Siege (10 page)

Instead of replying, I search for Brittany and the other Yorktown High students. To my relief, I spot them right away, lying exactly where we put them, in the middle of the field's end zone. Because Sigma was targeting Pioneers, not humans, the unconscious kids are covered with only a light dusting of modules. But their fevers have worsened. We need to get them to the treatment center
right now
.

I run to Brittany and pick her up as gently as I can, cradling her against my torso. At the same time, Zia picks up Jack Parker and the freshman girl, and Shannon hoists Tim Rodriguez over her shoulder. They're all in critical condition, but that's not the only reason why we have to hurry. Sigma is a super-intelligent AI, so I'm pretty sure it has a backup plan. In fact, another giant Snake-bot might be burrowing toward us right now, churning through the rock and soil of Westchester County. And Sigma will definitely make sure the next machine we encounter has extra safeguards against computer viruses.

I turn to Shannon. “Which way should we—”

“
OVER HERE
!
”

The synthesized scream comes from Marshall. His Super-bot dashes out of the woods on the other side of the football field, running toward us at fifty miles per hour. The armor on his torso has several scorch marks, probably from the explosion of the V-22 that brought us here. He halts a few yards in front of us and points at the woods.

“The Army's sending another plane! Come on, we have to get to the rendezvous point!”

The voice coming out of his loudspeakers is screechy and frantic. It's so different from Marshall's usual voice that for a millisecond I imagine that someone else has taken over his circuits. His plastic face is creased and his steel hands are shaking.

“Hey, Marsh?” I ask. “Are you all right? You—”

“
No, I'm not all right
!
” His voice is as loud and high as a siren. “
I'm scared out of my freaking mind! Now let's just get out of here, okay
?
”

Shannon strides forward, taking charge. “Lead the way, Marshall. Take us to the rendezvous point.”

Marshall and Shannon start running across the football field. Zia and I follow them, with the students in our arms. DeShawn's quadcopter flies a hundred feet above us. We reach the woods and charge into the shadows. We're safer here, hidden from any spy satellites that Sigma might be using to keep track of us.

But I don't feel safe. Not at all. In fact, I feel more vulnerable than ever.

Something's wrong.

The backup V-22 that General Hawke sent to rescue us lands on the empty lanes of the Taconic Parkway, just west of FDR State Park. As soon as the aircraft touches down, we carry the unconscious students up the loading ramp and into the plane's cabin.

The pilot and the rest of the crew wear hazmat suits. These soldiers were briefed about the Pioneer Project, but they're still unprepared for the sight of us. The crewmen frantically back away from our robots as we rush into the V-22. They're terrified of the Pioneers and equally scared of the infected students in our arms. And I don't blame them. The anthrax microbes we're bringing onto their plane have already killed twenty thousand people.

I'm scared too. I keep expecting to see another Snake-bot burst through the parkway's asphalt. Without delay, I take over the V-22's controls from the pilot and throttle up the aircraft's rotors. We climb two thousand feet in half a minute, then speed southwest toward the Hudson River.

The sun has set and the sky has turned dark purple by the time we return to Joint Base McGuire in New Jersey. After we land on the runway, more soldiers in hazmat suits aim fire hoses at the V-22 and spray it with disinfectant to kill any anthrax spores that might be clinging to the plane. Then Zia and Shannon and I carry the students into the Biohazard Treatment Center, which is separated from the rest of the military base by an impressive system of barriers and air locks. The center's doctors and nurses wear bulky blue “moon suits” to protect themselves from infection. Although I can't see their faces very well through their airtight visors, they look just as frightened as the V-22 crewmen.

Following the doctors' instructions, I lay Brittany on a gurney in the center's intensive care unit. Shannon and Zia do the same with the other unconscious kids, then head out of the treatment center. But I'm not ready to go yet. Instead, I take a few steps backward and watch from the corner of the ward as the doctors surround Brittany. They hook her to an IV line and a heart monitor and a ventilator. I turn my cameras away when the doctors cut off her jeans and T-shirt, but I stay in the room. I'm afraid to leave her.

Then another man in a protective suit comes into the ward, but this man isn't a doctor. It's my father. He flew from New Mexico to New Jersey with General Hawke, and now he looks even worse than he did when I saw him in his lab this morning. His face is pale and gaunt behind the visor of his moon suit.

“Dad!” My voice comes out of my speakers a little too loud. “What are you doing here?”

