Android: Golem (The Identity Trilogy) (21 page)

I reached Adrian as he powered the vehicle up and hopped. I reached out and caught the skid that doubled as landing gear and a charging unit. The hopper strained to grab altitude with me hanging from one side, and it fought to automatically correct to a horizontal pitch.

“Adrian Graham, you are under arrest for destruction of private property.” I didn’t know if the club would press charges, but Adrian had committed the crime in front of me, so it was within my power to arrest him. By the time we sorted out the property destruction, Hansen would have my report in his hands and we could work on the murder charges. “Adrian Graham.”

Inside the vehicle, Adrian stared at me, then fumbled in a storage compartment and brought out a pistol. He pointed it at me and pulled the trigger.

The bullet chopped through the acrylic glass; the hopper didn’t have transplas. The impact slammed against my head and took a hunk of synthskin with the round. Blue fluid leaked down my face and occluded my right eye with a sapphire film.

Adrian fired twice more as he jockeyed his vehicle. Fortunately, both rounds missed me, but I recognized that he was endangering the public. By that time, we were thirty meters off the ground and rising quickly.

We slid into the traffic lanes. The hopper’s auto safety programming struggled to bring us into the proper lane, but my shifting weight created problems.

Then, another hopper drifted up from street level and streaked toward us. I barely made out the two men inside the craft before a hatch opened on the hopper’s side and the nose of an assault rifle shoved through.

The gunner opened fire at once.

Chapter Seventeen

Military-grade rounds ripped into Adrian Graham’s hopper and shredded my jacket, thudding into my chest and punching through my body. I raised my free hand to protect my head and more bullets deflected from my arm.

I realized then that the men weren’t there to attack Adrian Graham.

They were after me.

I clung to the landing skid as Adrian banked his vehicle over sharply. The hopper banged against another vehicle in the other lane. The contact jarred me and I almost lost my hold, but I squeezed tightly. The metal crushed a little in my grip.

The attacking hopper banked and persisted in its pursuit. I was relieved that the gunner had stopped firing his weapon.

The other nearby hopper pilots had figured out what was going on and were veering sharply away from the two vehicles locked in combat. Horns blared, triggered by the defensive programming of the hoppers, as well as panicked pilots.

I opened my comm as I twisted. “Dispatch, this is Detective Drake. I require immediate assistance.”

“I have you, Detective Drake. We’re locking onto your GPS now.”

“Affirmative.” I rolled in the high winds. Adrian had chosen to gain altitude in his attempt to shake off the pursuers. We bumped and jostled through traffic as we cut through the levels. “I’m under attack by a hopper.”

“Roger that. I have you in view. I’m trying to identify the attacking hopper. I’m streaming through the street cams but locking on is problematic.”

I twisted and focused on the pursuing hopper. I took vid through my internal recording equipment, which hadn’t been harmed by the bullets that had chopped through my metal body, and uploaded the file through my PAD connection. “I’m sending you vid of my attackers.”

“Roger that, Detective. We’re also arranging mosaic vid from the surrounding traffic cams and vehicle security systems.”

My attackers opened fire again. A line of bullets stitched holes along Adrian Graham’s hopper, chewing through the body and through the acrylic glass. Adrian jerked violently to the side as blood suddenly fountained inside the cockpit.

I holstered my weapon and pulled myself up as the Directive programming kicked in. If I could, I had to save Adrian. Balancing on the skid, I grabbed the door and yanked. I noticed then that my strength was lacking. Some of my internal systems had been damaged. The nanobots inside my body were rushing to repair the damage.

With a metallic squeal of pistol-shot fractures, the door’s locks shattered and it came open. Almost immediately, the wind caught the door and yanked it from my grip, popping it above the hopper’s roof like the gull wing it was meant to imitate. Another hopper came by, moving fast, and slammed into the open door, tearing it from its hinges. The door fell, jerking back and forth in the wind as it was buffeted, getting batted like a soccer ball by the other hoppers.

The attacking hopper struggled to close the distance, but was held off by the thick press of the other traffic.

I pulled myself into the cockpit and pressed a hand against Adrian Graham’s wrist to read his biometrics. His sunglasses were gone. His blood pressure was falling fast and his heart rate was thready.

For a moment, unexplainably, I was back on that rooftop with Shelly dead in my arms. Then I snapped into motion again, surveying the damage, though I knew there wasn’t anything I could do to save him.

One of the bullets had torn out part of Adrian Graham’s throat, shredding his airway and ripping through his jugular. He was bleeding out and drowning in his own blood. He looked at me once, then his bloodshot eyes dimmed and lost focus.

The pursuing hopper came back, closing fast from the rear. Bullets punched through and hit the corpse and me. I settled in at the joysticks, struggling to control the hopper so it wouldn’t be a threat to the other pilots. I had to protect them.

But, that was also out of my control. The assault rifle bullets had taken out the steering, and the hopper veered sharply, bouncing off a large cargo hopper that swatted me aside like a gnat. The hopper went vertical and flipped, before landing upside down on the pursuing hopper.

Since I wasn’t buckled into the seat, I started to fall. I flung a hand against the top of the cockpit and held myself in place. I stared through the acrylic glass nose and the other hopper’s windshield at the two men.

Carbosteel ground carbosteel as the vehicles fought the wind and scraped against each other. Then, the hopper I was in shifted, sliding over the side of the pursuit vehicle. I thought I was going to slide free, and I was concerned about the traffic around us, but the skids tangled and wouldn’t separate. We were locked together.

The other pilot panicked as he fought for control. His efforts didn’t do any good. The hoppers tumbled through the air and slammed against a building, then rebounded and lost altitude rapidly. We hit other hoppers on the way down, but no more than glancing blows.

