“Then I suggest you withdraw to the Lammergeier and wait,” Solomon said. “Take the dogs on board with you. I don’t know how they’ll react to me and the other quads under stress.”
“I could just fry the damn house,” she said. “I get that they need payback, but these guys have already lost one buddy today. I don’t want them losing any more.”
“I can handle this, Captain. Please withdraw.”
Fonseca stood staring at the siege house for a moment as if she was regretting this, then checked her helmet optics and darted away, head down.
Solomon’s thermal scan showed the two men, one upstairs and the other moving back and forth in what was probably the passage to the back door. He activated the three quadrubots idling at the back of the house and set them to attack if anyone tried to escape. They were now his detached arms and eyes, part of his neural network.
Erin Piller walked up to him with the rifle she’d taken from the gun truck.
“So you’re going in with us,” she said.
“I am, Private.”
“Are you armed, or are you a breaching device? And why am I talking to you like you’re human?”
“Because I’m an AI, not a robot. I’m just housed in one for the time being. Think of me as a disembodied brain in a highly specialised car.”
“Fair enough. So are you? Armed, I mean.”
“Yes. I could do this alone. But I understand why you want to do it yourselves.”
“Do you really.”
“Yes. I understood it when I saw that your sergeant was more worried about your welfare than bleeding to death.”
Erin looked at him in the way humans always did, searching for some kind of eye contact, and he knew he’d established an understanding.
“Call me Erin,” she said. “So you’ve located them, yeah?”
“We have one target by the front upstairs window and a second downstairs moving between the front and back. That seems to be the hall. I’ll move the other bots as a distraction.”
Erin turned to the others. “Okay, Conway and Jackson breach the back door, Solomon takes out the front door. I go in via the front, neutralise Guy One downstairs, then we move upstairs to take out Guy Two, if he hasn’t already come down shooting. Dieter can sit this out with the dogs.”
It wasn’t a difficult task. Solomon hadn’t worked with weapons since his initial development phase, and never at close quarters like this, but he had every tactic in his database, he could see what was happening, and nothing here could kill or disable him. His only problem was ensuring that none of the squad were injured. That included being hit by ricochets off his frame.
“Wouldn’t you prefer to use Ainatio optics?” he asked. “Then you’ll see what I can see.”
Conway adjusted his goggles. They just looked like basic protection. “Thanks, but this isn’t the time to get used to new gear. We’ll be fine.”
“Everybody in position,” Erin said. It didn’t appear to trouble her that Solomon was as unfamiliar a piece of technology as the advanced optics they’d declined, but optics were harder to relate to than a talking bot. “Any chance of the Lammergeier running its engines for a while to cover our noise?”
“Consider it done,” Solomon said.
The aircraft throttled up. While Jackson and Conway worked their way through the gardens to the back of the house, Solomon moved the bots to the other side of the back yard to distract Guy Two. That got the man’s attention. A burst of fire spat from the window. Solomon saw it from the quads’ viewpoint and for a second, he caught a glimpse of his prey, not some unkempt savage but a grey-haired, clean-shaven man in his fifties who took care of his appearance. Solomon wondered about the who and the why, marvelling again at the willingness of men to face almost certain death rather than save themselves, but it didn’t change what he needed to do.
Conway was in position now, sticking a frame charge to the back door.
Solomon adjusted his legs and crawled forward almost flat on the ground while Erin moved from one house to the next via the front yard, hugging the walls. They ended up on opposite sides of the frontage, facing each other across the porch.
“He’s gone into the front room,” Solomon said. Guy Two seemed to have settled by the window again. Solomon adjusted to a bipedal stance and stood up, ready to turn and breach the door. “Ready?”
Erin got on the radio. “Ready. Stand by... in three... two... go.”
The explosion from the back sent Guy Two racing to the top of the stairs as Solomon punched out the lock on the front door and burst it open. He stood back to let Erin enter the hall, then the firing started. There was no point in waiting outside. He dropped back onto all fours and leaped through the front window, crashing straight into the living room on a carpet of shattered glass. Guy One, rifle aimed at the door to the hall, spun around just as Solomon righted himself and managed one startled grunt before the door swung open. Erin put two short bursts into him. He fell where he stood.
“Downstairs — clear,” she called. She looked at Solomon, wide-eyed. “I thought you were following me. I could have shot you.”
“No harm done. I’m bulletproof.”
“Move.”
Conway and Jackson were exchanging fire up and down an impressive oak staircase. The ornate balustrade was in splinters.
“Last mag.” Jackson reloaded, pressed flat against the wall. “He’s got a friggin’ armoury up there.”
Solomon knew they didn’t want him to fight their battle. This was retribution. Maybe the individual who’d shot Jamie was already dead in the burning shell of another house, but that detail would never be known, and it obviously didn’t change anything for this squad.
Jackson yelled up the stairs over the noise of the Lammergeier still idling in the street. “Hey, buddy, you’re going to die here. You know what we’re killing each other for? A few boxes of toilet paper. Now there’s an epitaph. No wonder this world’s fucked.”
