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 felclass="underline" 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
The 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.”