April 6: And What Goes Around (26 page)

"I
distributed a number of robotic spy bugs for our masters. It's amazing how tiny
they have made the current generation. A few at the port and near several
agencies, as well as the Chinese consulate. By late in the morning we should be
able to get reports from what they are hearing and seeing all condensed to
eliminate the things we don't care about such as workers discussing yesterday's
football games over coffee in the morning. We should know where our efforts
will be effective and concentrate there."

 Gunny saw a shiny
mote in the air fly past behind Chen. It startled him because he hadn't seen a
single bug since they arrived on the island. It turned and made a circuit of the
Oriental gentleman at another table behind Chen, ignoring the lights and lit
candles on the tables that normally would attract an insect. It paused straight
in front of his face. It was entirely
too
shiny to be an insect.

"I dropped a
few at the local police station just in case they take an interest in us,"
Chen said looking down at his food.

The little flying
creature hovering briefly in front of the man at the other table turned away.
He made a waving gesture to shoo it away long after it had started to leave on
its own. He was slow and never really focused on it, swatting absentmindedly.
Gunny had the strong impression it had been examining the man's face. He
considered the idea it could be running recognition software.

"Tongan Customs
is in the same building as the police so that made matters easier," Chen
said taking a sip of the wine again.

The mote took a
long curving pass over their table but turned sharply and went straight for
Chen's face. Chen had received the same gene altering treatment April and
several of her friends enjoyed. It decreased his reaction time considerably
over what he was born with. He made a swatting motion with his free hand the
little flyer had to swerve around the hand,  then he ducked his head to the
side. Gunny had never received the treatment. He just happened to be one of
those one in a hundred thousand freaks of nature who were frighteningly fast.

Gunny's hand
flashed out so fast the normal eye couldn't track it and snatched the speck out
of the air right in front of Chen's nose, after it had evaded Chen's hand. Pain
shot up his arm from the little robot. It did something nasty to his hand but
he didn't let loose. He just ground his teeth together and snarled at the pain
clutching his fist even tighter. He could feel a buzz in his palm as the little
device tried to get loose.

Chen was twitched
away from Gunny's fist,  but recovered quickly, and picked up on what was
happening even faster. "It's like what I was distributing – but hostile!"

Gunny took his
identification card off his neck. It was on a tough synthetic cord and he
doubled it  around his wrist. "My hand is numb already. It's some kind of
toxin." He stuck a butter knife through the cord and turned and turned
until it bit into the flesh and cut off the circulation.  He grabbed the cruets
on the table for salad and poured vinegar past his thumb, flexing it a little
to let it run down to the bug. "Hah, they didn't make it water proof. It
stopped buzzing when it got wet. Get me to a hospital, and if I faint don't let
the cord come loose whatever you do."

It was almost
morning with a band of light showing on the horizon before they could leave the
hospital. Not that the doctors had released him. He'd been admitted and
questioned heavily by local police. They hadn't been able to recover the
drowned bot. The Tongan police now had that in a urine specimen jar. Chen had
rushed upstairs to recover their things while Mackay took him to the ER,
abandoning most of their clothing and the hidden cache, but grabbing one set of
clothes for Gunny. That was a good thing since they hadn't seen his other
clothing since the emergency room.

When he caught up
to Gunny and Mackay, Chen reported that an ugly mob had materialized in the
hotel lobby demanding to know where the spacers were. Coming down stairs he'd calmly
gone straight in the restaurant again on seeing the angry faces. Being Asian and
covered with road dust had probably helped him look like a local. But anybody
trying to bypass them and go out the doors would have attracted their attention.

When they
frightened a room number from the clerk they all went up the stairs without
leaving a watch behind in the lobby, so Chen made his escape. The mob was all fit
young men and not all of them looked like locals. Chen felt they were hired muscle
but not all foreign professionals or special forces. They also weren't
connected to the local police or they would have known to find them at the
hospital.