A voice yelled back. “I’ve got nothing to lose, then, asshole.”
Jackson gestured to Solomon and mouthed something, making a walking gesture with two fingers and pointing to the staircase.
Can you shield me?
Solomon rose on his hind legs. Jackson nodded and gave him a thumbs-up, then slipped in behind him as he put one rear foot on the stairs. They edged up one step at a time. Solomon kept his body turned towards the landing to make sure the launcher on his underside was clear and watched the doors. There were three. All were slightly ajar, but he could see a man’s heat profile near the middle one.
I could just fire straight through the partition wall now.
No. Remember why we need to do this.
“Ready?” Jackson whispered.
“Yes. Watch the middle door. Wait until — ”
The heat profile moved. A hand went to open the door. It was plenty of thinking time for an AI, but barely a heartbeat for a human. Jackson stepped sideways to open fire but Solomon had already fired two rounds before the door was fully open. The man was hit and falling by the time Jackson began squeezing the trigger. But Jackson got his shot in. Solomon hoped that honour was satisfied.
Jackson edged in and checked the body. Solomon knew the destructive effect of the rounds he was carrying, but like witnessing death, it was a very different thing to see it and integrate it into his emotional learning.
I’ve killed a man. I need to think about this later.
“Upstairs clear,” Jackson called.
“Clear, all targets neutralised.” Solomon repeated it so that Fonseca could hear it over the net. “My apologies, Jackson. I was a little premature.”
“No worries. Thanks.”
“You got him.”
“Sure. And his spare ammo.”
Erin searched Guy Two’s pockets and held up a piece of plastic. “Another ration
card. Might not be his, of course. But if it is, these guys are a long way from home. I’d kind of thought they were the locals defending their town to the last.”
“They let you enter,” Solomon said. “Possibly to see if you were part of a larger convoy.”
“I guess they wanted fuelled vehicles. They could have had the goods any time.”
Jackson inspected his arm. Blood was seeping through his jacket sleeve. “Toilet rolls.” He shook his head as if he despaired of the world, and hissed through his teeth. “Ass paper.”
Fonseca was waiting at the end of the drive when they came out. She looked somewhere between relieved and guilty. The dogs were running up and down the street with their handler wandering behind them, doing a final sweep to make sure that nobody was hiding. They seemed untroubled by all the noise.
“We had to return fire,” Solomon said, not waiting for Fonseca’s question. “All above board and in keeping with international law, if you still choose to follow it. I’m going to direct the quads to bury the bodies here.”
“Just these two,” Fonseca said, nodding at the house. “The other buildings are too unstable to send anyone in to recover remains.”
“These bots are designed for hazardous recovery work.”
“I know. But I say we leave it. Chris Montello’s in surgery, by the way.”
Solomon had never quite understood her ability to be callous one moment and compassionate the next. “I’m glad we could help.”
“Help? Alex says the surgeons were brawling over him. They haven’t had a decent emergency for years.” Fonseca walked off, shaking her head. “They’ve all got some technique or treatment they want to try for real. Medics, huh?”
Erin came down the drive behind Solomon and stooped to pat his back. He wasn’t sure if it was a human back-pat or what she might do to a favourite dog, but he didn’t mind either way. He wanted to ask her if they really had come all this way to scavenge for ammunition that Ainatio could easily have given them, but it sounded too much like telling her Jamie had died for something trivial.
“I’ll drive the APC home,” she said. “But if you could fly the others back and get Jackson to a medic, we’d be grateful.”
“Of course.” Perhaps she wanted to weep and couldn’t do it in front of her comrades. “May I ride with you?”
She looked taken aback. “Yeah. Yeah, no problem.”
The landscape around Solomon seemed as alien as anything on Opis. He’d spent very little time outside the Ainatio facility, and his view of the wider world beyond the perimeter fence was now confined to drones and satellite feeds. That was nothing like being corporeal and standing on solid ground. Networked to the other quadrubots, he both watched and experienced the excavation of two pits on the lawn at the back of the house and the sensation of placing the bodies in them. The bots’ manipulators were temporarily his own hands, and their close-up view of the shredded bodies were in his eyes. It made killing very personal.
Yes, this is odd. I know these deaths are regrettable, but I feel no guilt. I don’t feel victorious, either. And I do know both emotions all too well.
He didn’t know if either man would care whether his grave was marked, but he decided to do it anyway, and had the quads drive in single planks taken from a fence.
Fonseca sat down on the kerb next to him as the last of the squad vehicles were loaded and sealed for decontamination. “I’m going to put together a shopping list for the transit camp,” she said. “Screw the regs. Ammo, compatible long-range radios, and better armour. And anything else you can think of. It’s not like we’ll go short.”
“It’s no problem for me to hide items in the inventory.”
“Don’t stay out too late with your new girlfriend, then. Catch you later.”
New experiences were precious, even if Solomon felt uneasy that today’s had come at the cost of personal tragedy. He arranged his frame in the APC’s co-driver’s seat and tried not to think about how odd he looked. Erin drove in silence for the first few miles, occasionally wiping the heel of her hand across one eye. Humans definitely needed to cry. He shouldn’t have begged a ride. His presence was inhibiting her.
