The God Wave (28 page)

“Lanfen, please . . .”

“Let her do it.”

Chuck turned. Mike had risen from his chair and was staring at the screen.

“She's right, Doc. If these bastards are doing what it looks like they're doing, we gotta know.”

Chuck swung his gaze back to the screen. The view there danced crazily for a moment before focusing on the next set of double doors. Thorin moved through them into the next chamber. This, too, held rows of bots. They were similar to the ones in the room before, though not identical. Thorin moved swiftly to the first one and, as earlier, gave it a thorough visual once-over, but there wasn't really anything that jumped out at the group.

What did capture their interest was in the next room. It was a strange collection of items, to say the least. In addition to four charging stands, two of which were occupied, there were racks that held a variety of robot appendages, each outfitted with different types of armaments or tools. Some of the weapons were recognizable as assault rifles by the ammo magazines built into the upper arms. Another set of racks held ordnance: tiny missiles, egg-shaped pellets, objects that looked like short harpoons.

“Makes sense,” murmured Dice. “That's the way I'd do it. Build a bot chassis that can be adapted to different uses just by swapping out parts.”

“I hear someone,” Lanfen said, and the view slewed crazily again.

“Get out,” said Chuck.

Behind him, Mini said softly, “She
is
out, Chuck.”

“But the bot . . .”

“Wait,” said Lanfen.

She moved the bot to the far side of the lab, its optics trained on a thick, steel-plated door of the sort that might be found on a deep freeze or a vault. There was a round window in the door made up of two thick pieces of glass set about four inches apart. The window grew until it filled the TV screen from top to bottom.

Chuck realized they were looking into a smaller chamber that contained rows of shelved canisters. He moved closer to the screen.

“Lanfen, can you adjust his optics to focus in on the labels?”

But she was already doing it. The image adjusted so sharply, it made Chuck dizzy. When he was able to focus, the lettering on the nearest canister became suddenly readable.

“Oh,” said Eugene weakly. “That's not C-O-two, is it?”

“No,” Chuck answered, “it's methylphosphonofluoridate.”

“What's that?” Mini asked.

“It's used to make sarin gas.”

THORIN'S AURAL SENSORS WERE NOW
picking up definite sounds of movement in the next lab. Had the bot been detected, or was it just a security patrol on regular rounds? No alarms had sounded, though that might be a measure to catch the rogue robot—or his handler—unaware.

The sounds of approach were coming from the lab Lanfen and her metal counterpart had visited previously. Accordingly, she turned and moved as swiftly and quietly as possible to one of the two unoccupied charging stations. She stepped Thorin up into it. Even partially disassembled, his two neighbors dwarfed
him. Lanfen allowed a corner of her mind to be amused that she had once found Thorin formidable-looking and overlarge.

She'd barely gotten the bot frozen in place when the doors at the entrance of the lab swung open, and a single security guard entered and flipped on the light. He swept the lab with an alert gaze once, his eyes landing on Thorin. He stepped over to the bot with a quizzical look on his face, seeming to find its presence bemusing. He leaned closer, eyes focused on the bot's right shoulder.

Adrenaline hit Lanfen like an electrical charge. She needed to shift his attention off of Thorin, and quick.

At the speed of thought, Lanfen leapt mind-first into the battle droid she'd scanned in the previous chamber, powered it up, and sent it careening into the workbenches at the center of the room. They were heavily enough built that the collision caused no damage, but the noise was thunderous.

She leapt back to Thorin in time to see the guard hurry back toward the doors, talking rapidly into his headset, his weapon drawn. He disappeared into the neighboring lab.

Brilliant—now I'm cut off
.

That left her three options: continue on through the interconnected labs and hope the guards made a full circuit, venture out into the corridors, or leave Thorin where he was. She opted for the corridors, moving to the chem lab's outer door to take a cautious peek beyond.

Her caution was warranted. A glance into the corridors proved them to be a bit busier than she might have hoped. A team of security guards was already entering the lab in which she'd crashed the battle bot.

