Android: Golem (The Identity Trilogy) (36 page)

“They were providing security for MirrorMorph. When Haas-Bioroid picked up the tech, the mercenary team was cut loose in favor of Haas-Bioroid people. That’s when the split happened.”

I looked at the mercenaries around us. “So, what have these people been doing since then?”

The woman sneered at me. “What everybody does. At least, everyone human. We
survived
. Whatever it took. Whatever job we could do.”

“You don’t know who employed you?”

“No. The contract was handled by a fixer we use. Until we found Dawes dead, we believed the fixer was Dawes.”

I knew about fixers. They were the go-betweens that existed in the criminal underground, the people that could match up a crime and a criminal, or an employee with an employer. “Who set you up with this job then?”

She shook her head.

I started to object, to point out the foolishness of protecting that person.

“Knowing a name won’t help you. She’s dead. Killed the same night Cartman Dawes was murdered.”

I conceded the point. I had a lot of questions. “So there’s a third player in all of this.”

Blaine nodded. “Yeah. A wild card. We don’t know if it’s another corp, or if it’s part of this group that has gone rogue.”

“Was Dwight Taylor one of the rogues?”

“No. But after the Giacomin hit, he went his own way.” Blaine shrugged.

“Is that why this team killed him?”

The woman shook her head. “We didn’t kill Taylor. Since you were there, especially since you lived through whatever happened, we thought you’d ferreted Taylor out and marked him for a kill squad.”

“No, and that wouldn’t explain why they tried to destroy me.”

“They might have known you could be salvaged.”

“The destruction was quite extensive.”

“Or maybe they considered you collateral damage.” The woman stared at me. “If Blaine is wrong—if this really is Haas-Bioroid—they created you. They can create another one of you tomorrow.”

I chose to ignore that because there was no way to explain all the details about why she was wrong, and it wasn’t the line of investigation that I was interested in. I shifted my gaze back to Blaine. “You said Taylor went his own way.”

“He did.”

“Why?”

“Separated from the group.” Blaine shook his head. “Nobody really knew why.”

The woman spoke up again. “We think it had to do with Simon Blake’s death.”

I reflected for a moment. “Taylor and Blake were close?”

“Taylor was with Blake the longest. In the beginning, Taylor was one of the few that came out of the Mars wars with Blake. At the end, Taylor was the last remaining member of the original guns.” She shook her head. “Taylor was the one that took Blake’s betrayal the hardest.”

“Betrayal?”

“Later, after Giacomin was murdered, we discovered Haas-Bioroid was hunting Simon Blake and Taylor, too.” Blaine grimaced. “Turns out Mara Blake’s true blue husband was a louse. Nobody knew till after he was dead. He was seeing Giacomin on the side. They started thinking that maybe Giacomin was clean and that Blake had set her up as the fall guy. When that came out, Haas-Bioroid killed Blake, too.”

“Was Blake guilty of selling the programming?”

Blaine shook his head. “We never knew for sure. Someone was selling the software, and after those two people were dead and gone, the loss stopped.”

“As far as you know. The true perpetrator could simply have decided to cut his or her losses.”

“Maybe. Haas-Bioroid seemed satisfied with the outcome.”

“What about Mara Blake? Was she satisfied with the outcome?”

“No. She was in love with her husband. He was there one day and dead the next.” Blaine sat up straighter. “I think that’s the major reason she didn’t fight harder for her company when Haas-Bioroid started pulling it away from her. Mara Blake is smart. She could have handled herself in a fight, even with Haas-Bioroid. She didn’t.”

 
I pulled up the file from the Net and perused the story of Simon Blake’s death. “Simon Blake died in a hopper crash.”

And suddenly, the world rushed away from me.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

At first, I thought I was remembering one of the earlier hopper crashes I’d had. This past week had been filled with several traumatic episodes. Then I realized that I was trapped, wrapped inside a metal cocoon. I coughed and hacked. I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs.

Lungs.

I knew I was back in the other experiences. I looked around the crushed cockpit and tried again to get out. I couldn’t. I was numb from the waist down and I wondered if I’d been paralyzed in the wreck.

I noticed the blood all around me. I knew I wasn’t me, and I didn’t know where I was.

“Please remain calm.” The automated hopper voice spoke calmly. “Help is on the way. Your vitals remain strong. Concentrate on remaining calm. Help is on the way.”

I tried to remember how I’d crashed the hopper, what had happened, but I couldn’t. The memory wasn’t there. Pain shot through me.

I struggled to lift my right arm and couldn’t, but I could get my left arm free. I fought against the carbosteel frame that held me trapped. I swore to myself that I would never let this happen to me again, that I would never again be this vulnerable. I wiped at my face, only then realizing that something obscured my vision.

“Please do not move. Movement puts you at risk. You have been in a very serious accident. Please do not move. Help is on the way. Estimated time of arrival of ambulance is three minutes eleven seconds.”

Blood covered the interior of the shattered cockpit hatch. None of the shards had broken loose, though, and they remained within the framework.
 

Which meant none of them were in me.

I wanted to ask the on-board near-AI where I was, but I couldn’t find my voice. I didn’t think I was on Mars anymore, and I wasn’t on the Moon. I felt heavy, which ruled out Mars, and there was more light than would have been found on the Moon.

Around me, tall spires stood up straight against the sky. I was on Earth. I was in a megapolis. Finding out which one would be easy enough. I tried to access the Net and couldn’t. I wanted to find a PAD but I couldn’t even begin the search.

I just had to be patient.

And not die.

I dragged air into my lungs, then expelled it. Through the shattered window, I saw the emergency ambulance hopper as it set down nearby. I wanted to call out to whoever had arrived, but I couldn’t. I sat there trapped.

