Old Ironsides Read online

  ‘The atmosphere is constantly heated and cooled by the motion of the station, by gravity and by the movement of people,’ she explained. ‘Water vapor builds up real quick in here and often overwhelms the dehumidifying system that was built to cope with hundreds of people, not tens of thousands. The rain’s already been filtered but it’s still expelled breath, basically – not great for colds.’

  Nathan covered his face in alarm as the rain began to fall, drenching the streets around them as throughout the crowd thousands of glowing blue hard-light umbrellas flickered into life like a neon desert of flowers springing to life beneath the downfall. Nathan hurried after Foxx, still amazed as he watched the umbrellas block the rain, which drizzled down them like glowing electricity and dripped from the edges.

  ‘Aww, you don’t got one of these do you?’ Vasquez smiled as he pointed up at the concave shield covering him, hovering over his head and joining with others around them to provide the crowds with the perfect moving protection against the rain that now rushed off them and poured over Nathan.

  ‘You breathing the city now, Ironside?’ Allen chuckled as they hurried toward a large building set off from the main streets.

  Foxx led the way and the doors of the building opened for her. Nathan was not slow to realize that the building was lower tech than much of the rest of what he’d seen recently, the doors automated but solid rather than built from hard light.

  The interior of the station was filled with citizens, some in handcuffs, waiting their turn to see the two duty officers, who each sat in a hard light cubicle that presumably protected them from attack. For the first time since he had awoken, Nathan realized that he felt at home. The station smelled of the poor and the weak, the criminal and the angry, the dregs of society that he had once served. Although he had hated them back then, now he found their presence strangely comforting as he followed Foxx to an elevator. Moments later the four of them reached the police offices and Foxx led them into a unit whose door was marked ‘DRUGS’.

  ‘So you’re all anti-drugs cops?’ he asked as they walked inside.

  ‘Damn, you’re a real natural detective, Ironside,’ Allen said as he crossed to a work station and sat down.

  Vasquez chuckled as he slumped into his own chair, a well-worn leather recliner set behind a work station piled high with glowing electropaper, trash and odd little mementoes of previous cases littering it. By contrast Allen’s desk was clear, orderly and cluttered only by a single electro-sheet and a small hologram of an attractive blonde woman holding two baby girls in her arms. Nathan caught sight of the image and smiled.

  ‘Your family?’ he asked.

  Allen nodded, suddenly cautious. ‘Sure, what’s it to you?’

  Nathan saw Vasquez watching him silently, almost expectantly. ‘Okay, what is it with you two?’ he asked.

  Foxx looked at her two partners and sighed. ‘Spit it out, children.’

  Vasquez and Allen exchanged a glance. ‘You first,’ Vasquez said.

  ‘It’s always me, why don’t you go?’

  ‘Hey, I’m not the one getting cagey about my kids man.’

  ‘Vasquez,’ Foxx demanded and folded her arms.

  The former soldier sighed and looked at Nathan. ‘If this guy’s an undercover cop then I’m Abraham Lincoln. No ID chip and stunned by falling spit and a spinning piece of crap like New Washington, plus he almost churned his guts out riding the sky line down here? Give me a break.’

  ‘Yeah, and who’s his assigning officer?’ Allen challenged. ‘Where’s his badge and service record. They don’t hide that stuff after a bust, only prior to it. If he’s worked undercover then I’m amazed he’s still alive ‘cause right now he couldn’t hide himself from a blind man in a snowstorm at night.’

  Foxx sighed, but Nathan took control. ‘They deserve to know,’ he said.

  ‘Know what?’ Allen asked Foxx.

  ‘It’s your call,’ Foxx replied to Nathan, ‘but it was Director General Ceyron’s explicit order that we keep it under wraps.’

  ‘The Director General,’ Vasquez almost choked. ‘You know the DG?’

  ‘We’re old friends,’ Nathan said.

  Allen leaned back in his seat and folded his arms expectantly. Vasquez raised a questioning eyebrow, and Foxx perched on the edge of her desk. Nathan glanced around the office to make sure that it was empty, took a deep breath and then let it all out. The virus, the illness, his death four hundred years previously, the awakening, the drone attack and his presence at New Washington.