She took stock of the situation. If she continued around the ring of labs, she would eventually come to the one opposite
Thorin's barracks. Thorin ducked back into the labs and made haste through one after another, recording everything in his path. That included a stunning variety of robot forms. Forms that tantalized, disturbed, terrified. There were even-bigger battle bots being outfitted with more-powerful weapons. There were sleek, reptilian robots with segmented bodies like Bilbo's and magnetic clamps on their appendages. There were others of the same type but covered with wet suits.

No time to give them a thorough examination. I can only hope Dice and Chuck can figure out what they mean from the footage I'm sending back.

Time was definitely a factor, and she paused only every now and again to create a new disturbance along her back trail—for all the good it did. Alarms were sounding now, and the sensors were picking up a lot of human feet pelting along the corridors. Between the added stimuli and reckless passage through the facility, she had lost track of where she was and was reluctant to poke her robotic head out into the corridor again. Sending up prayers to her ancestors to grant her wisdom, Chen Lanfen at last spied an empty charging station in what appeared to be a repair bay. She put Thorin into it, shut him down, and escaped to her maintenance closet.

Drenched in a cold sweat, she huddled in the corner behind the trash bins and shivered, waiting for morning.

IT WAS PAST MIDNIGHT WHEN
everyone left Chuck's house. They had turned on a late-night movie to cover their continued discussions. Anxiety ran high, with anger and fear boiling underneath.

Chuck had never felt so powerless in his entire life. He was out of his element. Trapped in a box, the dimensions of which he couldn't see. He didn't think he could sleep. Lanfen was safe enough for the moment, but just knowing that she was huddled
on the floor of a storage closet in a secret military installation and wouldn't be able to get out until morning made him crazy.

What had they been thinking? That they were spies? Superspies, even, with psychic powers? For God's sake, he was just a neurologist. A scientist who now knew too much about an organization that did not seem to exist on any chart his contacts knew about.

His conversation with his colleague at the FBI had been the most chilling. Chuck had fairly high security clearance there himself, and his friend, Wallace Freely, had stratospheric clearance. Confronted with the names Deep Shield and General Leighton Howard and the blanks Chuck had drawn at the Pentagon and the CIA, Wallace had said simply, “I need to look into this, Chuck. Please don't take this anywhere else.”

His imagination went into overdrive. What if the Deeps shut the place down after the incident with the rogue robot? What if they canceled Forward Kinetics' classes? What if Lanfen ended up stranded in the facility with no way to get out?

What if . . . ?

He called her cell phone finally, at around 4
A.M.,
just to be sure she was all right. He had gone back into his study, where the bugs were still dormant thanks to Mike's tinkering.

“Were you sleeping?” he asked when she answered.

She laughed softly. “What do you think? Were you?”

“No. I'm . . . kind of nervous about tomorrow. If they cancel our classes, if we can't get in to get you out—”

“I have PowerBars and a water bottle,” she said. “And there's a bathroom on the other side of the door.”

“Are you okay otherwise?”

“Yes. No. I mean . . . the things in those labs . . .”

“Yeah.”

“What did your guy at the FBI say?”

“That he needs to look into it. That I shouldn't talk to anyone else about it. Of course I already have. I called the Pentagon and the CIA. I told him that, though. He seemed okay with it.” He was jabbering. He stopped.

“How well do you know him, Chuck? Could he be . . . What if he's an insider? What if he goes to Howard? Did you get the feeling he might?”

“N-no,” Chuck said. Then he added more decisively, “No. I've worked with Wallace. He sounded . . . spooked. I'm not sure General Howard is anything he claims to be. The fact is, we don't really know anything other than what Howard has told us . . . and Matt has assumed.”

“So what do we do? It sounds as if we're trapped. We can't just break our contract on some pretext, can we?”

“No, but there may be another way. Matt might be able to negotiate something. He's good at that. I'm not.”

“I hope so.” She yawned. “Thanks for calling, Chuck. I think maybe I can sleep for a little bit now.”

“Yeah, me, too.”

They said good night and hung up. Not for the first time that night, Chuck picked up the business card he'd set in the middle of his desk. It had two words on it—Kristian Lorstad—and, beneath the name, a telephone number. He thought about dialing it but couldn't bring himself to do it. It felt too much like jumping out of a boat into deep water with no idea of what might be living in it.