“I wish I could offer you some comfort,” he said. “But I can’t think of anything that would make today less painful.”
“You’re not really an AI, are you?”
“I am. I wouldn’t lie to you.”
“Autonomous doesn’t explain your personality.”
“I’m the only one of my kind. My initial development cost two trillion dollars.”
“Pricey for a combat unit, even with government procurement.”
“It’s not my primary role. But I can be one when I transfer to an appropriate shell like this one. And yes, that does make me highly illegal and in breach of a dozen disarmament treaties and international restrictions on AI capability.”
“So you can move into different... containers.”
“Yes. I enjoy quadrubot frames, though. I feel more connected to reality. Although I don’t normally use this particular one.”
“What did they create you to do, then?”
Solomon really wanted to tell her. She deserved complete information to form her opinions. He did his best. “I manage complex projects, but my specialisation is ethics. Moral decision-making for the benefit of mankind.”
Erin looked at him. “You and me both. Except a sniper rifle’s a hell of a lot cheaper.”
“Is it easier to talk to something that resembles a dog?”
“You’re very perceptive.” She tried to smile. “But then I’d expect that from a trillion-dollar intellect.”
“You don’t seem troubled that I’m banned tech.”
“You don’t seem troubled that my kind wiped out your kind. Well, nearly all of you.”
“That was a consequence of using us to replace humans. I was created to do the exact opposite.”
Erin nodded a few times as if she was answering a question only she could hear. Solomon decided to let her steer the conversation. He could see that she was churning over the day and still at that stage of struggling to believe what had happened. He was caught up in processing it too. It was a revelatory moment in his understanding of what Bednarz had set as his task, his duty to humanity, his development of human values within himself: I want you to define the best, seek it out, and protect it against all its enemies.
The best wasn’t engineering genius, exquisite artistry, or philosophical insight. He understood now that it was about qualities rather than skills: loyalty, trust, a willingness to sacrifice yourself for others and for beliefs you held dear, to give up your future for someone else’s. Before today, those concepts had always seemed almost theologically distant. Now he’d had a glimpse of them being lived out minute by minute, and the key to them was death. Even he was enmeshed in it now.
“You know something?” Erin said suddenly. It came out almost like a cough, as if she’d been bottling it up and couldn’t hold it any longer. “I shouldn’t have left it so late. Jamie, I mean. He gave me a bottle of perfume today. I should have told him I’d date him. He’d have been happy right up to the last second. You should never leave things unsaid. I didn’t learn that lesson the first time, either.”
Solomon wanted to ask what she meant by the first time, but it seemed too raw, and he had no magic phrase that would make her feel any better. Regret and guilt radiated from her. She said nothing else until she drove into the decontamination unit at the Kill Line boundary. Despite her silence, Solomon felt he now knew her better than he’d thought possible.
“Perhaps you should come into the base and see a doctor,” he said. “Just for something to help you sleep tonight.”
“Thanks, Solomon, but then there’ll be the next night, and the next, and the next. I’ll get through it.”
“Do you want to visit Chris when he’s well
enough?” Solomon could use first names for all of them now. They felt like friends. “He’s still in surgery.”
“How do you know?”
“I’m linked to the research centre.”
“Okay, yes.”
“It might be a day or two, depending on the doctors.”
“Thanks, Solomon. You’re very kind. And you’re a real badass under fire. You’re always welcome in our gang.”
Solomon was touched. Alex said things like that all the time, just throwaway comments, but Erin didn’t seem the glib kind.
When she dropped him off at the main gate, the sentry leaned out of the guard hut to do a double-take as he identified himself with his ID code, an indication of how rare it was for him to venture outside in a bot frame. Why didn’t he do this more often? Why had it taken so long to meet his neighbours? Things had to change. He had mankind’s future to ensure. These were the people who would create it, and deserved to.
He decided to see Erskine first to pre-empt any repercussions over the rescue mission, but when he tracked her down she was having a relaxed chat with Dr Prinz in her office. The message log showed that the conversations between her and Trinder had only been about the likely length of Chris’s treatment, not a dressing-down for unilateral decisions. Perhaps she’d been equally keen to see how her troops performed in a real crisis before any of them were entrusted with a Nomad mission.
Solomon transferred out of the quadrubot and merged back into the research centre’s network to patrol the building. In the detachment’s mess hall, Trinder was holding a wash-up on the Kingston mission, looking ten years younger, as if this was what he’d been waiting for all his life. Marc and Tev were playing pool in the recreation hall, and Alex Gorko was having a beer with Dr Mangel in a quiet corner of the bar.
In the medical wing, Chris Montello was in the recovery room, waking up from anaesthesia, his leg partially enclosed in the shell of an enhanced healing unit that was making his body produce bone and tissue at an accelerated rate. Solomon watched the realisation form on the man’s face as he began piecing his memory together and remembered why he was here and what had happened.
The Best of Us Page 15
