The God Wave (27 page)

She became aware that Brian Reynolds was watching her about halfway through their afternoon session. Afterward he approached her.

“Something the matter, Lanfen?”

She forced herself to relax. “I'm fine. Why?”

“You seem jumpy. Jumpy for you anyway.” He smiled. “Of course your jumpy looks like most people's cool, calm, and collected.”

Mental gears spun. What sort of thing might get her adrenaline up? “It's my shifu, Master Chu. The man who taught him everything he knows is visiting his
kwoon
—his school—and he's asked me to give a demonstration of some of the more advanced
shaolinquan
and white crane techniques he taught me.” That was actually true. That she felt nerves about it was not. “Performing for Shifu Chu is intimidating enough, though I'm used to it. Performing for his master is terrifying.”

“Yeah. I can see that. It's like performing in front of my dad. That routine I did for General Howard on your first day here was merely purgatory. Strutting my stuff in front of my dad is pure hell.”

He turned away then and marched off to the bot barn. They were careful, these Deep Shield people, about never leaving their robots alone with anyone from Lanfen's team. She reached out with her imagination and touched the video switch again, noticing that Brian didn't so much as twitch mentally. He seemed oblivious to her presence.

She withdrew, took a deep breath, and went to join Mini and Dice in the canteen. Mini looked like Mini always looked. Dice was shredding a napkin.

“Hey,” Lanfen said casually as she strolled up to them. “I need to use the facilities before we take off.”

“Oh,” said Mini, jumping up from her chair, “me, too.”

They headed for the women's restroom.

Once there Lanfen actually did avail herself of the facilities. It amazed her how one's bladder responded to stress. Then she and Mini went to the exit and opened the door. Lanfen stepped halfway through and activated Chuck's mysterious little jammer. Mini kept on walking with Lanfen apparently by her side. Lanfen, trying not to let the glimpse of her retreating back unnerve her, slipped back into the restroom and went straight to the maintenance closet in the corner nearest the door. It was locked. She took only seconds to get into her zeta state. Her imagination was quite literal: she envisioned diving into the lock, tunneling into its mechanism to feel the tumblers with heightened senses. Feel them and manipulate them. It took but a moment of concentration—and some recollection of that YouTube video on lockpicking that she'd watched once after locking herself out—to shift them and let herself in.

The closet was full of the usual sorts of things one would expect to find in a maintenance closet: vacuum cleaner, mops, shelves full of toilet paper, and the like. It smelled of cleaning products and paper.

Grimacing, Lanfen shut the steel door and settled herself on the floor behind a large, rolling cart equipped with two trash containers. She checked her iPhone. It was approaching 6:30
P.M.
She slipped an earbud into one ear in case Chuck called, and she wondered how long it would be before the place would be battened down for the night. It occurred to her to wonder how she'd even know in the first place.

The answer was swift and laced with wry self-deprecation. Pulling her senses together, Lanfen closed her eyes and pictured Thorin standing in his little bay. Then she reached for him . . .

He wasn't there.

Damn!
Brian must still have had him off somewhere. A sick churning began in her stomach. She worked on calming it, going through several of her rituals before she banished the queasiness. Then she tried again to reach the robot, sympathizing with him being stuck in his little space just as she was squeezed into this claustrophobic closet. This time she was successful. He was there in his niche. She peered out at the workshop through his optics. Four technicians were working at the tables in the center of the large lab. Brian Reynolds was standing just inside the door, chatting with another one of her trainees. As she watched, the two men turned and left the room.

Great,
Lanfen thought.
Two down and four to go.

Chuck decided that Eugene had a twisted sense of humor. It would require one to choose
Transformers
as the movie they were allegedly watching to cover their clandestine activities. Eugene and Dice arrived at Chuck's house first to set up the movie. Dice, being Dice, had added an audio track to the video stream that featured indistinct conversation, laughter, and other sounds in appropriate places. It was the sort of thing only an archgeek would do.

