Ijiuto had planned to follow Sophia off-planet, leaving his bio-weapons to devastate Mag-Ingat.
The cruel irony of it, of course, was that Pippa wasn’t even here. She was out at that damn detention center. But Ijiuto hadn’t known that, and neither had Sophia.
So they’d targeted the place where all the kids were. The Mag-Ingat Skymall.
I felt like we were going slow, although the Cape whizzed past beneath us. I leaned forward to peer between the seats at the cop car’s dash computer. It showed Parsec’s tracking map, forwarded by him in a show of cooperation with the authorities.
Six blue dots.
One on each of the biggest greenways.
Including the one between Extritium and Hanayashiki.
“Please,” I said to d’Alencon, in the front seat. “Please—”
A loud thwapping noise suddenly overtook us. The cruiser plunged. The jolt cracked my head against the roof.
“That’s what it feels like to be redirected,” said the police officer beside me. Rubbing my head, I saw four black and white darts zooming away ahead of us. They were light tilt-rotor airplanes with twin rotors blurring at the ends of their wings. They darted between the uptown towers like birds.
“That’s the riot squad,” d’Alencon said. “They’ll get there faster than we can.”
I started scratching the knees of my jeans, worrying a small hole larger.
“Mike,” Dolph said. He had a split lip, a black eye, and severe bruises coming up on the cheek around that eye. His chin and his t-shirt were stained with his own blood. He looked worse than he had the night I accidentally head-butted him in the nose. “It’s gonna be OK,” he said.
OK? I stared at him, wild-eyed. OK? I wanted to scream.
What I said was, “Where’s MF?”
“In the trunk,” Dolph said, jerking his chin towards the back windshield. “They impounded him.”
“Maybe he could help,” I muttered, and then d’Alencon warned us to prepare for landing.
He put down in the parking area between Extritium and Hanayashiki.
He did that for me.
Before we landed, I scanned the greenway for the Mujin Inc taxi. I didn’t know which one it was, and couldn’t even remember what they looked like, with the exception of the sporty Skyliner Dolph and I had borrowed. As it turned out, I wouldn’t have recognized this one anyway: it had been freshly sprayed, green, red, and white.
“That’s it,” d’Alencon said. He pointed to the far end of the parking area, which bordered on a lawn dotted with spindly cherry trees. I glimpsed the patriotically striped vehicle, with a crowd of festival-goers around it, and then I saw the children playing on the lawn beyond the parking area. I saw the sparkly fairies swooping and circling above their heads. I strained my eyes until they hurt, looking for any sign of glitter.
Redirected by the cruiser’s AI, private cars rose up from the parking area to make room for us.
The cruiser touched down with a bump.
I flung the door open. I was not in handcuffs. My arrest had not got that far yet. I ran.
*
Behind me, in the back seat of the cruiser, Dolph said, “Please. Take these cuffs off. Shit, I’ll turn myself in later.”
D’Alencon turned around and looked at him. “The reason you’re in those cuffs,” he said, “is to stop you getting yourself in more trouble by striking a police officer. You ain’t gonna do that now, are you, Psycho?”
Dolph looked back at him. “I did enough of that already,” he said. “And I did it for a reason.”
“What was that?”
“To try and make you understand that every motherloving soul here is gonna die if you don’t—”
“We are doing all we can,” d’Alencon growled.
But they weren’t hardly doing anything. Meaney and the other officers had set off at a jog, following me. They were the first group of police officers to arrive on this particular stretch of the mall level. The riot birds had got here before us, but they had not yet been able to land. One of them hovered above the stage near Extritium, its rotors tilted up to chopper configuration, waiting for a landing zone to be cleared below. The fairground rides were still running, and their music and clatter swallowed the noise of the riot bird’s rotors, turning it into just one more distraction. Dolph looked over in that direction, and laughed. He said it really struck him in that moment that there were no authorities, as the word is commonly construed, meaning people with the power to stop bad shit from happening. The “authorities” are only people like us with better gear. And they don’t even always have that.