He had a choice: throw himself to the sharks or talk to Matt.

He'd have to weigh it seriously.

Lanfen's iPhone woke her with a soft vibration at quarter to eight in the morning. She was groggy from a lack of sleep and stiff from being still for so long. She checked the jammer reflexively. It was off. There were no security cameras in the maintenance closet.

She'd checked back in with Thorin several times during the night. The labs had been crawling with MPs every time, and they had found Thorin during their sweep of the facilities. Brian had been summoned to return him to his own lab, where he was examined minutely. Lieutenant Reynolds had looked grim and nervous, which made Lanfen cringe with discomfort. She knew what she had done was necessary, but it felt somehow dishonorable.

At 7:55 she heard the door of the women's restroom open and Mini's voice say, “Well, I love those boots, Lanfen. I'm going to have to go to Macy's and see if they've got some in my size.”

That was Lanfen's signal to make sure the jammer was off.
They needed the surveillance cameras to pick up Mini and her Lanfen wraith (Lanfen couldn't help but think of Mini's creations that way) entering the room. Lanfen rose from her corner, stretched, and moved to the closet door, listening intently. If this was going to work, Mini had to get herself and the wraith into the two stalls closest to the maintenance closet. Lanfen heard Mini's steps go past her hiding place and heard one of the stall doors creak open.

“Shoot,” Mini said. “I forgot my hairbrush. Can I borrow yours?”

There was a moment of near silence, then the sound of a stall door opening. Lanfen switched the jammer back on, slipped out of the closet as quickly as she could, and sprinted the three strides across the room into the last stall. She shut the door and flipped the jammer off. A cold tide of adrenaline surged through her.

Okay, Chen, breathe.

Sweating a little, she reached down to pick up the jeans, sweater, and boots Mini had pushed under the stall dividers. Then she perched on the edge of the toilet seat and sent up a prayer of relief and gratitude.

“So how was your night?” Mini asked. “I had all kinds of weird dreams because of that stupid movie. I dreamed the espresso machine in our lunchroom turned into a big, shiny robot.”

“I didn't sleep well either,” Lanfen said, pulling off her clothes. “I know what you mean about the robots. Stuff of nightmares.”

“I want to pick the movie next time,” Mini said.

Lanfen pulled on her jeans and sweater. “Good luck. They're going to want to see the next five Transformers movies now.”

“There are five?”

Lanfen laughed as she pulled on her boots. “I don't know. I may be exaggerating. At least I hope I am. I vote we watch a romantic comedy next time.”

“You like those?” Mini asked incredulously.

“No. But I'm willing to subject myself to one just to see the boys suffer.”

Lanfen shoved her discarded clothing and shoes under the stall divider. Mini bundled them into her voluminous purse. Then Lanfen took a deep breath, stood up, and got her small bag down from the hook where she'd hung it. After a moment of thought, she flushed the toilet. Mini's toilet flushed a moment later, and the two women moved to the sink in harmony, washed their hands, and left the restroom, sidestepping the “wet floor” cone that declared the bathroom closed for cleaning.

By the time they'd made their way to the canteen to meet up with Dice, Lanfen's stomach had settled enough for her to eat a bagel and drink a big mug of black tea before they parted to go to their respective classes.

Up until the time she entered her practice room, Lanfen had seen no sign that the deeper recesses of Deep Shield had had any nocturnal excitement. But her whole class was there with one very important exception: Reynolds.

“Where's Brian?” she asked the other lieutenant in her class, Cathy Letson.

“I can't say, ma'am,” Letson answered. “All I know is he's got meetings this morning.”

Meetings. No doubt he did. Lanfen felt a stab of guilt. If Brian was in trouble with his superiors, it was her fault. She reminded herself it was for a good cause, though, smiled at the lieutenant, and said, “Well, his loss then.”

She began her class drills, praying that no one would connect Thorin's walkabout with anyone at Forward Kinetics.

