Android: Golem (The Identity Trilogy) (38 page)

I was torn. Blaine stood on one side of me and the woman stood on the other. I had to choose one. I went for the woman, perhaps thinking that I made a better shield for her because I could cover her with my body. Or perhaps I was remembering how I hadn’t been able to protect Shelly.

The attackers staggered for a moment, then resumed their attack without hesitation. They came at us, moving quietly and quickly behind bulletproof shields. Bullets from the mercenaries’ weapons sparked as they struck the shields, and every now and again one of the attackers spun backward as a heavier burst struck home or a grenade landed in their midst. None of them went down. They remained inexorable, stepping relentlessly toward us.

I stepped in front of the woman. “You can’t hold a line here. They’ll kill you.”

Angrily, she stepped forward and to the side, bumping me out of the way with her left forearm. I was too big for her to move with just her own strength, but I knew she wanted me out of the way. So I went.

She fired again and again and again. The brass from the assault weapon hammered against my bulletproof jacket and pinged from my face. She pursed her lips in frustration. “Fall back! Fall back to the warehouse!” She cursed.

Helpless, I tried to stay out of her way. We edged toward the open warehouse doors, but I knew we were moving too slowly. Yet, if the mercenaries broke and ran, their attackers would charge into them. Bullets continued to strike me. I tried to maneuver myself so I could provide partial protection for the woman, but she kept shifting to clear a line of sight for her weapon.

Then, in a crimson rush, the woman’s head came apart beside me at the same time two heavy caliber rounds hammered into my back. My bulletproof jacket stopped the rounds, but it was covered in the woman’s blood and brain matter. She stumbled and fell. I caught her, but I was only holding onto a corpse. At the same time, another mercenary beside me jerked and spun, then fell as well.

Our attackers were all around us, firing indiscriminately. They moved like a unit, close-knit and together, and their fields of fire overlapped.

I reached for the woman’s weapon, tried to close my hand around it, and couldn’t. I felt frustrated, but more than that, I realized how alien it was for me to desire the weapon. I hadn’t been built to kill humans.

Beside me, Louis Blaine had drawn two pistols and was firing methodically, cursing the whole time. Red laser sights lit up his body and he jerked as rounds hammered his body armor. These soldiers were obviously trained to shoot center mass to knock an armored opponent from his feet.

By then I was moving, knowing I had to act fast or Blaine was going to die in that alley. I couldn’t save them all, but I could save Blaine. The First Directive at least freed me up to choose someone to save instead of losing them all.

I stepped in front of Blaine, felt a half-dozen rounds slap against my back, and knotted my fists in his jacket as I propelled him toward the warehouse. A carbosteel door blocked our passage, one that hadn’t been raised but was still the shortest path to safety. Two mercenaries leaned out to give us cover fire. Bullets ricocheted from the pitted surface and sparks flared to life only to extinguish a moment later.

I lifted my foot and drove it into the door. Carbosteel screeched, hinges whined, and screws wrenched free of the masonry. With a loud, crunching clang, the door shot into the warehouse. I propelled us inside.

Cursing, Blaine broke free of me and fell into a tactical position beside the door. He brought up his weapons and fired into the men gathering in the alley. The muzzle flashes lit his face and I saw that his features were tight with anger and fear.

I looked around at the small army gathered inside the warehouse. Evidently, the mercenaries had been using the location as a base for some time. Sleeping pods and food lined the walls. Debris from past occupancy by some business or other remained in the center.

“Do you know who these people are, Drake?”

I didn’t know if the question was prompted out of suspicion or desperation. When humans were filled with emotions, it was hard for me to know. I was certain he still didn’t trust me, and this attack had to have damaged that small amount of trust even further.
 

“No.”

Blaine whirled around, put his back to the wall, and shook the empty magazines from his weapons. He reloaded, slamming home the new magazines. “You have access to facial recognition databases through your on-board systems, right?”

“I can’t see through their helmets.”

 
The alley was littered with the bodies of mercenaries that had been caught by surprise, but they’d been joined by bodies of the attackers. Most of them had been hit with high-caliber weapons that had left them in pieces.

The first line of attackers reached the warehouse walls. Almost immediately, anti-personnel charges went off, blowing them all backward and shredding many of them. Some of the mercenaries carrying large caliber weapons trained their sights on the fallen and more vulnerable members scattered in front of them. For a moment, the battle turned into a wholesale slaughter and the tide of the massacre went the other way.

Blaine fired again and again, but I knew his ammunition wasn’t inexhaustible. What was worse was the mini-cannons on the hoppers were turning the warehouse walls into Swiss cheese.

“They’re not going to be able to hold this warehouse.” I had to make him aware of the situation. If he didn’t heed the warning, the First Directive would impel me to carry him out by force if necessary. That caused a conflict within my programming architecture because, if I tried to remove him by force and he fought me, I couldn’t guarantee I would successfully get him out. Humans were unpredictable in certain stressful situations.

“I’m not going to leave these people behind.” Blaine fired again.Return fire caught him in the right thigh, spinning him around. He dropped to his left knee and cried out in pain. Blood spattered the concrete floor around him. Only a few feet away, one of the mercenaries jerked around and fell with a huge hole in his chest.

A moment later, one of our attackers hit the cargo hopper with an incendiary missile and reduced it to a slag heap wreathed in flames. Two flaming figures rushed from the stricken vehicle, but they managed only a few stumbling steps before the fire wreathing them brought them down. The bright light of the explosion washed through the warehouse like a rapid tidal wave, but the darkness reclaimed the area even more quickly.

I crossed the distance to Blaine. “We’ve got to go or they’re going to kill you.”

