“Hang tight,” Donnie says. “I’ll be there in an hour.”
It’d take me longer than an hour to verify the peace-tie breaking software was clean. I won’t be able to help Silvia. Not directly.
But maybe I can help her escape. I don’t know how far she’d get without me, but it’s farther than surrendering.
Weirdly, the scariest thing about my death is knowing Silvia would see it. A headshot is Donnie’s sign of respect; he could have targeted my pancreas, given me a long, agonizing death. But Silvia …
Could I get her to look away? If I yelled “Run, Silvia!”—well, she couldn’t stop herself from reflexively turning back to watch me in the attachment station. Me shouting will draw her attention just before the guns splatter my brains in visceral pyrotechnics.
I don’t mind dying. But I do mind my last moments being used to fuel someone else’s PTSD.
I can’t believe I’m trying to solve a puzzle that ends in me dying when nobody’s watching.
“Oh, and Mat—you’re thinking about making a big sacrifice, telling Silvia to go on without you. Except she won’t get far. If that gun fires, it also wires an alert to the police station informing them two cop killers are here. This isn’t like the freeway in a nice neighborhood, Mat—this is a bad neighborhood, where the police drones are always overhead. She’ll flee, but if the IAC doesn’t get her, the cops will.”
I’m still caught several words back. “We’re not cop killers.”
“All those poor cops at the scene: dead from prosthetic armament gunfire.” Donnie’s voice oozes with fake mourning. “Shame you didn’t leave any live witnesses to your crime.”
“That’s the IAC, you motherfucker! That’s what they brought you back online to do, didn’t they? To cover their tracks? They fucking murdered the cops who saw us, and you’ll testify—”
“Mat,” Silvia whispers. She slumps to the ground beside me. “Stop.
“It’s over.”
* * *
Tactically speaking, this isn’t a bad situation.
Silvia’s cross-legged on the ground, hyperventilating. But as far as I can tell, there’s only one gun pointed at me.
I replay his words: My pet prosthetics aren’t aimed at your gunports. They’re aimed right in the center of your left eye.
He got cocky. He shouldn’t have told me where he was aiming.
Silvia’s a coiled spring of hyperfast reflexes, so quick she could leap in front of me like the Secret Service. The fire wouldn’t penetrate her reengineered body; the crumpled bullets in Herbie’s foot wells proved that.
Donnie knows his hand is weak. That’s why he’s programmed the prosthetics to prevent me from telling Silvia what to do. He knows Silvia’s the key.
The problem is, Silvia doesn’t know Silvia is the key.
I look over, and my heart breaks. Her body’s always moved with an insectile quickness, but now she’s curled up like a dead bug you’d find on the windowsill.
“Silvia. You all right?”
No answer.
Pretty stupid question.
“This isn’t over,” I say. My skin prickles as I probe the edges of Donnie’s language processors. “There are … ways.”
The speakers overhead splutter as Donnie snorts. “For fuck’s sake, guys, I’m right here. You think I’m some fucking Bond villain? I’ve got you folks on speakerphone while I’m getting in the car.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Silvia’s words fall to the ground like snowflakes, delicate and melting. “We lost.”
This whole thing would be easier with a cigar. “Are you giving up because you believe it’s hopeless, or are you giving up because you believe you’re incompetent?”
Her head snaps around like an owl. “What difference does that make?”
I like anger. It means she gives a shit.
“I’ve been in worse situations, Silvia.” I mean, not globally, because even if we escape we’re still pursued by the police, and the IAC, and Donnie, and whoever was trying to kidnap Silvia from the IAC’s clutches, but, you know, baby steps. “This isn’t unwinnable.”
“Yes it is.”
“Shut up, Donnie!”
“No.” Silvia hooks her fingers into her hair, pulls hard; I hear a sound like carpet being ripped up. “He’s right. It’s unwinnable with me. I’m not … fit … for this stress. I could barely hold down a job where I met people once a week. And, and, I was stupid to think I could become some neurotic superhero, taking down world-class secret cabals when I didn’t know the first thing about detective work or computers or combat.…”
She trails off. Donnie stays quiet. I suspect his therapybots are telling him not to interrupt a self-sabotaging hostage.