“By the way,” Eugene told Chuck as they watched Dice set up the riff-tracked movie, “your exterminator left one of those doorknob ads on your front door. I put it on the hall table.”

Chuck glanced into his foyer. “I don't have an exterminator.”

Eugene's eyebrows disappeared under his curly fringe of dark hair. “Well, you do now.”

Chuck went into the front hall, finding the envelope right where Euge had said he'd left it. It was from a known local pest control business, but one that Chuck had never contracted to do
any work. There was even a statement in the envelope charging no fee for a free estimate of monthly service. He had to admire how the Deep Shield crew covered their bases. If he'd called the number on the envelope, he'd get a legit service that would be happy to enroll him for the monthly rate of forty dollars.

Mini arrived late with the Lanfen bogey in tow. That had required a pantomime of epic proportions—Mini driving to Lanfen's townhouse for the pickup, fabricating her at the door, and driving to Chuck's house. Anyone watching would have to suspect that they were looking at a doppelgänger in order to spot the illusion, and Chuck was willing to bet that most of the very levelheaded agents assigned to them would be disinclined to suspect anything of the sort.

Eugene had invited Mike to their movie night—rather publicly—and he came bearing soft drinks and beer. They ordered out for pizza. They made popcorn. They talked shop until Mike had a chance to locate and reorient the surveillance devices Deep Shield had installed in Chuck's study—the room they had singled out as their lair (another Eugene-ism). Mike tweaked the firmware, so the feed presented a static image of an empty study and cut off audio completely.

Chuck beckoned Mike into the freshly shielded room and wrote a note about the exterminators. That sent the alpha zeta on a sweep of the entire house, during which he found two bugs in the kitchen that Chuck knew hadn't been there earlier. They had no doubt been installed in response to the spotty performance of the original ones. They left those devices alone, but it bothered Chuck that his home security system was no deterrent to the Deep Shield agents.

With the surveillance accounted for and the doctored movie playing loudly in the living room, the team gathered in the study. Chuck had chosen the room for their subversive activities
because it was precisely in the center of the first floor, had no windows, and was buffered on all sides by other rooms. He'd had it specially built for the study of neurological X-rays.

He set up his laptop on his desk and waited for Thorin's feed to start. In the meantime they tried, in all ways, to behave like a group of friends enjoying a movie night: wandering in and out of the kitchen, eating pizza and popcorn, and ostensibly watching a movie about sentient robots.

AT 8:04
P.M.
LANFEN WAS
roused from meditation by the sound of the restroom door opening and closing. The footsteps moved more deeply into the main area at first, and she caught the sound of metal on metal. Someone was checking the stalls for toilet paper, which meant . . .

Her heart picked up its tempo; she worked to calm it. If a maintenance worker had to reload those dispensers, he was going to have to get into that closet to do it, and she had to stop him. Unlike Mini she couldn't make herself appear to be a vacuum cleaner. She turned her attention to the locking mechanism in the door, slipped into her zeta state, and attacked the tumblers, holding them fiercely static. On a wild whim, she tripped one of them into a new position.

She had no more than done that when the maintenance worker shoved his key into the lock—or, rather, tried to shove his key into the lock. With the tumblers rearranged and the lock in Lanfen's mental grip, it was impossible. The key simply no longer fit and would not turn.

Through the door Lanfen heard sounds of the man's frustration. He WTF'd; he tried a second and then a third time to get the key to go; he swore extravagantly and vividly; and he pounded the door with his fist. Finally he got out a cell phone or walkie-talkie and called his supervisor.

Lanfen pulled one earbud out of her ear and listened intently.

“Sergeant, I got a problem down here in the D-level ladies' latrine. The damn lock on the damn maintenance closet is hosed . . . No, dammit, I mean really hosed. I can't even get the key in the lock. Damn tumblers must be screwed.”