DICE HAD ALMOST RELAXED WHEN
he was called away from the lab to a meeting with General Howard. He told himself he was
only anxious about it because he knew all sorts of things Howard didn't. It was probably nothing. The general just wanted an update.

But when he wasn't escorted to Howard's office, he tensed once again. He was led to a far more lived-in sanctuary in the hidden part of Deep Shield—the part that Lanfen had used Thorin to infiltrate. His suspicions were further aroused when he saw Chuck sitting in a side chair before the general's large desk. Chuck came to Deep Shield only on rare occasions, when his expertise with the interface was required. Dice tried to compose himself, getting his brain into some semblance of order. He had a very real fear that if someone asked the right question, he'd blab everything. He wasn't trained for this, dammit. He was a robotics engineer, not a spy.

More Q, less James Bond.

The general was not behind his desk when the polite corporal delivered Dice into the office. He sat in the chair beside Chuck. The corporal offered Dice a cup of coffee, which he accepted just so he'd have something to do with his hands.

When the corporal was gone, he turned to Chuck. “Do you have any idea—”

Chuck shook his head. “None.”

Dice opened his mouth to ask another question but quickly closed it. The less said, the better. Chances were good the office was bugged. So he and Chuck sipped coffee and waited. In ten minutes on the nose, General Howard appeared, Lieutenant Reynolds in his wake. Dice knew Lanfen had been fretting over her pet student all morning; she'd be happy to know he wasn't shuffling around in chains.

I hope the same can be said about us after this meeting.

Howard slid into the chair behind his desk. Reynolds stood at ease just to his right.

The general didn't waste time. “We had an incident last night
with a couple of the robots. Lieutenant Reynolds's unit apparently got loose in the labs somehow. Did some damage, including to several other robots. Thankfully it wasn't as much damage as it could have done. We found it in a repair bay some distance from its assigned station.”

Dice and Chuck exchanged looks that Dice was sure were suitably startled.

“Wow,” he said, barely needing to feign shock. “You think it was deliberate sabotage?”

Howard glanced aside at Reynolds. “We're not altogether sure what to think. If it was deliberate sabotage, it was of a most peculiar kind. The perpetrator had the opportunity to do substantial damage but didn't. I mentioned there were other bots involved—all were new models that haven't been outside the lab since they were built. They rolled off of their charging stations in a couple of cases, doing minor damage to other equipment. But that was the extent of it. If this was deliberate sabotage, I'd have expected much more than that. Or at least theft. But nothing is missing.” He hesitated, then asked, “Doctors, have you ever had one of your bots go rogue?”

Dice and Chuck both shook their heads.

“Never,” Dice said. “Ours are controllable only through energy manipulation of the kinetic interface. They are robots, not sentient beings. I don't know what's possible with your models, though. You've made modifications to the design, many of which I don't have firsthand knowledge of.”

“So there had to be a human operator,” Howard surmised.

“Not necessarily,” said Chuck. He set his coffee on the edge of Howard's desk and leaned forward in his chair. “Depending on what modifications you've made, you may have introduced a sensitivity to the kinetic converter that interprets nondirective energy as instructions. For example, with an enhanced sensitiv
ity level, the interface might misinterpret output from another source as an instruction set—Wi-Fi, for example, or cellular activity. A radiation leak, perhaps? That might explain the randomness of the bot's activity. Or . . .”

“Or?”

“Or maybe you've got someone on your staff who unwittingly manipulated the bot. Someone who's a latent talent, perhaps, and was in the labs last night. Or maybe one of your regular bot drivers somehow fed the bot instructions unconsciously. Do your human operators ever sleep anywhere near the labs?”

“Wait. That would mean I did it,” interrupted Reynolds, then to General Howard, “Beg pardon, sir, but he's suggesting I did this.”

“Not consciously,” Chuck clarified. “And not you specifically. Regardless, I'm also not saying you did it with intent. Frankly we don't know how the subconscious mind of the operator would affect the robot. We've never tested that. But it stands to reason it would work once a mind was trained to exert itself in that way. Were you anywhere in the area last night?”

Reynolds nodded slowly. “I was in the barracks two floors down. Is that . . . would that be close enough?”