“You can’t hold my hand through all that, Mat,” she finishes.
“I can.” My chest aches with how badly I want to hold her. “Silvia, we’ve come this far, we can—”
“You realize I’m a drawback, right?”
Her statement is so soulless my words shrivel at the thought of debating her. Her self-hatred’s ingrained into her emotional DNA.
“I’ll never be an asset to you, Mat. I’ve seen what I do to my mother. I’ll always be that person you have to work around—I’ve watched you do it already! You have to talk to me in the woods so I don’t freak out, you have to put on a movie like I’m a toddler to keep me occupied—”
She settles down into that dead-bug position again, blocking the world out with her fingers. “I can’t do this. I’m not strong.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake.”
More words are barreling out of my throat by the time I see her cringe, but I’m so furious at her self-hatred that my own self-hatred rises up to battle it—
“Not strong?” I cough out a bitter laugh. “My God, Silvia, you’ve never seen my panic attacks—and you know why? Because when I get them, I hole myself up inside my servers for weeks at a time, too terrified to talk to anybody, trying to make the world logical with mission replays and hardware tuning until the only people who’ll hang with me are fucking kill-crazy psychos—”
“Hey,” Donnie protests. Let him bitch. If I stop I’ll never say this again, so let it roll—
“Fucking hell, I got so panicked after some asshole blew off my left arm that I replaced it with massively armed overcompensation, and I kept lopping off limbs because I didn’t feel safe unless I was walking around with a computerized tank protecting me! And you … Jesus, you…”
My heart’s thumping so hard that when she makes eye contact with me, silently asking what I really think of her, I yank my gaze aside before I melt.
“I know how hard you fight to be normal. And you, you have a sister who loves you and a mother who still cares, while I’ve shoved away everybody except for backstabbing assholes like Donnie—”
The speakers crackle. “I will shoot your ass.”
“Take the shot, motherfucker! Let the cops catch her! Think the IAC will hire you then?”
Donnie, mercifully, shuts the fuck up.
I return to Silvia, who’s kneeling before me like I’m giving her a benediction.
“You’ve got a life, Silvia. It’s not easy. Mental illness never is. But Jesus, the fact that you’ve built anything underneath that stress means you’re stronger than a thousand normal people. If you weren’t held down by some bad brain chemistry, you’d be a goddamned superhero. Hell, you are a superhero in my eyes.”
Blood rushes to my face. This revelation’s embarrassing, adolescent; she’s the first person in years I’ve forged a connection with, and I’ve ruined it with gushing boyish adulation.
“You mean that?”
I hesitate; she touches me again. Her fingertips brush against my left prosthesis, stroking the warm metal to verify I’m real—
The prosthetics twitch, a wall of automatic warnings. She doesn’t notice them; she’s too busy craning her neck around, trying to make eye contact.
But I’m staring at my HUD’s alerts—now that
I’ve configured my visual processors to look for a target, they’ve confirmed which gun is hot.
The pair of Sherman 1600 lower prostheses doing jumping jacks. They’re the threat.
Even better: my readouts confirm that, yes, their gunports are indeed locked onto my left eye.
I know where the threat is, and how to neutralize it.
Yet I can’t tell Silvia how. Worse, me processing this new info has left her waiting for an answer. Her fingertips have frozen on my armored plating, ready to withdraw.
“Yes,” I say. “I mean every damn word. It has been an honor to fight alongside you, ma’am.”
That should make things better. Instead, it fogs the air with awkwardness. Knowing we have this mutual respect doesn’t tell us what to do with it.
“So what do we do now?”
“You back off,” Donnie says. “No touching him, Silvia.”
Her hand vanishes quick as a magician’s trick, guilt flickering across her face.
She can’t control her reflexes; whatever she wants, her body does. If I could convince her she wanted to be somewhere else, her body would take her there.
If I could convince her to jump in front of me, we could blow this popsicle stand. We’d still have to escape the cops, but … baby steps, Mat, baby steps.
