Mirage Page 10

  The scene around the entrance to the hospital reminded Derec of Union Station not a day earlier. Emergency vehicles crowded close to the entrance, small knots of people stood around, a police line kept spectators back. No robots, though, and no bodies lying on the pavement.

  Sathen stood by the nurses’ station, a cup in one hand, his face expressionless for the moment. He blinked when he saw Derec and straightened.

  “Mr. Avery, thank you. Come with me.”

  Derec followed the agent back down the corridors which earlier had been less crowded. An acrid stench cut through the usual medicinal odors.

  The walls on either side and across from the door to Agent Daventri’s room were blackened. Small fixtures sagged, melted. The ceiling showed black, too, though oddly the floor seemed clean but for a few sooty footprints. Agent Sathen gestured for him to look inside.

  The walls appeared covered by black flakes or the scales of a charcoal reptile. Here and there lay a mound of ash or a mass of slag. A forensic unit hovered in the air in the center of the burnt area. As he stood there, Derec thought he could hear the walls crackle delicately, still cooling.

  “What about--?” he started to ask.

  Sathen shook his head. “We’re collecting everything that we can, but whatever it was burned hot enough to vaporize seventy, eighty percent of whatever was in there before it started to cool. The only reason there’s still a room is because of the standard radiation shielding in the walls, but even that has been crystallized by the heat. Another second or so and this whole corridor might have been engulfed. It was a timed charge, very expertly made. Maybe a bubble nuke.”

  Derec backed away. He felt himself tremble. “Is there some place I can sit down?”

  Sathen frowned, but nodded. “We can talk back here.”

  Sathen took him to a commissary at the end of the hall. He fetched two cups of coffee from the dispenser and set one before Derec.

  “Thanks. Sorry. I’ve been up since... what day is it?”

  Sathen nodded. “I know what you mean. Thanks for coming down.”

  Derec swallowed a mouthful of too-hot coffee. It shocked him into more wakefulness. “Was anybody else hurt?”

  “One of our agents was found strangled by the nurses’ station.” Sathen’s voice was edged with anger.

  Derec blinked at him, startled. “I’m sorry.”

  Sathen waved a hand as if to say, “Never mind.”

  “Why did you ask me down?” Derec asked.

  “I have questions about the robot. I understand you built Bogard.”

  “Yes. Look, if you’re wondering whether or not Bogard did this--”

  “No, not exactly. I’m wondering if a robot--understand, Mr. Avery, I don’t know a lot about robots--I’m wondering if it’s possible for one to malfunction in such a way as to explode. They go--what? insane?--when they have a conflict over protecting humans. When they get like that”

  “No,” Derec said firmly.

  “They do operate on a small nuclear battery, right?”

  “Did you check for radiation?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “Zero.”

  Derec frowned. “Zero?”

  “Near enough to make no difference. A bubble nuke would eat up its own radiation in the course of the blast. But if the robot blew up... I didn’t know what their power supply was. So is there any other way for it to do this?”

  “No, Agent Sathen, there is not. Bogard certainly would not have strangled someone beforehand. That would be impossible.”

  “I never count anything as impossible, Mr. Avery.”

  “Count on this. Bogard could not harm a human being. And it had no self -destruct function.”

  “You sound very certain. “

  “I am. Look, Bogard runs--ran--on a positronic brain. All positronic brains are built with the Three Laws already encoded. Before anything else is loaded into a positronic robot, the Laws are there. They cannot harm humans or allow humans to come to harm.”

  “But they also have to obey humans, too,” Sathen countered.

  “Not if it results in harm.”

  “Bogard was different, though, wasn’t it? A bodyguard. “

  “No, even Bogard was constrained by the Three Laws. Whatever happened here, Bogard had nothing to do with it.” Derec drank more coffee, feeling his impatience and weariness begin to turn to anger. “Bogard had a slightly wider range of interpretative freedom when it came to defining harm, true, but nothing that would allow deliberate self-destruction, especially if it meant killing a human at the same time. If it had malfunctioned that severely, it, as with all positronic robots, would have simply shut down.”