  Vasquez and Allen sat in silence until he finished. A long moment passed as they looked at him with impenetrable gazes, and then looked at each other. The pair of them burst into laughter, rolling up as Vasquez jabbed a thumb in his direction.

  ‘This guy,’ he chortled. ‘You got any other stories? I can go get some corn and iced cola, make a night of it.’

  ‘I’ll call Debbie, tell her to bring the kids in,’ Allen agreed.

  Nathan looked at Foxx, who shrugged at him. Nathan pulled the ruck sack from his shoulder and yanked the top open as he turned and dumped the contents onto the desk alongside Vasquez. The cop’s laughter choked off and he lurched out of his seat, one hand flashing down for his sidearm as the remains of the sentry drone clattered onto the junk littering his desk.

  ‘This is one of the drones that tried to kill me,’ Nathan growled, finding his anger once again as he pointed at the machine.

  He turned to Allen, and from his jacket pocket he gently retrieved the only thing that had survived along with him from four hundred years before: the old picture of Angela and Amira that Helena Sears had handed him. He held it out to Allen, who was silent now as he took it. His clear blue eyes flicked up to meet Nathan’s immediately, and Nathan knew that he understood.

  ‘They died four centuries ago and I was visiting their graves when I was attacked,’ Nathan said quietly, the old pain flaring again inside him. ‘That’s why I’m here. Somebody likely figured that I would go there, and they left these drones to find me and kill me when I did. If it weren’t for Lieutenant Foxx, I’d be dead.’ Nathan faltered. ‘Again.’

  Allen handed the picture of Nathan’s wife and child to Vasquez and then looked at Foxx, as did Vasquez as he held the picture in his hand. Foxx nodded.

  ‘It’s all true,’ she confirmed. ‘We need to find out who sent those drones and why they targeted Nathan. You boys up for this?’

  Vasquez and Allen looked at each other again, and then they both turned to Nathan.

  Vasquez stood, handed the photograph back to him and nodded. ‘Sure, we’ll help out.’

  ‘You got it,’ Allen confirmed. ‘Whatever you need, man.’

  For the first time in four hundred years, Nathan felt a glimmer of hope spring to life somewhere deep inside him.

  ***

  XVIII

  Vasquez peered at the drone’s ugly black body and poked at it with a pair of tweezers as the rest of the team gathered around.

  ‘What do you think?’ Nathan asked.

  Vasquez spoke as he fiddled about inside the bug’s innards.

  ‘It’s a standard sentry drone all right,’ he said, ‘much like the ones the CSS deployed against the Aleeyans back in the day. Basic circuitry, lightweight carbon fibre nanite-reinforced shell with standard sensors. Only problem I got is that these things shouldn’t still exist.’

  ‘How so?’ Foxx asked, leaning against her desk with her arms folded.

  ‘They had a limited shelf life,’ Vasquez said. ‘We got some instruction about them in the Marines. They’re dispensable assets, not designed to survive long in the wilderness on their own. They have a basic metabolic system which allows them to feed on fruits, animals, whatever they can find, but their internal chemical fuel for digestion is limited – eventually they run out, can’t process food anymore and drop out of the sky.’

  ‘Some sort of safety feature?’ Allen hazarded, watching as Vasquez poked about inside the drone.

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sp; ‘Yeah,’ Vasquez confirmed. ‘You deploy these things, you don’t want them hanging around too long to come back and bite you in the ass. The mechanics of the wings and circuitry were specifically programmed to open up to the environment after the bug runs out of power, ensuring that they rusted quickly and couldn’t be reverse-engineered by the enemy. Bottom line, you’re right; somebody had to have put these things there to lie in wait.’

  ‘Not to mention that they’re banned under the Convention of Battlefield Conduct,’ Foxx pointed out. ‘The injuries suffered by people under attack from these things, if they survived, were horrendous. The CSS banned them within months of warlords deploying them to root out infected stragglers, but it took a long time to account for most.’

  ‘How come the Marines used them in the wars if they were banned way back after the plague?’ Nathan asked.

