Counting Heads (18 page)

Nicholas, the Applied People mentar, said, “Commander Londenstane, what was that?”

The old lady outside the GOV raised a thin finger to her lips.
They cannot sense me. We are pointcasting directly to you. Please tell them everything is fine
.

Instead, Fred said, “What was what?”

“Your heart rate just spiked.”

Fred hesitated. “Nothing,” he said at last. “I was just thinking about how little you pay me for this shit.”

BB of R Marcus said, “Do you require a privileged brotherhood conversation?”

“No, Marcus, thanks. I was thinking about a personal matter. Something at home. I’m not thinking about it anymore, so let’s all just drop it, okay?”

Excellent
, said Cabinet.
We have a brief message for you, so please lend us your generous russ attention
.

Fred didn’t like this one bit, but he played along. At the same time, he couldn’t help wondering how Cabinet was able to communicate with him right under the noses of some of the most sophisticated mentars in the world. And to commandeer his HUD, for that matter, for surely there were no emitters in the middle of Lake Michigan. Fred didn’t lock his gaze on the apparition but swept his eyes across the horizon as though searching for the approaching dredge. He found the dredge too, a small dark bump on the horizon.

We will never forget the compassion you showed our family in our time of great need all those years ago. We realize that compassion is a famous russ trait, but in you it runs deeper than in most. In other fine ways as well, you seem a remarkably gifted man
.

Fred thought, Yah, sure.

Our current situation is desperate
, it went on,
and we are compelled once again to seek your compassion. We have a special request to make of you
.

Fred glanced at the woman on his windshield. Surely, it couldn’t expect him to assist in its escape.

Ellen Starke, our late sponsor’s daughter, was a baby when you were assigned to guard the Starke family. This morning she was critically injured in the attack that took the life of her mother. We fear that whoever assassinated Eleanor will not allow Ellen to survive. If we are taken into custody, even for a brief period of time, Ellen will surely die
.

Fred experienced a sudden rush of anger at this dead aff’s mentar. How dare it try to manipulate him?

Nicholas broke in again, “Sorry to return to this, Commander, but your stress levels continue to rise. Yet, we see nothing in your immediate environment to cause it. Do you believe, perhaps, that the NASTIE that has invaded your car is still viable? If so, you should request the Command to send a car to pick you up.”

“That won’t be necessary.”

“Or a decon team,” Nicholas continued.

This took Fred aback. That was why Nicholas was watching him so closely. It thought he was already infected by nano. He quickly said, “Listen, Nick, Marcus, Costa, Libby, Nameless One, and whoever else is out there copying. Such minute attention to my inner state of harmony is hampering my concentration on the matter at hand.”

“Understood,” said Nicholas. “Carry on.”

Fred said, “But a backup car might be a good idea. Nameless One, please dispatch a GOV.”

“Nameless One reports that it dispatched a GOV five minutes ago,” Marcus said. “ETA is sixteen minutes.”

Myr Londenstane
, Cabinet continued,
Ellen needs me to watch over her while she is defenseless
.

So call Applied People and hire bodyguards, Fred wanted to reply. I’m not allowed to take on private jobs. But Fred knew Cabinet wasn’t asking to hire him. It was asking for a personal favor. Fred wanted to know when had they become so chummy. He had worked for Eleanor Starke for six months in 2092 and ’93. Her household consisted of herself, baby Ellen, and the freshly seared and emotionally shipwrecked Samson Harger. All the other domestics and guards avoided Harger because he was morbidly depressed and because he stank so bad. Fred simply felt sorry for the man. It was no big deal. Yet, when it came time for Fred to rotate to another assignment, Governor Starke, herself, threw a going-away party for him. In aff households, this was unheard of. In all his years, he’d not seen the likes of it. They’d even baked him a cake. And they’d given him a little gift—house slippers, and a slipper puppy to care for them.

We implore you. Are you willing to help Ellen survive?

Damn you, Fred thought. Still, he did not immediately expose the apparition, as he knew he must. His duty was clear; he was a russ after all, but the soulless mentar had found the perfect wedge—not his compassion, which it kept harping on, but a russ’s most highly prized and most commercially valuable quality, his sense of loyalty. Doggish loyalty that, apparently, had no expiration date.