  ‘‘I see... so it’s possible it shut down before the explosion happened, which would explain why it didn’t prevent it?”

  “That’s... reasonable. But without its brain or any of its recorders, there’s no way to tell now.”

  “Recorders?”

  “It was a security robot, after all, Agent Sathen. We built in several accessory recorders not directly tied to the positronic brain. Admissible in Earth courts, since you don’t allow for robotic testimony.”

  Sathen narrowed his eyes, thoughtful. “Interesting. So, this malfunction--how likely would that be?”

  “It wasn’t behaving according to normal operational standards when I talked to it,” Derec admitted. “Having failed to protect Senator Eliton, witnessing the deaths of other humans, it was likely in the first stages of a collapse. That’s why I told you to leave it alone. It might have been salvageable if it weren’t pushed. I suppose--I’m just guessing, now--that it could have continued to break down after I left. The pathways under breakdown aren’t well understood, only the cause and effect.”

  “So when whoever set off this charge did so, Bogard may very well have been completely inert.”

  “Could very well have been.”

  The silence stretched then, while Sathen worked through the information. Derec finished his coffee.

  “This Agent Daventri... did you know her?” Derec, asked.

  “Hm?” Sathen shook his head. “No, not very well. She’d just been assigned to Eliton’s team. Before that she worked a different district than me. I knew about her, though. Good agent. A little green, but we all are once or twice, eh?”

  “I suppose so. Some of us fairly often.”

  Sathen grinned briefly. “So, how is your investigation coming?”

  “Mine?”

  “On the RI.”

  “Phylaxis was taken off of that.”

  Sathen frowned. “You were? But I thought that’s what you people do--analyze positronics.”

  “It is and normally we would, but apparently your people decided that this time it should be handled completely internally.” Derec heard the bitterness in his own voice.

  “That’s... huh.” Sathen gestured to Derec’s cup. “More coffee?”

  Derec peered into his empty cup, shook his head. “Do you have more questions?”

  “Probably, but I suppose they can wait. Is there anything else useful you could tell me about Bogard?”

  “Relating to this? No, I don’t think so.”

  “Then, no.”

  Derec got to his feet. “Oh, you might remind your forensics people that Bogard was partially constructed out of amalloy. It has a distinctive molecular signature.”

  “Right.” Sathen remained sitting. “Thanks, Mr. Avery. You don’t mind if I give you a call later?”

  “No, I’d be interested to know how this is going.” Derec glanced over his shoulder, in the direction of the destroyed room. “This is crazy, isn’t it?”

  “I haven’t seen anything like it,” Sathen admitted.

  Derec left the hospital, the muzziness of too long a day smothering his thoughts. He let his transport carry him back to his apartment this time while he dozed along the way.

  At home, he entered the darkened space, not troubling to call for the lights. He stumble
d against a chair on the way to his bed before he finally stretched out.

  “Zero radiation...” he mumbled to himself, just before sleep took him.

  _

  NINE

  Mia’s hand trembled with the knife as she sliced through the meat patty. The aroma seemed better than anything she had ever smelled before. She had not eaten since before the incident at Union Station and had not thought about it till Ariel asked if she were hungry.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t say this until you’re done eating,” Ariel said, “but... I thought you were dead.”

  “Almost,” Mia said around a mouthful of bread. It was warm, fluffy. She wondered if it were freshly made. She did not ask, not about any of it. She wanted to pretend for the moment that it was authentic beef, natural potatoes, garden-grown greens. More than likely it was the same processed, reconstituted, vat-grown molecules everyone on Earth ate except the very wealthy and powerful. She swallowed and washed it down with milk.

  “Bogard got me out. I can’t go back to my apartment, it’s being watched. I can’t go--” She laughed wryly. “I can’t go anywhere.”

