The Last Firewall (28 page)

Leon thought he’d gone crazy, until his implant chimed and popped up a reminder. He snorted too.

“It’s Friday,” Mike said. “We’re supposed to have a double date tonight.”

“Under the circumstances, let’s reschedule.” Leon held up a hand up to shade his eyes. “Besides, I thought you didn’t want to go.”

“I was looking forward to a night out, actually.” Mike said, smiling. “I need some fun in my life.”

“The last week hasn’t been enough of an adventure?”

They continued east, away from the block house and whoever had come to investigate. They tried to stay out of view, keeping to crevasses and behind shrubs where they could. The sweat poured off Leon’s forehead and down his face, leaving salt trails behind as the moisture evaporated in the dry heat.

After ten minutes the egress building disappeared behind a ridge and they increased their pace, no longer worried about being spotted. Still, they needed to be careful of their footing to avoid the small, spiky cactus that erupted from random spots in the earth and the larger saguaro that loomed overhead.

After a quarter hour at the faster pace, they grew painfully hot and were forced to slow. Soon they found themselves pausing in the slim vertical shade of the tall cacti for a few seconds each time they passed one. They drank more water. Somehow they’d already finished two bottles.

“This.” Mike took a breath. “Is.” He paused again. “Hell.”

Leon nodded, too hot for speech. They kept marching, gaining more elevation now. The egress and any visible activity were long gone. They came to a false peak and stared dismally at the valley ahead of them. They’d need to scramble down and back up again, even higher.

He took out the third water bottle, sharing with Mike. They ate a few bites of energy bars, although neither had an appetite. Mike somehow appeared white and sunburnt at the same time. And he wasn’t saying much, not even cracking a joke.

Mike noticed, too. “I need shade.”

“There.” Leon pointed to the bottom of the canyon where eroded rock formations in the dry river bed created pockets of shelter and the scrub trees were thicker and larger.

“Water?”

Leon shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

They took off for the spot, a half mile distant, but before they’d reached it, the thump of approaching helicopters sounded. They quickened their pace, skidding on loose rocks, desperate to reach cover.

Leon risked a glance up, taking his eyes off the terrain for a moment. The valley floor was close. He tried to ignore the pounding in his skull, the rubbery weakness in his legs. The only good thing was that he wasn’t sweating any more.

He scrambled down the bank of the wash, swayed, and stumbled, falling down on all fours, scraping hands and arms on rocks and jamming his knee into a boulder. Slowly he climbed to his feet, blood running down his leg as the landscape wavered. He picked grit from his palms, searching for Mike, who was nowhere to be seen. Panicked, he finally spotted Mike up on the hillside he’d just descended, two hundred feet back up the route he’d taken, sprawled flat and unmoving.

The sound of the helicopters grew closer, echoing off the rock walls of the canyon. Leon vacillated, not sure if he should run for cover, but he couldn’t leave Mike.

He scrambled back up the hill again, tearing his hands on rocks, beyond caring. Mike lay face down, a spot of vomit below his head. Leon knew this was bad. His instinct was to research the symptoms, but he’d give away their location if he connected to the net now. Besides, the cause was obvious: serious heatstroke. Leon had never been this hot in his life.

He slung the backpack off and pulled out the last bottle. He struggled Mike up onto his side, had to stop to steady himself as the horizon swam. He poured precious water on Mike’s hair and face and chest, then took a long sip. He tipped a little into Mike’s mouth, who sputtered but didn’t open his eyes.

“We’ve got to get to some shade,” Leon said to no one, taking the final swig. “Right now.”

“We can’t wait for the sun to go down.” Leon looked around, puzzled. Who was he talking to?

“Come on, we can get to the shade over there.” He got up and walked a few steps toward the river bed, stopped. He was supposed to be doing something. Why did thinking hurt?

With a start, he remembered Mike. He staggered back, tried to lift the older man, but failed. Leon grabbed his arms instead, dragging Mike ten feet over the rough ground, until he found himself sitting down and couldn’t remember how he’d gotten that way.