There was a momentary pause as he listened to his sergeant on the other end, then said, “Yeah, yeah. You're right. Nothing I can do about it tonight. Give facilities a call, would you, and get us on their radar? In the meantime I'll get supplies from the men's latrine . . . Yeah, thanks, Sarge.”

He left but not before giving the door a good, solid kick. He was back later, apparently with supplies he'd cadged from the men's room across the hall. Lanfen could hear his vacuuming and mopping the floors, filling dispensers, flushing toilets, emptying trash bins. He left a little after nine, and the room fell eerily silent.

Time.

Lanfen made herself comfortable, took a deep breath, and dove back into zeta, reaching for Thorin. When she accessed his optics, she found herself in a darkened room. Silence prevailed there. She waited, using the bot's audio sensors to listen to the adjoining room and the outer hallway.

Both quiet.

Lanfen turned on the video feed and stepped Thorin down from his station. It was 9:05
P.M.
She'd have sworn she felt the sudden cessation of power that flowed up from his charging station through the pads in his feet. Another of the Deep's improvements—Bilbo still had to charge through a cable plugged into his thorax.

It took Lanfen several steps to adjust to the differences between Thorin's dimensions and Bilbo's. She imagined herself expanding to fill the larger, heavier skin. She flexed the joints, rotated the head, adapted to the new weight and stature. Concen
trating mightily on that adaptation, she turned her attention to the heavier tank bots at the end of the row of charging stations. Each station, like Thorin's, possessed a single, softly glowing LED lamp that bathed the occupant in pale radiance.

She moved to stand directly in front of one of those occupants and gave it a slow once-over from the top of its egg-shaped head to the soles of its treads. She paused on the forearms, crouched to get a better view of the hands and fingers. That was when she spotted an odd construct in the center of the thorax that reminded her of the deflector dishes all the Starfleet vessels had in the
Star Trek
episodes.
What is it?
she wondered, and prayed that Chuck and the others were seeing what she was seeing.

“WHAT IS THAT?” ASKED EUGENE,
leaning toward the flat-screen monitor that hung on Chuck's study wall. “A radar dish maybe?”

“Could be.” Dice chewed thoughtfully on the inside of his lip. “I've talked with them about implementing various scanning devices, but . . .”

“But what?” asked Chuck, glancing over at Dice from his perch on the edge of his desk.

Dice approached the screen and pointed. “Well, first of all a radar dish that's hard-fixed like that into the torso would require the bot to physically turn around to scan in a three sixty. And see these little depressions in the bot's head? And this bubble on the crown?”

Chuck nodded.

“I think those might be the tracking system. In fact their engineers asked me about the advisability of having a retractable transceiver in the head. They were concerned about messing up the gyro. I think that might be where the radar or sonar—or whatever tech they're using—is housed.”

“Then what's the deflector dish for?” asked Eugene.

“At a guess—maybe an EMP transmitter?”

Eugene's eyes bugged out. “As in electromagnetic pulse? That could wreak havoc with an enemy's . . . everything. But that's not possible, right? At least not at that size. That's—”

“Science fiction,” said Mini softly. She sat in an overstuffed chair next to Mike and behind the three men who hovered nervously around the TV screen.

Thorin was moving on now, turning toward the set of double doors at the far end of the workspace. In three long strides, he gained the doors to the adjoining lab and opened one a crack. The next room was empty of humans, the dim glow of the light switches offering the only illumination. Thorin lingered in the shadows for a moment, then, without warning, the others at Chuck's house were seeing the place in infrared.

LANFEN SORTED THROUGH THE BARRAGE
of visual information and pushed through the doors, deeper into the lab complex. This lab was entirely given to workbenches and computers—diagnostic equipment, she guessed. There were a couple of charging stations there, but only one of them was inhabited. It was one of the dwarf bots, like Thorin, but its forearms were both off. She turned and found the missing parts on one of the workbenches.

She moved toward it to give her remote companions a look at what the engineers were doing to the arms. She couldn't be sure, but it looked as if they were being refitted with an assembly she didn't recognize.