  Ariel nodded slowly, the crease between her eyebrows deep with worry and puzzlement. “So you came here. Why?”

  “Because you have no reason to turn me away and no reason to turn me in. “

  “Are you a felon?”

  “Victim.”

  “Risky assumptions, though. I’m Auroran and several of my people, important people, were murdered by Terrans yesterday. People whose safety should have been guaranteed by you. Why would I now trust any Terran?”

  “That’s a good question. I’ve been asking myself exactly the same thing.” Mia tore off a piece of bread and pushed it through the sauce remaining on her plate. She ate it slowly, not looking at Ariel, and drank the last of the milk in her glass. “Thank you. Now I have to ask: Are you going to turn me in?”

  Ariel frowned. “Should I?”

  “If you do, you’ll never find out who killed Ambassador Humadros.”

  “You want to explain that?”

  Carefully, Mia recounted the day of the reception, the events she remembered just before the explosions, and the slaughter that followed. She told Ariel about the bizarre behavior of the robots, the chase and capture of three of the assassins. She described how Bogard had carried her from the hospital after her room was bombed. She spoke in an even tone of voice, choosing her words precisely, the way she would if giving an oral report on an assignment, as if it had happened to someone else and she was only the investigator. The habit of training and experience helped, kept the fear at arm’s length, got her through the entire recitation without a break or a tremor.

  “There are several unanswered questions,” she said. “Several dozen, actually. But the big ones--who were the assailants, how did they get in through security, where did they get their weapons?--those can be confronted directly. Unfortunately, some of the answers may lead to questions just as large that can’t be directly confronted. My conclusion is--has to be--that someone inside the Service is involved. They knew about Bogard, they knew where I was, they knew the only way to get me was the method they used because Bogard could defend against anything else. But they were also eliminating witnesses. They wanted Bogard gone, too. Besides, I can think of no other way security at Union Station could have been compromised so badly. There has to be an insider.”

  “How do you explain the behavior of the RI?” Ariel asked.

  “I don’t. Which brings me to you. You have a degree from the Calvin Institute, your specialty is robotics--”

  “I’m a bureaucrat--”

  “--and you’re embassy staff with a stake in what happened. I think you want to know as badly as I do. Plus, you want to know that it won’t happen again.”

  “You’re still assuming.”

  “And you’re not throwing me out.”

  Ariel smiled faintly. “I have some expertise in robotics, true, but that doesn’t mean I can solve this for you. For all I know, I won’t even be allowed near that system. Besides, there’s already someone who has probably been called in to do that. Still... assuming you’re right and there’s an insider, that means that any investigation will be hampered, crippled, or blocked completely.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But that also means you can’t do anything, either.”

  “Not exactly.”

  Ariel shrugged. “As an Auroran, there’s not much I can do.”

  “You’re being modest,” Mia said. “As a member of the Auroran embassy mission, you have a primary interest in this investigation. You can make noise, embarrass people, harass them.” She smiled. “All things you enjoy.”

  “Now you’re being facetious.”

  Mia shrugged. “Do you remember when we met?”

  “Four years ago, Kopernik Station. The day I arrived to take a job with the Auroran Trade Section.”

  “I was new on the job then, freshly certified, right out of the academy.”

  “And the reason they assigned you to the duty was your high tolerance for open spaces.”

  Mia smiled. “They assumed that included outer space, too, so I spent two hours’ shuttle time with my eyes shut and my fingers clamped tight around my seat, not daring to look out the port.”

  “You were in charge of security on our baggage--”

  “--and you weren’t going to let me inspect your personal luggage--”

  “--and you weren’t going to let my bags off Kopernik without a thorough inspection--”

  “--and you weren’t going to let a human do it.”

  Ariel was laughing. “I’d met some stubborn people before that, but you were the most”

  “After you, that is.”