Their situation was critical. If he didn’t do something, they were going to die. And yet, if he called for help over the net, he’d alert everyone to their location. The murderous AI and the violent People’s Party would descend on them, probably kill them.

He’d make one more attempt to get Mike to shelter. He struggled up, pulled Mike a few feet, and fell. Everything went dark. On the verge of passing out, he opened a net connection to broadcast a call for help.

His implant returned an error, NO SIGNAL AVAILABLE. He stared up at the tall valley walls on either side. The sun baked down on him. He tried to reach for the water bottle, but missed, getting only a handful of dry dust. That was the last thing he knew.

55

C
AT SPIED ON THE BOTS
five miles away, using their own sensors. Two drones rode the truck to the highway in case anyone tried to reach transportation, while the rest of the team spread out in a circle. Fire trucks and ambulances arrived, dispensing first responders into the building.

A half hour passed without much change. Cat shrugged off her outer shirt, wrapping it around her head for protection from the blaze of the sun, and moved further into the partial shade of a scrub bush. The Rally Fighter waited a few hundred yards away, over the edge of a rise, its profile too distinct for searching bots to miss.

She wondered if their target was Leon Tsarev and Mike Williams. Her chest caught at the notion that the Ethics Institute had taken a direct interest in her, but she shook her head. Despite what Adam said, she couldn’t warrant that much attention. The Institute didn’t get involved in simple murders.

The thought of the men she’d killed in Portland turned her stomach sour. She still dreamed of going back to school, of friendships and relationships beyond one night stands, and a larger purpose in life than merely remaining alive and free. She’d been on the run for a month, but her old life seemed a million miles away.

She fought the despair that welled up and focused on her senses to calm herself. The dry air moved up the hillside, bringing the fragrance of cactus and the smell of sun-baked earth, while her thighs held her crouch under the scrub tree and the heat pressed in all around her.

The simple exercise helped tranquility prevail, and she reconsidered her situation. Adam claimed he was hiding until he gathered enough evidence to expose a dangerous plot. The promise to speak on her behalf if she helped had seemed plausible at the beginning, but now she wondered if the hope of redemption had blinded her.

The way he had acted during training, quitting on the verge of her victory, made her doubt Adam’s integrity. From that seed suspicions grew, with monstrous implications. Between the missing people and the others scared to near catatonia, the deep wrongness in Tucson didn’t jibe with Adam’s story.

Perhaps Leon and Mike had come to detain Adam. If so, they should have brought an army, not snuck in on a train.

She’d become embroiled in something much bigger than her own problems, and understood too little. She needed information to make educated decisions instead of guesses. Hopefully this desert search would turn up something.

Determined to wait for new information to reveal itself in the search playing out before her eyes on the mountainside, she regretted her lack of water, already desperately thirsty in the hundred and five degree heat. Could she drink the water in a cactus? She risked a tiny download through the firewall, disappointed to learn that the moisture was too acidic for consumption.

Cat walked to the car, pulled rubber mats out of the footwells and carried them to the scrub brush. She put one on the ground and used the other to push the prickly bush back, making herself a nest deep under the plant. She crawled in, getting all of her body in the microscopically cooler shade.

The chop of approaching helicopters echoed off the mountain, quickening her pulse. She checked their specs on the net, through layers of onion routers, carefully penetrating the firewall. Military observation drones used for desert warfare, their recognition algorithms would easily pick people out of the open landscape.

Suddenly a network transmission died, a trigger for the simulation she’d created. Her adrenaline surged: Adam had fallen for the cut-loop! Not sure how long the diversion would last, she seized control of the airborne drones, directing the copters where she thought the targets of the search had gone, east instead of west, the illogical route. One a human might use hoping an analytical AI would play the odds and look toward the highway.

She piloted the drones on a tight search pattern, using their synchronized stereoscopic video feeds to extract high fidelity three dimensional data. Tense minutes later, she got the first positive blip from recognition software and brought the copters in close.

Her heart leapt and fell: she’d been right about their identity, but maybe she was too late to help. The static image of the two unconscious men grabbed at her; one was obviously Leon Tsarev, his faced etched with despair.

