Counterpart (34 page)

“So, show of hands. Who's coming with me?”

Everyone votes to continue except Charlene, which doesn't really surprise me, since her role is pretty much a glorified chauffeur. I can only imagine this mission must feature as a brief, albeit interesting tangent from her typical routine—plus an opportunity to hit on a major icon of the resistance. I don't blame her for not wanting to stick around now.

But one other person has left their hand at their side.

My mouth goes dry. “Samuel?”

“I'm sorry, Rhon. But it isn't worth it.” While I expect him to glance away, he meets my gaze steadily, wearing the expression of a man exhausted beyond the point of fear. How much has guilt worn him down when I wasn't looking? “Maybe this—maybe it's better this way. Let the Russians finish what the machines started at Brooks. Let it end here.”

I can't believe what I'm hearing, and I tell him as much in no uncertain terms. “Really, Samuel? You, of all people, are willing to throw in the towel? You'd just abandon them?”

“I know it sounds cruel—”

“Not cruel. Cowardly.”

That shuts him up.

“Can a few people really be worth the risk, Commander?” Charlene interjects, not quite stepping between us, but very nearly.

“Yes,” I say, at the same time Samuel says, “No.”

I regard Lefevre and the rest of our small team. “Can you give us a minute?” As soon as they hop into the trucks and I'm sure their windows are rolled up all the way, I turn on Samuel. “Well? You decided to wait until now to tell me you had doubts about this mission?”

Samuel smiles bitterly. “I've always had doubts. I just didn't share them.”

“Why the hell not?”

He massages his neck with both hands, as if he had a headache. “Would you have listened to me, even if I had? I know you, Rhon. When you set your mind to something, nothing had better get in your way. You're like a bulldozer. And, to be honest, I figured you were right. We should save the clones. I wanted to save them, too.”

“But now you don't.”

“Now I want to save
you.
” His eyes plead with me. “Do you really think we can find and acquire the clones, and still get out before the Russians level the place?”

“We might.”

“And we might not. If Hawking was wrong about the timing of the attack, or if the Russians launch a nuke instead of firebombing the city, we'll all die. Are you prepared to trade your life, my life, the lives of everyone on this team for the off chance of saving a few—”

“A few what, Samuel? A few experiments? A few guinea pigs?”

He frowns, looking wounded. “I'm on your side.”

“It doesn't feel like it.”

“What happened to not forcing us to go through with the mission? To understanding if we want to turn around?”

That was for Charlene or Ximena or Lefevre, the ones here because of some misplaced sense of duty. Not you. I never expected you to step back and let me fall.

I turn around, stalking away for a moment, like I've watched Camus do so many times. Now I get it, now it makes sense. Sometimes you can't stand there watching as someone you love slips a knife between your ribs—especially when you're not entirely sure they're wrong to do it.

“No, you're right,” I agree. “You're welcome to go back with Charlene.”

“Come with us.” Samuel hovers right behind me. “Whatever you might believe about the clones, they're not you. They're not worth this.” I wonder how he's justifying this decision to himself, or if these words are merely rhetoric meant to persuade me. “Please, Rhon. Come back with me. We can figure out what's happening at McKinley. We'll find a way to fix it.”

It's tempting. He makes a convincing case. But one thought continues to go around and around in my brain, like blood circling a drain.
I can't. I can't. No. I won't abandon them.

Turning to face Samuel, I shake my head. I almost expect tears to come, but they don't. Peace flows into my heart instead, filling it like helium, so light it could float right out of my chest. “If I leave now, I'll always wonder if I could have saved them.”

“You won't have to wonder very long,” Samuel says quietly.

I look at my watch. He's right. We've already wasted ten minutes talking.

“Well, if you're determined to go through with this…”

He's never been a good actor. I can tell he'd rather be anywhere else, but I know he's going to offer to come along anyway. I cut him off with a sad smile, shaking my head again.

“No. I know you'd follow me to hell and back, but not this time, Samuel.”

“Don't go.” His voice is small and scraping, like a blade on ice. “Then I won't have to.”

Without any thought to our audience, I grip Samuel's face between my hands and plant a kiss on his forehead. “The resistance needs this beautiful brain of yours more than it needs my face. All right?” His lips are locked so tightly, they might as well be sewn together with thread. “Please, don't be angry with me.” I kiss him again, this time on the cheek. “Go with Charlene.”

