Heart of Steel (7 page)

“I shall—” Arthur began, but a loud click overrode him.

“What’s wrong with Scarface?” Mechanus asked over the speaker, sounding confused. “He’s a complete sweetheart.”

“He’s an eight-foot-tall shark monster!” Julia returned.

“Seven and a
half
,” Mechanus corrected her. “And he’s done nothing to hurt you since you arrived.”

“He
pulled my leg off at the knee!
” Julia exploded. She didn’t usually yell, but there was
no way
that Mechanus was this dense.

“Well, uh, aside from that.” Mechanus cleared his throat. “I could assign a different employee to make deliveries...”

“Not that cat-monster,” Julia said.

“You needn’t worry about that. Bagheera has been assigned to latrine duty for the foreseeable

future.” He sighed. “In any case, as we speak I’m working on a new companion for you.”

Julia put her hands over her eyes. “Oh no...”

“No, it’s really no trouble,” Mechanus protested. “I want to make up for your loss of Jim, so I’m building something cuddly to keep you company. It should be done in a couple of days.”

She groaned. She could only imagine what he was building in whatever lab he was in, and her imagination turned out to be entirely too fertile in that regard.

“Look, uh...” she said, choosing her words carefully. “I know you probably have lots of other projects going on...” She tried to think of hobbies that mad scientists would have, and came up blank. “So I wouldn’t want to keep you away from any of them.”

“My dearest Julia,” he said, and the metallic note to his voice was nearly inaudible now. “It is my greatest pleasure to provide you with your every desire. I only wish to make you happy.”

Julia opened her mouth to reply, but she recognized the tone. It was the same tone she’d heard from Jim so many times—he’d made his mind up, and there would be no arguing with him.
Crap.
She shut her mouth without saying anything.

“Your map will arrive in twenty minutes,” Mechanus continued. “I do hope you find it helpful.”

So did she, but likely not for the same reasons he did.

***

Arthur said,

Mechanus glanced up from his project. He was currently directing the surgical robots that were attaching nerves and blood vessels between the differ-ent components, but as he turned his attention to Arthur the cluster of spidery appendages paused in their work.

Mechanus asked.

Mechanus frowned. While most of his assistants happily obeyed the man who’d given them a new life, he’d made certain not to obliterate Jim’s mind entirely, in an effort to make him a docile companion for Julia rather than a dull-witted pet. This, apparently, came with some side effects. He would need to tighten Jim’s leash, then.

He mentally reached through the network and peered through the electrodes that he had implanted in Jim’s brain. Rather than accepting the surveillance, Jim’s mind recoiled, and Mechanus caught the echo of a thought—

—wrapped in undeniable hostility.

Mechanus transmitted.

Jim’s thoughts, while not terribly strong, were tinged with frustration and outrage.

Interesting. His thoughts were quite clear—if rather profane.

With a trivial effort, Mechanus took control of Jim’s new limbs and stopped his forward progress—he’d been heading away from the refurbishment lab, trailing half-attached parts.

would certainly be dead. Now, you have a new life. I suggest you try to be a bit more grateful for this.>

Mechanus chided, and, with another small effort, walked Jim back to the lab.

The echoing thought was starting to go red with agitation.

Jim was stubborn, though—more so than any of the other assistants he’d built. He mentally bucked and squirmed, trying to slip free of Mechanus’s influence, but Mechanus had been doing this for a lot longer than Jim.

Mechanus responded with lightning swiftness, grappling Jim’s mind into functional immobility before stuffing back down into his own subconscious. As he did, Mechanus caught a hint of Jim’s underlying thoughts—

—churning atop a froth of anger that seemed to feed on itself.

Sweat stood out on the right side of Mechanus’s face as he locked Jim away in his own mind.

Mechanus chided.

And with that he slammed the metaphorical lid down on Jim and backed out of his mind with a sigh of relief. None of his other creations had given him this much trouble. Even elevated to humanlike intelligence, the animal-based chimeras he made were so much more tractable.

Arthur asked.

Mechanus considered this. he said finally.

Arthur paused diplomatically.

Mechanus dismissed this with a wave.

at all
in three days.>

Arthur’s interface drone floated down to a point in Mechanus’s direct line of sight. His monitor bore a generic frowny face that still managed to look mildly disapproving.

Mechanus asked.

Mechanus protested. that’s
a hobby, one I’ve been undertaking for the past decade, and I haven’t heard you say a single cross word about it. But this... Julia may well be the key to unlocking my past, but I will need her help to do so. I can’t do that unless I can prove to her that I’m not some horrible monster. This is a major project, Arthur—and I need to devote every resource to it.>

Arthur was silent for several seconds.

he said finally, and the interface drone floated away.

Mechanus barely noticed the drone’s departure, so focused was he on the hybrid creation on the table before him. It was nearly complete.

