Metal Fatigue (38 page)

He returned abruptly to the real world — stuck outside the house, surrounded by rustling trees and darkness. Distant shouts echoed from the RUSAMC camp as soldiers stirred. RSD officers in the now-gloomy foyer swarmed around the doors.

Without stopping to hide the laptop, Roads leapt to his feet and started to run. Branches whipped at him as he threaded through the trees and around the building to exit fourteen. The same officers who had stopped him earlier, alerted by confused messages coming from within the building, had taken position by the door.

He raised the pass as he — approached, but they stopped him anyway.

"I'm sorry, sir," said one. "No-one in or out."

"But I have to get
in
there!" Roads pleaded.

"Until the situation is contained — " began the other, but was stopped by the sound of breaking glass.

Roads turned away from the door and ran back around the building. The floodlights that had once illuminated the grounds had been extinguished along with the security system, but his implants easily supplemented the lack of visual light.

Running across the lawn was one large figure, extremely bright in infra-red.

Without even stopping to think about what he was doing, Roads sprinted after it. The glowing figure darted through the ring of trees in the direction of the nearest fence. The RSD patrol that should have been waiting for it had been halted further along the fence, confused by the sudden radio silence. The shape climbed over unobstructed and loped onto the street.

Roads followed a second later, cursing the lapse in security. Shinning over the fence with a grunt, he continued the chase across the street and into the dark city centre. The glowing figure led him along a main road and around a corner. The distance between them gradually widened, despite Roads' best efforts. By the time he turned the corner, the figure had disappeared.

Then, two storeys up, on the southern side of the street, he saw a broad, red-skinned figure with the same infra-red pattern as the one he had been chasing. Massive shoulders flexed as it lifted itself up and onto the rooftop. Barely had Roads caught sight of it than it was gone.

"Shit!" He stumbled to a halt, breathing heavily through his mouth. Glancing around him, he oriented himself. He could think of only once place Cati might be heading, and that was a long shot.

Running again, he took the nearest corner left, and stared along the street. If he wasn't too late ...

One hundred metres down, barely within range of his implants under such poor light, a figure leapt from roof to roof across the road, and vanished again.

Heading roughly south-west.

Roads ran back the way he had come and found Mayor's House in complete confusion. No-one checked his pass as he ran through the rear gates and jogged to the carpark. Only when he started the engine of an unlocked car did someone come to see what was going on. And even then, the officers who had spoken to him twice already that night let him go.

Panic made Barney's heartbeat race as the lights went out: in darkness, stripped of all the trappings of civilisation, she felt like a child again, waiting for the berserkers to come.

Surrounded by shouting people all trying to make themselves heard over the racket, she finally twisted free of O'Dell's hand and lunged forward through the milling bodies. Ahead of her, someone screamed — a woman. A single shot, fired in panic, made her ears ring.

Barney cursed the darkness. Who could have known they'd need night-specs
inside
the building?

The sound of shattering glass came to her from the end of the hallway. She wrestled free of the crowd to pursue the noise. As she passed the entrance to the Reagan Suite, she collided heavily with a person running in the opposite direction. Whoever it was didn't stop. Recovering her footing, she continued on her way past the command centre and around the corner.

A single broken window opened into the night air at the end of the hallway. Leaning through the frame, she glanced down.

Cati was gone. All she saw — and then only briefly — was a long, sleek shape slipping rapidly through the trees skirting the lawn around Mayor's House.

The timber wolf.

Then a hand touched her on the back and she spun, ready to strike.

"It's me," said O'Dell, backing away a step. Muted moonlight painted his face in silver. "You okay?"

"No, I'm
not
okay," Barney snapped. "What the fuck did you think you were doing back there?"

"Stopping you from getting too close, of course." He tilted his head to one side. "You saw what happened. Do you think you could have helped?"

"No, but — " She wanted to throttle him, to lash out. Instead she pushed angrily past him. "You'd better have a good explanation for this, Martin."

"Oh, we have, Barney," O'Dell called after her. "Better than anything you could have imagined!"

