Robot Geneticists (Book 4): Rebel Robots Page 7

  “The others?”

  Oh, he was just not going to let this one go. Rachel considered feigning an injury to distract the robot from this line of inquiry. But Charlie13 had warned her that this job wasn’t going to be all simulations and gushing gratitude from newborn robots.

  Before Rachel could decide how to word her answer, Toby22 ventured a guess of his own. “That’s who’s come calling upstairs, isn’t it? Unhappy robots who didn’t want to be built, coming to enact vengeance on their creator? I mean, robots buildings robots… any hack science fiction writer knew better than that a thousand years back.”

  Rachel paused. She hadn’t considered that.

  Behind her, Toby521 came to a halt.

  “It’s me,” Rachel said. “I accessed those files. I wasn’t supposed to see them. There’s no separating the coincidence of illicit file-downloading with an invasion of Kanto. So… this whole mess is my fault.”

  “We should keep moving,” Toby521 chided her, voice soft as a feather.

  Rachel hadn’t meant for this to be her fault. Unintended consequences were just that—unintended.

  They emerged from the ovens and dropped onto a maintenance walkway that ran alongside. Rachel’s steps clanged along followed by the heavier clatter of Toby521 as his bulk rattled the metal grated floors.

  “I wish we could have stopped by my apartment,” Rachel called back without turning. “I had an early breakfast this morning with the activation prep.”

  “Odd… I wasn’t even alive then.”

  Rachel’s brow furrowed even as she ran. That was weird, now that she considered it.

  “Once we find a place to hide, we’re going to have to come up with a solution. I can’t go indefinitely without food like you can.”

  Toby521 chuckled. “I had meant to ask, but I didn’t know if it was rude or not. I don’t know much about this world, after all. But being genetically engineered, do you eat normal food? Can you… I don’t know, photosynthesize or anything funky like that?”

  Rachel couldn’t keep running and properly address the ridiculous notions emanating from behind her. She panted for breath before diving in with a scientist’s ire and a piranha’s ferocity. “I’m human. My thoughts are as human as yours. My body’s 99.9 percent the same genetic code as any pre-invasion human’s. I don’t run on cold fusion, dark matter, or sunlight. I’m hungry. As the only human on the entire island of Japan, my groceries are delivered to Kanto daily, just for me. I had a lunch planned—artichoke mushroom lasagna with strawberry rhubarb pie for dessert.”

  Toby521 looked her over critically. “You stay slim for eating lunches like that.”

  Rachel took a steadying breath. “I have the metabolism of a hummingbird. Part of that extra 0.1 percent. Eating too much has never been a problem.”

  She thought back to the stories Eve told of her escape and flight from Evelyn11’s clutches. Half starved. Delirious at times. Nevertheless, Eve hadn’t complained—Charlie7 even backed up her story. Rachel didn’t want to find out whether she was that mentally tough.

  Continuing on, robot and human reached one of the factory’s innumerable lifts.

  Toby521 caught Rachel by the arm. “You can’t. We use power that’s not on the automated systems, they’ll know where we are.”

  “I know that,” Rachel said, tugging her arm free of a robotic grip that wasn’t intent on holding on against her will. “But we can’t keep running.”

  She ducked onto the lift platform and shut the safety gate with Toby521 still on the other side. The robot watched her, clearly not knowing what to make of her actions. Setting the destination floor to the second-lowest level of Kanto, Rachel hit the button to begin the lift’s descent.

  The brakes disengaged with a hiss of released pneumatic pressure. Like a starter’s pistol firing, Rachel took the brake release as the cue to burst for the gate. The loose webwork of steel mesh culminated in a bar that came head-high to Rachel.

  In an instant, she had grabbed hold of the bar and pulled herself up. She rolled over and dropped to the catwalk just as the lift shot downward.

  Toby521 wrung his hands. “That looked dangerous.”

  “It was,” Rachel replied. “But now we’ve laid a false trail. Time to double back and find something I can eat.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Charlie7 had logged more flight time than most robots had been alive. Whoever was on his tail, the three of them put together probably didn’t add up to as much piloting experience as he possessed.