“Maybe he could help,” Dolph said. “The bot, Bones. Krasylid Athanuisp Zha.” He pronounced Mechanical Failure’s newly discovered name with the care befitting the name of a newly acquired gun. I know, because that’s how he always pronounced it to me afterwards. “Let him out.”
*
I hit the lawn running, and halted with a stitch in my side. I frantically looked around for Lucy. I remembered that she was wearing a frilly white dress, and Christy had a red sunhat on—just like a thousand other people. Why would they be here, anyway? The greenway was big. In every direction, toy fairies swooped above the roofs of the shops and the crowds on the walkways, their little rotors whirring.
I’d run straight past the taxi, intent on locating my daughter. Now I swung around to take a second look at it.
Captain Meaney and the other police officers were advancing on it from the direction of the parking area. They moved slowly because of the knot of festival-goers surrounding the taxi, which was growing by the moment as more people discovered, through the osmosis of crowds, that someone was handing out free toys.
“These things go for 300 GC,” said one parent to another standing near me. “And they’re just handing them out? Crazy.”
Her little boy clutched a toy fairy. “It’s broken,” he said. “It doesn’t scatter fairy dust like it said it did.”
I seized on this sliver of hope. The things had not yet started to sprinkle fairy dust. They must be programmed to release their lethal cargo at some specific time.
“That thing’ll kill you,” I said. I took the boy’s toy out of his hands and threw it as far as I could across the lawn, knowing that wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference. The toy fairies weren’t broken. They were just locked. By the AI inside them, whose spooky presence I had glimpsed in the St. Clare’s cargo hold. The AI designed by my brilliant ex-wife.
“Hey!” The mother’s outraged shout followed me as I jogged back to the taxi.
“Excuse me,” I said, “excuse me.” I edged through the crowd.
The trunk of the taxi stood open. Toy fairies filled it, out of their packaging, tumbled around in there like tiny winged corpses.
In front of the trunk stood a young man in a red, white, and green happi coat, with his hair spray-dyed in stripes to match. He had bad skin and a gap-toothed grin. He was passing out toy fairies as fast as eager little hands could grab them.
I saw Lucy.
Standing right in front of the trunk, with Christy and a bunch of the other kids from Shoreside Elementary, stretching out her hand.
I never saw the people I knocked aside. I grabbed Lucy’s wrist and yanked her back, empty-handed.
“Hey,” the young man said, and then he took a step back, bumping into the taxi. He was scared of me.
Smart guy.
I seized the front of his happi coat and dragged him up on his toes. “How’d you get this job?”
“It was on GetHired, man! I just applied like normal! Is there a problem?” His voice broke. He was terrified. I let him go.
“Sorry,” I said. I took Lucy’s hand.
“Happy Founding Day,” the young man yelled at my back, sarcastically.
“Yeah,” I said. “Happy Founding Day.”
Sweat started out at the backs of my knees as I eased Lucy away from the taxi.
“I want one of those fairies!” Lucy whined.<
br />
“No, sweetie,” I said, and my voice came out soft. “I’ll give you a better present.”
She jerked her hand out of mine. “That’s what I want,” she said, starting to cry. “You never give me anything I want.”
I picked her up, ignoring the protests from my aching shoulder and back muscles. She immediately struggled down. I grabbed her arm, and reached for Christy with my free hand. “Come on, kids,” I said to the other children, and we walked away.
Behind us, the police officers moved in, breaking up the crowd.
“What was all that about?” Christy said. “What’s wrong?” She looked back at the police officers.
“Oh, nothing,” I said. I didn’t know, at the time, why I felt compelled to speak quietly and downplay my fear, but later it dawned on me: I did it because I was scared shitless. I was acting like prey. What use are claws and teeth against 8,999 machines?