Chapter

SIX

The map of Shark Reef Isle that Arthur supplied to Julia came in a distressingly thick binder. Of course, it had no index or table of contents. Fortunately, Julia was patient—or stubborn, depending on the speaker—thanks to the many hours she’d spent studying for her medical degree, and within a couple of hours she’d found Laboratory 8, where she’d seen what was left of Jim. From there it was relative simplicity to locate her room. It wasn’t labeled Guest Room—that would have been too easy, and in any case Arthur had said that Mechanus didn’t get any guests—but it was marked with a small heart.

...O-kay.

One meal and two more hours’ study later, Julia thought she might have found a possible route leading to an exterior door.

Measure twice, cut once
, the sensible voice said.
Make sure that is what you think it is before running off.

There was also the minor matter of patrols, in the form of robots and beast-men alike. She had to memorize the hell out of the route—and, by the looks of it, half a dozen alternate routes—to reassure herself that she could dodge the monsters that he had roaming the place.

And then there were the wolves. The
dire
wolves.

As she set about retracing the possible escape route—and associated hiding spots—for the thousandth time, she started to imagine how big these dire wolves would be.

She’d seen sled dogs that looked about as much like wolves as would likely be allowed in civilization, and guessed that a regular wolf would be about that big. For the dire wolves, she mentally scaled this up to about the size of a bear—comfortably big enough to be worrisome, but not ridiculously big.

And definitely not so big that an aluminum cane across the nose wouldn’t make them think twice about eating her.

She hoped.

That still left getting off Shark Reef Isle and back to civilization.

Well, if she looked around she might be able to find a solution to that. If she could perform an emergency tracheotomy with the barrel of a ballpoint pen, she could fashion a serviceable boat in a pinch.

You don’t even know which direction Hawaii is,
said the sensible voice, drawing her up short.

Well. There was that.

So it was that she spent most of that night studying the map, memorizing nearby landmarks and resolving to find out what all the little symbols meant. After checking and rechecking the layout, she found that the corridors seemed to be arranged in concentric octagons, connected at regular and, to her relief, largely predictable intervals that would make finding her way around relatively simple.

Just like at the hospital,
said the sensible voice.
It looks like a labyrinth at first, but once you get familiar with it...

Of course, there were still the guard patrols to account for.

She woke the following morning facedown in the opened binder, having drooled on the East Wing of Level Twelve in her sleep. She sat up, her spine crackling and her neck aching from the awkward position, and her right foot numb from having it tucked under her left knee all night. She stretched it out, grunting at the sudden flood of pins and needles that filled her foot seconds later, and feeling her hip pop.

Note to self: don’t do that again.

Presently the door opened to admit a thin, multi-jointed robot that appeared to be a cross between a stick insect and an IV stand, a multi-limbed, angular affair topped by a wedge-shaped head that put her in mind of a praying mantis, with large, luminous green eyes and a cluster of vertical slits where one might expect to find a mouth. It bore a covered tray from which vaguely breakfast-like smells wafted, set it on

the small table in the middle of the room, executed a very complicated sort of bow, and left.

Julia investigated the tray and found bacon, fried eggs, and toast, though the eggs were about twice the

size she would have expected from, say, chicken eggs. Well, she was in no state to worry about her cholesterol, and she needed to get up all the energy she could for her explorations, so she ate the offered breakfast, super-eggs and all.

Once she’d finished, she checked the door. As before, it was unlocked, so she poked her head out and looked up and down the hallway. The mechanical purring of machinery was louder in the hallway, especially now that she wasn’t in the presence of the little humming drone that Arthur seemed to inhabit. The floor was impeccably clean, and still ice cold under her bare feet. This latter observation reminded her that she would need to bargain with Mechanus for a pair of shoes if she was going to leave.

She listened as hard as she could to hear any movement above the background noise, and the vise of anxiety slowly clamped itself down over her heart.

This is a bad idea,
she thought, and it was definitely not the sensible voice that had been giving her advice up till now. This was the twitchy little rat in her mind that told her that breaking up with Jim would be more trouble than it was worth, that you don’t want to ruin your vacation by disappointing him. Usually she listened to the rat voice, as it led to a minimum of conflict, especially between her and Jim.

Well, by most standards their vacation was already ruined. She was the prisoner of a mad scientist and Jim might as well be dead. Apparently the rat voice wanted her to stay exactly where she was because doing something about it was
risky
. The rat

voice hated risk and preferred to avoid conflict as much as possible.

Clearly, the rat voice wasn’t going to be helpful in this setting.

“Screw you, rat voice,” Julia whispered, and she grabbed her cane and ventured out into the corridor.

She figured she had two, maybe three hours before her next meal arrived, at which point her absence would be noted. It sounded like a long time to scavenge possible supplies and learn the Tau of MacGyver to make something out of them, but without any way to reliably judge the passage of time, her prospects were dicey at best—and she still had to avoid any guard patrols, or else Mechanus would put a stop to things.

Up ahead, she heard someone approaching along a side passage, accompanied by a click-clack like the toenails of a very large dog against a hardwood floor. She pressed herself against the wall and held her breath.