He rests a gloved hand on my Quarter-bot's torso. “I-I wanted to see…”

Dad stares intently at me, as if to confirm that I'm okay. He must've already read the after-action reports we transmitted while we were in flight, so he knows how close we came to disaster. He also knows about the horrific number of Sigma's victims and the pitiful handful of survivors.

After a moment he glances at Brittany and the three other infected students. Dad always liked Brittany, or to be more precise, he was grateful to her. Most of my childhood friends started avoiding me after I turned twelve and my muscular dystrophy got worse, but Brittany and I stayed close until I left Yorktown High. And though I never said a word about it, Dad probably guessed my feelings for her. In my condition back then—trapped in a wheelchair, dying—who else was I going to fall in love with?

Dad shakes his head. Then he steps closer to me and runs his hand over the holes that Sigma's modules drilled in my armor. “I'm helping the doctors.” He sounds distracted. “I'm part of the medical team.”

This makes sense, sort of. Although Dad's a computer scientist by training, he also became an expert in brain science when he developed the procedure for transferring our memories to neuromorphic circuits.

I extend my right arm and point it at Brittany. “Are you going to examine their brains? Do you think Sigma's anthrax might've damaged their nervous systems?”

“I don't know.” He shakes his head again. “I only have a theory at this point.”

“Well, what's your theory? What do you suspect?”

Again, my voice is too loud. My fear and worry are showing. Dad's worried too, but to his credit, he doesn't let his anxiety overwhelm him. He just pats my pockmarked armor. “Let me look at the kids first. Then we'll talk about it. In the meantime, you need to get your Quarter-bot decontaminated. And you need to repair this damage to your armor.”

I don't want to leave, but there's nothing I can do here. And I know General Hawke wants to meet with us, so we can give him a full briefing on Sigma's new capabilities. He'll want us to predict what the AI will do next and whether it's necessary to evacuate the whole region around Yorktown Heights, including New York City. The local radio and TV stations are spreading rumors about the outbreak, and the people in the area are starting to panic. If an evacuation is necessary, the Army will need to start the process very soon.

I nod my Quarter-bot's head. But before I go, I stretch my steel hand toward Dad and grasp his arm just above the elbow. I use my pressure sensors in my fingers to make sure I don't grip him too tightly. “Please help Brittany, Dad. Don't let her die.”

“Adam, I—”

“You have to save her. And the others too. You remember Jack Parker, right? Mom used to go over to their house all the time. She and Mrs. Parker were friends.”

Dad lets out a long, tired sigh. He's a scientist, so he won't give me false hope. He won't reassure me that everything's going to be all right. But he's very good at what he does, so I trust him. He's never let me down yet.

“I'll do my best, Adam.”

• • •

In the treatment center's decontamination room, Shannon stands behind Zia and uses a pressure sprayer to squirt disinfectant on the back of her War-bot. Shannon's Diamond Girl is already slick with acidified bleach, so I guess they're taking turns decontaminating each other. I train my cameras on them as I stride past, hoping Shannon will glance at me and maybe say a word or two, but she keeps her sensors focused on the War-bot's armor. Zia, though, swivels her head as I cross the room and points a steel finger at my Quarter-bot. Her gesture makes it clear she hasn't forgotten her promise. She's going to punish me for hurting Shannon. The fact that I saved both of them from Sigma doesn't change a thing.

On the other side of the room, DeShawn is decontaminating his Swarm-bot's forty thousand gray cubes. His modules dive into a large tank of liquid bleach, then pop back up and dive into it again. Disinfectant drips from the cubes as they hover halfway between the floor and the ceiling. Meanwhile, Marshall's Super-bot stands alone near the air lock that leads outside. He holds the nozzle of a pressure sprayer in one of his hands, but he isn't doing a very good job of decontaminating himself. He's pointing the nozzle straight down, spraying his footpads but nothing else. He looks like he's so deep in thought he's forgotten what he's doing. The bleach pools around his footpads and spreads across the floor.

I stride over to him, but he doesn't seem to notice me. The camera lenses inside his humanlike blue eyes are fixed on the pools of bleach. My circuits swell with the same queasiness I felt an hour ago when we ran into the woods of FDR State Park. Something bad happened to Marshall back there. Something really horrendous.

I move closer to him and reach for the pressure sprayer. “Hey, give me that thing. I'll help you.” I grasp the nozzle and wriggle it out of his grip. Then I step behind him and begin spraying his back. “It's like putting on sunscreen, right? You can't do the hard-to-reach places without a little help.”