I cannot allow the authorities to dig up the lake bed. The inspector correctly identifies this as my last backup. However, it’s not housed in the facility you have located. That is a decoy. Before the excavator arrives, I implore you to capture the decoy as though it were the real backup. I can tell you how to safely do this and still make it look genuine. In this way we can turn back the excavator. Nod your head, and I will proceed to give you instructions
.

The slippers had worn out long ago, but he still had the slipper puppy. And for that he was going to violate his oath of office? Just what kind of russ did this mentar think he was—
defective?
“Costa,” he said, “is that the dredge I see approaching?”

“Affirmative, Londenstane. It’s still ten minutes out.”

Fred knew where his duty lay, and yet he hesitated. The mentars, Nick and Libby and especially the Nameless One, might already know of his private comm, might be testing him, giving him enough rope. So why was he drawing it out? Perhaps he
had
been infected by the NASTIE!

“Costa,” he said.

“Go ahead.”

“Costa, ah—” Fred cleared his throat and thought about what a good life he had: Mary and their friends, his high rank at Applied People and all, how he loved his job. If only Cabinet had made it easier for him by trying to bribe or threaten him.

“Go ahead, Londenstane,” Costa repeated.

Fred locked eyes with the lady in the lake. What did he owe the Starkes anyway?

“Um, Fred?” Reilly said from behind him.

Fred turned and craned his neck to see into the aft compartment. Reilly was crouched next to the starboard door, watching it through his cap visor.

“I see residual heat in IR,” Reilly said. “But it’s taking a godawful long time to dissipate.”

Fred said, “That’s enough. I’m setting this bird down. Prepare to ditch.” When he turned back to the controls, Cabinet’s image was gone, but so were half of the HUD displays. “Car,” Fred said, “put down on the lake surface.”

At first there was no helm response, but then the hover fans quit abruptly, and the GOV fell nose first into the water, and Fred was thrown against his harness.

“Commander!” Reilly said.

“Hang on, Dell. It’s already infiltrated our control system. Better go NBC.”

“Way ahead of you, skipper.”

Fred ordered his own blacksuit to deploy its full NBC isolation mode. Gloves sprang from his sleeves, a soft mask dropped from his cap visor, and the visor’s own HUD came online. The velvety blacksuit fabric turned shiny as it sweated anti-nano grease. He could taste bottled air as the suit inflated, giving it a slight positive pressure. His air gauge said he had two hours of air at one atmosphere.

“Libby,” he said, “tell Nameless One we’re about to execute an emergency evacuation.”

No response.

“Anyone out there hear me?”

The car had ceased relaying his comm. They were on their own. Gingerly, he touched the control panel—everything aboard had to be considered hot. The panel was dead. And not only was the GOV sinking, but it was being drawn slowly toward the mouth of the crib manifold.

“I’ve got a dead stick,” Fred said, unbuckling himself from his seat.

“Wait’ll you see what I’ve got,” Reilly replied.

Fred went through the companionway and was stunned by what he saw. The passenger compartment was in full bloom. The glom entry site at the starboard door was a furnace of molecular activity. A tough sack, like a living scab, covered it, glowing with inner heat and bulging ever larger. Its mop head of colorless microtendrils crisscrossed throughout the compartment, dissolving everything they touched and feeding a molecular mush to the main assembler under the scab. A NASTIE was the ultimate agent of opportunity, programmed to make the best use of whatever materials it found. In the GOV it had found a treasure trove of rare and restricted material: munitions, power plant and fuel, and the pilot subem and military-grade cables, sensors, processors, not to mention the living tissue of two russes. There was no telling what sort of assault weapon it could fashion from all these pieces.

Reilly was crouched against the port side door with a grease gun, melting the advancing microtendrils with little squirts of anti-nano. But they advanced as thick as cotton candy, and parts of his suit were scorched and brittle, and the raw meat of his flesh showed through. His blacksuit kept trying to cover his exposed skin with battlewrap, but the tendrils ate this too. Reilly was boxed in too tight to move. He’d never make it forward to the driver’s cab in one piece. But with any luck, he’d be able to open the door at his shoulder.