“Again, I don't know. As I said, we never experimented with that. And our operators sleep off campus, miles away. At that distance, I don't think it ever occurred to us something like this was possible. Two floors down, though . . .” He left the thought hanging.

“But why would I take Thorin out into the labs? If I was dreaming, why wouldn't I remember it?”

“It may be the same neurological state as sleepwalking, which the subject rarely, if ever, remembers.”

“But why would it affect
me
? I wasn't the only operator in the barracks last night. There were at least three others.”

“Again, we're not saying it was you. But, if I had to make a guess, you'd be at the top of my list,” Dice said.

“Why?”

“Because you're somewhat of a prodigy, Brian. You're ahead of the curve when it comes to throwing yourself into the bot. Plus you've been working with the bots longer than just about anyone outside of our teams, and you have a special affinity with Thorin.”

General Howard looked like a man with a deeply perplexing problem—which Dice supposed he was. “This poses a whole new set of possibilities we hadn't anticipated. Not only might our own operators unexpectedly trigger unintentional behavior in a bot, but just a bit ago Dr. Brenton suggested that a third party might be able to hijack a unit. Either event poses a major problem. One that could bring the entire robotics program to a halt.” He looked from Chuck to Dice. “Gentlemen, we need to find a way to keep this from happening again, and time is of the essence. We are on the verge of a first-time deployment of our mechanicals. I need you to solve this.”

Deployment?
Dice glanced at Chuck, who was shaking his head and smiling.

“Ironic, isn't it? All the efforts we've made to allow the human mind to interact with mechanicals, and we didn't foresee having to prevent them from doing it. I don't think the answer is on the human end of the equation, General. The human mind is a delicate instrument—”

“So it has to be at the mechanical end,” Dice said, thinking fast and out loud. “We may need to establish a storage protocol. Delink the converter from the servo. That effectively breaks the circuit.”

“Yes,” said Chuck, seamlessly picking up the thread. “Good
idea. I think we need to design a sleep experiment. See if it's even
possible
to sleepwalk a robot.”

Dice watched the two military men weigh what they'd said, barely daring to breathe. He swore he could feel Chuck's gaze on the side of his head. Chuck knew as well as he did that no storage protocol would keep the Forward Kinetics zetas from manipulating the robots. If the Deep Shield zetas were able to manipulate mechanicals directly, Howard would know that delinking the converter and servo interface wouldn't do a damn thing.

Howard only frowned a bit less and nodded. “Yes. A storage protocol. Dr. Kobayashi, I would appreciate it if you would begin working with my staff on such a plan first thing tomorrow. While you, Dr. Brenton, can get to work designing an experiment that will show us if there's a potential for unwitting sabotage by our own operators.”

Dice nodded, and Chuck said, “Certainly.”

“Would a storage protocol help if it was a clumsy attempt at sabotage?” Reynolds asked. “If it wasn't me dreaming or sleepwalking or whatever?”

“It should,” Dice lied. “But how likely is it that it's sabotage? Like the general said, as sabotage goes, it was pretty lame.”

“Maybe the saboteur wasn't an expert at manipulating this sort of mechanism. Or maybe they were there for a different purpose. Maybe they were just spying or going for a joyride.”

Dice forced his head to move up and down. “Yeah. Yeah, I can see that, I guess. I mean it might be tempting for someone—I dunno, a guard or maintenance guy—to just, you know, try to move one of the bots. If that's what happened, though, they probably scared themselves half to death.”

The general's frown deepened again. “We've questioned everyone on duty last night. Perhaps we should do so again—with a slightly different emphasis.”

“You said you have a deployment coming up,” Chuck said with surprising outer calm. “How much time does that give us?”

The general shot him an inscrutable glance, then said, “The end of the week, gentlemen. You have until the end of the week.”

CHUCK AND DICE WERE BOTH
silent on the way back out to the less-top-secret confines of the top-secret facility. They found Lanfen in the canteen, holding a cup of tea and looking wary.

Chuck slid into the chair next to hers. “We've been asked to fix a little problem with the bots,” he said. “One wandered away from its charging station last night and got everyone in an uproar.”