Authors: Will Shetterly

Tags: #Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Chimera (12 page)

The cat dropped the Vetterli as I shouted, "It's not what it looks like! Listen to me!"

Someone threw a tray at the cat. She ducked and backed away. The man with the bat ran forward, screaming, "Get her!" The boldest members of the crowd followed.

I wrenched free of the dogwoman and grabbed the cat's arm. "Come on!" I waved the SIG so everyone could see it. "Stand back!"

We ran for the elevator. I prayed no would-be hero would pull a gun, and someone must've decided to give me that much. As we leaped into the elevator, the kitchen man thrust his bat between the closing doors. I poked the SIG in his face and said, "Maybe humans werewolf, too."

He sprang back, yanking the bat free. The elevator doors closed.

I punched "ground," and we descended. The cat said, "I did exactly what she—it—wanted."

Something twisted in my guts. I knew I would have to think about Kristal Blake sometime, but for now, all I had to do was keep the cat alive. And maybe, myself, too. I said, "If it makes you feel better, so did I."

"Tauber's dead. If we hadn't come here—"

I didn't let her finish that thought. "No. Blake had time to pick her target."

"So why didn't she kill us?"

I wanted to think about where to go and what to do, not what had happened or why, but those were the easier questions to answer. "They want the earring. Or they want to frame us for Tauber's death. Or both."

"What now?"

"We go someplace safe."

"Where?"

"I'm working on that part."

The elevator doors opened. The cat said, "Oh-oh."

In the lobby, six copbots waited for us. Outside, a police van sat on the street, and another copbot kept anyone from entering the building. I lifted my arms high and shouted, "It's all right! She hasn't—"

The cat slammed me aside. I landed on one side of the doors, the cat on the other, as a flurry of sleep darts pinged off the elevator's back wall. The cat slapped a button for an upper floor. The doors stayed open. "They cut the power!"

I shouted, "We surrender!" and peeked out to see their response. All six copbots were advancing on the elevator. More darts whistled by my face to say surrender wasn't an option.

I ducked back, popped the SIG from the Pocket, and fired, hitting a copbot's optics. The bullet struck something vital as it ricocheted within the bot's body—the copbot fell, spewing sparks from its eye socket. The other copbots scattered for cover. Their reprogrammer had left their sense of self-preservation intact.

The cat said, "Give me the earring!"

I passed my SIG to my left hand, fired blindly into the lobby to discourage sudden assaults, and flexed my right wrist as I extended that arm in the cat's direction. The earring flew from the Pocket.

She caught it and grinned coldly. "It's magic time."

A copbot had gotten far enough to one side to shoot into the elevator. Four darts hit the cat. She stared at them, then slumped down the elevator wall. "Shit."

"Zoe!" I shot at the bot that had hit her, but missed its optics. Still, it moved back under cover.

The cat sat splay-legged on the floor. "It's okay. I'm...on it."

I shot two more copbots, scaring one and catching another's optics. "Bastard sons of blenders—"

The cat, fighting to stay conscious, turned the halves of the black opal, then slid its gold plates into the jewel. All the copbots froze like kids in a game of Statue. The cat smiled. "Abracadabra. Pretty cool, huh?" Her eyes closed before I could agree.

I leaped to her side and yanked sleep darts out of her. The fine print on one made the cold thing in my guts grow colder. More than two doses in a mammal of average human size could be fatal. The cat barely came up to my shoulder. I shook her. "Zoe? Do you hear me?" Her arms were thin and muscular in my grip. Her smell reminded me of a former girlfriend's pet—a cat that I missed more than the girlfriend.

Zoe blinked her golden eyes open and focused the slitted pupils on me. "Sleep now?"

"Not if you want to wake up. They overdosed you."

I dropped the earring into the Pocket, put Zoe's arm over my shoulder, and hauled her toward the police van. The last copbot stood at attention just outside the door, where it had barred anyone from entering. Four students waited there. As I came out with gore on my suit and the cat in my arms, their expressions changed from curiosity to concern. One said, "What's going on?"

