Half Life (Russell's Attic Book 2) (36 page)

“I’m glad
you
have such a well-developed sense of your own innocence, but the authorities—”

“I’ll take my chances,” said Pilar.

I turned to Denise. “And what about you?”

She was slower in answering. “Why should I run? I haven’t done anything wrong, either.”

“Like that means a damn thing!” I said. “If they want to find something, they’ll find it. People are looking for someone to blame right now, and you’re the one who created the robots—you’re right at the top of everyone’s shit list!”

“And maybe I should be!” retorted Denise. “Maybe I should have turned myself in from the beginning. I—maybe this
was
partly my fault; my hard drive was stolen right before all this started, and…”

Oops.

“…and maybe that was Funaki or Vikash. But I couldn’t have been the original leak; there wasn’t time. I should have known right away, but I was afraid—and Vikash was telling me—” She sniffed hard. “And I believed him! He was the one who warned me away. I should have turned myself in then, and maybe this all would have been avoided. Vikash wanted me to run, because it matched
his
plans!”

“He was
right!”
I said. “He told you to run because in his twisted mind you’re the only person he thinks deserves to get out of this. No matter what else he did, he was right about that!”

“Hitler liked sugar,” Checker piped up.

“Well, if he thinks I’m smart enough to—to spare, maybe I’m smart enough to stop him.” Denise lifted her chin stubbornly. “He has to answer for what he did. My team deserves justice. I can’t leave.”

I sank down on one of Miri’s chairs. God save me from stupid, headstrong civilians. Not that I wouldn’t have gone after Liliana with everything I had if I’d known where she was, but why did everyone else have to be as much of a moron as I was? “I don’t know what you want us to do,” I said.

“Find Vikash,” answered Denise promptly. “Turn him over to the authorities. I’ll be able to decipher his programming and testify against him.”

“If you go in to testify, they’ll still probably be scared enough to bury you, too,” I said.

“I know,” she answered, after only a slight hesitation. “It’s—okay.”

“Can hook you up with a good lawyer,” offered Arthur in a murmur.

“Thank you,” said Denise.

“Idiots,” I said at the room, but the word wasn’t as vehement as I’d meant it to be. “Look, I don’t disagree with you. I’d like nothing better than to bash Agarwal’s head in.” And take back Liliana, and give her back to her father, and let at least one person in this bullshit mess of a case live out a peaceful, happy life. “But you might be asking the impossible here. How do you even expect us to locate him?”

“Well, there’s the ’bot-recognition program,” said Checker. “If you take a look at the math—”

“I can do that,” I said tiredly. I reached out my left hand for a laptop…and paused. “Wait a second. Denise.”

“Yes?”

The Agarwal robot’s words floated back to me, stunning me that I’d forgotten them. I supposed I’d been busy. “Agarwal, he said—he said you’d know how to find him.”

She glanced around at the rest of us as if seeking help. “But I don’t.”

“No, wait.” I searched my memory. “Not
how.
Where. He said you’d know
where
to find him.”

“I—I have no idea,” she said unhappily. “I’m sorry, but I think it must have been a joke. He used to say that to me when we were working, all the time, if he was frustrated, or if he was annoyed at the rest of the team. ‘If you need me, you know where to find me—on top of an active volcano.’ And I’d always say something like, ‘Yes, I’d rather be hiking in Hawaii, too.’ But that was sarcastic, obviou—”

“What if it wasn’t?” I said. “Agarwal is an arrogant son of a bitch and likes knowing he’s smarter than everyone else. What if he literally was building himself a base on top of—” I pointed at Checker. “Active volcanoes in Southern California. Talk to me!”

Pilar spoke up first, typing rapidly. “There are some off Route 66, up north in the Mojave Desert. It looks like they’re a tourist attraction—”

Checker and Denise were also scrambling at their laptops. “Coso Volcanic Field,” said Checker. “It’s far, though, up past Bakersfield—”

“Oh, God,” said Denise, staring in shock and horror at her screen. “Mammoth.”

Pilar frowned. “The ski mountain?”

