The Last Firewall (33 page)

“After all this, I’m going to be.” Cat paused, embarrassed, wondering what Leon thought of her.

“Why?” Leon asked.

“For the men in Portland.”

“Don’t you know?” Leon said.

Cat shook her head.

“It’s been a major story the last couple of days. Your case was debated across the country. The conclusion is that you were acting in defense of another person. Oregon State isn’t charging you for murder. You’ve got to deal with more minor stuff, like your robberies, but not homicide.”

Cat sat back, the cabin swirling around her. She wasn’t guilty. She could go home to her old life, to Einstein, her puppen, and Maggie and Tom and even Sarah! She wanted to hug them. She couldn’t believe she’d been on the lam for nothing.

“You didn’t know.” Leon stared at her.

“No, I thought I was going to jail when I helped you two.”

“You did it anyway.”

Cat’s face flushed. Why? She shouldn’t be embarrassed about being selfless. “I just wanted to do the right thing.”

“Thank you,” Leon said.

The vehicle slowed. “We’re here,” Tony called out. “All passengers please exit.”

Shit, now she had things to live for, and she was heading into likely death.

65

T
ONY GLANCED AROUND,
the cabin feeling empty with everyone else gone. “You ready?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Slim said, pulling his head away from the weapons console. “Remind me, why are we doing this?”

“Helping them is the right thing to do. Plus, Adam will kill us for what we’ve already told them.”

Slim stared hard at him. “We’re going to Brazil after this. I don’t care out how it ends up. I want cheap booze and easy women. Am I clear?”

Tony smiled at him. “No argument here. Ever been to a Brazilian steakhouse?” He rubbed his massive stomach. “The loveliest place on earth.”

Slim turned back to his weapons console. “Let’s get this frakking thing over with.”

Tony’s only answer was to slam the accelerator. The heavy vehicle lurched forward with a roar.

He sped north on Campbell Avenue at seventy miles an hour. They passed the occasional auto-piloted car and swerved around them, the other vehicles not noticing. Tony mumbled thanks under his breath that Cat’s coverage still worked, making them invisible to AI.

Tony turned right on Skyline drive, heading for the end of Swan Road, a vantage point that would let them see whatever was coming after them. As he turned left onto Swan, the motor protested the sharp incline with a loud whine.

As a kid, Tony had bicycled up this street on Saturdays. He would walk the last quarter mile because it was too steep to ride. He’d rest for fifteen minutes at the top, taking in the view, drinking a pop for the sweat he’d worked up. When he was ready, he’d put his hands on the handlebars, clamp the handbrakes tight, then carefully get onto the seat, balancing against the thirty degree incline. With palms sweaty from nerves, he’d let go of the brakes. His bicycle would hit fifty, sometimes sixty miles an hour if he dared ride that fast. Forty-five minutes to climb the hill, and he’d fly to the bottom in less than five, an exhilarating, terrifying experience.

Tony smiled at the memory and looked down at his massive body. He hadn’t ridden a bicycle in a long time. But he remembered like yesterday the feeling of the wind pushing against his face until the tears ran and his mouth dried out from the dry desert air blowing past.

Finally the armored personnel carrier climbed the last of the steep grade. Tony stopped, looking at the “Private Property” sign at the end. It’d been there since he was a kid.

“Hell, yeah,” he said, and drove the heavy vehicle up the driveway, past the circular house he’d always gazed at from his bicycle. He glanced at the swimming pool, three car garage, and wrap-around windows and kept going, crunching through manicured flower beds and cactus until he was two hundred yards above the house.

Tony turned the carrier around, putting the mountain at their back. “Call in,” he said.

Slim nodded, picked up the handheld computer and smashed the camera lens against a protruding control on the weapons console, then thumbed the screen to make the call. “Adam, we’ve got the girl.”

“Where have you been?” Adam said. “I haven’t been able to track you for hours.”

“Catherine must have blocked our signal. We followed her through the mountains and finally got her.”

“Did you kill her?”

“We tried. She’s locked into the armored personnel carrier, and we barricaded the door from the outside. She’s banging, but she can’t get out.” He paused dramatically. “We’re afraid to go in. She nearly killed Tony.”