I strapped Zoe into the van's passenger seat. "Lunch break. We're making a movie."

"Oh. Big deal." Three students wandered away.

Zoe said, "I like lunch."

The last student glanced at her. I said, "Actors." The student grinned and followed the others.

I sat in the driver's seat. The van said, "Destination, please." I leaned under the dashboard, opened my pocket knife, and went to work. The van repeated, "Destination, please."

Zoe lifted her head. "Max? It wants to know where we're going."

The van said, "Destina—"

I came up from under the dash with a small black box that dangled cut wires. Zoe had slumped in her seat. I said, "Stay awake!"

"Sleep is nice."

"Sleep is bad. See this?" I showed her the box. "It's a locator with an override to take us to the nearest cop shop."

"That's not where we're going."

"Right. Stay awake."

I got out and crawled under the van. The second locator was harder to reach—it was welded above the power train in the middle of the car. Thieves stupid enough to steal a police vehicle would bring their favorite high tech cutters. In a way, I had.

I put my hand close to the locator and opened the Infinite Pocket. It was dark under the van, and I couldn't see much of what was above the power train, but I knew the shape of the Infinite Pocket as well as I knew the shape of my hand.

The Pocket was intended for objects about the size of the SIG, meaning its field of warped space projected four inches from my inner wrist in an oval six inches long at its greatest point. Whether it had any true depth is a question for mathematicians and philosophers. Effectively, its edge was finer than the blade of a monomolecular knife.

Its drawback as a tool or a weapon was that it's hard to maneuver something almost invisible set at a right angle to your wrist and triggered to shut down near living flesh. Most of the time, there's something better to hand. No pun intended.

I doubt it took thirty seconds to scoot under the van, cut the second locator box free with the edge of the Pocket, and scoot back out, but the entire time, I was wondering how long the copbots would stay down and whether their reprogrammers had a backup plan in place.

Leaving both locators on the street, I took the wheel, tapped the manual control, and drove away at the speed limit. Under the Libertarians, the limit's only a suggestion, but people would be less likely to remember a police van that seemed to be heading for a donut shop instead of an emergency.

I said, "Wakey."

"Gotta?"

"Gotta."

"Where we going?"

"A friend's."

"You have friends?"

I glanced over at her. She wore a weary "gotcha" smile. "Sad, desperate souls, every one of 'em."

"Is your friend a cop?"

"No."

"Good."

We didn't talk after that. Once we were a few blocks out of USCLA, I put on the roof flashers and drove as fast as I safely could. I glanced over every now and then to give her a shake. I put the radio on a technofolk station and punched the volume all the way up. That seemed to help.

I drove from University City to Mission Hills on surface streets—that's long-time L.A.-speak for any route that's not one of the major tollways, which were built on raised beds to pass over the city streets. The tollgates probably would've let the van pass, but they would've also recorded its presence and direction.

With the flashers on, the trip was faster than it could've been, but it was still agonizingly slow. Not everyone could move aside quickly. And though police vehicles don't pay tolls, we still had to wait for the bars to rise at the cheaper stations, where they save on the cost of automation by hiring neighborhood kids to tend the tollpike.

Many neighborhoods have free main streets, thanks to business associations that want to promote traffic. Though free streets are infinitely faster than stopping every block or two to drop five or ten C, they're heavily traveled by the surface class in their gross polluters and ancient electrics that invariably die where they'll stop the most traffic. And on free streets, few stop lights have been maintained, so I crept through most intersections with the siren screaming and fervent prayers to the gods of traffic.

I distracted myself from the miseries of automobile travel in L.A. by pondering what had happened. Someone was building humanoid chassis for AIs. Someone was building very good humanoid chassis. I wanted to believe that there were two Inspector Blakes. But when she—I wasn't ready to think of Kris Blake as it yet—had shown me her eyes before shooting Tauber, she meant for me to know what she was. She wanted me to attack her after she killed Tauber. Of that much, I was certain.