I told you this was a bad idea,
sneered the rat voice.

Julia forced herself to remain still as the owner of the toenails passed by, revealing that it was more along the lines of a bear than a dog, huge, hulking, and shaggy, with jaws that looked like they could crush her head like a cantaloupe. The nails she heard clicking on the floor were six-inch-long, scythe-like claws, found on both its hands and its feet. It advanced to the middle of the intersection and paused, looking around as Julia, caught in what felt more and more like an ineffectual hiding place was close enough to smell the thing’s breath. She tried to make herself as small and unnoticeable as possible.

Any moment, she thought, the thing was going to turn and see her—

Please God don’t let it look this way let it go the other way please—

The bear-thing turned and headed away from her, and she silently let out a slow breath.

Bite me,
she told the rat voice, swallowing hard.
I’m not dead yet.

The rat voice fell into sullen silence, and she crept down the hallway in the direction the shaggy bear-thing had come from. Her bare feet made next to no noise on the metal floor as she moved, and she strained her hearing for any further sounds of people approaching as she peered in one window after another, looking out for either supplies to grab or minions to avoid.

The air in the complex was almost unsettling by its lack of organic smells; even the usually-sterile environment of the emergency room offered, alongside the odors of antiseptics and industrial cleaner, the smell of sweaty, unwashed people and various bodily fluids. Here, the sheer olfactory artificiality made the place feel like nothing
real
lived there. In a way, she supposed, this was accurate; everything that lived here, Mechanus had made.

After about an hour of exploration, Julia was about to turn and head back to her room when, through one of the windows, she saw a black box sitting on a table, apparently left there by a careless minion. She tried a nearby door, and it opened. She pushed the door open with a soft hiss of pneumatic hinges, and investigated the box. It appeared to be made of plastic, and was about the size of a paperback novel. Inside she found a roll of gauze, a roll of white medical tape, a pump-action spray bottle

labeled ‘For cleaning wounds’, a suture kit in a case, and a small pair of scissors.

She chewed her lip. All of this could definitely be useful, especially if she encountered those dire

wolves—assuming she managed to get away. At the same time, though, she probably wasn’t going to be able to conceal the whole thing very well if she wanted to try to slip away while, for example, Arthur was taking her from Point A to Point B.

She knew she didn’t have time to debate all the pros and cons of each item. She picked up the antiseptic spray first; at the very least she might be able to spray it in something’s eyes as a deterrent. Next she grabbed the suture kit and checked it. Forceps, three curved needles, nylon sutures, and a scalpel with a guard on the blade. All of these could be useful—especially if used creatively. She put everything away in the case and tucked it carefully in the waistband of her pants. She also took the antiseptic spray, likewise concealing it.

How much time had she spent here? Certainly no more than ten minutes, but there was no way to be sure. She arranged the hem of her shirt over her ill-gotten goods and glanced out the viewing window. She caught movement—someone approaching—and ducked down below the sill. At first all she heard was her own breathing. She held her breath, listening hard for any sign that the creature in question was either about to enter, or moving on. It walked past the window in great lumbering strides, and then paused and opened the door.

It swung inward, and for a few heart-pounding moments she lost sight of the creature. It entered the room, made a beeline for the first-aid kit—silently she cursed herself for not having time to close it up

again—and picked it up, closing the case with a click that sounded like a gunshot to her adrenaline-flooded ears. She jumped, clamping a hand over her mouth so she wouldn’t scream.

Her lungs were starting to burn from holding her breath, but she dared not move, clutching her loot to her chest so hard her knuckles had gone white. The creature—a wolf-monster—turned and left without so much as glancing at her. The door closed.

Only then did she exhale, feeling light-headed from fear and hypoxia.

Okay. Time to go.

She started back towards her room at the quietest jog she could manage.

***

Mechanus said, a note of satisfaction in his voice. Julia’s new companion was finally assembled—no longer a random assortment of relevant components, but a cohesive whole, wanting only a jolt to start its heart.

Mechanus waved off Arthur’s concerns.

bly bracing.> He stretched, feeling his right shoulder pop.

He threw a nearby switch. Electricity coursed through the electrodes embedded in the newly-created chimera’s flesh, including several arranged around its sternum and just below the ribcage. The chimera bucked on the table, arching its back and letting out a braying scream. Mechanus dodged out of the way as its hooves kicked wildly.

“Easy there,” he said as his latest creation caught its breath. Its eyes darted around wildly before finally fixing on Mechanus. He smiled at the chimera. “How are you feeling?”

The chimera snorted unhappily, and then lifted its new hands to examine them. It looked down at the rest of itself, and its ears flattened in fresh alarm.

“It’s all right. I’ve given you new life, and a new purpose. Do you understand me? Nod if you do.”

The chimera nodded its head.

“I made you to be a very special gift for a dear friend of mine. Her name is Julia, and you are to be her companion.”

The chimera nodded again, and let out a quiet whicker of comprehension.