  Still, there were three of them.

  The skyroamer was never meant to be a military vessel. They were high-speed, ion-engine-driven atmospheric craft, and they performed that function admirably. But as Charlie7 streaked across the Indian Ocean, he was itching for a dogfight.

  “Need a ride. Urgent.” It was Eve on one of her top secret social IDs.

  Charlie7 doubled-checked the routing info, and it matched Eve’s last known destination. He’d worried that he would arrive at the genetics factory only to find that Eve had already been kidnapped and moved elsewhere.

  He replied back at once. “Already en route. Stand by for extraction.”

  Now it was just a matter of buying enough time to land and collect her.

  As a respected member of society, Charlie7 was allowed to skirt plenty of committee guidelines. Now, though, he regretted following the one that prohibited stealth technology on personal craft. Plato’s Betty-Lou could make it hard enough on pursuers for a robotic pilot to get away. Plato might have lacked the anatomical fortitude to withstand two hundred times the force of gravity, but Charlie7 could take more punishment than his ride ever could.

  “Don’t suppose you fine fellows want to play nice?” Charlie7 broadcast on an open channel.

  By the lack of response, he imagined the answer to be “no.”

  Open water spread to the horizon in all directions. There was no land between him and Madagascar and hadn’t been since he’d cleared Indonesia.

  Water below. Cloudless sky all around. The options for clever tricks and ploys were minimal. His pursuers were under a minute behind him. Taking into account deceleration, there was little chance he could acquire Eve and get airborne again without them catching up.

  He needed to buy time.

  “Hate wasting this…” Charlie7 muttered as he selected an encrypted channel with a security key that he knew was compromised. “Plato, this is Charlie7. I’ve got three skyroamers following me. Any chance you can pick them off before they know you’re in range?”

  After a few seconds, Plato’s voice answered back. “C’mon. Who you think you’re dealing with here? Of course I can.”

  “What’s your ETA? Sooner is better than later.”

  Charlie7 waited, wondering what the algorithm would spit back.

  “I’m almost there now. Just hang tight. I’m just lining up a shot now…”

  The three skyroamers following Charlie7 scattered, taking evasive maneuvers against a foe they couldn’t see and who they knew was about to fire on them. The weapon in question didn’t matter. Chasing down Charlie7 became secondary to saving their own skins.

  How long would it take them to realize Charlie7 had been talking to a relay?

  The answer appeared to have been just under four minutes.

  Now with nearly five minutes of buffer instead of one, he might be able to work some magic.

  Chapter Twenty

  Eve met Charlie7 in the plaza of the genetics complex, just far enough from her disassembled skyroamer that he didn’t have to land on discarded components. The robots who worked at the facility had kept a safe distance. Whether they had been unaware of Elizabeth55’s plans or had merely decided against crossing Eve Fourteen, she didn’t care.

  As the ion engines continued to whine, Eve shielded her face from the cloud of dust and ran for Charlie7’s skyroamer. She dodged stabilizer jets and three pieces of the starboard wing, along with the inert chassis of two of the drones responsible for
the vehicle’s current state.

  “Hurry!” Charlie7 shouted once the canopy was open. He urged her on with a beckoning wave that did nothing to either improve her running speed or clear the path ahead of her.

  Without the boarding ladder down, Eve planted a foot and redirected her momentum into a leap that vaulted her into the passenger’s seat over the sidewall of the cockpit. The skyroamer took to the air even as the canopy was closing.

  “Thanks,” Eve said distractedly as she squirmed into a seated position and secured the safety harness.

  Charlie7 had been watching. As soon as she was buckled in, Eve felt her internal organs jam against the back of her ribcage. She couldn’t breathe. Blood pooled at the back of her head until her vision went red.

  “Sorry about that,” Charlie7 as he eased off the throttle. “Had to disable the human-safe overrides.”

  “I take it they know you’re here?” Eve asked through a wave of dizziness that was already beginning to pass.

  “They are about two minutes behind us and gaining. Three skyroamers. Not answering social calls.”

  “I assume you have a plan,” Eve said.