I turn and climb into the Humvee, sitting behind Lefevre now, with Ximena in the driver's seat. Charlene's taking the armored truck, because it's slower, and we'll need all the speed we can get. What I wouldn't do for a Ferrari right now.

“Rhona…”

Samuel's still standing where I left him, and my name on his lips has never sounded more like the opening note of a dirge.

I point him toward the armored truck. “
Now
, Samuel. Get the hell out of here.”

I'm sorry
, I want to tell him, but it would be a lie.

Even with the sharp turn toward industry that came in the early half of this century, Calgary still retained a large amount of suburbia and land before the war. Now it's all dry forest and weeds, ripe kindling for a lightning strike—or an incendiary bomb. Half the city will burn the instant the Russians provide a spark. And if we're still here when that happens, we'll go up with it.

The machines have the Park surrounded, so despite being pressed for time, we're forced to take a more scenic route to avoid them, passing through the outskirts of the city.

Calgary has always been a major supplier of integrated circuits, and that didn't change once the machines took over. Semiconductor fabrication plants were among some of our highest priority targets during the final year of the Machinations, regardless of the innocent civilians imprisoned inside, forced to labor for the machines. According to the most recent intel we have, the foundries here have remained mostly intact, continuing to process the silicon crucial to running the machines' core processors. The higher echelon has carefully, and successfully, guarded the city all these years from any attempted bombardments or incursions. But they won't be expecting us to come from the interior of their own citadel.

And they would have had every reason not to a year or even a few months ago. But today, predators lie inert as fixtures in the street, planted wherever they were standing when the higher echelon shut them down, giving us a golden window of opportunity. The Bow River is low at the moment, but mud and sinkholes testify to its having broken its banks in the recent past, and near the Stoney Trail Bridge, now partially collapsed, I spot several scouts failing to manage the wild terrain. Other machines have fallen into craters in the asphalt and sidewalks, marked by previous conflicts. It would be a simple matter for a person to climb out, but the machines' programming isn't that sophisticated, particularly the lesser models. They're not equipped with enough balance or strength to extricate themselves, and they have no sense of camaraderie. It's every machine for itself unless instructed otherwise by the higher echelon. And right now, all that server brainpower is organizing combat against our people up north. At least that's one thing going right for us today.

As we circle back to Canada Olympic Park, minutes away from our destination, it strikes me as a good time to take inventory. Apart from a few close calls, we've managed to avoid any significant engagement with the enemy, but sooner or later we're going to have to fight.

Before I left, Ulrich took me aside and pressed a heavy backpack into my hands. “In case of emergency,” he told me after I asked him what it was for. At the time, I wished he was coming along. If I'd requested him, I know the council would have approved, and Ulrich wouldn't have refused. But I couldn't do that to Zelda. I was already taking her brother. If things went belly-up, I didn't want to leave her without a soul in the world who loves her.

Unzipping the backpack, I immediately smile. It's like a small-weapons grab bag. There are grenades, ammunition for almost every caliber gun, extra clips for our standard EMP-G, and a large, white canister, slightly narrow at the center, with a single tiny switch on the side. It takes me a few seconds to realize what it is. An electromagnetic pulse bomb. They're the type of thing you'd think we would have in spades, but the machines developed countermeasures against them years ago; they've proven more or less useless since.

I've never seen one like this before, though. This must have been the project Ulrich and Zelda have been working on together. If effective, it might just give us the edge we need against the machines. Would've been nice if Ulrich had mentioned it before, rather than simply shoving the pack into my arms and gripping my shoulder awkwardly for a moment. I ended up forcing a hug on him anyway. Serves him right.

I'm still hunting around in the bag when something slams into the side of the Humvee, causing Ximena to brake so suddenly I nearly fly out of my seat. My seat belt saves me from smashing my head on the dash.

It also saves me when an enormous arm smashes through the passenger window and tries to rip me out of the vehicle.

The predator's metal hand—if it can be called that—grips my body like a vice, and pulls. I lower my head, chin to chest, to avoid the roof, but my shoulders smack against the upper part of the door, and my legs drag against the seat. Somewhere underneath the panic, I recognize the machine as the same model predator that injured me in a McKinley training room last year, when Commander Evelyn Meir thought she could trick me into moving to her base at Churchill through intimidation. Meir programmed that machine not to kill me. This machine no doubt lacks those same inhibitions.

