“Uh, sir? Are the police looking for Ryan?”
He nods. “Definitely. The police, the FBI, they’ve all involved in the search.”
“Do you think they’ll find him?”
“Don’t worry. They’re doing everything they can. I’ll let you know as soon as I get any news.” He raises his head for a moment and glances at my camera lens. Then he goes back to studying his papers. “That’s all for now, Armstrong. You’re dismissed.”
Raising my right arm, I salute the general, then turn around and head for the door. As I leave his office, though, I get the feeling that Hawke is hiding something. He doesn’t think the police will find Ryan. I could hear the resignation in his voice. He thinks my friend is as good as dead.
A surge of fury invades my circuits—I want to bolt out of Pioneer Base and start running east, back to Yorktown Heights. I want to find the traitor who’s working with Sigma, the thug who kidnapped Ryan Boyd. I want to pound his face and stomp on his knees and clamp my steel hands around his neck. I can picture it so clearly: his tongue hanging out of his mouth, his eyes widening as I crush his throat. In an instant, my mind draws a thousand gory images, each as vivid as the worst scenes in a horror movie. Are you scared, tough guy? Had enough?
The emotion is so strong that for a couple of seconds I lose track of the data coming from my sensors. When I come back to reality, I’m standing in the corridor outside Hawke’s office with my hands locked into fists. Another Pioneer is just a few feet away, training its camera on me. The number 5 is stamped on its torso. It’s Marshall Baxley.
“Everything okay, Adam?” He’s modified his synthesized voice, making it sound fancy and British, like he’s an actor in a Shakespeare play. “You seem perplexed.”
“No, I’m fine.” But that’s a lie. The truth is, I’m a little freaked out by the explosion of rage I just felt. Nothing like that has ever happened to me before.
“Are you sure?” Marshall moves a step closer, his footpads clanging. “I see you just came out of the general’s office. Was Hawke giving you a hard time?”
I’m starting to wonder whether it’s a coincidence that I found Marshall here. Was he spying on me? Eavesdropping on my conversation with Hawke? I wouldn’t put it past him. “No, we were talking about the weather.”
He chuckles. It makes me jealous, his ability to synthesize laughter. He does it so easily. “You’re funny, Adam. You’re one of the most amusing robots I know. Where are you going now?”
“Why do you care?”
He places his mechanical hands on the sides of his torso, just above where his legs are attached. It’s a posture of outrage, hands on hips. “I was trying to be friendly, that’s all. We have an hour to kill before the next training exercise, so I thought I’d invite you to hang out in my room for a while.”
“Hang out?”
“You know, drink beer, smoke cigarettes. Oh, wait a minute.” He slaps one of his hands against his turret, as if suddenly remembering something. “Well, we can talk at least. That’s something we can still do.”
“What about your friend Zia? Will she be there too?”
“Oh Lord, I wish you two would stop bickering.”
“Bickering? She’s insane.”
“Look, Adam, we don’t have a lot of choices for friends here. We take what we can get. And Zia’s not so bad. I find her fascinating, actually. She’s so ferocious.”
“So why do you need me? Why don’t you just hang out with her?”
Marshall lets out a synthesized sigh. “All right, you want the truth?” He moves another step closer and lowers the volume of his speakers. “Zia can get tiresome after a while. She spends way too much time talking about Hawke. It’s like she has a crush on the man. That’s a disgusting thought, isn’t it?” He synthesizes a gagging noise. “And when she’s not talking about Hawke, she likes to lecture me on military strategy. She downloaded all the Army’s files on every war ever fought. You should hear her go on about World War II. It’s like listening to the History Channel.”
I have to admit, this is interesting information. Although Marshall may be a weasel, at least he’s entertaining. I’m still angry at him for siding with Zia this morning, but maybe I should let it slide. He’s right about one thing: we don’t have a lot of choices for friends here.
Marshall raises one of his arms and points down the hall toward his room. “So are you coming or not?” His fancy British voice quavers a bit. It’s a subtle change, but my acoustic sensor detects it. I realize that behind all his jokes and cleverness, Marshall is lonely. He’s dying for someone to talk to. “Zia won’t be there, but DeShawn said he’d stop by. Both of you like football, so we can talk about that. I’ll do my best to pretend to be interested.”
That clinches it. I definitely want to talk to DeShawn. We have more in common than an interest in football. “Okay, I’m in.”
“A wise choice, Mr. Armstrong.” Marshall claps my torso. “Let’s make some trouble.”
Marshall stops at his door and raises his right hand to a keypad mounted on the wall. Swiftly tapping his mechanical fingers on the keys, he enters a six-digit password that unlocks the door. But as it swings open he lets out a synthesized yelp of surprise. Pioneer 6 stands just inside the doorway.
“What up, peeps?” DeShawn telescopes his arms, spreading them wide. “What took you so long?”
“Well, well. I see you’ve made yourself at home.” Marshall is trying to act casual, but I can tell he’s annoyed. His British accent sounds strained. “May I ask how you managed to get into my room?”
“It was easy. I looked up your birth date in the Pioneer Base library. You couldn’t think of a better password than that?”
“Ah. How foolish of me.” Marshall slaps his turret again. “It was force of habit, I suppose. Until recently I had trouble remembering numbers. But that’s not a problem anymore, is it?”
“You should use your circuits to generate a random number. You can make it as long as you want, a hundred digits, two hundred. Then no one will ever guess it.”
I stride forward and point at the keypad. “But that would be inefficient. It would take forever to punch in such a long number.”
“How about transmitting the password wirelessly instead?” DeShawn points at the keypad too. His robotic voice is full of enthusiasm. “We could add a transceiver to the locking mechanism. Then you could send it a radio signal with the encoded password.”
I focus my camera on DeShawn’s turret, wishing he had a face so I could see his expression. He’s obviously a tech geek. Just like me, he spent years trapped in a wheelchair, paralyzed and helpless and bored out of his mind, and now I realize we both had the same strategy for coping with it. DeShawn became an expert on software and computers and all the other gadgets that make life tolerable for someone with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. As I stare at his turret I feel a pulse of gladness in my circuits. We’re even more alike than I’d suspected.
I turn on my wireless system and connect to the Pioneer Base library. Then I scroll through the databases until I find a file on transceiver electronics. “Okay, I see a couple of options,” I say. “We can install a circuit board with—”
“Slow down, boys.” Marshall snakes one of his arms around my torso and the other around DeShawn’s. “I’m not in the mood to reprogram anything right now.” He guides us into his room and shuts the door behind us. “Let’s just have a little conversation, shall we?”
Marshall’s room looks a lot like mine. There’s no furniture. The room is empty except for the recharging station and Marshall’s evil twin, a motionless spare Pioneer with the label 5A stamped on its torso. But the walls are covered with posters. They look like the kind of posters you’d see in a high-school English classroom. Each shows a black-and-white photograph of a famous poet and a quote from one of his or her poems.