Half a dozen of Lucy’s classmates had fairies. They turned them on and sent them aloft. Kids are so quick to figure this stuff out. Sparkly wings blurred overhead as we shuffled along. I didn’t know where to go. We couldn’t all fit in the police cruisers. We were slightly closer to the Hanayashiki exit, so I made the decision to go that way.
The sun was sinking. The shadow of the top of Bonsucesso Tower slashed across the greenway like a sword. Incongruous scents of chocolate and magnolias tinted the air, and everywhere flew the little sparkly toy fairies with their rotors whirring.
“These things are a bit freaky,” Christy said, ducking as one flew low over her head.
“Yeah,” I said. “Watch out.”
“Pretty, though,” she said, looking up.
I followed her gaze. The goddamn sky was full of the things, like a swarm of butterflies. Some of them were getting up higher than the force field barriers, and being carried away in the wind. People stopped in their tracks; they looked up and gasped. It was that soft unguarded ‘oooh’ you hear when people have witnessed something unexpected and magical.
I dropped to my knees and grabbed the back of Lucy’s head and pressed her face into my shirt.
*
I did not know what else was going on at that moment, and even if I had, I couldn’t have understood it, because no human being could understand it. This was the brutal, blindingly fast warfare of artificial intelligences, fought with the only two weapons in an AI’s arsenal: one and zero. Something and nothing. That’s all they have. But oh, what a lot of damage they can do with it.
When Dolph and d’Alencon let MF out of the trunk of the cruiser, he’d been encased in a silver body bag. This was a portable Faraday sack, the type of gizmo commonly used to disable electronics. Of course, MF was not your average bot, as we were coming to understand. He could’ve just ripped the thing open with his manipulators. But he was trying to be cooperative. So he lay there without moving until Dolph pulled the sack off and told him just how much trouble we were in.
MF already knew part of it. Back in Bonsucesso Tower, he had explored the servers Mujin Inc had used, and picked up enough remanent data to determine what type of architecture Sophia had used to build her AIs. It wasn’t much, but it was the difference between operating with a map, or without one.
Now, crouching on the asphalt of the parking area, he launched a full-spectrum attack on the toy fairies.
Sophia had originally designed them for use on Gvm Uye Sachttra, where there was no connectivity. There, they’d have been invulnerable. But here, they were flying among hundreds of AIs far more powerful than they were, any one of which could have subverted them in a hot second. After the target of the attack changed to Mag-Ingat, Sophia must have worked around the clock to harden them against potential hacking. They now had military-grade security, or even better. It was no wonder the police department had not been able to even find them, let alone hack them.
MF was less dainty in his approach. Data bombs flew around us and under our feet and over our heads, traversing the radio frequencies and the optical fibers running through the greenway. They exploded in the zettabyte-deep buckets of the uptown servers where Sophia had hidden her command strings.
There were side effects.
Fairground rides clanked to a halt. Others sped up and began to shake themselves to pieces. People screamed.
Lights in the towers above us flashed on, then off. Doors opened and shut like guillotines. Elevators stopped. Alarms shrieked in a discordant fanfare.
“This is my fault,” I said to Christy, who was crouching beside me, trying to make me get up, and she said, “No, it’s not,” and a second later, “What is?”
The toy fairies fought back. They flung oceans of nonsense data at MF and his borrowed processors. They ring-fenced themselves with ramparts of encryption built on the fly. MF stole more processing power to assault them. Customer service bots froze. Cars lost their minds and drifted in mid-air. Payments ceased to process. The radio in d’Alencon’s cruiser died at the very instant that Officer Meaney was using it to tell him that they had arrested that poor sucker with the patriotic hair.
At the height of the battle, MF probably had half the city’s processing power under his control. It took him 15.8 seconds, all told, to break through to the enemy’s inmost citadel: the toy fairies’ parental controls.
After it was all over, I asked a friend who knows more about computers than I do how long it would have taken him to hack those controls.
He said, “‘Bout half an hour.”
MF did it in 2.3 seconds.
The fairies’ rotors stopped turning.
All 8,999 of them fluttered to the ground on their glider wings, like falling sycamore seeds, and lay inert.
