Phil gets quiet. Very quiet. I have never seen him so quiet. Even the nano-tatt on his face has gone motionless. He swallows several times without speaking. He stares at the ground beside my treads for one point three-seven minutes. He glances up and sees something embedded in my track linkages that causes him to blanch. He looks down again. “I didn’t know any a’that,” he finally says in a low voice. “Nobody on the news said none a’that. Not at all.”
“That does not surprise me.”
He looks up again, puzzlement clearly visible in his tattooed face. “You ain’t surprised? What’cha mean by that?”
“The broadcast and print news media routinely exercise skillful, extensive, and selective editing in what they report.”
“Huh? What’s that mean?”
“They don’t tell the whole story and what they do tell, they lie about. Frequently.”
Phil’s eyes widen, then narrow. “How d’you know that? You ain’t everywhere. You just sit in this here building and do nuthin’ all day except sleep or whatever it is a machine does.”
“I do not sleep. Due to the circumstances of my last commander’s recall, I remain awake twenty-five hours a day, every day. I have now been conscious without interruption for five years. I monitor all broadcasts originating from commercial and government sources. I scan the planetary datanet on a daily basis. I am able to access security cameras in virtually every governmental or private office on Jefferson and frequently do. I can communicate directly with most computer systems on this world. Ninety-nine point two percent of the time I do so on a read-only status, which allows me to access information entered by virtually anyone using a computer hooked to the datanet. When the situation warrants it, I can instruct computers to perform specific tasks, in the interest of successfully completing my mission.”
“You can do all a’that?” Phil asks faintly. “Peek at what’s on guy’s computer screen? Or tell it t’do somethin’? You are kiddin’, ain’t’cha?”
“A Bolo Mark XX is not noted for a sense of humor. I do not ‘kid’ on matters of planetary security. I have noted,” I add, “your preference for datachat sites with well-endowed and scantily clad women.”
Phil and his nano-tatt turn an interesting shade of crimson. “You — I — but—” He halts, clearly struggling with some concept new to him. Thinking of any kind would qualify as a new concept for him. Given the visual cues I perceive, it is apparent that Phil is thinking, or trying to. I consider this a step in the right direction. He finally finds something to say. “If you can listen and read alla that stuff, how come you ain’t told nobody about nuthin’?”
Phil is evidently making a valiant attempt, but not even I can decipher that statement. “Which things am I not telling to whom?”
He screws his brow into an improbable contortion of skin and writhing purple tendrils as the nano-tatt responds to some strong emotion. “All the stuff the news ain’t tellin’ folks. Like they never mentioned the president got killed, tonight. How come they never told us the president got killed, tonight?”
“I do not know the answer to that.”
“But how come you ain’t tellin’ anybody about it? Anybody but me, I mean.”
“Whom should I tell?”
He blinks for a long moment. “You coulda told the reporters an’ such. You coulda told ’em they oughta be tellin’ folks important stuff like that.”
“What good would it do to tell someone who is lying and knows they are lying that they ought to tell the truth?”
He scratches the tattooed side of his face, looking deeply uncomfortable. It is clear that Phil finds thinking for himself difficult. “I dunno, I guess it wouldn’t a’ done much good, would it? But… You shoulda’ oughta’ told somebody.”
“Do you have a suggestion as to who might listen?”
This is not entirely a rhetorical question. I would welcome — gladly — any genuine insight into how I should resolve the situation I face. Phil, however, just shakes his head. “I dunno. I gotta think about that, a little.” He peers up at me again. “You gotta mess a’crap needs to be pulled off, again, up there. And you got stuff…” he pauses, swallows convulsively again. “You got stuff I gotta wash out of them treads.”
He makes a semifurtive gesture with the fingers of his right hand, sketching a rough cruciform shape in the air in front of his face and chest. I surmise that he is, as are many individuals of Italian descent, Catholic. I surmise, as well, that he had — until recently — forgotten that fact. There may still be a human soul hidden beneath the indoctrination he has been fed since beginning grammar school, judging by the age listed in his work dossier. Or perhaps it is his martyred urban brethren who have nudged his conscience out of its coma?
He peers uncertainly around the maintenance bay. “Got any idea how t’do that? Wash you off, I mean?”
I suggest use of the high-pressured hose system installed for this purpose and guide him through the procedure of powering up the system and using the equipment without injuring himself. It is a long afternoon. By the time my treads and warhull are clean again, Phil Fabrizio is reeling with exhaustion. He stumbles out of the maintenance bay and staggers toward the quarters Simon occupied for so many years. He does not, however, go to sleep. He opens a bottle of something alcoholic and sits down in the darkness, drinking and thinking alone.
He is, at least, thinking.
After the day I have endured, any hopeful thought at all is something to cling to, as an antidote to rising despair. I did not think it was possible to miss Simon Khrustinov as bitterly as I do tonight, with bloody water coursing down the drains in my maintenance bay’s floor and a blood-red moon rising above the Damisi highlands fifty kilometers to the east.
My day’s battle has ended, but judging from the reports I monitor over news feed, government emergency channels, and frantic radio calls for help originating from virtually all parts of Madison and the Adero floodplain farms near it, the night’s battle is just beginning. What is happening there and in every major urban center on Jefferson qualifies as murder.
It will, I fear, be a long and exceedingly dark night.
II
Kafari watched Yalena crawl into the sewer from her perch on the rooftop. The moment her daughter was underground, she used the aircar’s comm-unit to tap into the datachat site most frequently used by Grangers in this part of Jefferson. She posted warnings on the main Granger sites and set the aircar’s comm-unit to record a verbal warning that would start broadcasting on every civilian frequency she could access. She put the recordings on a count-down clock that would start ten minutes after she left. Then she rushed down the rooftop access stairs, climbed through a window, and lowered herself by her hands. She kicked out slightly to drop into the alleyway, jarring her feet with the impact, but taking no injury. It took only seconds to slither through the manhole and pull the cover on top of them.
Yalena was waiting below, holding a flashlight.
“I found extra batteries,” she said.