  ‘The Aleeyans were ruthless in battle and deployed them against us,’ Vasquez explained, visibly disturbed by whatever memories he had of his service. ‘We responded in kind using newer drones until they got the message.’

  ‘That explains why this thing is here, and that there could still be older missing drones,’ Nathan said, ‘enough that they could be placed to wait for me?’

  ‘I’d say so,’ Vasquez agreed as he stood up from his examination. ‘They were built in illegal factories in their tens of thousands by warlords. There could be hundreds, perhaps even thousands of them still out there, and if they were stored well they’d still be useable.’

  Foxx pushed off her desk and looked down at the bug.

  ‘So that means we’re looking for somebody with motive, means and opportunity to find Nathan, assess his likely plan and lay this trap.’

  ‘They had to know where I’d be,’ Nathan agreed. ‘But you said that the CSS don’t want anybody knowing about who I really am, so who could have known where we’d be going? It was a spontaneous decision by me to visit the site of my family’s graves.’

  Allen offered Nathan a sympathetic look.

  ‘That’s true but it was also inevitable,’ he pointed out. ‘Assuming our perp’ knew who you were and where you came from, it was only a matter of time before you would have wanted to go home.’

  Nathan looked down at the bug and frowned. ‘But why me?’

  ‘The plague,’ Foxx said, ‘just like Ceyron suggested. It’s the only thing that marks you out as special other than your age.’

  ‘You think that those Aleeyan sympathisers he mentioned might have figured me out enough? How could anybody like that get inside my head?’

  The reply came from directly inside Nathan’s ear. ‘I could!’

  Nathan almost jumped out of his skin and jerked sideways as Doctor Hans Schmidt’s shimmering translucent form materialized from what seemed like inside Nathan’s body and stepped aside, grinning from ear to ear.

  Nathan’s heart felt as though it was trying to beat its way out of his chest as he glared at Schmidt. ‘Don’t do that again.’

  ‘I thought you’d be pleased to see me,’ Schmidt replied, unfazed in his mirth. ‘I did save your life after all.’

  ‘You know anything about who could have known enough about Nathan to lay a trap like this for him?’ Foxx asked the doctor.

  ‘Mister Ironside was given the vaccine to the plague prior to his successful resurrection,’ Schmidt said as he leaned down and peered at the bug. ‘There should be no reason for any party to have any interest in him at all other than his advanced years, but then again he was studied for centuries by all manner of scientific teams keen to research how his body had reacted to the plague. Who knows who might have been probing around inside him, taking samples and such like?’

  Nathan shivered involuntarily at the thought of his frozen corpse being violated repeatedly by medical teams as Doctor Schmidt moved forward and his head vanished inside the interior of the bug as he scoured it for information.

  ‘Detective Vasquez, would you mind plugging the bug back in again?’

  ‘You wanna do what now?’ Vasquez asked.

  ‘The drone’s sensory and programming circuitry remains intact,’ Schmidt replied. ‘I believe that if it is reactivated, I will be able to access and download its data files and analyse them immediately for evidence of who programmed it.’

  Foxx gave Vasquez a nod, and the former soldier thought for a moment before he reached into his desk and produced a strong looking cord made of a strange material, gun metal gray in color. Vasquez wrapped the cord around the bug, pulling its wings and the remaining legs in close to its body before fastening the cord to the leg of his desk. Then, he produced from his desk what looked rather like a small battery, and after a brief poke around inside the bug he plugged the battery in.

  ‘That should do it,’ he said, but Nathan saw him draw his sidearm. ‘A locator cell won’t give it much juice but it should be enough to activate the bug’s cerebrum base.’

  ‘Just in case, I suggest everybody else leaves the room,’ Schmidt suggested.

  Nathan and the others stepped out of the office and the transparent door shimmered back into place, a slight tint to it the only indication that it was there at all. Nathan watched as Vasquez checked that the door was sealed and then reached in and activated the power cell.

  Almost immediately the bug leaped off the desk and clattered to the floor and Vasquez jumped back three feet with a loud shriek of surprise that Nathan could hear even through the door.

  The bug writhed and clattered about, one wing breaking free of its bonds and beating the floor as it spun in circles. Doctor Schmidt followed it and then looked at Vasquez.

