city blues 01 - dome city blues (49 page)

As I worked my way closer, I had to keep reminding myself that the robot couldn’t see me and
refused
to hear me.  I tried not to think about the fact that it had started to investigate my decoys twice, and then changed its mind and returned to its favorite vantage point.  If it could change its mind about
that
, it could change its mind about ignoring the sounds that I made.

As I moved closer, the robot’s image seemed to waver in the lenses of the Night-Stalkers.  Streamers of vapor made the air around it seem to blur and ripple.  It was parked next to the cylinder of liquid nitrogen that I had passed on my way in.

The first pieces of a plan began to stir around in my brain.  It wasn’t a very complicated plan, but it was a plan nevertheless.

I continued to close on the robot until I was seven or eight meters behind it.  Then, I laid on the floor and took aim, not at the security robot, but at the cylinder of nitrogen beside it.  I mentally crossed my fingers, and gave the trigger of the machine pistol a squeeze.

The ceramic meat-grinder rounds weren’t designed to pierce armor, but they had no trouble punching through the thin double-walled thermex of the nitrogen cylinder.  The wounded cylinder spewed super-cold liquid all over itself, the conveyor belt, the floor, and my friend the robot.

A good third of the robot frosted over instantly.  The carbon-laminate and steel of its armor and chassis pinged as they contracted at different rates.

I drew a bead on the robot’s back and pulled the trigger again, pumping a dozen or so rounds into the now frozen machine.  The frosted metal and iced carbon-laminate shattered like fine crystal.  The robot toppled to the floor in a shower of electrical sparks, its pneumatic Gatling gun pointed toward the ceiling.  A few of its servos whined and jerked convulsively and then it lay still in a pool of smoky vapor.  The assembly room was silent again.

Chalk one up for the good guys.

I walked back to the hall door.  The fractured security robot made no move to stop me now.  I eased the door open and peeked around the corner again.

This time, there were no shots, and no robot.  I thought about Iron Betty’s dire prophecies concerning Homo Trovectior and I almost laughed aloud.  Machines might be able to run faster than humans, shoot straighter, fly higher, and calculate Pi to seventeen-hundred decimal places, but until machines understood treachery, Homo Sapiens was destined to stay on top.

My secret amusement was short-lived.  I wasn’t just dealing with robots here.  There was still John.  And, as I was finding out, he was quite well versed in the arts of treachery.

It took me two or three more minutes of cat-footing around the halls to find the second stairwell.  I did another jack-in-the-box entry, and then climbed to the fifth-floor without running into any more of John’s robots.

When I reached the top of the stairs, I laid Ryan’s machine pistol on the upper step and drew my Blackhart.  If there was going to be more shooting, I wanted the knockdown power of the 12mm steel-jacketed slugs.  In about thirty seconds, John was going to know where I was anyway; I wouldn’t have to worry about giving away my position.

I listened intently for any sounds from the other side of the fire door.  Nothing.

I eased the fire door open.  Emergency lanterns threw puddles of light at evenly spaced intervals down the length of the hallway.  The corridor was empty, so was the foyer outside John’s apartment.

The carved wooden doors that led to John’s apartment were open.

John’s voice came through the open doors.  “Come on in, Sarge.  The party can’t start without you.”

CHAPTER 31

“Do you remember that furlough we took in Rio?” John’s unseen voice asked.  “We picked up that pair of Filipino twins at the Fan Dancer Club?  You swore that you could tell them apart, but I swapped girls on you halfway through the weekend, and you never knew it.  I thought it was funny at the time; those girls were interchangeable.  The girls didn’t care, either; one American soldier with a pocket full of money is about the same as any other.  But the joke was on me. 
We
were just as interchangeable as
they
were.”

John walked slowly out of his apartment and stood in the hall, his hands held open and empty, palms turned up in a casual imitation of the crucifixion posture.

“There’s a moral to that story, Sarge,” he said.  “Sometimes, things aren’t what they look like.  Come to think of it, maybe things aren’t
ever
what they look like.”

I sighted my Blackhart in on his sternum.  “Where’s your back-up, John?”

“You don’t need your gun,” he said, “I’m not going to shoot it out with you.”

“Where’s your back-up, John?  I don’t want to have to ask again.”

John smiled slightly.  “I don’t have any snipers in the rafters.  You may not believe it, Sarge, but I’m not out to get you.  In fact, I’m doing everything in my power to protect you.”

I didn’t lower the pistol.  “You’ve got half the punks on the street trying to kill me,” I said.

John shook his head.  “If I’d wanted you dead, don’t you think I would have hired a professional?  I never thought for a second that a bunch of street punks could take you down.  I did it to keep your head down.  You were bearing down on me like a freight train, and I needed some room to think.”

“What about Holtzclaw and Kurt Rieger?  Did you kill them to keep me busy?”

“I didn’t have anything to do with them.  That was...”  His voice trailed off.

“That was who?”

“That was somebody else.”

I wanted to see John’s face.  I flipped the Night-Stalker lenses up onto my forehead.  Between the emergency lanterns, and the light coming from John’s apartment, I could see pretty well.

“I’m not in the mood for riddles, John.”

John lowered his hands.  “Can we go into my apartment and sit down?  I feel like an idiot standing in the hall.”

The skin around my eyes was sweaty from the Night-Stalkers.  The air felt cool against it.  “I like it out here just fine,” I said.  “Put your hands back up.”

John sighed and raised his hands again.

“Look,” he said, “it’s not too late to walk away.  I’ll put the word on the street that the hit is canceled.  Just go home and let it go.”

