Machines of Eden (17 page)

He waited until the cars
were
ten meters
apart
before
speaking
.
“
All right, Eve, who’s
that?”

“
To whom are you
referring, Adam?
” came Eve’s innocent
reply. “
Did you see someone?”

“
I passed a woman in the
cable car.
Blonde, looks like she means
business. Probably still talking to you right
now.
”

“
That is
Janice.”

“
Who is she?”

“
Another of our colorful
locals, a former worker who is no longer measuring up to protocol
as I would like. The isolation of our location has had an
unfortunately deleterious effect on Janice’s mental status. I
suggest you avoid attracting her attention.”

“
I don’t think she noticed
me. What can you do to keep her out of my way?”

“
I can’t control Janice,
Adam. I can’t even hinder her movement. West Station is
largely
out of my
reach.”

John
waited until the car got to the docking platform at the
bottom of the line and then crawled quickly out, hiding behind a
pile of rusting spare cable wheels. He could see the other
car
from there, which had also just
reach
ed
the far side
at the top
of the cliff he had come from
. The woman
exited and disappeared over the
lip into
Eden
.

He examined his
own
surroundings. In
front of him, a walkway curved around the side of a squat building,
its second story dome overhanging the lower level like a giant
mushroom. He could see two bridges from where he crouched; one was
a solid, glass-enclosed walkway that led across a chasm to an old
Quonset hut, the other was an open-air suspension bridge leading to
a tall tower
at the edge overlooking the
waves below
.

He could feel an ocean
breeze on his cheek, heavy with the scent of brine. The sun was hot
on the back of his neck. Despite the natural beauty of Eden, he
felt safer here in the open air with the sound of gulls echoing
down the canyons. He realized how tired he was, and for a moment
let himself relax. Save for the wind and the seagulls, it was a
quiet, lonely place, and the clean light refreshed and heartened
him.

But there was work to do.
Before he entered the mushroom dome, he scanned the structure,
looking for installation points. There were a few security cameras,
easily avoided, and an intercom speaker. He saw several boxes
mounted on the walls and some cables strung over the sides of the
walkways. All seemed normal, but his unease persisted. It was when
he looked downwards, however, that he finally found the answer to
this station’s oddness.

Mounted on large steel
braces that stretched between three of the rock faces that made up
the split hill were
five powerful
Delta-photon projectors. Roughly the size and shape of light
beacons, properly aligned and calibrated Deltas could alter the
light spectrum around them in a wide field, effectively blocking
visibility from above. On a tropical island like this, an overhead
spotter would only see a green blur similar to any other stretch of
jungle
, or a blue blur to match the sea
that West Station was built over
. He
guessed that a sideways system would be set up
somewhere
facing the coast to avoid
detection by
passing
ships
.

Some of the most
recent
Delta-photon
models could even simulate the appearance of tree cover,
dirt, or mundane urban buildings to a detail level that would fool
any surveillance short of a low-level flyby from a pilot who cared
to look closely. It was yet another tool this island fortress
possessed that
John
found troublingly familiar.

There has to be something
big here. Really big, much bigger than a
biophiliac
commune.

He felt a wave of
déjà vu
. This was
exactly the type of facility he’d spent the war years locating and
decommissioning. Most of the defense manufacturers hid their
factories in similar ways
. Only a
good combat hack could see through the
deceptions
and remove them piece by
piece
.
It was
this kind of technological defense measure that had put Staff
Sergeant John Fletcher’s
kind at the
forefront of every conflict
ever
since technology caught up with warfare and
machines took over the battlefield.

B
attlefield jamming, deploying mobile EMP projectors,
and
counter-hacking
guided missiles, the combat hack played a decisive role. Tech
specialists were used to overcome enemy AI and bots, to find the
way through preprogrammed static defenses and minefields, and to
generally outfox the enemy’s technology on every level.

He realized, with a slow
sinking feeling, that he was right back on the
battlefield.

In fact, I never left
it.

Four hundred screaming men
and women beat at the gates outside, hurling their bodies against
the steel paneling and making it shudder each time. Inside the
compound, tucked in the heart of the city, all was quiet and still.
Its occupants had been evacuated by airborne transport hours
before.

Brightly lit corridors and
power-washed pavestones in the courtyards gave an aura of order.
The echoes coming from outside were the only betrayal of the chaos
and terror that still hung invisibly in the air.

Suddenly a door broke open
with a crunch, and four armed men fanned out into the hallway of
the main compound building. They were dirty, mud-splattered and
hungry-looking, but with a hardened determination in their eyes
that set them apart from the horde outside. They wore camo and
utility belts. One brandished a club with nails driven through its
head, but the others had more impressive weaponry. The one in front
even had a grenade on his belt to compliment the machine pistol in
his hand.

“
There’s four floors.
Spread out and find the arms cache!”

The intruders moved
cautiously at first, looking around corners and leaning over
railings to scan their surroundings for threats. Nothing moved in
the building except the searchers themselves, so they set a faster
pace. Poking their heads into each room and blasting away locks
with the shotgun one carried, they cleared the first two floors
quickly.

“
Nothing here. Let’s move
up to the next floor.”

“
No. They wouldn’t store
ammo on the upper floors. There’s gotta be a basement.”