Gunny's hand was
gone
and a bandaged stub at his wrist. He was looking at a year to grow a new one
and then months to regain strength and dexterity. His hand had been a ruin from
the bot's injection, all discolored and swollen past any repair.

The doctor would
have been surprised Gunny was so functional, newly from surgical recovery. His
knees were still wobbly and he was sick to his stomach, but it was a miracle he
was vertical. Chen cheated and gave him a shot of military stimulants. He'd pay
for using that in a couple hours but he needed it right now to stand and walk. He
got dressed with his partners help and headed down the fire stairs after a
quick disconnect of the alarm system by Mackay. Chen went ahead again to secure
a boat, leaving them his scooter. The hospital had been quiet before the day
shift and the street was near empty. Too empty really. The two of them on a
little scooter were conspicuous. They went slow and tried to look harmless.
Gunny hid his stub in front of him and leaned on Mackay like he was drunk. It
wasn't very hard to fake. He wasn't in the best of shape.

When they reached
the agreed intersection and pulled over Chen materialized from the shadows to
led them to a boat, leaving the scooter parked against the dock yard fence with
the key in it. Odds were it would be gone before sunup. There were a couple
other boats along the docks with fishermen prepping for a day's work, but Chen
led them to a pleasure motor craft. He spoke in Chinese, which neither of them
knew, so they concluded it was bravado, making noise so it appeared that they
had nothing to hide.

"Go forward
and lay down," Chen commanded Gunny, "before you fall down. You look
like hell."

"Can you run
this thing?" Mackay demanded. "I've rented a row boat in a city park
before and that is the sum of my experience with boats."

"I can,
"Chen assured him, "and I checked the tanks to make sure it has fuel.
The first one I looked at was near dry. Can you at least untie us? Can you
figure that out? Don't skulk like you have no business doing it. Walk tall and
confident."

"Yeah, that
much I can do," Mackay agreed, and slipped off in the dusk. He forced
himself to walk not run, and tossed the lines back on the boat. A rumble told
him the engines were started and he jumped back aboard as soon as he tossed the
second line. The boat was moving already but he managed not to fall in the
lagoon. As he joined Chen he saw their running lights were on too.

"Where are we
going?" Mackay asked. The sky was steel colored and the horizon bright now.

"I told Jeff
I intend head due north at a fuel conserving speed and we'll be picked up by
shuttle in the open ocean if weather permits. I'll check the weather once we're
clear of the reef and see how the waves are. If it's really bad we'll need to
redirect to an island. I don't know these waters or the currents and it's going
to take all my attention to just get out of the lagoon. Would you look and see
if you can find papers for this vessel?" Chen asked. "We will try to
compensate the owner in the fullness of time for stealing her."

"Why not just
tell them where to find her after we lift?" Mackay suggested. "They
know the currents and should be able to locate where it has drifted from a
start point if they don't delay too long."

"That would be true, they might, but we aren't going to do
that," Chen told him. "We might have to do this again sometime so
it's a bad idea to teach people how we operate and that we can do an open ocean
pickup. No, as much as I'd like to do that I'm going to scuttle her."

* * *

"Our mission
to make sure the last minute supplies were loaded failed," Jeff said, "I'm
sure we'll get
some
of them, but they had to retreat. Gunny was terribly
injured and they might have been targeted further. However, if Gunny hadn't
intercepted the attack bot aimed at Chen he would be dead. You can put a
tourniquet on your wrist to seal off a hand but that method is terribly
ineffective when the same lethal injection is on your face.

Jon ran a hand
around his throat, considering the truth of that. "So you have no idea who
owned the little devil?"

"None at
all," Jeff said. "It apparently had Chen's picture or the recognition
data for his face. He was in Chinese intelligence but worked all over for them.
Lots of other agencies could have his image. Even if it was Chinese, which
faction? The Tongans have the damaged bot so we can't examine it. I don't want
to risk what little credit we have with them by asking for it. They are already
peeved at the trouble they feel we brought in."