A moment later, a man appeared at the cockpit hatch and peered in through his cupped hands pressed tightly against the transplas. He saw me and put one of his hands against the hatch.

I weakly pressed my left hand against his to let him know I was conscious and that I knew he was there.

“Don’t worry about anything. We’re going to get you out of there.” The voice sounded familiar. The man lifted his helmet’s face shield and smiled reassuringly at me. I recognized him as Dwight Taylor.

I stared at the man in silent curiosity, unable to ask the questions that flooded my thoughts. He was dressed in the emergency rescue worker uniform. I didn’t know how our fates were so inextricably woven together, and I couldn’t help remembering how he had died in my arms, frightened and in horrible pain. I wondered if I had failed him. Or if he had failed me.

I wondered why I was even thinking like that because I’d never truly known the man. He was just a figment of whatever I was currently going through.

He returned a moment later with a medical rescue device that chewed away the carbosteel. The noise of the great jaws biting into the metal vibrated through me, and the crashed hopper shivered ever-so-slightly.

Gradually, though, the crushed walls of the hopper were excised and pulled away. Wind pushed across my face, and I felt the drying blood stiffening my features. Out the corner of my eye, I saw the congealed crimson staining my cheeks.

“Please remain calm. Statistics have shown that people who can remain calm during high-stress situations are able to better deal with injuries and psychological damage. Help is here.”

I was calm, but I knew my biometrics were scaling upward as well as dropping. It was still confusing to know that the heart rate and blood pressure were mine. I had been conscious of them in other people before, but never myself.

A few minutes later, Dwight Taylor cut me out of the hopper harness and gently lifted me from the wreckage with the aid of another man who had a chimera tattoo on the side of his neck. They were mercenaries, not emergency rescue men.

“Just hold on.” Taylor laid me on a powered stretcher. He folded my arms over my chest and the stretcher’s programming package ran belts around me to secure me. He pressed a device to my forehead for a handful of seconds, then pulled it away. “Your vitals are good.”

I already knew that, but I also knew my vitals—which I should not have had—were falling fast.

Dwight Taylor dropped the device into one of his uniform pockets. “We’ve got to get you to the hospital.” He called for the stretcher and the near-AI controlling it moved automatically toward the waiting emergency hopper.

The vehicle was red and white, and not really any help in identifying where I was. A lot of medical transport hoppers were red and white throughout the megapoli.

I tried to ask where we were, but I couldn’t get the words out. The stretcher trundled into the back of the hopper and I struggled to maintain consciousness. I was fighting a losing battle. I watched as Dwight Taylor climbed in beside me, pulled the safety harness around him, and took an IV pack from the built-in cabinets that lined the side of the vehicle. He popped the plastic package as the automated doors closed the hopper.

In the next moment, we were airborne and I lost touch with reality again.

*

When I woke, I was in a hospital room. Machinery bleeped and hissed and clicked all around me. I couldn’t move my head so I used my peripheral vision as much as I was able. I recognized some of the machinery, but not all of it.

One of the units was a heart and lung unit that took over when a patient’s natural organs couldn’t function well enough to keep the person alive. That was bad. Another unit charted medirepair nanobots used on humans, but I wasn’t familiar with the code or the tracking software, so I didn’t know what they were doing or if they were effective.

I was still paralyzed from the waist down.

I knew that somewhere in that room there would be e-documentation, a file that would tell me who I was supposed to be. My curiosity filled me, consuming my thought processes. When I tried my right arm, I discovered it was weak. Forcing myself onto my side, I rolled that way and pushed up with my left arm.

The arm didn’t hold me. It buckled under my weight and I collapsed back to the bed. The situation was most curious and I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do.

I tried to access the Net again, but remained blocked. I tried to call out for a medical assistance personnel, but the words never came.

Still, my efforts to elevate myself had registered on the machines monitoring me and an alarm now sounded—gentle pulses of insistent noise.

A moment later, a white-uniformed male nurse hurried into the room and inspected me. That told me a lot about who I was. Typical hospital patients didn’t receive human contact because waldos could be operated by nurses from the nurses’ station to turn a patient, to manage bed pans, and to administer medication in IV bags.

The nurse glanced at the machinery surrounding me, then took a small penflash from his shirt pocket and peeled my left eyelid back with his thumb. He shone the light in my eye and it felt like a laser. Pain flashed through my eye and crashed against the back of my skull.

Finally, he took the light away and thumbed open the comm control on his collar. “Dr. Kellory, you’re needed with your patient in 32B.”

I summoned enough strength to grab the nurse’s hand as he turned to go.

Quietly, patiently, he pried my hand from his. “Dr. Kellory will be here in a moment. Please remain still. We’re doing everything that can be done.” He walked through the opening back into the big room beyond.

I swallowed—another human thing that I discovered I didn’t like doing—and waited. My throat was dry and I thought I might be thirsty, though I had never before experienced that sensation. The feeling fit what Shelly had referred to as “parched” while we’d been on the go.

I couldn’t help wondering if I would feel better if she were there now. Everything I was experiencing was new to me and confusing. I didn’t like being confused. I liked having answers, and now even the most basic ones were beyond my means.

Another minute and twenty-nine seconds passed.

A tall man in pale blue doctor’s scrubs walked through the entrance, followed by the black-haired woman. She looked pensive. She also looked older than I remembered from the hotel on Mars. Her face appeared the same, but her age showed in and around her eyes.

The doctor was all grim efficiency. His gaze swept the machinery plugged into me. His body language told me he was not satisfied with the results he saw there.