A chasm lay before her. She was a criminal, on the run, and they were the authorities, possibly here to arrest her. But she couldn’t let them die in the desert or leave them for Adam. She downloaded the geo-location and sent the copters home.

The afternoon sun rained down, intense waves of heat even greater than an hour before. Her lips, mouth, even eyes dried out, every breath bringing more painfully arid air into her body and leaching moisture away.

She jogged back to the car. The motor started with a whine and she crunched forward, killing baby cacti. She’d heard they took hundreds of years to reach maturity. She said a quick apology to the universe and tried to not to think about them. She could only do so much.

Cat clutched the wheel as the big car rose up, protesting the thirty degree inclines, and struggled across the ravines toward the two men.

56

T
HE AIRCAR SETTLED
onto a street near the University medical center. Slim watched in amazement as Tony walked off unaided and without even a limp. Between the nanotech and in-flight treatment, Tony was nearly from the big anti-bot round that had pulverized his femur and nearly killed him.

The big man didn’t seem as large as he had two days ago. Like maybe all those nanites had used up some of his fat to rebuild the leg. Weird.

Tony glanced at him. “Ready?”

Slim swallowed. “Let’s get this over with.” They were both armed, a pointless gesture since Adam had thousands of bots under his control, but he would have felt naked without a gun.

Four hulking military robots met them outside.

“Why did you drop cargo as you came over the mountain?” The towering bot spoke with Adam’s voice.

Slim remembered visiting the seventh floor of the Gould-Simpson building once, seeing Adam’s original four-foot tall orange body. The bots in front of him had nothing in common with that utilitarian model.

Slim shrugged. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I picked up a cargo bay drop on telemetry and radar.”

“Had to be a glitch. I put Tony in the medical couch and never touched the controls.” Slim figured Helena had masked her own descent.

“There are too many computer glitches,” Adam said, hesitating. “Come.”

They followed as the other bots fell in behind.

“Catherine Matthews is here. Eliminate her.”

“But boss,” Slim said, “after everything we went through, you want us to kill her?”

“Exactly. She’s too much of a threat.”

Slim and Tony glanced at each other. The near-death experience had been for nothing. Slim forced his frustration down, bile pushing back in response. He reached for a cigarette.

Adam ignored them. “She went to the Continental’s emergency exit with the goal of escaping. I stalled as long as possible, but I need to let the train go. Get down to the tunnel, figure out what’s become of her.” He stopped and turned. “It could all be a ruse, and she may be wandering the city. Just find her and kill her.” The group of bots whirled as one and sped toward the computer science building. Adam called back, “Use a big gun from far away. Don’t get close!”

Slim took a slow drag and waited until Adam was distant before speaking. “Strange, huh?”

“Yeah, I’ve never seen him so nervous.”

“What now? Helena’s gonna cause a ruckus.”

“We’re on his turf,” Tony said. “We follow his orders, and with luck, he won’t connect Helena to us. Forget her, it’s the girl that worries me. She’s outsmarted and outfought us every time.”

Slim breathed deep of the hot, dry air. Home, for a moment, anyhow. “Here’s an idea. Let’s do this last thing for Adam, then get lost. We got no implants and he can’t track us. We’ll go to Rio, find ourselves some bikes and ride around the country.”

Tony smiled. “Gas-powered hogs are still legal down there.”

“Shit, that’s sweet. We take care of Cat, and then Brazil. Let’s liberate some equipment from the base. We need big machine guns.”

Forty minutes later, Slim and Tony headed north in a ten-seat armored personnel carrier. Tony drove, peering through the bulletproof windshield, while Slim tried to access their weapons. At seventy miles an hour, the road noise from eight all-terrain tires deafened them.

“Shit. You gotta have an implant. The damn system doesn’t have a manual mode.” Slim bashed his hand against the screen. “Two twenty-millimeter cannons and I can’t fire a freaking round.”

Tony looked at him. “Find the fuse box and shut down the computer. See what happens.”