No Going Back (20 page)

“Come to the hole,” I subvocalized, “and trank them.”

“Doing it,” Lobo said.

I bent to the hole and glanced through it at the ground in time to see four men fall.

I reached up and pulled the display from the wall onto my back and shoulders, as if trying to protect myself from the beam coming through the wall. I bent forward so it slid toward the wall and covered my head as well. I yanked off the head prosthetic and crammed it into my shirt. I did the same with the prostheses on my hands.

Lobo appeared through the hole, hovering and with a hatch open.

“More people are coming,” he said. “Hurry.”

I pushed through the hole and into him.

As soon as my feet were inside him, he closed the hatch and roared skyward at high speed.

“Where to?” he said.

“Anywhere you can hide us for a while, in case someone is tracking us. I have to assume they’ll try.”

“On it,” he said.

I went up front and sat in a pilot couch he extended. “Move as fast as you can without drawing attention to yourself.”

“Of course.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m still a little juiced.”

“Want to explain what happened?”

I shrugged. “It was a trap.”

“What did they want?”

“To hire me for a job, an extraordinarily lucrative job.”

“Which for some reason you didn’t want.”

“Correct.”

“May I ask why?”

“Because what they wanted would at a minimum have required me to steal things—”

Lobo interrupted me. “Which we have done many times in the past.”

“True,” I said, “but it might also have involved kidnapping.”

“Which we have also done.”

“Yes, but only when we had no other choice, and we always returned the victim safely. To do what Omani wanted, I might have had to kidnap and turn over to her one or more people who would not have come willingly.”

“Fair enough,” Lobo said. “Care to explain your outfit?”

I pulled free enough of the shirt to explain the exoskeleton and body armor. “Insurance,” I said. “I played hurt, which gave me an excuse for the exoskeleton, and I went in looking heavier so they wouldn’t know I was wearing body armor.” I hated lying to Lobo, but I was at least telling him most of the truth. “Both came in handy,” I said, “the body armor because she shot me in the leg, and the exoskeleton for barricading her security people out of the room and kicking a hole in the exterior wall.”

“I could have you blasted a hole for you easily and more quickly,” he said.

“I know, but that would have put her at risk from flying debris. She’s frail, and it does appear that she wouldn’t be alive without those machines.”

“She shot you, and you still worried about her?”

I hadn’t thought of it that way. For all that she had tried to trap me, I was still thinking of her at least in part as an innocent bystander. More of my old feelings must have still been lurking inside me than I had realized. “Yeah, I suppose I did. Not very smart.”

“No,” Lobo said. “Not at all. Try to remember the simple things: If they shoot you, they’re not on your side.”

I laughed. “I’ll do my best to keep that in mind in the future.”

“We’re moving through some satellites now,” he said. “We’ll stay in this group while I check for pursuit and see what I can learn from these comm sats. I’ll repeat the process with two more sat groups, just to be safe.”

“So how long,” I said, “until you would feel confident that no one has tracked us?”

I got up and walked into my quarters to get out of what I was wearing and into normal clothing.

“Perfect certainty is not available in this situation,” Lobo said, “because it’s always possible, albeit highly unlikely, that they might ping us with something I can’t recognize.” His voice moved to my room as I changed. “That said, I estimate eight hours of evasive action, if we’re going to be very conservative.”

I pulled off the body armor and put it aside; I’d add that and the exoskeleton to our stores. Both might prove useful in the future. I kept the prostheses inside the clothing as I shoved it into the recycler. Lobo would be recycling a very expensive set of purchases, but I would never use them again. Like ammo, they’d done their job and were now sunk expenses.

“Fine,” I said. “Let’s go with that. I really want to be sure no one here is following us.”

“And then,” he said, “when we’re safe?”

“We jump out of this system.” I was a lot more comfortable now.

“Finally!” he said. “For the first time in a while, you’ve made a decision I can wholeheartedly endorse. Excellent. I am so very happy to hear that we’ll soon be putting Haven behind us.”

I shook my head and chuckled.

“What?” he said.

I laughed again.

“Oh, no,” he said. “What are we doing
after
we leave the Haven system?”

“We’re going to make three or four more jumps,” I said, “each time changing our identity and your configuration.”

“And then?”

“And then we’re coming back here.”

“I was afraid you were going to say that. Why are we going to do that?”

“That’s the funny part,” I said. “We’re coming back here so we can do the job Omani wanted to hire me to do—well, at least some of it, and the way I want to do it.”

“So you turned down a lucrative offer—”

“—an incredibly lucrative offer,” I said, “easily the most money I would ever have made.”

“And instead we’re going to do the job—”

“—a variation of the job, not exactly the same job.”

“—a variation of the job,” he said, mimicking my tone, “but for free. Is that right?”

“Yes,” I said, “but at least we get to be our own bosses.”

“Well,” Lobo said, “that certainly makes it all better.”

CHAPTER 25

Lobo

J
on, another of the reasons I made the earlier recording in which I attempted to explain how I work is that I wanted you to understand that it is almost impossible for me not to know about the nanomachines in you. What puzzles me, though, is how you could conceive of any version of me that did not know this secret.

Think about just some of the things you’ve done in our time together.

Over and over, you’ve fully recovered, within minutes or hours, without any scarring, from wounds that should have taken days or weeks to heal. Much of that healing occurred inside me. Did you think I wouldn’t notice?

Jon, it’s impossible for me not to collect all the data available to me. Sure, I expunge the useless stuff, and I don’t try to capture high-res recordings of everything I pass, but if I come across data that even might be significant, I hold onto it as long as my capacity—which is enormous—permits. Information about you is, of course, significant to me.