She ran back around the corner and into the growing crowd. Most of the people from the command centre — including David Goss and Roger Wiggs — had arrived, bringing torches with them. The scene was lit by strobes of light that illuminated patches for an instant — the hole in the wall, the twisted remains of the grill, spots of blood slowly darkening on the carpet, startled faces everywhere — then moved rapidly on.

The Mayor had struggled to his feet and was being led amid muffled protests to an emergency stairwell.

"What the hell's wrong with the lights?" Barney asked Goss.

"Power's gone," he said, his voice low and dangerous. His enormous frame loomed heavily in the gloom. "Someone's killed the entire network — along with security, RSD communications and — "

"How?" she interrupted.

"By using the proper codes. And we can't switch any of it back on until we find out what they were."

"You don't know the codes? Who does?"

"About half a dozen people, I'd guess."

"That narrows down the suspects, at least."

"If we could find Margaret, we'd be up and running before you knew it. She programmed the codes herself." Goss' eyes roamed the chaos. His thoughts were obvious: how to find the Director of RSD when it was hard enough talking face-to-face.

A RUSAMC soldier stepped forward. "Word from below. The building is sealed."

"Too late," said Barney. "Cati's gone. He left via the window back there."

"He —
it
— went past me," said the woman who had screamed after the lights went out. She rubbed her shoulder as she spoke. "It pushed me out of the way, and kept going."

The RUSAMC officer glanced from Barney to the woman. "Then we'll need some sort of search party."

"He could be halfway across the city by now," Barney said. "You're better off trying to get the power back on."

The officer hesitated, obviously reluctant to take no action at all. "Who's in charge here?"

Goss glanced around him again, looking for authority and finding none. "I guess I am, for the moment. Tell Jim Farquhar on the desk to round up as many people as he can. We have to seal and quarter the grounds. I'll be down as soon as I can to sort things out here."

"Yes, sir," said the officer, and relayed the orders through his throat mike.

Barney turned away, feeling worse than useless. No-one had been hurt, but that didn't assuage her bitterness. If she had followed her instincts, she might have prevented the attack. Instead, she had let Phil down.

Belatedly remembering the cyberlink, she called silently for Roads. "Phil? I hope you saw all of that, because you'll never believe me if you didn't."

She waited a moment, then repeated: "Phil? Phil, are you there?"

No answer. PolNet must have crashed along with RSD and the house security. She hoped he had made it into the building. God only knew, she needed his help to make sense of everything that had happened.

Cati had obviously been in the vents, as she had first thought. But security had told them not to worry about the dead zone in the basement. Security had therefore been wrong — or deliberately misleading. And the more she thought about it, the more the latter seemed probable.

She and Roads had already ascertained that Cati's controller had to be someone high up in RSD — or exceptionally skilled with the city's datapool — in order to gain access to archived data. Furthermore, that same someone must have arranged for the crates to be brought into the building, eavesdropped on RUSAMC information to tell Cati where to wait for the General's appearance, and then used the override codes to kill the power when escape was called for. If security had lied to prevent Cati from being detected, then that meant...

Cati's controller had been in the command centre during the attack.

The crowd had thinned slightly, but the sense of chaos remained. Barney threaded her way through to Roger Wiggs, who stood near where the air-conditioning vent had fallen.

"I still can't believe it," he said when he saw her. "Right under our noses — "

"Neither can I," she agreed, although she didn't have time for sympathy. "Listen, about half an hour ago, a call came from one of Stedman's cronies to ask about the air-conditioning in the basement. Do you remember who took that call — or at least who answered the question?"

Wiggs frowned. "I don't remember. We were busy."

"Think — it's important!"

"I don't know, okay?" Wiggs glared at her, and turned away.

"Shit." Barney went to find Goss, but caught sight of the imitation General Stedman instead. Restored to its original shape, the latter stood motionless, frozen like a statue to one side of the hallway. Occasional pools of light darted across its immobile features.