She gave the bot a long look, then moved to the next set of doors. The labs, she realized, were arranged in a daisy chain, though each also had a door that opened onto a central courtyard or corridor. She thought of taking a look out there but decided her time would be better spent going through the labs one by one.

A blinking red light high up in the corner where wall met ceiling alerted her to the fact that someone was potentially watching her—or, rather, Thorin, making his way through the labs. The thought made her heart race and her skin go cold. She moved the bot swiftly to the doors, appreciating how quiet it was. With her in direct control, even the servos were silent. The only sound Thorin made was the soft tread of his padded, articulated feet.

The third lab was huge, easily three times the size of the two she'd just passed through to reach it. There were two long rows of charging stations, and now she had more than enough light to see by using Thorin's normal optics. She shut down infrared—and froze. Along both walls of the long chamber, the charging niches held a small army of squat, beefy robots. Their heads were aerodynamically shaped, like eggs wearing bicycle helmets.
Sinister
bicycle helmets—sleek, with long, tilted optics ports, as if someone were paying homage to the archetypal alien Grays. The armature was gleaming, anodized steel and studded with implements: a grapple, a laser cutter, and what looked like small rocket launchers.

Her phone buzzed. She answered, squeezing the switch on her earbuds. Dice's terse whisper flowed into her left ear: “Get closer.”

She turned Thorin to the closest bot and scanned it visually from head to tread. Her heart rate was rising again. These were definitely not deep-sea rescue robots. They were mechanical supersoldiers.

Back in her closet, Lanfen wrapped her arms around her chilled body; out in the lab, Thorin echoed the movement, his arms clanking against his sides. Whispering a curse, Lanfen sorted herself out and divorced herself from her fear. She tentatively reached out one of Thorin's hands and raised one of the other bot's arms, so the overhead niche light illuminated the weaponized hand.

Dice gasped in her ear.

CHUCK SHOT TO HIS FEET,
pulse pounding. “What the hell is that?”

Dice moved to stand next to him, leaving his iPhone on the desk, its speaker activated. “There's no magazine, but there's that feed tube. Flamethrower maybe? Plasma weapon?” He turned back toward the phone. “Lanfen, is the other hand the same? Can you show us?”

Thorin returned the first hand to rest and brought the other one into the light. Above the two middle fingers was some sort of nozzle. As with the weapon on the opposite side, this had a tube running back up into the arm.

“That's a nozzle,” said Dice. “Can you get closer to the torso? There's an odd bulge toward the back. I can just barely . . .”

The camera angle changed, drawing in on what looked to Chuck like a tank of some sort.

“A fire bot?” murmured Eugene from behind Chuck. “We talked about those, remember? That would explain the laser cutter and the tank, wouldn't it? Maybe it sprays carbon dioxide.”

Dice looked skeptical. “Maybe, but—”

From the iPhone, Lanfen asked, “But what, Dice? How can we be absolutely sure this isn't just a harmless rescue bot?”

“I don't know how we can be sure, Lanfen. Can you see if there's anything that indicates what they mean to put in those tanks?”

“Such as?”

Dice didn't want to say it. “Chemical weapons.”

“No, no, no.” Chuck shook his head emphatically. The surge of adrenaline he'd felt at the first sight of the bot had become an icy sludge solidifying in his veins. “I think it's time for you to get out, Lanfen. Withdraw.”

“Chuck, they might have already seen Thorin wandering around down there. We're only going to get this one shot, and I want to make sure of this. We
need
to be sure of this.”

“Not enough to endanger you,” he argued.

“Endanger me how? That's not me down there in the lab. That's a robot. They'll have no way of knowing who's in control or where that person is.”

“But they can make an educated guess, Lanfen.”

“But Thorin isn't ‘my' robot—it's Reynolds's. Wouldn't the suspicion land on him? Listen—we're wasting time. I'm going deeper into the complex. Maybe there's a chem lab somewhere or something that will at least tell me what they're experimenting with.”