I was able to hold myself in position in the cockpit and keep track of our path, but there was nothing I could do to stop the tumbling free fall. A moment later, we hit the street and skidded at least a hundred meters till we smashed through the front of a flower shop.

The hopper crunched and came apart. Adrian Graham’s body wrapped around mine, then flopped free as gravity reasserted and pulled the corpse away.

I was on my side and the open hatch was to my left. I pushed free and scrambled up from the wreckage. On top of the hopper, I gazed around at the destruction of the flower shop. None of the workers appeared injured. They huddled in the back near the fresh bouquet displays.

I leaped down and almost fell as damaged gyros nearly gave out beneath me. I forced myself up and raised my Synap pistol as I staggered toward the other hopper.

Outside on the street, two NAPD patrol hoppers descended like predatory birds and remained in hover mode, ready to move if they had to pursue one of the vehicles.

“Dispatch, patch me through to the uniforms outside the flower shop.” I closed on the wrecked hopper. “Send emergency rescue vehicles to this location.”

“Detective Drake, this is Officer Frances Miller.” Her voice was strong, certain.

Shelly and I had worked with Miller on three occasions. She was a good police officer, content to work the streets, and had no desire to be a homicide investigator. Shelly had liked her.

“Thank you for coming, Officer Miller.”

“Are you all right in there?”

“Yes, thank you. I have two men in this hopper that attacked me.”

“No one else?”

“No.”

The hopper door on the passenger side had buckled. I slipped my fingers into the gap and yanked it open with a piercing screech.

The pilot was out, blood oozing from a scalp wound, and the passenger was barely lucid. He reached for his rifle. I triggered the Synap and shocked him into unconsciousness.

I didn’t recognize either man.

*

At the NAPD, Lieutenant Ormond ordered me to one of the interview rooms in the detective bullpen. I sat in a straight-backed chair at the bare table in the small room. The one-way glass was in front of me. Usually it was behind me. Sitting there, staring at it, was very curious.

As I stared at my reflection, my face reshaped itself as the nanobots worked. Manufacturing synthskin was a lot simpler than repairing the carbosteel infrastructure of my body—what would be bones on a human.

My repair subroutine kept me up to date on the restorations. I was already back to seventy-one percent efficiency.

I thought most of the damage could be fixed by the nanobots, but I suspected some of it would require a trip to Haas-Bioroid. That was fine, because I was due for scheduled maintenance anyway.

I had been taken into custody. Curiously, I suspected the difference between being arrested and taken into custody was negligible. Seated in the room, I was still able to use my internal PAD to track the investigation into the attack on me.

Hansen had been handed the case because I’d already forwarded him the Trina Oakes murder information. He’d gotten the assignment by default because everyone believed the two incidents were related. I knew Hansen wasn’t happy—he’d already sent four emails to that effect.

Everyone seemed determined to believe the attack on me had something to do with Trina Oakes and Adrian Graham. With the murder book on Trina Oakes in hand, Hansen had wasted no time following up on the cred trail Adrian Graham had left. The finances he’d gotten from the woman’s murder and his grandmother’s death were already long gone.

According to the bookkeeping Hansen had already pulled up with the aid of a warrant, most of those creds had gone to Viktor Dobtcheff, a known Russian
Mafiya
loan shark, through various shell companies. Dobtcheff had a long history of law-breaking, but he hadn’t yet been tagged with murder.

Facial recognition had turned up nothing on the two men in the pursuit hopper. They were unknown variables. That intrigued me. If those men had been assigned to kill me, as I believed they had been, it stood to reason that I would know them.

Or at least, I would know where they came from.

I sat and I pondered.

*

Three hours and twenty-two minutes later, Lieutenant Ormond came through the door.

I started to get up.

“Don’t.” Ormond put out a hand to me. “Don’t you move.”

I stayed where I was, but was curious about the command. I didn’t know why he didn’t want me showing respect for his arrival and his station.

For a long moment, the lieutenant stared at me as if he’d never seen me before. Then he let out a long sigh and wiped his face with a big hand. “Can you tell me what oscillating jet you decided to take a dump in?”

The usage of the word confused me for a moment, until I translated it into the vernacular. “I don’t defecate.”

“You tell me that, but I’ve got a couple city blocks that have considerable damage to them, and a flower shop that’s going to need massive restoration. I’d say that’s evidence to the contrary.”

“I didn’t—”

“Just don’t talk for a minute, Drake. I’ve got a headache as big as this room, and the commissioner is asking questions.”

I started a timer for the minute he’d asked for.

Ormond pulled out the chair on the other side of the table. He put his hand on the built-in scanner and opened files that appeared in holo. The feed came from a 3D news station.

I watched in silence as the sequence showed Adrian Graham’s hopper flying out of control and bumping other hoppers in the aerial lanes. It ended at the flower shop, but there had been several views of the pursuit hopper.

Finally, the minute Ormond had asked for had passed. I budgeted another ten percent for error, which I knew I had not made.

“No one has been able to identify the men that came after me.”

Ormond cursed.

I waited.

“That’s what you want to talk about? Those men?” Ormond shook his head.

“Yes. I am curious about who sent them. And why.”

“Evidently, they were there to kill Adrian Graham. They succeeded at that.”

“I don’t believe that’s what they were there to do.”

Ormond scowled at me. “Oh? Then what do you
believe
they were there to do, Detective?”

“I believe they were there to kill me.”

“Why would you think that?”

I indicated my clothing, which was filled with holes. I would have the nanobots fix those later, if they weren’t taken as evidence. I would have claimed them as evidence. “I am proof of that line of logic.”