Except I can’t tell her; Donnie’s computers are analyzing every word I say. We might be able to get past that if we shared some secret code, but …
Wait.
We do have a secret code.
“We’ll stay put,” I say. “Like Indy and Marion at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
She closes her eyes in a reverie-soaked smile. “We stay tied to the pole, hoping that God uses the Ark of the Covenant to wipe everyone?”
That’s our code.
I whistle the first bar of the Indiana Jones theme song. She whistles the rest back. The gun twitches, linking our warbling melody to decades-old Raiders of the Lost Ark movies.
But it lacks context.
I grip the socket wrench. Thank God I have something in my hands.
“It’s stupid.” Silvia’s hand rests on my thigh again. “But even after everything that’s happened, I’m … I’m glad you’re here.”
The great thing about this movie code is that Silvia doesn’t have to know she knows it. She just has to pick up the vibration I’m laying down, and if she’s not flirting this won’t work.
“If I’d known I was going to be captured, I wouldn’t have gotten myself this banged up in the process. I’m not the man you knew ten years ago.”
“It’s not the years, honey,” she quotes back to me. “It’s the mileage.”
Okay. We’re on the same page, quoting the same scene. So hopefully she’s remembering what happens next in the movie, her knowledge of the plot mixing with what I hope to God is at least some attraction to me, and …
I’m going to quote the scene where Marion kisses Indy, and hope she goes for it.
My chest hurts. I can’t recall ever being this nervous for a first kiss.
“That hurt,” I say, in my best Indiana Jones drawl.
“Well, goddammit,” she replies in her best Marion Ravenwood impression, “where doesn’t it hurt?”
I look down at my elbow. “Here.” I touch my chin to my neck rest. “Here.”
I look at her.
“Here.”
Fireworks.
* * *
The prosthetic empties an entire clip into her skull.
That does not stop our kiss.
My left arm chucks the socket wrench at the Shermans to knock them over.
That does not stop our kiss.
She’s everything. The soft fullness of her lips, the sweet taste of her tongue, the way her hands knot up in my hair, the way she trembles as she presses her body against me.
“Eyew,” Donnie says.
His disgust changes the frame, transforms us from two people kissing into licking freaks. She’s entrapped in cold machinery; her body is squirming coils grafted onto a human head.
“Oh, man, I wish this prosthetic’s camera did not have such great resolution.” His adolescent snigger is like itching powder. “Some things you don’t need to see.”
Silvia snakes out from my grasp, shrinking down, her eyes welling over with tears.
“Shut! Up!”
I grab the Shermans, fling them at the speakers above. Ninety pounds of carbon-fiber mesh smash into the overheads at eighty-six miles per hour, propelled by Vito and Michael’s ferocious strength—they explode, raining down hex bolts and twisted circuitry.
Silvia shrieks, covering her head.
“That’s a speaker, you imbecile,” Donnie says, switching his broadcast to the TV screen. “What, do you think you’ve hurt me?”
“Shut your stupid! Fucking! Face!”
I grab an MBT-2350 upper limb and whirl it into the screen, sending glass bouncing across the concrete. Yet that destruction’s not enough—I have Vito’s sensors pinpoint every speaker, send Kiva’s equipment flying, silencing anywhere Donnie could shame us.
I’m pretty sure I’m screaming.
And by the time I’m done, I’ve demonstrated Vito and Michael’s power without having fired one of my onboard weapons. Every speaker Donnie could use to speak to us is crumpled, every camera he could watch us through pulverized. Even though I’ve still got twelve minutes before the peace-tie firelock on my guns expires, these systems were designed to go toe-to-toe with light tanks.
Light tanks … or local police cruisers.
If that gun fires, it also wires an alert to the police station.
My metal hands are auto-massaging my temples again. This wasn’t part of the plan. This was pointless destruction, I wasted precious time, the cops have had two minutes and thirty-six seconds to reroute drones overhead, which means I’ve fucked us for no good—
Someone cups my cheek.
“Mat?”