  Ariel nodded. “Yes. After me.”

  “But I wasn’t unreasonable, was I?”

  “No. You asked what kind of inspection would satisfy me, and I said only a robotic inspection. You agreed. Surprised the hell out of me.”

  Mia nodded. “So we dragged some poor domestic from the Auroran section of the station over to do the inspection. I told it what specifically I wanted to know about, you validated my instructions, and everything else was kept confidential.”

  “I wasn’t used to Terrans understanding anything about positronic robots. I’m still surprised when I find one that does.”

  “I trusted you.”

  Ariel raised an eyebrow. “You trusted the robot.”

  “But I had to believe the claims for them, which meant I had to believe you.”

  Ariel gave her a sober, assessing look, nodding slowly. “Yes. You trusted me.”

  “It could have meant my career if you’d deceived me.”

  “It could have meant your career if you hadn’t compromised.”

  “And you had to trust me that I’d abide by the robot’s findings.”

  After a pause, Ariel sighed. “We trust each other. Then and, I suppose, now. Is that your point?”

  “That’s my hope.”

  Ariel’s gaze shifted to a point past Mia’s left shoulder. “And that?”

  Mia turned her head to look at Bogard, standing immobile at the archway between the foyer and the spacious living room. Ariel’s robot, Jennie, stood nearby, waiting.

  “Bogard? What about it?”

  “That’s the bodyguard, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why do you have it?” Ariel asked.

  “I’m its primary duty right now,” Mia replied. “I had to transfer its priority from Senator Eliton to me to keep it from freezing up. Bogard was close to... what do you call it? Positronic collapse.”

  “I imagine so. It failed. Why is it still functioning?”

  “Because--”

  Ariel shook her head. “That shouldn’t matter. A human died that it was supposed to protect. You can’t conveniently tell a positronic robot to forget about one set of duties and take up a new set to keep it from collapsing.”

  “You can with Bogard.”

/>   Ariel looked unhappy. “I don’t like it. But I suppose it has to stay with you?”

  “Bogard has all the data concerning the assault. There are things I didn’t see, couldn’t see, and most of the others who could provide reliable information seem to be dead now. Besides, I’m not exactly in any condition to defend myself at the moment. I need Bogard.”

  “You trust it?”

  Mia shrugged. “For now.”

  “I’ll reserve my judgment.” Ariel stared unhappily at the robot. Mia did not understand her reaction--she seemed almost afraid of it. Then Ariel shook her head and looked at Mia. “But you have a point about the data it has--it might be useful.” She turned to her own robot. ”Jennie, prepare the Terran guest room for Mia. And check my itinerary. Cancel any guests I had scheduled for the next ten days.”

  “Yes, Ariel.” The robot moved quickly from the room.

  Ariel pointed a finger at Mia. “I want you to make it clear to Bogard that I am now part of its responsibility. I don’t want it misinterpreting anything I do as a threat to you. How long before you’re back up on your feet?”

  “A few days maybe. A week at most. If I had some medical attention, maybe sooner--”

  “I’ll take care of that later today.” Ariel stood. “I’m exhausted and I need to think. Not a good combination. Make yourself at home. We’ll talk in the morning.”

  Mia reached out and caught Ariel’s hand as she walked by. “Thank you, Ariel.”

  Ariel hesitated, then returned a squeeze. “Get some sleep. You’ll be safe here for the time being.”

  Mia sat propped up in bed in the half-light from a dimmed bedside lamp, knowing she should sleep and unable to slow the cascade of thoughts. She had dozed so much during Bogard’s journey through the warrens that while she did not feel rested, she did not feel sleepy.

  Ariel had given her the guest room with no windows, for which she was grateful. She had fewer problems with open air and unceilinged sky than most Terrans, and given time she could manage to overcome those reservations and minor fears she did possess. But tonight, after everything else, trying to sleep with a window looking out over the roof of D. C. would be difficult.