?
Derec looked up and down the hall, and that was when he saw it: next to a door, a screen listing Ariel Burgess as patient and Krista Weil as surgeon. The door was broken in and smeared with blood, the frame bent and the room within empty. Where was Ariel?
“You’re too late,” someone said from behind him.
The speaker was a small, wiry woman with bruises on her throat, bleeding from a puncture on the back of her right hand. Her voice was hoarse. Derec had no idea where she’d come from, or if she’d been there all along without him noticing.
“Too late how?” Derec asked.
“She woke up. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but she did, and she got out. It’ll be years before I get to try the procedure on another Spacer.”
Derec wanted to kill her. Instead he asked, “Are you Krista Weil?”
She nodded.
“This complex is going to go up in smoke any minute,” Derec said. “You can’t sit here.”
Weil gave him a pitying look. “Indeed I can. This was my work. If it is destroyed …” She shrugged. “I’m Terran. I won’t live long enough to rebuild it from the ground up.” A bleak smile broke over her face.
“Brixa told me I should have done it myself. Too uncertain, though, at least that’s what I thought. But that wily bastard was right, as usual.”
Except right at the end, when he was badly wrong about Basq.
“Where did Ariel go?”
She shrugged and wandered away down the hall. Derec would have gone after her, but if he hadn’t used up the five minutes yet, there wasn’t much left. He ran down the hall in the opposite direction, taking the first staircase he saw and willing himself to believe Ariel had gone this same way.
As he got to the top of the stairs, the first explosions shook dust down around him. Derec ducked his head at the impact, glanced up to see part of the corridor collapsed and smoke billowing toward him.
He turned in the other direction and ran on.
Derec had just turned down a side corridor, with an emergency exit visible at the far end, when a door on the left side of the hall burst outward and a robot appeared — a Cole-Yahner domestic with a blast wound on the side of its head and visibly damaged optics.
“Echo,” it said. “Echo. Echo.” It was Parapoyos, blinded now but making his crippled housing work as well as it could.
Without facing him, Parapoyos said, “Who’s that?”
“Where’s Ariel, Parapoyos?” Derec asked.
Now the robot did face him. “Well, if it isn’t Derec Avery,” Parapoyos said. “Your girlfriend doesn’t need you around. She’s gone.” A distant explosion sounded, and one more alarm added its counterpoint to the general din. “I’m guessing the Terrans fried her once she got out of the building, if she did. Doesn’t matter much. I’ve got a ride to catch.”
Turning away, the robot moved down the hall. Then Basq came out the same door it had used. “Parapoyos,” he said.
The robot halted. Basq took a step toward it. His hands, hanging open at his side
s, dripped blood from gashes across his knuckles, and more blood streaked his face and hair. “You were called to answer once, and shown mercy. Again you have betrayed us.”
“Mercy,” Parapoyos said. “You made me into a tool. Blame yourself if the tool had more functions than you realized.”
Faster than Derec could follow, Basq closed the distance to the robot and wrenched off one of its legs.
“Gernika is ashes,” Basq said, standing over the supine robot. “You did that. The previous generation you only turned out to die. This one you killed yourself.”
“And what did you do to me?” Parapoyos asked.
“Gave you better than you deserved. An error I now rectify.” Basq flipped the robot’s leg aside. He knelt beside it. Parapoyos struck at him, and Basq let the blows land as he worked his fingers into a seam in the robot’s torso and tore it open.
“You ungrateful bastard,” snarled the voice of Kynig Parapoyos.
“You’d be dead if it wasn’t for me.”
“I would also be free of guilt,” Basq said.
Exposed beneath the shell of the torso was a gleaming silver ovoid, with hoses running into and out of it and extruded filaments connecting it to what Derec could identify as the robot’s primary systems interfaces. With horrifying delicacy, Basq snapped each of these filaments. The robot’s arms fell limp.
“Basq, don’t. You’d have done the same thing,” Parapoyos pleaded.
“At one time,” Basq said. “As recently as today. No longer.”
With the stiff fingers of his left hand he punched a hole through the ovoid. Parapoyos howled, a wordless wail that abruptly became a series of choked grunts as Basq tore open the ovoid and ripped loose the brain of Kynig Parapoyos.
In the silence, Derec was aware of his own breathing. Basq held the brain in both hands and squeezed. Tissue and blood spurted out from between his fingers to spatter on the floor, and it was done.
Basq stood. “We have all been used, Derec Avery,” he said. “It is time we made sure we are not used again.”
