Android: Golem (The Identity Trilogy) (24 page)

I took it and her biometrics pulsed through my mind. “It is nice to meet you, Jenny.”

She turned and started walking toward the double doors. “We’re going to get you in and out quickly today. From what we understand, Lieutenant Ormond is anxious for your return.”

That was news to me.

“I was also told you were shot today.”

“I was. Several times.”

“How are you?”

“I’m fine. The nanobots repaired all the damage. I’m at one hundred percent efficiency.”

“That’s good to hear. We’ll still want to take a look.”

“Of course.”

*

After Jenny escorted me up the elevator to the diagnostics center, I was briefly left in the outer room while she went to set aside a room to examine me. Being in a room full of bioroids lacked stimulus. We all sat in the room and didn’t converse. We could have talked, but none of us really interacted that way. We were designed to interact with humans, not each other. We were supplemental to humans, not truly individualistic.

Or maybe we were individuals, just not capable of being so when around each other. I knew I sat there occupied with my own thoughts, and I suspected some of the others were doing the same. Mostly I thought about the black-haired woman, Shelly, the Cartman Dawes murder, and the attack I had undergone.

They were all intriguing, and I wanted answers. I felt there was some kind of connective tissue between all of those events. Shelly had never liked coincidences, but they did happen.

I surveyed the other nine bioroids in the room that were nearest me. Six of them were service units—groomers and physical trainers of both genders. One was a bodyguard, developed to assume the identity of people marked for death. His body was adjustable in size and height, and his face could be restructured within minutes.

Two were pleasure bioroids, or “sexbots” as some humans called them. They were anatomically correct and capable of sex with humans. Both looked completely human. Synthskin covered the carbosteel skeletons in dimensions designed to be aesthetically pleasing to humans of both genders. One was a blond and the other had brilliant green hair. They both had lacquered fingernails, elegant makeup, and stylish clothing that was too tight in all the right places.

Curious about them, I scanned their ID chips and discovered they were both from the Heaven & Hell Club in New Angeles. I knew the place from previous busts. A great number of illegal activities took place there, and some of them were protected by crime families as well as politicians and corp execs.

The green-haired one must have sensed my cybernetic intrusion. She glanced at me and smiled, but the expression didn’t put a dent in her silver eyes. They were cold and heartless.

I couldn’t help but wonder where that thought had come from. I’d seen pleasure bioroids before, and I’d never had that response. I was clinical about my observations of bioroids, not judgmental.

A male pleasure bioroid entered the room and looked around at the occupants. He was tall and broad-shouldered, well-manicured, and dressed in a current fashion suit that would have allowed him in any club or boardroom. His hair was chestnut colored, parted in the middle, and flipped casually over his wraparound sunglasses.

He smiled at the two female pleasure bioroids and went over to sit with them. Almost immediately, they began complimenting each other, obeying subroutines I could only guess at. Observing them in action was like watching self-replicating code fill a computer holo: busy, but not really achieving anything.

“Detective Drake.”

I glanced over to where Jenny Crain stood in the doorway.

“We’re ready for you now.”

*

I followed the young tech into Exam Room 9, stripped off all my clothes—which I had set to self-clean before taking the tube-lev to the Root—and sat in the link chair in the middle of the room. Instantly, the chair straightened out until I lay horizontal.

Jenny performed a cursory inspection of me, spending some extra time with the repairs the nanobots had made. “The remodeling looks good.”

“Thank you.”

She smiled. “Are you ready for the link?”

“Yes.” Actually, I wasn’t. Although I had been designed not to have many preferences—except for solutions and staying busy—I didn’t like the links. As long as I was linked, my body was not my own. Access to the Net, which I was always on in some fashion, was stripped from me. I was trapped inside my mind and shut off from the outside world. When I’d told Shelly about it, she’d told me it sounded like it was comparable to being laid in your own grave.

Usually, my thoughts were a good place to be, though. I could work on cases or ready reports that would be filed as soon as I once more had Net access.

The links sprang out of the chair and slotted themselves into my body, locking me down. The Haas-Bioroid diagnostic programming invaded me and swept me away.

I blinked and the cold, sterile exam room went away.

I was back in that hotel with the woman behind me as the elevator cage dropped with dizzying speed and my blood dripped to the floor.

Chapter Nineteen

“Let me help.” The woman sounded frantic.

I looked up at her as she approached. Fear widened her eyes. Her pulse hammered at the hollow of her throat. She pulled at my shirt and revealed the bullet wound in my side. I stared at the raw meat and blood, not knowing how my body wasn’t carbosteel. I had just seen it only a short time ago.

The elevator continued to drop and I pushed the woman from me. “There’s no time.”

“You could bleed out.”

“And if we get caught, those men will kill us.” I hit the emergency stop button. We’d dropped four floors, leaving us on the third floor. I knew that the men hunting us would have the lobby covered. We couldn’t go there.

The cage stopped. I shoved one of the pistols into my waistband and kept the other in my right fist. I used my left hand to force the elevator doors open.

We’d stopped between floors, but there wasn’t enough room to get to the second floor. I took the woman’s hand and stepped up to the third floor. I knew the men would be coming as quickly as possible.

Without hesitation, I ran down the hall, pulling the woman after me. The wound in my side pounded painfully. It was strange because I knew what the sensation was even though I couldn’t remember ever experiencing it in this magnitude or for this long. The warmth of the blood running down my leg seemed somehow familiar, too.

I pressed on.