  Charlie7 nodded as if they were chatting over coffee. “It was a good one. It involved retrieving the chairwoman of the Human Welfare Committee before someone else grabbed her. How about you? Any thoughts on how to get away from three skyroamers that don’t involve maneuvers over five Gs?”

  Eve saw the three blips on the skyroamer’s radar. Her mind raced with possibilities, most of them ending in their skyroamer getting forced to the ground. In many of her mental scenarios, they’d end up scattered to a thousand pieces and a splattered mass of gore, respectively.

  “Distress call?” Eve ventured tentatively. “Maybe even as a deterrent, they might back off.”

  “That was the bullet I already fired. Not sure they’ll flinch again. Of course, I only mean bullet in the metaphoric sense. But if you don’t have any better ideas, I do have a card up my sleeve I’d hoped to keep hidden.”

  Despite the grim circumstances, Eve snickered. “You don’t keep a card up your sleeve; you keep a protofab.”

  Charlie7 punched in a series of evasive maneuvers and relinquished the controls. The skyroamer swerved and dove into the Madagascar jungle. Leaves pelted the windows.

  “What are you doing?” Eve shouted over the crash of foliage. It wasn’t the ecological damage that bothered her so much as the deceleration. They’d dropped below the canopy and the speed of sound alike.

  Eve’s answer was forestalled by Charlie7 unbuckling from his own restraints. “Take the controls,” he told her.

  “What?”

  Eve had grown accustomed to Charlie7’s idiosyncrasies. He was unlike any of the other robots in ways that ranged from the subtle to the glorious. He carried the title of oldest robot alive like a badge, like armor, and occasionally like a sword. However, this was unhinged, even for him.

  Hastily, Eve wriggled free of her own harness. As the skyroamer juked and veered, she braced herself against the cockpit sides.

  Charlie7 climbed halfway into the back storage area of the skyroamer, shoes in the air, allowing Eve to slide beneath him before planting his feet in the passenger’s seat.

  “I can’t randomize evasive maneuvers like you can,” she warned him as she secured herself into the pilot’s chair. With one hand on the steering yoke, waiting for the programmed evasions to run their course, her other hand tugged the straps tight.

  A hatch popped in the back. Some hidden compartment groaned open with a protest of steel plating.

  On the radar, the pursuing blips had closed the gap, but they were hampered by the jungle—same as Eve and Charlie7. The pre-programmed flight path ended, and the skyroamer shuddered as Eve took control. She spotted a path and swung them on a hard left. The straps of the safety harness bit into her flesh as they kept her seated.

  The trees came so quickly. Even with her lenses programmed on the fly to filter out leaves and just show her trunks and terrain, it was harrowing. Eve held her breath and gripped the yoke as if she were trying to strangle it.

  “Bring us up,” Charlie7 announced. The clattering of his digging in the storage compartment had ended.

  Eve wanted to argue that their pursuers had gained on them, that going back above the trees before the other skyroamers crashed was a losing strategy. But Eve couldn’t keep this up forever. Already her nerves were frayed, and they’d had closer calls than she cared to admit.

  Pulling back on the flight yoke, Eve jammed the throttle to the max human safety limit. Unhampered by the acceleration limits, the skyroamers behind them closed the gap with frightening speed.

  “Keep us steady,” Charlie7 advised. “And keep your head down. It’s about to get windy.”

  Despite needing to watch her flying, Eve glanced back and up. Charlie7 had one hand on the emergency release for the canopy—a feature designed for use after a crash, not before one. In the other, he held a coil rifle.

  “Charlie, I don’t think this is a good—”

  The canopy popped open. Given their airspeed of over six hundred kilometers an hour, the wind caught it and the canopy was torn away from the craft.

  “—idea!”

  Charlie7 stood all, one foot on the passenger’s seat, one braced against the back wall of the cockpit. Tornado-force winds ripped at his suit coat, shredding the cloth against his metallic flesh. With one hand, he kept a grip on the hull of the skyroamer. In the other, he clutched the coil rifle, aimed back at their pursuers like a Chicago mobster with a tommy gun.

  Eve had Plato to thank for even noticing the similarity.