“It’s in the caldera of a supervolcano. I never, I never knew that…” She sounded stunned.

“You mean like Yellowstone?” said Pilar.

“I’ve got it, too,” said Checker. “It says here it’s one of the highest potential seismic threats in California, and if it erupts it’ll be a thousand times more powerful than Mount St. Helens. Holy—holy crap.”

“That’s where he is,” said Denise.

“That’s a hike, too, though,” objected Checker. “If he’s been building some supervillain base—”

“It’s not that far,” said Denise. “I take weekend skiing trips there all the time. Lots of LA people do.”

“That’s true,” Pilar put in. “I don’t even ski, and I know that if you ask anyone what the best place to ski around here is they’ll say Mammoth. It’s really a volcano?”

“Supervolcano,” said Checker. “It looks like the last eruption buried thousands of square miles. The entire western United States.”

“You gotta be kidding me,” said Arthur.

“Well, it’s not a serious worry or anything; it hasn’t erupted in the better part of a million years and probably won’t erupt for a million more, at least not…not left to its own devices…”

“You don’t think he’s able to trigger an eruption!” cried Pilar. “He’s not that crazy, is he?”

Nobody answered her. The question rang in the air.

“Shit,” said Denise weakly. I didn’t think I’d heard her curse before. “Vikash and I used to talk about going up to Mammoth. I remember now. And later I found out he didn’t ski, and I said, ‘What on earth do you go up there for, then?’ and he just laughed and said it was beautiful, and I—I agreed…”

I snapped my fingers at Checker. “You. Numbers. Now. I need every single possible piece of numerical information related to either supervolcanoes in general or this one in particular.”

“On it,” said Checker.

“Me, too,” piped up Pilar, her head dipping over her laptop.

“Mammoth’s a big place,” said Arthur. “We know where he could be holed up?”

“Big is an understatement,” said Checker, his fingers not slowing as he talked. “The caldera is like two hundred square miles, and that’s if we assume he’s hiding out somewhere in there and not caldera-adjacent.”

“I suspect I could find him.” Denise was sitting very still, like she’d disconnected from the world. “Or he would find me. He invited me, didn’t he? If I drove up there—”

“Not happening,” said Arthur. “You ain’t going in. This guy’s way too dangerous.”

Denise turned her head to face him. “I’m sorry, but this is my decision.”

“She won’t be going alone,” I said. “She’ll have her robot friend with her. Namely, me.” I grinned at Arthur. He didn’t grin back. I turned back to Denise, something almost like hope tugging at me. “Do you think we might be able to get to him before he dissects Liliana?”

“I don’t—I don’t know.”

“Russell,” said Arthur. “This guy
beat
you last time. And now it’s a chance he rigged a volcano to blow? You need a better plan. Heck, you need a plan.”

He was right.

I’d fucked up this job from minute one, and it had snapped back on me with several good beatings, a dozen people murdered, and a little girl in the hands of a mad scientist.

But I wasn’t the only one in this room. I didn’t know why it was so hard to remember I wasn’t in things alone.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m open to ideas.”

C
HAPTER 34

T
HE PROBLEM
with soliciting other people’s opinions, I reflected, was that they all disagreed. Vehemently.

“You’re not listening to me,” Denise insisted, the better part of an hour later. When she raised her voice it wasn’t loud, but it sounded uncharacteristic enough that it made you pay attention. “This isn’t a BattleBots competition—I need more information! I can’t take one look at what he’s got and then MacGyver a solution in seconds without any time or, or materials—no scientist could!”

A flash of memory, a thin black girl tossing off an acerbic remark—I shook the image away. The pain in my arm was making me tired. “I thought you were as smart as he is,” I said.

“Robotics, yes, but I’m not—I’m not
tactical.
I need to know what he’s working on, what he has, before I can figure out a weakness. We need to know more.”

“Maybe tech ain’t the answer, then,” said Arthur. “Maybe we don’t fight tech with tech.”

“Then what?” I asked. “What’s orthogonal to technology?”

Pilar looked up from where she was still furiously researching on a laptop. “What about psychology?”