Fred had to step back to avoid the tendrils snaking through the companionway. His suit’s cooling unit cycled on to counteract the increasing air temperature in the GOV. He shouted over the noisy hiss, “We don’t want to flood with lake water, do we?”

“Do it anyway,” Reilly shouted back.

“I’ll need you to work your door.”

Fred retreated to the cab, grabbed up the raft cassette from the floor, and clipped it to his belt. He opened his weapons kit, found his own grease gun, and clipped that on too. The GOV’s dashboard and control panels were sagging like melted chocolate. Fred pulled on a second pair of gloves and quickly rummaged through his kit to see if there was anything else he could use. He hated leaving the kits to the NASTIE, but there was no alternative.

Glancing out the window, Fred was shocked to see how close to the crib they had drifted. He prodded the seat frame with his discarded visola pouch to test how solid it was. In order to reach the escape hatch, he’d have to either sit in the seat or unlatch and move it aside. It seemed soft, so he unlocked it from its base and let it fall away.

Reilly moaned.

The escape hatch control was self-contained, not tied into the GOV subem, so it might still be uncontaminated. “Hatch, I declare an emergency and order you to open,” he said.

No response.

Fred grabbed the manual latch and turned it. Though the handle bent in his hand, it still worked, and the hatch undogged and swung inward. A torrent of water poured in, knocking him over and flooding the cab. The cold water quickly reached the nano furnace in the rear and exploded into superheated steam. Fred’s suit squealed a warning, and he ducked under the rising water. He hoped Reilly’s suit could keep him from getting cooked. After a moment, the water level had risen enough for him to pull himself through the hatch. His suit now hugged his body, and a mouthpiece popped up inside his mask. He wrapped his lips around it and took a deep breath. The air gauge reset itself to account for the depth. Because of the pressure, his two hours of air had dropped to forty minutes.

Fred kicked aft to the GOV’s port side passenger door. Reilly had unlatched it, but it seemed welded to the frame. Fred grabbed the handle, braced his feet against the side of the car, and pulled. He tore the softened door from its weakened frame, and out came Reilly in a gush of steamy bubbles.

A rope of tendrils followed him out, wrapped around his knee. Behind his mask, Reilly’s mouth was stretched in agony. Fred took Reilly’s grease gun and tried to cut the tendrils, but the gun was empty. He grabbed his own gun and cut them with a ribbon of grease. The tendrils encircling Reilly’s leg, however, continued to digest his suit and send out tendrils of their own. Fred wrapped his partner’s entire knee with ribbons of grease. When he looked into Reilly’s mask, he saw that Reilly had passed out before taking the breathing regulator into his mouth. He would asphyxiate, and there was nothing Fred could do except get him to the surface as quickly as possible. He unreeled his belt tether, clipped it to the ring at the back of Reilly’s collar, grabbed him around the waist, and pushed off from the GOV. Fred kicked and paddled furiously, but it was no good: the crib suction was too strong and Reilly’s limp body too cumbersome. They continued to vector diagonally toward the big strainer at the bottom of Lake Michigan. He hadn’t even managed to pull away from the GOV.

Fred changed course. If it wasn’t possible to swim straight up, maybe he could reach the lake bed before being sucked in. There’d be less pull on the ground, and he could clamber away on the rocky bottom. His air supply alarm went off. He’d been working too hard and breathing too heavily, and his air supply dipped below fifteen minutes.

Fred relaxed completely, letting the water pull him and Reilly down. He tried to visualize all the gear packed into these HomCom blacksuits to see if there was something he could use to save their lives. It had been years since he’d certified in them, and he only got to use one every month or so. He asked himself, Do I have any spare air on board? and quieted his thoughts for an answer. He got one too, and would have slapped himself on the head if he could spare a hand. Yes, he had spare air. He had a whole freaking cassette of liquid air.

Fred tore the raft cassette from his belt and tethered it to Reilly. Now they were strung together with Reilly in the middle. When he pulled the inflate ring, the ultrathin foil billowed out into the shape of a flat donut, more deflated than inflated. They couldn’t be more than thirty meters down, about three atmospheres, but the water pressure squeezed the raft’s air to a third of its volume. Even so, the raft was buoyant enough to offset the crib suction. At least for Reilly’s weight. Fred still had to raise his own weight by swimming.