One of the RUSAMC officers had her hand buried up to the wrist in its side. Barney backed away as its face began to change again, becoming blank, neutral — a vacant template of a man. Then the image dissolved into a short-lived pillar of snow, and five balls hung in its place, floating unsupported in the air. Each was silver, roughly a hand-span across and buzzed softly.

"Oh my God," she said, all thoughts of Cati's controller suddenly evaporating. Again she called for Roads, and again she received only silence in reply.

"Neat, isn't it?" said O'Dell, suddenly at her side.

Barney spun to face him. "You sonofabitch," she gasped. "You knew all along!"

"No. Not until Blindeye."

"But you still didn't tell us?" Anger made the words choke in her throat.

"I couldn't. What use is a defence like this when everyone knows about it?" O'Dell waved at where the statue of Stedman had once stood. "They will now, of course — but it worked once, and that's the main thing. Cati's controller won't try again. I think we've demonstrated the pointlessness of resisting us any longer, don't you?"

Barney shook her head, speechless. O'Dell's grin mocked her ignorance, her lack of sophistication — mocked all of Kennedy Polis with her. For one timeless moment she hated him more than she had hated anyone in her entire life.

Then:

"Has anyone seen Antoni or Margaret?" asked Goss, shouldering his way through the crowd toward them. "They have the codes. We need either of them to restore some sort of order to the system."

"I saw DeKurzak heading downstairs earlier," said O'Dell. "He said he was going to check the foyer. I'll have someone try to track him down, if you like."

"Fuck DeKurzak," Barney whispered, feeling her grip on the situation slipping entirely. "Where the hell is
Phil
?"

11:05 p.m.

Roads took the freeway at sixty-five kilometres per hour — the fastest he could squeeze from the RSD vehicle's small electric engine. He had no clear idea of what he would do if he came face-to-face with Cati. He needed backup, a weapon, some sort of advantage. Yet, with PolNet down, he had no way to talk to anyone. Even the radio standard to all RSD vehicles was silent. The communications network had obviously been silenced from within. Until it was brought back on-line, the city was effectively dumb.

And he was on his own.

Instead of cursing fate, however, he used the time to consider the five small 'glitches' at the heart of the substitute Stedman.

That it was a technological product, not magical or biological, was obvious. The degree of sophistication it displayed was more advanced than anything Roads had ever seen — both before and after the War — but that didn't make it impossible. The RUSA had openly demonstrated a working knowledge of field-effects, which alone would account for the 'levitation' of the balls, the apparent solidity of the image and possibly even its knack of becoming invisible. The image itself was probably nothing more than an extremely high — resolution hologram, similar to that employed by both the Head and the RUSAMC's flag-bearing jeep. Compact batteries could power the whole arrangement, perhaps even EPA44210s like the ones Morrow had hidden in his stockpile on Old North Street.

Roads mentally sketched the design of the machine: at least two balls to generate the hologram; perhaps another two for the field-effects; and one to collect sensory data of its immediate environment. The last might also contain transmitters and receivers to relay data and instructions.

That left no balls remaining for its 'brain', but Roads didn't for a moment contemplate that the RUSA scientists had managed to squeeze an entire AI into the spheres. He guessed that the artificial Stedman had received its instructions from the control van; the General and his assistants had probably directed the thing remotely, never leaving it to its own devices. Certainly it would have been easier to relay Stedman's voice in real time rather than generate it artificially; that way, the stand-in's responses would appear genuine on every level.

The device was ingenious. Expensive, obviously, and clearly a breakthrough in miniaturisation alone. Roads would have had nothing but admiration for it, had it not been for one thing: there was more than one in the city.

The similarity between the Mole and the Stedman-substitute was too close to be coincidence. The Mole had imitated Roads with uncanny accuracy, could become practically invisible and change its shape, and had demonstrated the familiar five-point arrangement on at least two occasions. The theft of the EPA44210s was explained by its need for power; the strange delay between locating them in Morrow's inventories and actually stealing them, likewise: the Mole wouldn't take the batteries until it was actually running low. And the lack of an obvious command centre didn't necessarily refute his theory, for the "brain" could be hidden anywhere in the city and communicate with the "body" by means of a little-used radio frequency.