He stumbled and would have fallen, but I kept him upright. We moved toward the back of the warehouse. Around us, the mercenaries were coming to the same conclusion and were drawing back as well.

I was already downloading blueprints from the city planner’s office. They had files for the original design of the warehouse and the new structure that was going up. Doors at the back of the building offered egress out into another alley. There was no guarantee those wouldn’t be heavily defended, but staying in the warehouse wasn’t an option.

 
I opened my comm and linked to emergency services, since I didn’t have access to Dispatch while suspended. “This is the NAPD Emergency Services. What is the nature of your emergency?”

“I am Detective Drake 3GI2RC. I am with Sergeant Louis Blaine. Blaine has been shot and injured. We are under attack by heavily armed foes determined to kill us.”

“Understood, Detective Drake. I have pinged Sergeant Blaine’s twenty. I have units en route.”

“Send emergency medical teams and the medical examiner. There are dead and wounded.”

“Copy that, Detective Drake. Are you there on assignment?”

“No. Neither is Sergeant Blaine. We were following up on leads in a case he was investigating.” I caught Blaine’s eye in the darkness. He nodded. I knew he would have a story and a reason we were there. He’d been around the NAPD for a long time.

I was cut out of the police dispatch but Blaine would be able to listen in on the chatter, and I trusted he would keep me apprised if there was anything I needed to know. I kept moving, carrying Blaine now. Mercenaries moved beside us, many of them wounded. Enemy fire hammered into the room.

The violence behind us was even more fierce. The attackers were at the warehouse wall again, shooting inside now. I didn’t know how the ambush had been staged. If the chimera mercenaries had been at the location for a time, it stood to reason that they would have been attacked before.

There was only one alteration to everything.

Me.

Chapter Thirty-One

I wasn’t comfortable with the thought that this might be my fault, and I kept thinking about how Thomas Haas had downloaded my memories onto the external drive he’d brought.

I searched my programming, running a diagnostic for anything nasty Thomas Haas might have left. I wasn’t surprised when I found a worm running in my comm software. I unleashed an anti-virus and watched the struggle between my program and the intruder as code spun and whirled. My systems slowed as more and more memory was consumed by the effort of getting rid of the invasive code. Images of my work with Shelly, as well as the experiences on Mars, exploded in my thoughts suddenly.
 

It became harder to walk and I had to put Blaine down, switching to a position where he was leaning on my shoulder, one arm wrapped around my waist. I concentrated on helping him to keep moving as the anti-virus chipped away at the worm.

Reading what I could of the code as I crossed the warehouse, I figured that Thomas Haas had buried the worm inside me to be activated later. I could only guess that he’d been waiting to find the mercenaries—and I had led him straight to them. I marked the time of the worm’s activation and saw that it had come on-line, sending a silent GPS locater trail to an unknown server, sometime after I had come in contact with Blaine and the mercenaries.

“We’re being attacked by Haas-Bioroid.” I pulled Blaine along, deeper into the shadows, and forced him to maintain a faster pace than he was comfortable with. Bullets chopped into the debris in the center of the room where we took shelter.

“How do you know?” Blaine had to speak loudly to make his voice carry over the sounds of violence.

“Thomas Haas infected me with a worm when he visited me.”

Blaine stutter-stepped and almost fell. “Are you under his control?”

“No. I’m eradicating the worm. I found it.”

“Do you know that for certain?”

“Yes.” But even as I said that, I wondered if the worm was a multi-layered creation, laced with a foolie designed to make me think I was removing it from my software when I really wasn’t.

Bioroids occasionally picked up viruses while in contact with the Net. Malicious hackers were everywhere, and bioroids—with all their built-in security against such manipulation—were a prize among that group. If someone could prove they had hacked a bioroid, they became champions in that group of subversives.

For a moment, I thought Blaine was going to argue, but he knew we were stuck with each other. He couldn’t travel quickly—or perhaps at all—on his own. He didn’t fight and he didn’t argue. He managed to keep pace with me as best he could.

Another explosion went off in the alley. More light and sound cascaded into the warehouse and ricocheted from the piles of debris and leftover crates like a speeding tsunami.

I was carrying most of Blaine’s weight now because his injured leg wouldn’t hold up. I kept him on task with gentle pressure and by shifting so that his injured leg caused him to topple slightly in the direction I wanted him to go.

Another mercenary stumbled away, his arm blown off and spewing blood. He bled out before he hit the floor.

“We can’t just leave these people here to die.”

Blaine’s concern didn’t jibe with the impression I’d gotten about him from other detectives. They’d said Louis Blaine was on the take, that any investigation he handled had to be mistrusted if cred was being handed out by guilty parties.

That wasn’t what I was seeing now. He cared about the people that had been killed, and he was afraid for his own life.

“We can’t save them. They have to save themselves. I have to save you.” I scanned the warehouse, spotting rows of abandoned product packed in crates.

Footsteps scuffed the concrete floor and I knew we weren’t alone. Blaine knew it too. I released him, propped him up against a nearby wall, and scouted the darkness as six men closed in on us. I spotted them all with thermographic vision, marked their locations, and went back to low-level light vision. If a weapon went off inside the building, or if someone launched a grenade into the warehouse, I would temporarily lose my vision if I stayed in night vision. That was a risk I was unwilling to take.

I didn’t have a weapon, but I had been trained to fight and subdue perpetrators. Killing the opponents I faced to eliminate them wasn’t a necessity, and it wasn’t allowed under the Three Directives, even if one of those people was trying to kill another under my protection. However, I could injure them to prevent them from killing someone else as long as I didn’t hurt them too badly. I also had infrared vision that didn’t rely on the goggles our attackers wore. I had edges that would make a difference in the coming battle.