The third floor had two elevator areas. I wasn’t quite certain how I knew that, but I knew it was true. My breath tore raggedly through my throat. I didn’t breathe normally, but I needed to now, and the effort felt largely unrewarded.

At the other end of the floor, I pulled the woman into the hallway with the second set of elevators. I felt fortunate that our pursuers hadn’t been lying in wait. I ran to all the elevator cages and hit the recall buttons, then glanced frantically at the glowing readouts. There were six elevators. Four of them were on the way up. The other two were headed down.

I leaned over instinctively and tried to catch my breath. I had seen Shelly do something similar after we’d chased a perp for a ways. I raised my arms over my head as well to open my lungs—lungs I had never had before—for better ventilation.

One of the elevators heading down was stopped on the second floor beneath us. I glanced around and spotted the seccams on the wall. I realized then that our pursuers probably knew where we were. They would have hacked into the sec systems and would be using the seccams as their own.

Feeling the panic building in me again, I forced open the elevator doors to the cage holding steady beneath us. We couldn’t use the stairwells. They were already in those.

“What are you doing?”

“They’ll be watching the seccams. They know where we are.”

Even as I said that, the stairwell door to our left opened and one of our pursuers stepped through into the hallway. The hooded mask identified him immediately.

I raised my pistol and fired two rounds, knowing I had missed with both shots, but they were close enough to send the hunter scrambling for cover. He cursed and blindly returned fire.

By that time, I had the elevator doors open all the way; the shaft looked dark and empty in front of us. I captured the woman’s hand and yanked her inside after me.

The elevator cage was only a meter below us. We managed to keep from striking the carbosteel supports and landed on the cage. It hung in the shaft, having enough give to cushion our jump slightly. At that moment, the cage resumed its drop to the first floor.

The elevator doors on the third floor opened once more, allowing light into the dark shaft. I got to my feet and lifted the pistol I’d managed to hang onto.

Our pursuer shoved his head and shoulders through the door. I squeezed the trigger and put a bullet between his eyes. Like a puppet with its strings cut, the man went limp and fell forward into the shaft.

I grabbed the woman’s upper arm and yanked her to the side to keep her from getting hit by the falling corpse. The cage’s emergency exit, probably already weakened by our jump, gave way under the dead weight. The corpse spilled into the cage with the passengers. At least three women started shrieking beneath us.

The cage stopped on the first floor. I opened the elevator doors to the second floor, crawled up, and we went through at a dead run. The elevators and stairwells were out of the question. That left only the windows.

I ran toward the window at the end of the elevator hallway and lifted my pistol, emptying the magazine in a rush of bullets. The pistol thundered and bucked in my hand as it spat flames and projectiles. I hoped that the glass wasn’t bulletproof transplas.
 

Before the thought was firmly seated in my mind, the glass shattered and fell away in shards.

I used my pistol barrel to break out the remaining glass, then clambered up on top of the window frame and reached back for the woman. She’d stopped hesitating; she took my hand automatically. The woman looked down at the ground a floor below us. The distance was more than five meters, but it was a garden, not a sidewalk. The earth would be tilled and soft. I didn’t know if any of the bushes were thorny, but they would hopefully help cushion our fall.

Instead of leaping, though, I froze. I stared out at the world around me. Earlier, when crawling on the outside of the hotel, I’d noticed it was dark and that the city had a lot of nearby buildings.

For the first time, I noticed that the stars were wrong for New Angeles. I wasn’t even in the same hemisphere as New Angeles. I looked at the woman. I wanted to ask her where we were. Instead, my words changed. “We’re going to have to jump.”

She shook her head fearfully. “I can’t.”

I wanted to tell her that jumping from this height was easier than holding onto my back while I’d climbed down the building. Instead, I grabbed her by the arm and yanked her off balance.

She fell with a scream and I jumped after her. We fell a lot slower and a lot more gently than I’d expected, but the off-balance impact drove the wind from my lungs. The sensation was new to me, but my body knew how to react. I kept myself under control until my lungs opened up again and sucked in oxygen. My side throbbed with continuous pain like I’d never felt before.

The woman lay prone beside me, also gasping for breath. I took a moment to reload my pistol with one of the magazines I’d taken from my vanquished opponents.

“Are you all right?”

The woman gaped at me and nodded. “I think so.”

“Nothing broken?”

“No.”
 

I offered her my hand and pulled her to her feet. Above us, a hopper coasted from the rooftop and a spotter light licked at the front of the hotel. I was in motion just as it reached down for us. By the time it touched the crumpled brush we’d left behind, we were already racing for the street.

The hopper traffic on the street was constant. Wherever we were, a lot of other people were there too. A taxi hopper had just let a fare out at the front of the hotel. I ran for it, dragging the woman behind me. The taxi pilot was helping get her passenger’s bags out of the hopper’s storage compartment.

I ran past her toward the hopper’s open hatch. The ignition was still running and the engine was powered up. I shoved the woman with me inside the vehicle and followed her in.

“Hey!” The hopper pilot abandoned her assistance with the bags and came around toward the front of her vehicle. “Get out of my hopper!”

At that moment, the hotel’s main entrance opened up and three men burst through. They raised weapons and took aim at the woman and me.

I put my hand on the woman’s head and shoved her into the seat. “Stay down!”

Bullets ricocheted from the taxi hopper an instant later, some of them ripping through the windows. Almost immediately, hotel sec guards engaged our opponents in a pitched gun battle that filled the area with noise. The canopy of the dome overhead trapped the harsh explosions and made the rolling thunder even worse.

The taxi pilot turned away and ran for cover.