Chimera

"He might wonder if we can really protect him," Derec said.

"Can't we? Seems to me I managed to kill that thing pretty dead. "

"It took a bit, though, didn't it?"

Masid shrugged. "Cyborgs, occlusion tech, dead baleys," he said. "Any suspects in mind?"

"That's your job, isn't it?"

"So they keep telling me. There are a few arms dealers big enough to handle this kind of thing."

"We just need one. "

"All right. Kynig Parapoyos. "

"Why him?"

"He's the great bogeyman of the galaxy. Anything you can't pin down to someone else gets blamed on him. But he does have his fingers deeper into military tech than the others, and the widest distribution network. He runs an intelligence agency that's as good as anything a legitimate government can field. If nothing else, he's the most logical choice."

Derec nodded. "For the sake of argument, let's say that."

"All right. Then the next question is, what does he want with cyborgs?"

"The ideal soldiers."

"He sells weapons to soldiers. "

"So? How profitable would it be to have something that could do it all?"

"Ideal mercenaries?" Masid shrugged. "I'm less impressed with mercenaries than with dedicated patriots and fanatics. Mercenaries are practical-miss a payment, they go away. They have a cost analysis attitude. If the cost is too high, they go away. What would make cyborgs different?"

"Depends. Research into them was suspended because they were unpredictable."

"Like people?"

Derec shook his head. "No. People are predictable, at least in certain broad patterns. "

"So a cyborg would be a weapon that might turn and shoot its owner?"

"Maybe. If I recall correctly, they couldn't be programmed with the Three Laws. Something in the organic side of things that kept sliding around them. "

"They're positronic, then?"

"The ones the Calvin Institute worked with were, yes. These? I don't know."

"How quickly could you find out?"

"Get me back to the lab."

Masid nodded and straightened. "I'll see what I can do."

Derec watched him go back into the cell block.

Too many questions to answer. Where would cyborgs be manufactured? Nova Levis? Could an industry be hidden there? A whole world? Why not? Was that perhaps the real reason behind the embargo?

But the technology…

"Derec. "

Rana stood in the doorway to the guard room. "Director Polifos is missing." "Did that robot take Director Polifos?"

Harwol spoke with a solid dispassion belied only by the glint of impatience in his eyes.

Derec, Harwol, and Rana stood in the positronics lab, facing each other.

"Why would you think that?" Derec asked.

"The robot is missing, Polifos is missing. I don't know, but in my policeman's way of looking at things that suggests a connection."

"A robot wouldn't do that," Derec said.

"Really? You know that for sure? You also said it was collapsed. "

"It was," Rana answered.

"Which means that it couldn't just get up and walk out," Harwol said.

"Normally, yes."

"What does that mean, 'normally'? Could it or couldn't it?"

"On its own," Derec said, "no. It had to have been removed. By someone who knew something about robotics."

"Anyone working in this lab could have taken it, then. Perhaps even Polifos himself."

It was not a question. Derec turned toward Harwol. Behind him, Hofton stood beside Ambassador Leri. Two of Polifos's techs stood further back, watching anxiously.

"I don't think it's reasonable anymore to assume," Derec said, "that the people working in this lab are the only ones on Kopernik familiar with robotics."

Harwol regarded him steadily, then nodded. "Do you think there could be another cyborg?"

"Do you mean did a cyborg steal the robot?" Derec did not want to contemplate the possibility of more than one cyborg. "But why?"

Harwol shrugged. He was out of his depth, but refused to show it. "The thing we saw from the recovered memories," he said, stepping toward the console, "didn't look like what we caught tonight."

We? Derec thought sourly. "No, it didn't. But then it changed by the time Palen's people opened the bin. No one remarked on anything unusual when the bodies were carried out, so it must have looked human. "

"Is that possible?"

"Malleable materials are common enough. I can imagine, though I can't describe, how you might make something that could do that." He thought of Bogard, brand new and newly aware, in its amalloy body, capable of changing shape to meet circumstances. But it never looked anything but artificial, always appeared to be what it was: a robot. Derec glanced at the monitors, then. Thales had said nothing so far.

Harwol rounded on Derec. "If I find out you had anything to do with this-"

"Why would I?"

"You didn't want us to have the robot. Maybe you had legitimate reasons; maybe not."

"Don't waste your time suspecting me. I was in a cell, remember?"

Harwol suddenly grabbed Derec's shirt and walked him back against the examination table. He pressed Derec against the hard surface. Harwol's breath flowed hot across his face.

"I don't have time to be diplomatic. I have dead agents and a lot of interference and now a piece of evidence is missing. I do not need self-important Spacer attitude. "

Derec braced himself on the table. "I used to be of the opinion that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent."

Harwol's eyes narrowed. "And now?"

"Now? I think it's the first choice of an idiot."

Harwol's grip tightened, and he lifted Derec slightly from the floor.

"Beat it out of me," Derec said. "That's always the best way to solve a problem. Works for me all the time."

"Agent Harwol. " Palen's voice cut through the sudden stillness. Her voice was calm, authoritative. "I want to see you privately. "

Derec's heart hammered. Slowly, Harwol eased his grip. Derec's feet touched the floor. Harwol stepped back.

"I want that robot," he said. "I want it found and returned."

Derec cleared his throat. "And if I can't do that?"

"Then we'll see how big an idiot I am."

Harwol turned to glare at Palen, who stood nearby, hands on hips.

"Now, " she said.

Derec watched them all leave, then sat down. "If I live through the night…"

"Sir-" Hofton began.

Derec held up a finger. "Where's Polifos?"

"I don't know," Hofton said. "No one seems to remember when they saw him last."

"Rana?"

She shrugged.

"All right, never mind." He looked over the console. "We have another subject to do an excavation on."

"Another robot?" Rana asked.

"No, not quite. A cyborg." Derec turned to Hofton. "Get Palen's pathologist-what's his name? Baxin. I think he should assist with this one. In the meantime, where the hell did Coffee go?"

"I can answer that question, Derec," Thales said. "Coffee walked out of here after I reloaded a functional matrix. " "What did he do?" Rana asked, leaning over Derec's shoulder to peer at the displays.

"We talked about this possibility," Derec said. He looked from one screen to another, trying to follow the RI's step trees. "Thales has been working at recovering Bogard's matrix so we could find out what happened when it collapsed. Because I'd built so many peripherals onto Bogard, it partly became a hardware problem. Thales thought it was a question of raw memory-not enough-but when he got to use this system, he had enough, and realized that wasn't the whole problem."

"A positronic brain," Thales said, "is not simply programming. Programming can be corrupted. The physical pathways are as necessary to its function as the matrix being run on them. Therefore, I determined that in order to successfully recover Bogard I needed to load its matrix into a brain."

"You had no way of knowing," Derec said, "if this would maintain its integrity."

"I was reasonably confident. But, no, I had no way to be certain other than to load it and see."