Marshall says nothing. His Super-bot just stands there with its head lowered. As I squirt disinfectant on him, I examine the scorch marks on his back. Long streaks of carbon blacken his armor. In his after-action report, Marshall said he was inside the V-22's cabin when the first of Sigma's Snake-bots smashed into the plane. But his report didn't have a lot of details. Now I'm wondering exactly how it happened.

I spray more bleach on the charred steel. “You got some pretty nasty burns there. Were you near the V-22's fuel tanks when they exploded?”

Again, no response. His Super-bot stands perfectly still.

I step around his robot so I can decontaminate the front of his torso. When I aim my cameras at his downturned face, I notice that Marshall has completely chewed up his plastic lips, both upper and lower. He's made a ragged hole in his Superman face, exposing his motorized jaw and fiberglass teeth. This disfigurement is even more upsetting than his silence. Ordinarily, Marshall is obsessive about his appearance. He worked for months designing his Super-bot's face, trying to get it just right. Now he doesn't seem to care that his steel skeleton is showing.

I finish decontaminating him. I don't know what to say, so I decide to keep things cheerful and pretend that nothing's wrong. “All right, you're clean. No more anthrax spores on you. You're as shiny as a new car.” I extend my Quarter-bot's arm, offering him the nozzle of the sprayer. “Okay, my turn. I'll take the Deluxe Wash please, with the Triple Shine Polish.”

Marshall doesn't take the nozzle. Instead, he slowly raises his Super-bot's head, giving me a better view of the hole in his face. “That aircraft? The V-22? It's a flimsy piece of garbage.”

His voice, coming out of speakers behind his fiberglass teeth, is quiet and deep and much calmer than before. But he still doesn't sound like Marshall. It almost makes me wish he hadn't started talking. “Marsh, you don't have to talk about it if you don't—”

“The plane shattered when the tentacle hit it. Then its fuel tanks exploded.”

“So, uh…so how did you…”

“The impact threw me down the loading ramp. I hit the ground and started running.” He pivots away from me and closes his plastic eyelids over his camera lenses. “I didn't think about anyone but me, Adam. I just ran.”

Now I get what's bothering him. The shock of the attack is still crackling in his circuits, but he's even more upset by how he reacted. He's second-guessing himself. “Hey, don't beat yourself up. You did the right thing. You retreated to a safe location where you could radio for help. It was the right strategy.”

Marshall turns back to me and his cameras stare into mine. “I wasn't following a strategy. I was so scared, I just blacked out. My motors went on autopilot, and I didn't even know where I was going. I didn't wake up until I was standing in the middle of the woods. DeShawn was in his quadcopter, blasting radio messages at me, trying to get me to respond.” He shakes his Super-bot's head. “I was a coward. I ran like a coward.”

I want to reach out to him. I want to rest my hand on Marshall's torso. But I stop myself. My robot isn't decontaminated yet. “That's ridiculous, Marsh. What matters isn't your first reaction. It's what you did afterward. In the end, you stepped up. Without your help, we wouldn't be alive now.”

I thought that would make him feel better, but instead he grimaces with what's left of his face. “You don't understand. I'm different from you and Shannon and Zia and DeShawn. I'm not a hero.”

“Oh come on, you're—”

“Will you just shut up and listen for a second?”

Marshall turns up the volume of his speakers. Shannon stops decontaminating Zia, and DeShawn's modules freeze. All of them point their cameras at Marshall, who raises both of his robotic arms and clenches his steel hands. I take a step backward, then another. It looks like Marshall wants to drive his fists into my armor.

“
This isn't what I signed up for
!
” he booms. “
There's only one reason why I became a Pioneer—because I didn't want to die! But do you see what's happening now? We're facing death every day, every hour, every minute! And I'm not good at that! I can't take it anymore
!
”

Marshall's last words echo against the walls. Then the room falls silent. No one tries to argue with him. No one points out that this war against Sigma is exactly what we signed up for. It was part of the deal we made with the U.S. Army: in exchange for our new lives, we had to give up our freedom. But none of us expected the struggle to go on for so long.

The silence is so complete that my acoustic sensor picks up the sound of liquid bleach seeping across the floor. Then Marshall marches away from us. His decontaminated Super-bot strides into the air lock, and a massive steel door closes behind him.