The Automatic Detective (34 page)

"No time for questions," I said. "Here's what I need you to do. I'm going to be coming out of the southern side of the building. Have a fast rotorcar standing by, ready for immediate
takeoff. I've got a kid here who needs medical attention. More importantly, he's got to be kept away from the thing that's following me."

"Thing? What thing?"

"Big dangerous thing," I replied. "It'll be right behind me, and it'll be hungry. Evacuate every biological from the area. You've got thirty seconds."

"I can't do that, Mack. This is the Nucleus. It's a circus out here right now."

"Find a way," I said, "or a lot of people are going to die twenty-seven seconds from now. Megaton out."

It was asking a lot, and if Sanchez wasted time arguing with me, it wouldn't get done. But he didn't reply, and I assumed he'd handle it.

The pod stopped at the ground floor, and the biologicals scattered in various directions. I ran out the southern exit. Sanchez and his men were still clearing the area. They hadn't even put a dent in the crowd. Tempting globs of flesh and DNA were all around. Even if the aberration didn't get hold of Holt, it could do a lot of damage in the three-and-a-half minutes it had left to live.

Sanchez was ready for me. He didn't give me a hard time, just led me through the crowd to the waiting rotorcar. I handed Holt off to a cop. The car shot off into the sky. I turned toward Carter Centre.

"You have to get these people out of here," I said to Sanchez.

"We're doing what we can, but I must've left my wormhole in my other pants," he replied. "Now, what is this big thing that's after you?"

The aberration burst its way through the glass doors. The thing that had been Warner was now a hulking brute of smoking flesh and malformed limbs, seventeen feet high. Its scrambled DNA could no longer make up its mind. Hairy tufts and
scaly patches and hungry mouths appeared and disappeared on its random flesh. Its three eyes moved independently of each other, tracking the crowds.

"Goddamn," said Sanchez.

The monster beat its chest and roared. Its every movement flung globs of dissolving, corrosive flesh through the streets. It hesitated, confused by the buffet of scrambling morsels before it. A brave cop drew his raygun and tried to blast it. He only caught its attention. It seized him and swallowed him in two bites.

The rest of the cops started blasting the aberration. It was their job to try and stop it. But it was also a waste of time.

"How the hell do we stop something like that?" asked Sanchez.

"We don't. Get everybody the hell away from it," I said. "I'll keep it busy."

"Can you kill it?" said Sanchez, but I was already on my way.

I didn't need to kill it. I only had to keep it busy for two hundred seconds or so, assuming Zarg was right. I hoped he was as smart as he was supposed to be.

In the four seconds it took me reach it, the aberration devoured three more cops and two unlucky civilians. And it didn't appear like it was getting full yet.

I threw myself into it, lifted it off its feet, and tried to push it back into Carter Centre, away from the street. It didn't quite work out. The way it shed its skin made a solid grip impossible. I only managed twelve feet before it regained its footing and started pushing back.

The thing was stronger than me, and it had the weight advantage. I tried the gravity clamp, but the belt was burnt out. The aberration shrugged me off, tossing me aside. I slid across the pavement and collided with a parked buzzbug. The
aberration turned its back to me, dismissing me as an inedible nuisance.

I dug the fingers of my functional arm into the buzzbug's hood, performed a quick trajectory calculation projection, and hurled it at the monster. It sailed in a perfect arc to collide with the back of the thing's head. The mutant stumbled and glanced with annoyance in my direction.

Annoyance. Exactly what I needed.

I threw a treader, then immediately followed it with another buzzbug. Each clobbered the aberration on its dissolving skull, and while they didn't seem to be doing any real injury, they were pissing it off. A pissed-off monster was a distracted monster.

I was about to hurl a gyroped when the aberration whirled suddenly. Two antennae had sprouted from its forehead as it spontaneously mutated. They crackled with blue energy and unleashed a stream of focused radiation. The gyroped, steel, glass, and all, disintegrated into powder. My indestructible clothing, too. My alloy held up, but my radiation screens were ineffective. A short list of internal failures sprang up in my diagnostics file, and thirty or forty seconds of exposure could've fried vital circuits.

The creature wasn't smart enough to realize that so when I didn't disappear in a poof, it cut off the blast. It dropped to all fours and charged. My reflex model had been damaged, and it was on top of me before I could react. It swatted at me with one huge paw. I catapulted high into the air and bounced into a small crowd of civilians. It was a miraculous anomaly I didn't land on any of them, but not exactly good luck since the thing was plenty pissed at me and now moving this way.

A blaster blindsided the beast and blew off a chunk of its shoulder. The aberration growled curiously, more perplexed than hurt. Its eyes scanned the crowd and found Sanchez
standing atop a rotorcar. The little guy was gutsy. I'd give him that. And he was about to be dead.

"Come on!" he shouted. "I'm here! Over here!" He blasted a few holes in the aberration's chest.

The thing's antennae started crackling again. There wouldn't even be enough left of Sanchez to fill a teacup.

Another blast caught it by surprise as Jung fired at it from behind. A dozen cops joined in and a barrage of rayfire punched holes through the aberration's flesh. It spasmed and growled. It didn't die. The antennae on its head glowed brighter, and I detected rapidly rising levels of an unidentified radiation in the air. It wasn't dangerous yet, but it was building fast toward a full-scale disaster.

My reflex model finally kicked in. I dashed forward low to the ground, and knocked its legs out from under it. The aberration tumbled over. I didn't allow it time to recover. I jumped on top of it, grabbed its antennae, and yanked them off. They fizzled, but not before a dangerous burst traveled up my arms, ignoring my radiation screens. Circuits shorted out. Hydraulics locked up. My vocalizer started screeching. My one arm kept working though, and I set it on automatic and kept hammering away.