“That’s fine. You did good. I’m sending reinforcements now. They’ll arrive in ten minutes.”

Slim cut the connection and hung his head. “We’re gonna die.”

“Don’t think that way,” Tony said. “If we’re lucky, the girl will kill Adam before he sends the big guns after us.”

Slim held out a cigarette to Tony. He dithered for a moment, then took one. He didn’t believe in the little cancer sticks, but what the hell. They pulled on the cigs in silence, the heavy duty filters of the cabin’s closed air system clearing out the smoke.

“Here they come,” Slim said, pointing to the display, before they had even finished their smokes. Six helicopters approached from the south. Slim and Tony sat side by side at the console, weapons primed and live.

Slim had the twin autocannons, and Tony took the controls for the machine gun. “They’re in close together,” Tony said. “Like Helena said they would come.”

Slim called “Ready”. They fired.

The personnel carrier shuddered with the firing of the cannons at six hundred shells a minute, while the machine gun hammered a thousand bullets per minute. They fired for one second per target, moving from one to the next, then filled the sky around the copters with more rounds. Five of the six military birds exploded midair, raining metal fragments and burning fuel onto the houses below. The last helicopter took evasion action, veering hard off to one side, and dove for the ground.

From their vantage point high up on the side of the mountain they tracked the copter, Slim aiming where it was, and Tony shooting where he thought it would go. Seconds later the drone exploded, hunks of chassis and blades crashing into a supermarket.

“Nice,” Slim said.

Tony shook his head. “I don’t like this. We’re firing into the city. We’re killing people.”

“They’re all zombies,” Slim said.

“Not everyone. Some are like us. No implants.”

The handheld computer chimed. Slim accepted the connection and they stared at Adam’s face. It was rippling with anger. Tony was glad they’d smashed the camera, giving them a little distance from Adam.

“What the hell happened? Did you leave the keys with her? She shot the helicopters.”

“She must have overridden the computers, boss. Now she’s driving into the mountain.”

Adam paused. His on-screen image didn’t move or blink, staying frozen as the seconds passed. Suddenly the simulation started again. “I’m sending reinforcements. A10s and more helicopters. Get out of the way.”

“You got it, boss.” Slim disconnected.

“Let’s go to Sabino,” Tony said. “It’ll be hard for them to fire on us unless they come straight up the canyon.”

Slim nodded. They roared down Swan, hitting ninety heading east on Sunrise. At Sabino Canyon Tony slowed to forty. He blew through the parking lot and drove onto the trail road. The first two-thirds of a mile was a straight-away, then they got into the gorge proper, high walls rising on either side of them.

“It’s been six minutes,” Slim said. “They’ll be here any second.”

Tony concentrated on his driving. He pulled the vehicle in close under the cliffs behind Blackett’s Ridge. Attackers could only come from the southeast now, up the canyon. Nestled where they were, there was no other approach. If he and Slim lasted through the next attack, they would drive the rest of the way up, abandon the APV at the top and escape on foot, hiking three miles to the Catalina highway. They’d steal a car and go to Mexico.

Tony grabbed a seat next to Slim. “Ammo?”

“Plenty,” Slim said.

“You get the planes with your autocannons, and I’ll take the helicopters with the machine gun.”

Slim nodded. “Let’s make them eat lead.”

66

H
ELENA LED,
M
IKE AND
L
EON
followed, awkward with the burden of unaccustomed weapons, and Cat brought up the rear. She’d taken one gun at first, then a second, and ended up with four. She figured it was better to have than want in this case.

Helena raced toward a small white concrete block building off the corner of Grant and Campbell. A substantial mechanical lock secured a set of heavy double doors on one side. Helena extruded the tips of her tentacles into slim metal plates, which she slid around the edges of the entrance. With a shriek the door tore out of the frame, the hinges ripping free.

Cat glanced down the street but no one had observed them, and she still provided coverage in cyberspace. Inside, stairs plummeted into darkness on the left, while the right side was taken up by an open air elevator, presumably to load maintenance equipment into the drainage tunnel.