Silvia creeps into my vision, keeping a wary distance, uncertain how to help me.
Her face is suffused with such concern.
“I fucked up the plan, Silvia. This was—”
“You have a plan?”
“I always have a plan.” I replay those words; sure enough, that wavering hitch makes me sound pathetic. “I … whenever I wasn’t reprogramming Vito and Michael, I was checking local maps, looking for our next bolt-hole. I don’t relax. Every moment of every day, I’m tracking escape routes and calculating threats and tabulating solutions.”
Meeting her gaze is scarier than looking down the barrel of a gun.
“Is that okay?” That time my voice definitely cracks.
She shakes her head—not dismissing me, but dismissing this fear resonating between us. She gives a bell-like laugh and my body shakes in relief.
“It’s who you are,” she replies.
I’m not sure I can handle this much acceptance right now.
“But … where do we go now?” she asks.
“There’s a smartcar share center thirteen point four miles from here. Twelve point two miles of that is freeway driving. It’s late at night, so most smartcars will be homed and recharging. If we can make our way there, we can hide in one car, I can hack into the rest of them, and hopefully nobody will be able to figure out which car we’re in as we send four hundred cars on random drives out into deep woods.”
She claps her hands. “It’s like a big old shell game!”
I grasp her shoulders. “Listen, Silvia. My combat systems won’t be online for another ten minutes. And those highways will have people catching a ride home from the bars—they’re not expecting a firefight. And even though the cops will come after us hard, they don’t deserve this either. You have to keep everyone safe.”
Her brown skin pales chalky white. “Mat, I—I can’t control this body—if anyone shoots at me, I’ll go for them—”
“The bullets in your head say otherwise.”
She grimaces, reaching back to scratch her neck shy
ly—then flinches as her fingers run over the edges of the crumpled bullets in her skull. “I—I mean, we were kissing, and…”
I open up Herbie’s door, wondering how surprised the cops will be once they find out what Herbie has beneath the hood. “That’s a real compliment, Silvia. But that also means you can control your body. You just … don’t know how yet. But I’ll be doing everything I can to keep Herbie on the road, because those thirteen miles will be long. So can you—”
Floodlights stream in beneath the door. The whoosh of stealthed drone-copters kicking up wind—though thankfully, Kiva holed herself up inside a fortress with reinforced walls.
“Attention!” a voice bellows. “We track two heat signatures inside, and one peace-tied broadcast with an expiry of nine minutes forty-six seconds. Come out with your hands up, or lethal force will be authorized.”
I pull on my body armor, then open Herbie’s door for Silvia. I’m thinking of all the people between us and that smartcar center—hundreds of bystanders who might walk away with lost limbs. I imagine weeping relatives camped by grave sites, police funerals for brave men who didn’t know they were chasing framed fugitives.
But there’s no time. There’s no time, and no plan. We’re down to improvisation and prayers.
“Can you do this?”
She looks terrified.
She says yes.
* * *
I stole Herbie from a used-car lot. I mean, I paid for Herbie, but in untraceable cash, and in return the owner told me how to break into the lot.
(There’s a reason I knew what Kiva was up to.)
Then I found a storage-unit facility with surveillance cameras that could be hacked, and spent long Saturday afternoons refitting a sturdy auto-car into a secret hackmobile. First thing installed was the illegal camouflage smartpaint and a properly anonymized internet access point, but I made other off-the-book purchases from dubious sources: self-sealing tires, carbon-mesh armor plating, stealth gunports, some severe surprises for anyone who thought my secret escape vehicle was just a Honda.
I’ve spent three years upgrading Herbie—and when I was done, sometimes I’d spend hours staring at him in something akin to love. Herbie was my real-life attempt at a Batmobile, the dream I drifted off to when limb maintenance got too tense—perfecting Scylla and Shiva and Roland always held that shivering tension of knowing I’d need their services come my next mission. Whereas Herbie was skylarking—sure, it was nice to have secret transportation, but how likely was it I’d wind up in a full-on vehicle-on-vehicle firefight?
Automatic Reload: A Novel Page 16