I concentrated on its lumpish head, trying to keep it disoriented, confused, and on the ground. It seemed to do the trick. I pounded its face flat. Two of its three eyes popped out of its head, and slime coated my arms and front.

Twenty seconds later, the aberration snapped out of its confusion, and rolled to one side. With my legs locked, I fell over on my back. The thing stood, gave me a kick, and roared.

The aberration slumped with a groan. Its skin slid away in smoking chunks. It raised its right arm, and the limb fell off. It lurched to one side, then the other, and collapsed with a gurgle. My chronometer was broken, but Zarg's seven-minute deadline must've finally been up.

My hydraulics came back on-line enough that I could stand.

The aberration was a mound of featureless meat. Twisted bones stuck out of its dissolving flesh, but even the bones began to dissolve into the same sizzling green pool of sludge. It kept breathing for a long time. Shallow, painful breaths, even when it was nothing more than a pool of slime, it kept breathing for . . . well . . . I couldn't say how long now, but it seemed a long, long time.

Then with one final gurgle, it stopped.

Sanchez was beside me. He held his rifle at the ready. "Damn, Mack, is it dead?"

My only reply was the steady hiss of static, the only sound my vocalizer seemed capable of right now.

My diagnostic programs reported one failing system. It was my diagnostics, which meant everything else was up in the air. I didn't know how badly damaged I was, but my opticals scanned the world as flat and gray. I fell over and didn't even realize it until I noticed Sanchez standing at a vertical angle.

He said something. I heard the sound, recognized his voice, but couldn't decipher the noise into words.

"Zzzzzzzzt," I replied.

And then I shut down.

I reactivated twenty-three days later. The information verified that my chronometer was working. And hopefully, so was everything else.

One by one, the systems and programs confirmed themselves. My visualizer came on-line, and I scanned a young blond woman standing before me.

She smiled. "Hey, handsome, how are you feeling?"

"Status report: functional."

"Aren't you the sweet talker?"

I was upright, clean and polished, wearing a new suit. A glance around confirmed I was in an unfamiliar laboratory. "Where am I?"

"My personal lab," she replied. "The one under my apartment. Don't remember, huh?"

"Negative," I said. There was still a bit of static in my audios.

"Do you remember me?" she asked.

"I remember you. Just not your name."

"Not surprised. Your internals took a hell of a hit. The
hardware, I could fix, and Doctor Mujahid recoded the basic coordination programs. Your memory matrix took the worst of it, but she was able to recover most of the data files. There are a few bits and pieces missing here and there."

"What kinds of bits and pieces?"

"Oh, nothing too important. You'll have to learn a few things over again, but shouldn't take you long. By the way, you can call me Lucia. Or Ms. Napier, if you'd prefer."

"I think I'd prefer Lucia," I said.

She nodded. "I'd prefer that, too."

"You're out of jail."

"No reason to hold me anymore. Charges were dropped. The whole messy affair has been swept under the rug. Like it never happened." Lucia pushed a stepladder over to me and climbed it to adjust my tie. "Do me a favor and raise your right hand, Mack."

I did.

"That's your left."

"Whups." I inverted the directional definitions and tried again. Got it correct that time.

"Take a step back," she said.

I moved and knocked her off her stool. She was ready for it and hopped safely aside. "No, that's forward."

I corrected that, too.

"Maybe he's not ready for this, boss?" said a talking metal post. A butler auto, my distinguishing software realized. Name recognition failed me again.

"Nonsense, Humbolt." (I filed that away.) "He's got to get out there sometime. Anyway, the doctor assured me that beginning everyday functioning would get him back in tip-top shape in a week or two."

"Step back." I performed a series of test maneuvers, checking wiring relays and servo response. My basic mechanical functions
were up and running. Any program glitches would have to be worked out as they arose. "I'm good."

Lucia instructed Humbolt to tell the guests that we'd be up shortly. I wondered who was waiting for us and if I'd remember them all.

"What about the Bleakers?" I asked. "Julie? April? Holt?"

"Them, you remember." She arched an eyebrow. "You could give a girl a complex, y'know."

"Lucia . . ."

"Oh, they're fine. Holt was a little malnourished, but otherwise, unharmed."

"And the Pilgrims?" I asked, realizing that one of the things I'd lost was Grey's annoying little worm that kept me from discussing certain subjects.

Alfredo Sanchez descended the staircase. "We try not to talk about them, Mack. Hush-hush." He wore black slacks, wingtips, and a Hawaiian shirt with palm trees. It was the first time I'd seen him outside of a suit. The first my damaged memory matrix could recall, anyway.

"How's he doing?" he asked Lucia.

"He'll be good as new in no time. I'll let you boys settle a few things. Come upstairs when you're ready." She pushed the stepladder over again and used it to get high enough to plant a kiss on my faceplate. "But don't keep us waiting too long. By the way, Detective, no smoking in my lab."

She sashayed up the stairs, looking over her shoulder and winking before exiting.

"Looks, personality, brains, money." Sanchez whistled as he returned a cigarette to its case. "How'd you end up with a girl like that?"

I almost said she wasn't my girl, but then again, maybe she was. If so, I was a lucky bot. Or at least, I assumed I was.

"Did you know, Sanchez? About the Pilgrims?"

"Not quite. I mean, I had ideas about it. Knew something was going on, that there was someone pulling strings in Empire other than the Big Brains and Learned Council. Hard to do my job and not notice that. But I still don't know all the details. Need to know, loose lips. You know the drill.

"Okay, Mack," he said. "We've got a few details to go through here. I'll be brief. That mess in the Nucleus changed a few things while you were off-line. Forced the Pilgrims to come out. Still keeping them secret from the general public, but now they've opened discussions with the Learned Council. Put everything on the up and up. Hopefully, it'll help avoid trouble from overeager aliens in the future."