  ‘If you’re done shrieking,’ he suggested, ‘might I borrow a boot?’

  Vasquez, his weapon pointed at the bug, stepped forward and slammed one heavy boot down upon it. The bug was pinned in place against the floor, its glossy black eyes revolving around to look up at Vasquez, who winced visibly at the sight of the revolting machine examining him and its metallic antennae brushing against his boot.

  Doctor Schmidt’s projection lowered down, as though it were sinking through the floor until only his head was visible, and then it advanced upon the bug. Nathan watched in horrified fascination as the drone turned to look at Schmidt and began trying to probe him too with its antennae. Schmidt ignored it and his head once again merged with the machine.

  ‘Damn me that’s weird,’ Nathan said. ‘What is he? Where is he?’

  ‘Schmidt?’ Foxx replied as she watched the doctor working. ‘He’s a holosap.’

  ‘A holowhat?’

  ‘Holo Sapiens,’ Allen explained, also watching. ‘When the plague hit, some of the world’s best scientists spent years trying to find a cure. When it became pretty clear that they were failing a few decided to make alternative plans. They used advances in supercomputers and immense data storage farms, along with new technologies in the world of bio-engineering, and scientists in the United Kingdom managed to create the first perfect copy of the human brain.’

  Nathan stared at Allen in amazement. ‘They copied a person’s brain? Hadn’t anybody watched the Terminator movies?’

  Allen shot Nathan a confused look but went on none the less. ‘The construction of a computerized human brain was planned to allow work to continue on finding a cure for the plague even if every last human being died, as well as a means of maintaining government and structure in the event of the complete collapse of civilization. In the event, in the remaining cities of the world that were still standing and containing people, the leaders and the wealthy decided to pre-empt their own deaths and switch to becoming holosaps. They cryo-froze their bodies, dying on purpose and were reanimated as holosaps to wait out the plague.’ Allen smiled ruefully. ‘You can’t catch plague if you’re not actually alive.’

  Nathan looked at Foxx. ‘That’s what you meant when you said that death was no longer the end. Does that mean I’m not the only person alive who’s hundreds of years old?’

  Foxx nodded.

  ‘There
are around thirty thousand holosaps still in existence, mostly individuals who for one reason or another were unable to return to their bodies due to malfunctions in the cryo-stasis capsules or damage to body tissues and organs, that kind of stuff. A few decided to stay as they were, preferring life as an immortal computer program.’ Foxx shuddered. ‘I think I’d rather just be cremated.’

  Nathan looked on as Schmidt emerged from the bug and rose to his normal height. ‘How old is he?’

  ‘Schmidt?’ Allen asked. ‘He died about a hundred eighty years ago, I think. Or was it a hundred ninety?’

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ Foxx replied. ‘Any human over a hundred fifty years old is a damned freak and…’

  She cut herself off and offered Nathan a shocked expression. ‘I’m so sorry, I…’

  ‘Forget it,’ he smiled. ‘You saved my life yesterday. I can cut you some slack.’

  They turned as Schmidt walked through the transparent door and spoke to Foxx.

  ‘I have some information for you,’ he said. ‘I think you’d better take a look at this on a holopanel.’

  Foxx led the way, and Nathan turned to follow when he heard Vasquez calling out.

  ‘Hey, guys! Some help here?!’

  They turned to see Vasquez with one boot on the wildly gyrating bug, his pistol pointed down at it and panic on his face.

  ‘Didn’t he scream a moment ago?’ Allen asked.

  ‘Sounded like a girl,’ Foxx agreed as she called out to Vasquez. ‘Hey, we’re a little worried about your masculinity out here. How about you take care of the bug for us, okay?’

  Vasquez sneered at them.

  ‘It’s breakin’ free and I can’t blast it without risking the people in the floor below!’

  Nathan glanced around the office and saw what he was looking for.

  ‘Would you mind?’ he asked Foxx.

  Foxx stepped forward and the door vanished before her as Nathan strode through it and to a desk. He grabbed a simple trash can that he was glad to see were still used occasionally. He walked across to Vasquez, who was looking nervous and seemed to be sweating a little.