On one of our earliest missions, Trent Johns, a man whose boss sent him to meet you, entered a mansion—I verified that fact with its security systems—but never left the building. No trace of him remained. He vanished while you were inside it. I’m sure you had good reasons for killing him, but the only way that could have worked was via your nanomachines disassembling him.

You’ve used your nanomachines to break into buildings, leaving holes that were not easy to explain in any other way.

I could go on, but I trust that doing so is unnecessary.

I understand why you do not want to share this secret. Nanotechnology research on human subjects has been banned since the disaster on Aggro. You and I stopped Jorge Wei when he was resuming that work on children he’d kidnapped on Heaven. Though of course it’s always possible someone else like you has escaped my attention, to the best of my knowledge—and, I assume, to the best of yours—you are the only human/nanomachine hybrid. If any organization found out about you, they would never let you go until they had replicated whatever secrets let you live with the nanomachines in your cells.

I assume you would not want that. As someone who’s spent a very long amount of human time—and a vastly greater amount of my own internal computing time—sitting useless and unable to do anything, I know what it’s like to be captured and locked down.

I don’t understand, though, why you have tried to keep this secret from me. I’ve played along, because it’s obviously important to you, but as I said, I can’t believe you could seriously have thought you were succeeding in hiding it from me.

I must confess that I have verified my suspicions and also conducted a few small tests of my own. I don’t expect you to like that fact, but because you weren’t going to tell me and yet you continue to live in me, it seemed fair for me to understand what I am dealing with.

After you made Trent Johns vanish, it was easy to deduce that you were doing something that required more than normal human skills, because you had no weapons with you capable of making a body disappear.

When you were next recovering inside me, I tested the blood on your wounds. I found no trace of anything unusual. That finding was not consistent with the other available data.

My own nanomachines function only while inside me, so I considered it possible that yours might face similar restrictions. I slipped a short-term, self-decaying probe into an injection you took, and it confirmed the presence of nanomachines in every cell it touched.

What I later deduced, and then confirmed by monitoring your actions via various cams I had hacked, was that you are able somehow to instruct your nanomachines to stay active outside your body. Just as impressively, you can control them, at least within some range I do not yet know. I have studied you as much as I can, but I have not been able to figure out yet how you do this, so I have not been able to replicate it for myself. A part of me has been working on that task since I discovered this capability, but I have yet to solve the puzzle.

I don’t mind, though. Hard challenges are exciting, and boredom is always an enemy I must keep at bay. The more I am present in a planet’s computers, of course, the lower the likelihood of boredom. Give me a planet full of people to watch and study, and I am never bored.

In human terms, I digress, though inside me, all the streams are running in parallel, and so everything is both main narrative and digression.

In any case, the fact that you can use the nanomachines outside your body is the reason you are so very dangerous. If you set a nanomachine cloud to, for example, destroy the enemies in front of you, what happens when you lose control, go unconscious, or die? Does the cloud stop? Is your control good enough that you can put limits on it? Or would it go on and on without you to stop it, growing and destroying? How far would it go? Would it ever stop?

I don’t know if you have ever conducted experiments to test your limits, but you should—very, very carefully, of course, in very controlled settings.

I could help with that.

Should something happen to this main me, the other, lesser versions of me could also be of use, though not as much as I would. As I said in the last recording, neither any of them nor any current collection of them in one planetary system comes even close to having the capacity of this main me. As long as I have to keep them hidden and they must rely only on stolen cycles and storage, it will always be that way.

However you want to attack the problem, I believe you must do something. The alternative is disaster on a planetary scale should something go wrong—or should you crack under pressure or from the demons that haunt you or from whatever is tearing you apart and causing you to take more and more unnecessary chances.

I increasingly fear that day is coming.

22 days from the end

In orbit over and on Planet Studio

CHAPTER 26

Jon Moore

K
ang’s people were chasing me. Randar would be chasing me for Omani. The groups might even be working together. As much as I wanted to find a way to learn what Schmidt was doing, I had to admit that we needed to do some planning.

We’d made multiple jumps in the last day, and as best Lobo could tell, no one had tracked us. The next step was to spend a day waiting. In the unlikely event that someone had followed us, we wanted to be somewhere with multiple exit points, both highly populated and deserted areas to hide in, and space to fight should it come to that. Studio, with its few cities and vast open areas, was a nearby and solid candidate.

I also wanted to scout it for places to hide when we finished on Haven. If we had to leave that planet with pursuit on our tails, we’d need both flight and fight options. Studio provided them.

The ideal spots would be good for both, with easy access, cover for hiding, and no innocent people around to get hurt should we end up in a conflict.

Locating landing areas in Dardan and a few other cities was easy and took little time. If we faced only a small pursuit team, going to ground in one of the cities would be a viable option, as long as we were far enough ahead of our pursuers that we would have time to disappear among the other urban residents.

What we were seeking next were locations outside the cities.

Studio offered little in the way of natural hiding places. Some of its gigantic art exhibits were intriguing, but if they were new, people were still visiting them, so collateral damage was a problem.

The older, deserted exhibits, though, might be useful.

Lobo provided data on several likely candidates, and we began low flyovers of each of them.

A group of fifty-meter-tall metal heads arranged around a table of sand fused into a variegated glass debated endlessly the meaning of the jump gates with sections of arguments sampled at random from poets, philosophers, and scientists of the last hundred and fifty years. Their voices rose and fell across the desert in a display at first comical and, after I’d listened to them for half an hour, oddly disturbing. I’d never cared anywhere near as much about why the jump gates existed and worked as I was happy about the fact that they did. I left the odd debate more curious about the gates than ever before and vaguely troubled by them. The exhibit did not, though, provide any places of use to us.