“We don’t want to hurt you, ma’am,” Gray says in accented English.
The bully says nothing. The look on his face doesn’t support his partner’s words, but True decides not to comment on that. Instead she tells them, “I’m the nervous type. I get jumpy. So take your hands off your weapons, okay? I’ve got just a couple of questions and then we can go our separate ways.”
“We are not here to hurt you, ma’am,” Gray repeats as he slides his hand off his assault rifle. He orders his partner to do the same, but the bully only glares at True, a look that promises a very unpleasant future should she lose control of this encounter. The wasp buzz grows louder. She watches his face as he processes that fact. After a few seconds, he takes his hand off the weapon.
“Make sure they don’t touch those guns again,” Shaw warns her.
“That’s the plan,” she whispers.
“Sure. I just want you to understand. It would be bad.”
The way he says it, it’s as if there is an inevitability to the situation, but she doesn’t question him. There isn’t time. A new note is playing against the quiet of the night: a faint, faraway siren. Maybe it has nothing to do with the explosion that destroyed the engine block but she doesn’t want to wait around to find out, doesn’t want to stay any longer than it takes to ask the questions she came to ask.
“What I want to know,” she tells them, “is who hired you to follow me. And what were you supposed to do when you caught up?”
To her surprise, the bully volunteers an answer. “We work for your business partner,” he says in lilting, contemptuous English. “The one you are here to betray.”
Lincoln? She doesn’t believe it. Lincoln would not hire uncredentialed thugs. “Damn it, I want a name. What is the name?”
“Chinese name,” Gray says nervously. “Li.”
“Li what?”
The bully says, “Li Guiying.”
True is so surprised, her mind blanks of everything but that name. Li Guiying. The roboticist. Tamara’s colleague. What does Li Guiying have to do with anything?
“That name mean something to you?” Shaw asks.
She doesn’t answer. She questions the thugs instead. “What did Li Guiying want you to do?”
“Follow you,” Gray says. “Find out who you are working with. Tag him. That’s all. Not hurt anybody.”
“Then why the guns?”
Even as she asks the question, she notices the bully’s hand moving again to his weapon. “Don’t touch it,” she tells him, but her warning is smothered by the sharp buzz of a descending wasp.
This time she gets a clear glimpse of the device as it drops. Its fuselage is a flattened, aerodynamic diamond shape, around six inches long and less than three across at its widest point, covered in a dark photovoltaic skin. Its wings are surfaced in PV too. They’re long and narrow, mounted on ball joints. Each supports a single rotor. A tiny third rotor sparkles in a vertical mount on the shark-fin tail. Four jointed legs flex to cushion the mech’s abrupt landing as it smacks down against the back of the bully’s neck. At the same time, the wings sweep back and up. There, revealed on the dorsal surface of the nearest wing, visible for a fraction of a second, a familiar emblem. It’s too small, too far away to see in detail, but True knows it anyway. There is one just like it at home, displayed alongside Diego’s formal army portrait. Dark star fields flanking a bright sun, angled lightning bolts splitting the sections.
The bully rolls to grab his gun. The mech’s legs must have hooked into his collar or his flesh because it doesn’t dislodge. It holds on. As his fingers touch steel, it explodes.
True squeezes her eyes shut against the blast, spinning into the alley, hunkering down against the wall. “Tell me you didn’t just do that,” she says in a furious whisper.
“I didn’t,” Shaw assures her. “The swarm is autonomous. It’s been assigned to protect you and that’s what it’s doing.”
Every word calm. Utterly rational. A man in control.
It’s True whose breathing has gone ragged, whose hands shake.
She looks up from where she’s crouched to see the bully’s headless corpse feeding an oozing pool of blood. Gray is a couple of meters away, still on the ground, his blood-spattered face staring in shock at the corpse.
She flinches as a third explosion—more distant—booms out of the night sky, echoing off the buildings. “The swarm just took out a surveillance drone,” Shaw tells her. “Probably police.”
She retreats down the alley at a run.
Ice-Cold
The wail and stutter of sirens rises in the distance as True flees down the alley. It reminds her of the chorus of howling dogs on the outskirts of Tadmur. That night, they had the legal authority of a bounty behind their actions, but tonight no documentation protects her from the consequences of what just happened, of what should not have happened.
“You overreacted,” she pants, not knowing if Shaw is still there, still listening. “You didn’t have to kill him!”
Two more explosions go off behind her.
“Fuck! You’re a fucking maniac!”
This time he responds, his voice calm and absurdly soothing despite what he has to say: “You know why autonomous systems make good soldiers, True? It’s because they follow the rules of engagement, even in tricky situations. They don’t let sentiment or doubt or mercy get in the way.” Shifting to a matter-of-fact tone, he adds, “Turn right at the next corner.”
She slows almost to a stop. “That’s not the way I came.”
“Do it, True.”
What choice? A wrong move now might make her the next target of the swarm.
All in, then. She jogs to the corner as the sirens are multiplied by echoes resounding off the buildings. “Where am I going?” she asks. She sounds surprisingly calm. Just a slight tremor in her voice.
“Past the next building on the left. There’s a small parking lot. You see it?”
“Yes. I see an autonomous cab with the interior lit.”
“That’s the one. Get inside.”
It’s a tiny, two-passenger vehicle. She gets in. The light goes out, the windows darken. The wailing of the sirens is muffled. She gets the belt on and the cab slides out of its parking space on a silent electric motor.
“Li Guiying,” Shaw says.
“A robotics engineer.”
It’s an absurdly inadequate answer. He must have searched the name; he knows that much already. But True is distracted. She’s thinking about the dead man: her responsibility for what happened to him, and her liability. They are not the same things. She went to meet the two men, thinking it was right action; she was motivated by worry over what Shaw might do if she didn’t defuse the situation. But the situation escalated. A man is dead—maybe two men are dead—and she is fleeing the scene.
I let this happen.
“Damn it, True.” His harsh tone anchors her. “Don’t spin out on me. You’ve seen blood before.”
Oh yeah. Roger that. She’s seen worse in combat but this wasn’t combat. A man—an idiot, yes, but a man—got his head blown off on a peaceful street in a peaceful city. And she doesn’t want to ask but she’s pretty sure the old man is dead too. No witnesses.
Maybe the truck had a dash cam, although that was probably destroyed when the engine block went up.
“I didn’t come here to trigger that kind of shit,” she tells him.