“I’m going to try,” Casey said, “whether you turn the shield off or not.”
“My algorithms will not allow me to restrain you. But if you are determined, then I will come with you.”
“No.”
“Otherwise I won’t disable the force shield.”
“I already told you, I’ll fly into it. I’ll gun myself.”
“If you truly want to save the embryos, you will let me accompany you. Otherwise you admit your mission is a gun and not what you claim it is.”
“I don’t have to make deals with you.” Casey pushed past the Surrogate and strode out to the street. She stopped and closed her eyes, took a deep breath.
“Well, come on,” she said.
Shattered aircraft hangars gaped like broken shells. Black furrows crisscrossed the runways. Wreckage smeared across the tarmac in rusty debris fields. The plague came and was assumed to be an act of biological warfare. Someone in the US, or China, or India, or Iran, or Russia unleashed the first retaliatory assault. The reactive response spread like the plague had spread. The world became a gun aimed at itself, which kept on firing even after there were no humans left to pull the trigger.
Ironically, in the last days, CDC scientists determined that the plague itself had not been an act of war. Microbes had filtered into the atmosphere, where they thrived, located human hosts, and proliferated throughout the population. Where the plague failed to kill, the weapon response from every country in the world had succeeded. The shield over Tourangeau Air Base should have protected it, as should have the shields over the White House, Norad, and other critical places. All the shields had gone down under cyber attacks as vicious as the hardware ones. The Surrogate, however, had figured out the code to reactivate the one at Tourangeau, and now the AI controlled it.
Some air vehicles at Tourangeau Air Base had gone undamaged. A wasp with a long stinger was painted on the nose of the electric VTOL. Casey hauled herself up to the canopy and claimed the forward seat. The Surrogate installed itself behind her. Casey buckled up and began her pre-flight check. But when she attempted to move the control surfaces, ailerons, rudder, and elevators—her side stick and pedals resisted her. “Are you doing that?”
“I will fly us out,” the Surrogate replied.
Casey craned her head around, awkward in the snug helmet. “You just open the shield, like we agreed.”
“The moment this air vehicle passes beyond the shield it will be attacked by weapons still in terrestrial orbit as well as the automated weapons still operating on the ground. I have downloaded complete specs and will fly.”
Casey wrenched at the control stick. “Let me fly my own goddamn ship.”
The Surrogate went quiet. Hummingbird wings fluttered.
Casey closed her eyes, let her fury subside to the point where she could speak without shouting. “You think you can fly better than I can?”
“I do not doubt your skill. But I can predict the assault and react with greater efficiency.”
Casey tapped her fingers on her thighs. She knew the Surrogate was right. The Surrogate was always right. It was one of the most infuriating things about it (a trait the robot shared with Casey’s mother). Rudimentary AIs directed the orbital and ground-based automated weapons. Some of the weapons were “ours,” some “theirs,” some “who knows.” And yes, it was probably beyond Casey’s skill set to evade them all.
“You’ll give me control once we clear the attack?” Casey said.
“There will be other attacks.”
“You will give me control.” Not a question this time.
“Very well.”
“Then let’s go.”
The instrument panel and heads-up display came alive. Powerful GE engines spun up. The ship rose vertically. At two hundred feet, the nose pitched down and they powered toward the invisible shield.
Beyond the shield, buried in a Doomsday Vault under the Sangre de Cristo mountains, lay the frozen embryos cloned from some of the greatest scientists and leaders on Earth, including Casey’s mother. They were the seeds of humanity’s future.
And Casey was the last garden.
They sped toward the shield. Casey blinked sweat out of her eyes. “The shield’s off, right?”
“No need. We can pass through unaffected from this side.”
“What? You never told me you could do that! You mean I could have—No wonder you wanted to come. You tricked me.”
“There will be a bump.”
The ship accelerated to full power, crushing Casey in her seat. If there was a bump, she didn’t feel it. The airframe was already shuddering. And then they were through and pitching steeply upward while rolling left. The sky flashed white and blue with energy bursts. The ship rocked wildly.
“Shoot back!” Casey yelled.
Instead, the Surrogate throttled down and deployed speed-breaks, which threw Casey against her restraints. If the Surrogate hadn’t reacted with inhuman speed and precision, the VTOL would have been destroyed. They skated across the sky, wing tips banked steeply. Then they were clear, rolling right and gaining altitude, finally leveling out.
“Okay,” Casey said, “hand it over.”
“I am adjusting the vector,” the Surrogate said. “Destination in six minutes.”
“Give me control!”
“There will be other attacks.”
“You shouldn’t even be here. You lied to me about the shield.”
Casey seized the side stick and pressed her feet to the rudder pedals, fighting the Surrogate for control. She hadn’t realized the robot could lie. That made it almost human. A warning light flickered, and something streaked up from the desert. The Surrogate wrenched the ship over, but the projectile clipped the starboard wing, and the ship barreled out of control. Sky and Earth swapped relative positions. Casey grasped the stick in a death grip. Despite that, the Surrogate established a semblance of stable, albeit inverted flight, rolled again for straight and level, and compensated for the loss of starboard thrust.
“Casey Stillman, let go, please.”
Casey released her grip and watched the displays. Hydraulic pressure dropped steadily on the starboard wing. The strike had severed a line. Worse, battery levels had plummeted, an emergency reflected in the off-key whine of the big electric turbine on the port side.
The ship wallowed toward the ground.
“We’re going to crash!” Casey’s heart was racing.
“I am managing it.”
The remains of a town passed below them. The VTOL, rocking and swaying under depleted power, traveled another mile. A landing pad came into view. The Surrogate angled them toward it, dumping two hundred feet of altitude before rearing back and engaging sputtering vertical thrust. The ship teetered on the edge. Casey tensed her body for impact. In the next moment the undercarriage absorbed the bone-rattling jolt of touchdown. Casey looked up. They had landed fifty yards short of the pad.
The instrument panel displayed the red lines of overtaxed and underpowered systems, and then the display went dark.
Casey popped the canopy. “Don’t say it.”
“Don’t say what?”
“That if I’d kept my hands off the controls we wouldn’t have been hit.”
The Surrogate reverted to hummingbird wings.
Casey unbuckled her restraints and turned around, kneeling on her seat. The Surrogate’s blank face regarded her. “Damn it. Not saying anything is the same as saying it.”
“I could have avoided the attack, yes.”
“I knew you couldn’t resist rubbing it in.”
She climbed down to inspect the damage. Hydraulic fluid dripped on Casey’s boot. A piece of the starboard wing’s trailing edge was missing, a ragged bite taken by the projectile. If the VTOL had been running on jet fuel instead of electricity, it would have exploded. As it was, shrapnel had penetrated the fuselage and damaged the battery array. Maybe the Surrogate could repair the wing, but without power, they were stranded. “I will effect repairs,” the Surrogate said.
“What about—”
“The repair procedure will render me helpless. So you will get your opportunity to pilot us back to base. You will have to manually deactivate the barrier. I will provide instructions. Don’t do it too soon, or the weapons will gain access ahead of you. Don’t wait too long, or you may misjudge the approach and destroy us.”
“How long will repairs take?”
“Estimated three hours.”
“I’ll be back by then.”
“Don’t go, please.”
From the stowage compartment Casey retrieved a pulse rifle, a sidearm, and a flashlight.
“Without me, your survival is questionable,” the Surrogate said.
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
But the robot was already dismantling the starboard aileron assembly.