She scanned the net one last time before she descended, doubting that she’d have access underground. The overview map in her vision was heavily dotted by a ring of security around the University, more than a thousand combat bots and humans on the ground and helicopters circling overhead. She checked briefly on Tony and Slim and spun off tiny autonomous agents to keep the observation drone cover in place while she was offline.

The staircase led to the floor of the squared-off tunnel designed to handle the severe rains of Tucson’s monsoon season and channel the surface water toward the river. Twelve feet wide and eight high, the passage crossed underneath the campus, getting them past the perimeter Adam had established.

They stayed close by Helena, who beamed a small light from an aperture on her body.

“How far?” Mike asked, after they’d walked for a while.

“Eight hundred and twenty-four feet,” Helena said.

They moved on in silence until the tunnel split in two.

“This is the Speedway branch,” Helena said, referring to the major avenue over their heads. “And this is what we want.” She gestured toward the smaller shaft.

“Why are these tunnels square instead of round?” Leon asked.

“They bulldoze from above,” Helena said, “rather than using a borer. The walls are poured concrete, not prefab conduit.”

They continued on for several hundred feet until the tunnel terminated at a squared-off end fed by round pipes. A steel ladder on the wall led up into darkness.

“This will take us from the rainwater management system into the University’s maintenance tunnels,” Helena explained. “According to the blueprints, we’ll come up in a cross tunnel that carries power and water across the quadrangle to the buildings on the other side.”

“Let’s go,” Cat said, her heart beating fast. In a few minutes she’d be fighting for her life against Adam, and he wouldn’t hold back this time.

“Adam created a perimeter, but he will have defense in depth. Be alert for anything.”

“We know,” Cat said. “Just because we’re human doesn’t mean we can’t remember.”

Helena raised one tentacle as though she’d say more, but turned and headed up.

Leon followed Mike. Alone, Cat looked back down the tunnel. Everything was quiet except for the sound of the men climbing the ladder.

As soon as Helena pushed open the heavy metal door, Cat felt the prick of Adam’s security return, more intense than ever. She didn’t dare analyze the incoming data, knowing she’d fumbled before when she inspected too closely. She focused on ignoring the pain while she checked on Tony and Slim.

Adam’s helicopters were on their way, but the weapons of the armored vehicle should cope with the Air Force copters. Once Tony and Slim destroyed the initial assault, Adam would divert more attention and bots to that side of town.

Cat swung her rifle over her shoulder, grabbed the ladder and climbed, her boots clicking on the metal rungs. At the top she poked her head out of the hatch. Pipes ran along one wall, and Helena, Mike, and Leon waited for her in the narrow corridor. She pulled herself out and joined them.

Maintenance lights blinked on as they walked down the tunnel. Through the net, Cat watched the battle begin between the helicopters and Slim and Tony. Cat slipped a few delays into the drones’ control surfaces, making it easier for the men to hit them. The AI pilots might have been surprised by the sluggish behavior of their aircraft, but the armored carrier’s weapons destroyed them before they reacted.

Cat and her group were five hundred feet from Adam’s Gould-Simpson Building. This was as close as they could approach in the tunnels. Helena led the way as they climbed two flights of a metal staircase, where they would emerge into the lobby of the nearby Suarez-Naam building.

Cat checked on Slim and Tony one last time. A dozen helicopters, six A-10 attack planes, and two hundred combat bots would arrive at Sabino Canyon in fifteen minutes. They had to stop Adam before then.

67

H
OW COULD ONE HUMAN
screw up his plans so much? Adam had a hundred thousand times the mental capacity of the girl.

Yet, for all his power, Adam had maxed out.

With one set of processors he maintained awareness of the university’s campus, where the vast bulk of his computational power resided. He monitored everything from security cameras to door sensors and electricity consumption to spot any assault on his physical computers. He’d augmented the few dozen bots that normally patrolled the campus with all the assets of the military base. Now he was fed sensory data from a thousand robots.

With another set of threads he controlled dozens of aircraft and hundreds of combat bots to pursue what seemed to be the current location of Catherine Matthews, in the foothills of the Catalina Mountains. He calculated an eleven percent chance that Slim and Tony had been turned against him by Catherine. Their stressed vocal patterns suggested something was not quite right.