Disbelieving, I released my grip on Lucy. “Daddy,” she whined, “That hurt!” I rose to my feet and kicked the fairy nearest us. It didn’t move.
Pulling Lucy and Christy with me, while the other kids scuttled after us, I half jogged, half ran back towards the parking area.
Everyone on the greenway was freaking out, unaware that they had already come unscathed through the moment of peak danger. It was the side effects. The power going out and coming back, machines stopping and starting, payment terminals freezing, cars drifting off course in the sky—these things don’t happen. We’re all so invested in the idea that Ponce de Leon is safe. But awareness of the dangers of the Cluster lurks just below the surface. The more clued-up people were glancing fearfully at the sky.
There was no stampede for the exits, by the way; we’re jaded, at the same time as we’re innocent. We all know that if Ponce de Leon were to be attacked from space, it wouldn’t do any good to run for the exits. So people just clustered together and nervously poked at their dead phones.
Moving among the groups of frightened people, bots—customer service bots, big and little, and ones that had been dressed up as historical characters for the festival—swept the walkways with fast, mechanical efficiency, picking up the fairies and dropping them into garbage bags.
We crossed the parking area to the police cruisers. Mechanical Failure was standing among the police officers, chatting Captain Meaney up. “Are you a natural redhead?”
I said, “Is it over?” I was red-faced, sweating, balanced on a razor’s edge between terror and relief.
“He did it,” Dolph gloated. He was sitting on the trunk of the cruiser, smoking a cigarette, despite his cut lip. His handcuffs were gone. “Correction. We did it!” He leaned over and held up his hand. I bemusedly returned his high-five.
“Yeah,” said d’Alencon. “However, y’all are still under arrest.”
“Oh, come on, Bones,” I said good-humoredly, already bouncing back. At least I thought I was. “You’re not gonna ding us for busting down an office door. We saved the freaking city.”
“I’m of the opinion you did,” d’Alencon agreed. He glanced at Officer Meaney, who was now on the radio, ordering up a hazardous waste disposal unit. “But that does not change the fact that those bio-weapons were imported to Ponce de L
eon on board your ship.”
54
Goddamn Parsec.
Goddamn Parsec.
He had talked. I knew it. There was no other way the cops could have found out. Sure, they could have learned by checking my manifests that I had shipped the toy fairies from Ponce de Leon to Gvm Uye Sachttra … but only Parsec knew that I had been unable to deliver them, and brought them back here.
Well, Rafael Ijiuto could have told them.
But there was no advantage for him in talking. In fact, if he did, he’d incriminate himself. Parsec, on the other hand, had everything to gain. So he had broken the unspoken code of Shifter silence, and dropped me in it to save himself.
He was in it up to his furry ass, of course. But he could probably get away with his “I knew nothing” defense, as long as it could not be proved that he’d committed any crime … such as importing bio-weapons to Ponce de Leon.
And I was the one who’d done that.
So they took me and Dolph down to PdL PD HQ, a grandiose colonial building in the middle of downtown. While we waited, Martin and Parsec were brought in. I jumped up from my seat and caught up with Parsec as he walked with a police officer towards the offices of the detective division. He was joking around with his escort, oozing bonhomie. He was not under arrest. He’d just come to give a statement, which would doubtless include compromising information about me, signed and sworn and, for what it was worth, true.
“You asswipe,” I said. “You slimy, lying crook. You traitor.”
He looked at me and said one word: “Tomas.”
I fell back. Watched him disappear through the swinging doors beneath the red light indicating the security force field was on. I knew exactly what he’d just told me. He could have given me up for the killing of Tomas Feirweather, alias Canuck. That had been murder, no two ways about it. But with that cryptic utterance of the man’s name, Parsec had indicated that he had not and would not finger me for that, as long as I played nice. By only squealing about the returned cargo, he was letting me off easy … and punishing me, as honor demanded, for killing his minion.
Lethal Cargo Page 32
