The bot sat up and tuned the local network. It had been two hours since Paladin knocked her flat with that EMP, and she’d started a slow recovery from her shielded backup. There were no signs of her adversaries. Where was Krish? She retrieved video from the past two hours. When she tried to stand, her feet skidded out from under her, scoring tracks through the brown, half-congealed blood on the floor. Her own blood, she realized, from the soft layer of tissue that covered her endoskeleton.
Standing up was the least of her problems. Video capture and real-time data both indicated that Med’s plan had failed. She reviewed, at twenty times normal speed, the video of Eliasz interrogating Krish. A few meters away, she could see for herself what remained of the interrogation scene: Krish slumped over a lab bench, his body emitting very little heat.
The bot walked haltingly to the man who had hired her for initiating a project that Big Pharma wanted to suppress. Based on his body temperature, she estimated he had been dead for over an hour. Probably massive organ failure from drug overdose, though only a blood test could verify that. He had some injuries on his face, but nothing that suggested he’d been beaten to death. She supposed it was even remotely possible that the agent hadn’t intended to kill Krish, just drug him into suggestibility.
From what she heard of the interrogation, the drug they’d given him was incredibly potent. Krish was spurting sentences that made no sense and hallucinating that Jack was in the room, pushed along by hints from Eliasz.
“Where would Jack go to be safe? Where would she go?” Eliasz murmured again and again, no matter what Krish said.
Finally, Krish started to nod out—probably oxygen deprivation as his heart began to fail—and he gestured for Eliasz to come closer. The agent knelt next to the dying man and they both came into video range.
“Jack, I’m sorry,” Krish slurred around a sob. “I’m so sorry.” He looked into Eliasz’ face and placed his hands tenderly on the man’s cheeks before leaning forward to whisper something she couldn’t pick up. Then, still cradling Eliasz’ face like a lover’s, he kissed the agent on the mouth. “Please keep yourself safe,” he sighed, then passed out. Eliasz caught Krish before he collapsed sideways to the floor, seating the unconscious professor at a lab bench and placing him in the exact position he held lifelessly now.
“Did you hear what he told me?” Eliasz asked Paladin, from beyond the range of Med’s cameras in the video.
“Yes,” Paladin vocalized. “I have also found some university documents that suggest where her safe house might be in Moose Jaw.”
“Let’s go,” Eliasz replied, as Paladin came into visual range. A square of hastily printed carbon fiber covered the hole that Med’s fist had opened in Paladin’s carapace. Distracted by a feeling of wrathful satisfaction, Med registered but did not process the meaning of the intense flush of heat that illuminated Eliasz’ body as he touched the bot’s arm and they walked out of the lab.
She messaged Threezed and began searching the university network for Jack’s birth name, in association with Moose Jaw.
I’m in the barn, Threezed sent from his mobile. With the antibiotic cows. Are you OK?
Over a mile away from the Free Lab, a joint project between the synbio and animal husbandry departments had resulted in a warm, oat-scented barn full of cows whose milk was rich with various antibacterials and antivirals. It was where Med liked to walk to get away from humans.
Her network search turned up some relevant data—most likely the same thing Paladin had found. Over thirty years ago, the archaeology department had offered a summer class that resulted in the excavation of smugglers’ tunnels in Moose Jaw. An undergraduate named Judith Chen had been on that dig. No subsequent work was done on the excavation, but it remained accessible via a storage room under a new condo development. It would be a good place to hide, with all Jack’s activity and energy use masked by people living in the building above.
Med signaled Threezed’s mobile. The agents are gone. I am slightly damaged. We need to get to Moose Jaw NOW.
On my way. We can take the lab truck.
As Med booted up the truck and waited for Threezed to arrive, she sent a warning to Jack, using the protocols they’d agreed on less than a week ago. She used a regulator to trim and cauterize the torn tissue on her stump. Full repairs would have to wait until later.
21
MOOSE JAW
JULY 18, 2144, 0648
Eliasz took his hands off the steering wheel as the truck entered autonomous mode on the highway to Moose Jaw. Outside, low hills merged with each other in the darkness.
“Are you going to be OK?” The man’s voice was carefully neutral, and Paladin could not read the expression on his face.
In fact, she could no longer see Eliasz’ face at all. Certainly the man had a face, and she could perceive that it possessed the usual group of sensory organs, but nothing about it was recognizable as Eliasz. She knew him by his voice, his bearing, and the cloud of molecules hovering around his body, but his face was merely a concatenation of muscle movements.
Her inability to classify the data provided by Eliasz’ expression filled Paladin with panic, which only intensified when she thought about how much her brain meant to him. The arms in Kagu Robotics Foundry had lied. Fang didn’t know what he was talking about. She was crippled without her brain, unable to tell the difference between wrath and laughter, or between a hostile face and a familiar one. How could she possibly aid Eliasz in combat?
“I believe I may be too damaged to function in a combat situation.”
Eliasz faced her, reaching out a tentative hand to touch the patch over Paladin’s empty brain socket. His face flickered with activity that meant nothing.
JULY 18, 2144, 0700
Jack got Med’s message in time to lay a decent trap. She’d seen that blurry footage of the bot chasing her, so she had some ideas what she was up against. She guessed the human agent would be standard-issue IPC: highly trained, on fire with righteous belief in property, as likely to kill her as anything else. All she had on her side was Med’s bit of intel, and hopefully the element of surprise.
A hidden compartment in the ceiling over her lab bench was the only place she could hide. It was little more than a crawl space lined with slightly springy foam, just tall enough that she could bunch into a crouching position from which she could hurl herself at the agents. As she waited, her knife in the relaxed fingers of her right hand, her perimeter feeding images to her goggles from security cameras outside, there was nothing to do but think about Krish.
Based on Med’s brief message, Jack guessed Krish had managed to betray her again before dying. Even as she formed that thought, a nauseating spasm of grief contradicted it. Nobody could withstand the kind of interrogation drugs an IPC agent would use—not without intensive training and modification. She and Frankie had spent years trying to patch themselves against pharma weapons. The most Krish had ever done was smoke 420 for fun.
In the clarity that comes with existential threat, Jack realized she’d held a grudge against Krish all these years for what amounted to a petty academic squabble over a text repo. Yes, it was terrible that he shut down The Bilious Pills. But now she could see how Free Lab was an extension of what the Pills started, a community that didn’t just protest property law but actually built alternatives to it. Krish had welcomed her and the Retcon Project, even after their decades of chilly silence. He must have known it might get him killed.