“
Why would they even store
them here at all? This doesn’t seem like a police
warehouse.”

“
I don’t know, but the
squealer said there was a dump in the main building. That courier
bot we took down said the same thing. Let’s hurry.”

The men dashed around,
checking back hallways and maintenance closets for stairs going
down, but found nothing. Two of them ranged upward to the top two
floors while one took the emergency-powered elevator up to the
roof.

The access door to the roof
was unlocked. The man with the grenade cracked it open, peered out,
and then stepped outside. The cityscape spread to either side into
the horizon, but directly ahead was something that held his
attention. Spray-painted on the waist-high wall of aged concrete
that barred him from the edge were the words “Die” and an obscenity
he wasn’t familiar with but understood the intent of
clearly.

He smiled.
They didn’t like being driven out of their own
headquarters. Tough. It isn’t gonna be the last time. We’re getting
stronger.

He turned and headed back
downstairs, never noticing the small device attached to the outside
of the access door. It had folded with a little clicking sound as
the door opened against it, and a tiny red light turned
on.

Downstairs, the club man
was getting frustrated.

“
There’s nothing here,” he
grumbled. “Filing cabinets and mop buckets!” He kicked a garbage
can over.

He heard something moving
outside the hallway, and moved to the adjacent exit to take a look.
He didn’t see anything at first, relieving his fears of a monster
attack bot on the loose. Then the quiet spinning of wheels against
flooring made him look down, and he saw a stream of perhaps thirty
fist-sized devices rolling out of a hatch on one wall.

They were boxy and tall for
their width, making them appear unsteady. They moved out into the
room as a body, then split up and began turning in all directions,
feeling their way along walls and up stairs. Their little wheeled
treads could easily grip all surfaces, and soon there were little
mouse-bots all over the room and climbing to the second
floor.

One of them rolled toward
the man, and he ducked back into his hallway. He waited for the
mouse-bot to approach, then swung his club down at it. It stopped
with surprising agility, backing up slightly so that his club hit
the floor harmlessly next to it, and then it zipped around to the
other side of the man. He could see little lenses all over its
squared body and wondered what its function was. He raised his club
again.

Suddenly sixteen other
mouse-bots were in the hallway, pouring in along the walls and
ceiling and floor from the big room they had deployed into. They
were all around him, and he frantically arced the club at a cluster
of them on the wall, sensing that they were indeed a threat to him.
He succeeded in knocking one off the wall, but that was as far as
he got.

Two of the nearest
mouse-bots darted forward and jabbed long needles that appeared
from their cases into his foot. Passing cleanly through his boot
and instantaneously sucking a droplet of blood each, the bots
backed away. It took four milliseconds to analyze the blood
samples, confirm the man’s identity as a hostile, and relay the
information among themselves across the data cloud they
formed.

Then it was all over. One
of the bots near him on the wall sent its needle twenty centimeters
out and hit him in the neck. Six on the ground got his feet and
legs. One on the ceiling slid its needle straight down into his
scalp.

The man went rigid, his
club grasped with an unfeeling, paralyzed hand, and then let a
small gasp of breath escape his collapsing lungs. His frozen heart
ceased sending blood to his brain, which was being quickly eaten
away by the venom from the head shot, and then his knees twitched
in reaction to the pain. Last of all, his eyes glazed over from
their terror and pain-filled state, and his body crashed to the
ground.

The man from the roof
exited the elevator at the same time the shotgun man came down the
stairs, ready to admit defeat. They saw the club man go down and
immediately began firing at the little bots surrounding him. But
other bots were already aware of them, moving into position,
sending data about the combatants to the rest of the swarm, telling
them that these men, too, could be killed, because they were firing
weapons and shared other characteristics with the man they had
blood samples from.

By the time one of the
little bots had rolled into the part of the building where the last
man was helping himself to packets of coffee creamer he had found,
they were no longer in exploratory mode. He never had time to
glance behind him on the floor, and the last thing he felt was a
little pinprick on his heel.

The horde outside finally
broke the gates in by sheer weight of human bodies, and trampled
unheeding over those trapped under the fallen gates. They broke
into every building in the compound, finding little of value, but
the ones that entered the main building never left it. After a
while it became obvious to the crowd that the big building was
nothing but a tomb, and they stopped going inside.

There were no weapons or
ammunition on the premises, of course. But the Gray military
committee that reviewed the data feed from the abandoned Pretoria
police headquarters building got quite a laugh at the body count.
They included the statistics in a report recommending that
surprises left behind in evacuated facilities would, at least for
the short term, be remarkably effective in curbing the attackers’
enthusiasm for destruction.

John
felt
that
he could rely on Eve to protect him to some extent, at least
until he brought her the program and the data she wanted so badly.
After that he was skeptical about his odds.

To escape this island he
needed to know more, more of everything. Locations of docks, boats,
hangers. If there were none, he needed tools, equipment, a safe
place to build his own means of escape, and time to do it in. It
would be hard enough to evade Eve’s interference, but
with
wild cards like Nut
and Janice roaming the island, escape would be
near
ly
impossible. He needed to stay ahead of the game, play a few
tricks of his own, hide some aces up his sleeve.