After that, certainty took a vacation. Assuming things had gone as the people behind Blake intended—and I had no reason to think otherwise—I was brought into it for two reasons: By shooting Blake, I encouraged Zoe to shoot her with the pistol Blake tossed in her lap, and, by shooting, I became as much a fugitive as Zoe. The planners had to assume that now I would do one of three things: take Zoe to the cops to prove my innocence, abandon her to run without any help, or stick by her knowing that my few resources—my maxed-out credit card and my web account—were no longer safe to use, since the cops and the killers could trace them with equal ease.

The case's rapidly widening scope frightened me. Someone had the copbots ready to move in as soon as the trap was sprung. If what Vallejo and Chumley had said about the bots that killed Gold and helped Doyle was true, these were regular copbots off the street, pursuing their duties one moment and obeying their secret masters the next, not counterfeits or bots stolen from the police repair shop. If, as it appeared, the bad guys could program bots through their link to CityCentral, they could have every copbot in L.A. at their disposal.

Perhaps their plan hadn't gone as smoothly as intended. The simplest scenario would've been to make people think that the copbots had killed a werewolf that had killed Amos Tauber, thus getting rid of Zoe and Tauber in one move. Maybe Blake had intended to kill me, too, to make me look like another victim of Zoe's werewolfing. Only it all went slightly wrong when I pulled the SIG.

But for a plan that simple, the location didn't make sense. Too much could go wrong in a crowded cafeteria. And that plan didn't leave them a way to recover the earring. Maybe they no longer wanted it. But if they didn't, why did they care about Zoe?

A more frightening possibility was that there were fewer uncontrollable elements than I first thought. If they had tapped Tauber's phone, they knew we would be meeting him at the university. If he usually ate at the cafeteria, they knew where to stage the murder where it would make a convincing werewolfing. Perhaps the explosives in Blake's Vetterli were powerful enough to kill humans—or perhaps only the first shot was powerful enough to kill humans—and the rest were barely strong enough to damage Blake's synthetic flesh. If the bad guys had wanted Blake to fall through a window so no one would examine her right away, they could count on her getting to one.

The degree of mechanization in investigating crime scenes simplified the planners' task. If the bots cleaning up the scene lied about what they found, who would know? Maybe they would substitute another body for Blake's. Or maybe they wouldn't bother. If an autopsy report claimed a woman died from an exploding projectile and a fall, who would insist on opening up cold storage to verify that her body was there? Dozens of people saw Kristal Agatha Blake die. Who would wonder whether she had ever existed? Our lives are collections of data. Killing Blake was probably as easy as creating her. The only thing I did not doubt was that the same people had done both.

The most frightening consideration was that Blake had been accepted by other cops as one of their own. Did that mean more cops were involved? Or were there more human-looking AIs out there?

Add another thing I was sure of: someone had used considerable resources to kill Tauber and frame Zoe. The result was the two of us on the run. There were simpler ways to achieve that than a werewolfing scare, but the killers' resources were so great that simplicity was not a consideration. Audacity was. By arranging something as conspicuous as an apparent werewolfing in a crowded cafeteria, they prevented the kinds of questions that would arise from a more discrete murder.

Now that Zoe and I were on the run, they would expect us to hole up someplace quiet. I wished I could think of anything else to do, but I couldn't.

Chapter Eight

In a blue-collar residential neighborhood in Mission Hills, I rang the bell at a shabby pink stucco house. Eddie LeFevre answered. A small man with a receding chin and dark, wild hair, he always dressed with a touch of discount style—this day's outfit were copper trousers, nullight boots, and a shirt whose fabric seemed like a window into the heart of a galaxy.

I grinned at him. "Hey, Eddie."

"Captain!" He stared at the mess on my suit. "What happened to you?"

"A long story. I need—"

"I been getting your money together—"

"We'll call it square if you can help me."

"How?"

"I've got a murder suspect OD'd on sleep darts in a stolen police van. If the cops spot us, we'll probably both be killed."

"Oh, man, when you call in a favor—"

"If you can't help, forget you saw me. We'll still be square."

"You want to make me an accomplice."

I nodded.

"Can I keep the van?"