  The rifle’s pock-pock-pock report as it sent slugs behind them was reminder enough that they were below the sound barrier. Still, Eve could barely hear them against the roaring winds as she ducked against the flight yoke for safety.

  Despite a death grip on the controls, Eve twitched her fingers enough to relay a request to Charlie7’s skyroamer for interface access. With her face pressed forward to survive the maelstrom just overhead, she couldn’t get a view of the data the vessel presented.

  DATA ACESS GRANTED.

  Instantly, the heads-up display in her implanted lenses let Eve see all the skyroamer’s in-flight data in one place—the backs of her eyes. There were still three skyroamers behind them, but they were falling back as they had to veer and swoop to avoid Charlie7’s continuing fire.

  “Are you trying to kill them or just scare them off?” Eve shouted into the gale. She made slight adjustments to keep them off a predictable course but nothing that might jostle Charlie7 out of the cockpit.

  The words were lost on the wind.

  Eve tried again, this time through her interface to the skyroamer, hoping Charlie7 was still connected as well.

  ARE YOU TRYING TO KILL THEM OR JUST—

  YES, came the reply before she’d even finished.

  One of the skyroamers fell back sharply on the radar monitor. Eve zoomed out as it fell out of the default range, but it had vanished entirely.

  Seconds later, another fell back and disappeared.

  The third skyroamer broke off.

  PURSUE.

  Eve looked up in shock. Charlie7 towered above like a smiting god, suit coat torn to rags, but looking all the more menacing for his dishevelment.

  “We’ve got to get away,” she called up.

  THEY WON’T STOP. THEY’LL REGROUP.

  Eve swallowed back bile. “I won’t.”

  Without a word, Charlie7 twisted around and dropped back into the cockpit, seating himself in the passenger’s seat.

  Eve slowed them to less lethal speeds. “What now? Where do we go from here?”

  “Home,” Charlie7 replied. He didn’t meet Eve’s eye. The robot with the coil rifle dangling over the edge of the cockpit appeared distracted, looking out over the Indian Ocean to the east. That was the direction their remaining tormentor had gone.

  “I gave Plato the signal to go dark, ta
ke Abbigail, and hide until this is over. Whatever this is.”

  Charlie7 turned his attention Eve’s way. “Good. But we’re still heading back to Paris. I’ve got a bad, bad feeling about all this, and I think it’s going to cost me a few.”

  Historically speaking, Eve knew about money, cost, value… but none of that applied in the modern age. “Cost you what?”

  “Secrets.”

  As they sped on toward Paris, Eve wondered just how much Charlie7’s secrets were worth.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Charlie25 sat at ‘13’s desk and drummed his fingers on the console. Everything about the workspace rankled him. How could two Charlies have laid out their offices so differently? He narrowed his field of vision on the face of his erstwhile counterpart. There was a smattering of Dale in Charlie13’s mix. That must have explained it.

  “The sooner you give us Rachel’s location, the sooner this will all make sense,” Charlie25 advised.

  “I already told you that I don’t know where she is,” Charlie13 countered. “For better or worse, you know me well enough that I would lie if I needed to. But consider this: how stupid do you think I am? I’m not some Joshua or Marvin. I’ve got as much Charlie Truman in me as you.”

  There was rustling of cloth and a scuffling of feet from the corners of the room. Joshua172 and Marvin44 wore human flesh that didn’t abide stillness and annoyance at the same time. That jibe had been well aimed and hit the mark. ‘13 didn’t run his mouth to hear his own magnificence.

  “Fine,” Charlie25 snapped. “We’ll find her without your help. But mind this: I have no intention of harming the girl. She’d be safer turning herself in. You don’t even realize what she’s unlocked.”

  “On the contrary.”

  Charlie25 started incredulously. “You knew.” Realization slowly dawned. “You knew this whole time. Why? How…?”

  “Old data,” Charlie13 replied without a hint of shame. “I was satisfied with the explanation.”

  “You and ‘7, thick as thieves, the two of you. I had hoped you might be swayed to see the deception you’ve been living under. But all this time, you’ve been as guilty as that creaking old fossil.”