"I should
tell you... The wall crawling bot that Irwin Hall put us onto was a singleton.
We hit it with an EMP but the insides were so fused we don't know who owned it
either," Jon told him.

"This sounds
much more sophisticated. I expected to see
somebody
start using attack
bots eventually, but I'd hoped it might be later instead of sooner. There are
any number of states capable of making them. I suspect several already have
them fabricated, but when you finally use them it changes the game. It's the
sort of asset you hold in reserve until it is worth exposing," Jeff said.

"Then I don't
know what they thought our agents were doing to be worth the escalation. Some
of our supplies are going to get through even without their help," Jon
said.

"Maybe it
wasn't the supply issue," Jeff guessed. "It might have been to keep
us from learning more about this flu. Every effort Dr. Lee has made to find out
more about it has been rebuffed. If that is the case they failed
miserably."

Jon perked up at
that. "How so?"

"Chen dropped
off a considerable number of our own bots in the short time he was there.
Including a few at the hospital. He didn't get a sample of the flu, but one of
our little helpers sat in the light fixture and watched a technician sequence
the sample from one of the aircraft they turned away for having sick
passengers. It recorded him running the entire procedure so we know he did it
right and sent us all the critical data displayed on his screen after he was
done. We don't
know
this is the new nasty version yet for sure, but Dr.
Lee and Dr. Ames are examining the data now. It seems very likely and we'll
know for sure soon."

"I'd count it
a success then," Jon decided. "I'm not sure Gunny is going to agree,
but can I assume you will compensate him for his loss of work and
discomfort?"

"Compensate him?" Jeff said. "The man is a
treasure
.
If he can't reach an itch while he's growing a new hand all he has to do is
call and I'll
scratch
it for him."

* * *

Home was visible over
the pilot's shoulder, out the front view ports of the landing shuttle
Dionysus'
Chariot.
Mackay was in the copilots seat not because he could fly her but
because there were only four seats bolted in the
Chariot
right now. The
pilot was in his pressure suit. Gunny hadn't thought about it until he saw
that, but they'd all be in isolation at Home because conceivably they could
have been exposed to the new flu on Tonga. Not in the external tank, that was
for confirmed infected. But they were informed they would be sharing a suite at
the Holiday Inn with the clinic delivering their meals and taking their trash
away to be handled as a biohazard. The air ducts would be closed and an
environmental pack from a moon hut in the room. They needed four days to fail
to develop symptoms or display a viral load, before they could be released, but
Gunny would have the initial work started to bud a new hand. That couldn't
wait.

They'd launched this
rescue very quickly without waiting to reconfigure for a different mission.
Normally they wanted a copilot, but not badly enough to make somebody ride back
strapped to the deck.  Gunny was wondering how much rescuing them cost. It took
a lot of reactive mass to drop a shuttle to an Earth surface landing and they
hadn't dropped off a single kilo of freight or brought anything back. The
expense was going to be a straight loss for Jeff. This had to be the biggest
failure for their security business to date. The team had no idea yet that Chen's
part of the mission had gone very well.

"Well that was
a bust," Gunny groused. He had a Fentanyl patch on the side of his neck
that they'd slapped on him as soon as he was strapped in his seat. It made him pretty
fuzzy minded, but let him think about something besides how much he hurt or
Mackay's urgings to put one foot in front of the other that finally ended. That
had been all that would fit in his mind from when Chen had hit him with the
military stimulants until the Fentanyl flooded his bloodstream. He couldn't
keep his eyes open now but he could still worry and complain in fine form.

"I'm going to
be pretty useless for security work until I get this hand back. It will drive
me nuts. What am I supposed to
do
sitting around for a year? Write a
book? Take up chess?"

"I don't
know. A year
is
a long time to grow back a hand," Chen told his
friend. "Maybe you should just skip it and have a hook fitted. It might be
handy for intimidation at times. Besides, I understand it itches like crazy
when it's growing out. Did you know they put a hard shell over it because you
can't have bandages touching it while it buds? It's going to be awkward until
it gets to where the nails form and you can go to a glove over it."