“It’s too late for that,” I said.  “I want to know what in the hell is going on.”

“No,” said John.  “I don’t think you do.”

“Don’t jerk me around,” I said.  “Where is she?”

“Who?”

“Sonja Winter,” I said.  “Where is she?”

“What makes you think I know?”

“You’re starting to piss me off,” I said.

John raised his eyebrows.  “Is that supposed to be a threat?  You’re going to shoot me?”

“You think I won’t?”

A tired little smile danced across John’s lips.  “No,” he said.  “I don’t think you will.  Maybe if I had a gun, but I can’t see you killing an unarmed man.  It’s just not your style.”

“Bad call,” I said.  “Remember that price you put on my head?  A couple of street rats caught up with me in my hotel room the other night.  I had to shoot both of them.  Then there’s the fact that you framed me for a murder that I didn’t commit.”

I tilted my head to either side as though relieving kinks in my neck, and then made a show of sighting the Blackhart in on John’s forehead.  “You see, old pal-o’-mine, my ass is wedged in a corner.  You’ve played the game too well, John.  I’ll blow your brains out in a heartbeat.”

We stood there for a few seconds while John tried to figure out whether or not I was bluffing.  The weird thing was, even
I
didn’t know if I could pull the trigger.  I decided to up the ante before John could read the indecision in my eyes.

“We’ve got sort of a logistics problem here,” I said.  “The only way for you to be sure that I will shoot you, is if I actually
do
shoot you.  Unfortunately, by the time you find out, it’ll be too late; your brains will be all over the floor.  So I suggest a compromise.  I’m going to count to three.  If you don’t tell me where Sonja is by then, I’m going to shoot you in the right kneecap.  That’ll solve both our problems.  I’ll still be able to ask you a few questions, and you will know for absolute certain that I am
not
fucking around.”

I nodded toward him.  “If I were you, I’d unbuckle my belt.”

“What for?”

“In about three seconds, you’re going to need a tourniquet.”

John swallowed visibly; his wistful smile seemed to desert him.  “All right Sarge,” he said.  “Maybe you
would
shoot me.”

“No maybe about it,” I said, with a bravado that I didn’t feel.  “You’ve left me with nothing to lose.”

John sighed.  “Your woman is safe.”

“You’d better hope so,” I said.  “Where is she?”

“In the third-floor R&D lab.”

“Let’s go see,” I said.

John looked around and took a step toward the far end of the hall.  “Okay,” he said.  “This way.”

“No,” I said.  “We’ll use
these
stairs.”

John shrugged and walked toward me.  I backed against the wall and kept my Blackhart on him as he passed me.  I fell into step behind him.  “Slowly,” I said.  “And keep your hands where I can see them.”

John slowed his pace.  I grabbed a handful of the back of his collar, and shoved the barrel of my Blackhart against his spine.  “Let’s go for a little walk.”

When we were safely through the fire door and onto the stairs I said, “I want to hear it, John.  All of it.”

John sighed.  “I don’t even know where to start.”

We moved slowly, my eyes scanning constantly for any sign of John’s backup.  “How about the beginning?”

“The beginning?” John said.  “I’d have to say it started at Iguazu Falls, when that laser chopped a hole in my spine.”

“Whoa,” I said, jerking his collar and bringing him to a halt.  “I saved your life at Iguazu.  You’ve got no reason to want revenge against me.”

“This is not about revenge,” John said.  “It’s about getting my legs back.  Or at least it was at first.  Now it’s about a lot of things.”

I looked around.  Standing here was a bad idea.  I nudged John with the barrel of the Blackhart to get him moving again.  “You were saying?”

“You remember what I was like after Iguazu,” he said.  “All I could think about was getting out of that damned exoskeleton.  That’s what I got into bio-medical R&D for in the first place.  Nerve splicing, pyramidal pathway switching, I tried it all.  None of it even came close to working.  I finally decided to let my AI have a run at the problem.  I fed it every file on neuro-cybernetics that I could find, whole bodies of data from hospitals, biotech clinics, and research labs all over the world.  Sweden, Japan, Germany, China.  After I had squeezed the legitimate sources for all they could produce, I hired jackers to go after scraps and rumors.  When I had nothing left to feed the AI, I programmed it to design a custom chip: a neural bypass to route motor-control signals around the damage in my spine.”

The fourth-floor landing was clear, but I watched the fire door out of the corner of my eye until we made the turn and started down the next flight of stairs.  “I know all this,” I said.  “Get to the part about the puppet chip.”

“The puppet chip?” John asked.  “Is that what you call it?”

“Why not?  It certainly fits.  What do you call it?”

“I call it what I’ve always called it,” John said.  “The neural shunt.”

“Wait a second,” I said.  “Your neural shunt is the puppet chip?  The same chip that you used to control Russell Carlisle, and Michael Winter?”

“It’s been modified a little,” John said.  “But yes, the one you call the
puppet chip
is a later generation of the neural shunt.”

John stopped at the next landing.  “Third-floor,” he said.  “The R&D lab is through this door and down the hall.”

“Open it,” I said.

John opened the door.  The corridor was empty.  I nudged him with the Blackhart.  “Keep moving.”

John started walking again.  I jerked on his collar to slow him down.  The hallway was lined with doors, any one of which might pop open to reveal a security robot or John’s lady gunslinger.  The ones that really made me nervous were those we had already passed.  I had no way to keep an eye on them without stopping every few meters to look over my shoulder.