Ximena swerves to try and shake the machine from the side of the vehicle, but all it accomplishes is making me want to vomit. I think I yell for her to stop, but if I do, it's squeezed in between a long string of curses, so I'm not surprised when she doesn't hear me.

Gun,
I think.
Gotta get my gun out.

We're so damned close to the Sports Hall of Fame now. Like hell, I'm tripping before the finish line. I fumble uselessly for the EMP-G on my hip, but the holster's snagged on the seat belt. I could undo the seat belt—maybe—but there's a good chance I'd end up outside the car, at the mercy of the predator. Not exactly the solution I'm looking for. Time to outsource then.

“Mathis!” I shout to one of the men in the backseat.
“Shoot—it—already!”

This snaps him out of his stupor. Captain Mathis distinguished himself during Operation Pigs in a Blanket, and again during the evacuation of Churchill, earning the council's gratitude and trust. But it's been months since he saw action, and being a pilot, never this close before. I imagine it's a shock being in the thick of it. Fortunately, he regains his wits quickly and fires off a perfect shot that disables the machine.

I take full advantage of the ten-second reboot time—
Wait, ten? What happened to five?
—to extricate myself from the machine's grasp. I anchor myself against the window and launch a swift kick at the machine. It falls from the Humvee, landing with a thud in the dirt, rolling and bouncing away behind us as Ximena four-wheels it off the road.

Thank God the machines are still using their older models, here at least. It goes back to what Liz was saying before. Whether for want of resources or labor, it seems the higher echelon hasn't been able to implement their breakthroughs across the board yet.

“Safe to say, I think they know we're here now,” I say, looking back at a grimacing Lefevre. For all the excitement, he hasn't even broken a sweat. Then again, he wasn't the one almost sandwiched through a window just now.

With both hands firmly choking the steering wheel, Ximena gestures with her chin. “Look ahead.”

Machines are swarming down toward us from the hillside, like an avalanche of metal. Some get stuck in the grasping arms of the trees, but the majority of them are moving with surprising alacrity and speed.

Ximena reaches down to throw the Humvee into reverse—a sensible response—but I place a hand on hers, stopping her.

“Wait,” I say. I hear Mathis and the others moving in the backseat, murmuring their discontent with the idea of staying put. It's just for a moment, though. They can suck it up. “I have an idea.”

“There are too many,” Lefevre grumbles. “Even optimism can't fight that.”

“No. But an experimental EMP might be able to.”

I show him the large bomb Ulrich gave me.

“You don't know what that will do,” he says. “It might only take them out for a few seconds, but it will disable the Humvee for longer than that—
shit
!”

He reminds me of Zelda when he curses, his entire body physically ejecting the word.

He also has every reason to swear.

The machines have cut us off. They slouch into our path, gangly and rusted, covered in woodland filth, but still functional, judging by the way their red optics home in on us. Almost immediately, they begin firing; the sound the bullets make as they collide with the Humvee's hull is like hailstones against concrete. I duck down beneath the smashed window, praying not to catch a stray bullet, and return fire with my EMP-G over the lip of the door.

Ximena tries flooring it through the thinnest section, attempting to break the enemy ranks by sheer force, but the machines only slow the vehicle down. For every one that gets sucked beneath the car, devoured by the wheels with a mechanical crunch, four more take its place in the path ahead.

“I don't think we have any other options,” I yell at Lefevre. “Do you?”

But I don't bother waiting for his permission. Holding the EMP in my lap, I flip the switch.

It detonates silently, so unobtrusively I almost wonder whether or not it worked. There's no flashy explosion. No thunderous boom. The Humvee engine cuts out. The interior lights die without a flicker, and the speedometer drops to zero. I hear the sound of a hundred machines simultaneously shorting out. Some crumple into metal heaps; others simply stop.

After forcing our way out of the Humvee, we beat it to the Sports Hall of Fame on foot, roughly a five-minute walk. We pass the boxy, colorful Markin MacPhail Centre, with its blown-out windows and its dead, twisted shrubbery, and carefully navigate the disabled machines like tombstones in a metal mass graveyard. None of the machines reboot, though farther down the road, I swear I glimpse movement. There's no telling what the range is on this device. We need to move quickly.

As Lefevre shoots out the glass doors to the square, red-and-white building, I glance anxiously at my watch. It's dead.

Last I checked, we had two and a half hours left.

Now, under two.