“That’s not exactly my forte,” I said, thinking of Dawna Polk.

Pilar ignored me. “Vikash has an ego the size of a hot air balloon. And filled with the same stuff. I had to
handle
him just to get routine paperwork out of him. Sometimes that involved ‘accidentally’ putting a hold on his paycheck.”

“It did take finesse to oversee him,” admitted Denise.

“Why? He respects you,” I said.

“Yes. Yes, that’s true; that had to be true. But to get him there—despite the way he talks, the rest of the team wasn’t—” She cleared her throat. “They were all good. Sanjay was more creative than Vikash, and Esther was quicker, and—” She stopped. “He’s brilliant; I’m not denying that. But Pilar is right. He needed handling.”

“I don’t know how this helps us,” I said tiredly.

“Maybe…” Denise folded her lips together. “Maybe I can convince him I’m going to join him. He—he’s just arrogant enough to believe that could be possible.”

“You’re talking undercover,” said Arthur, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Maybe deep. Maybe for a long time, before you know enough to move against him. Ain’t easy, something like that.”

“And Cas sucks at it, assuming she’d be going with,” said Checker, not looking up from his computer.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Well, it’s true,” Checker responded without hesitation. “Plus Agarwal would want to take you apart eventually, and he’d see you bleed when he pricks you, and it would all be over.”

He had a point.

“On that note, quick interrupt,” said Checker. “We’ve got some volcano numbers for you. Pilar, send me the—there it is, thanks.”

I went to look over his shoulder; he minimized a chat window with Pilar, tiled the research on the laptop screen, and handed it up to me.

I sat down and skimmed, the numbers slotting into my brain, forming a picture, eliminating possibilities one by one by one. I could feel everyone else’s eyes on me, quiet, tense—the awkward, surreal wait of finding out if we were at the end of the world.

We were lucky, in a way. The region was so seismically active and prone to earthquakes that it had been under monitoring for some time, especially since a swarm of thirty thousand quakes in one year had hit a few decades ago. Add that to the eruption risk, and the caldera had been under a fair amount of study. I ran seismic indicators, estimated explosive outputs, buried my mind in the vast magma cavern beneath California, the overwhelming size of it dwarfing any puny efforts of humanity…

I blinked and looked up, something loosening deep in my chest. “He can’t do it.” The words felt almost fragile, hopeful rather than true, about to shatter even as I spoke them. “He can’t—he can’t. Nobody could. To trigger an eruption—it’s too big.”

“You sure?” said Arthur. “Some of the bombs we can make—and he might’ve built—”

“No. You don’t understand. It’s…the amount of destabilization he would need to make it happen…saying one man could manage that is like saying he could manage to knock the Earth askew in its orbit. Or lower the level of the oceans. Or break a continent in half. Well. Not quite. But what I mean is, this is too big. It’s too big a problem.”

“You telling me—ain’t no possible tech way?” said Arthur. “The man built a kid. You ain’t think he—”

“That’s nothing,” I said. “When I say it’s too big a problem, I don’t just mean intellectually. It’s too
physically
big.”

“I actually have no problem believing that,” said Checker. “We as humans are terrible at perceiving scale. The caldera’s huge.”

“Why else would he be there, though?” asked Pilar.

“It
is
pretty up there,” murmured Denise. “Maybe that’s all.”

“Wait—wait,” said Arthur. “Russell. You saying it’s no chance at all of this?”

“Well, sure, there’s a
finite
chance,” I said. “Just like there’s a finite chance the thing’ll erupt tomorrow naturally. But I’d rather play the lottery.”

Checker snorted a laugh, and the tension seeped out of the room. Pilar took a deep breath, grinning, and Arthur turned away, scrubbing his hands over his face.

“Hey,” said Pilar into the almost giddy silence, “I have a crazy thought.”

“What is it?” said Checker.

“Well—okay, this might be totally nuts—but we were just talking about handling Vikash, and…if he’s not blowing up the mountain, what if we do it?”

“Uh, because I just said it’s
impossible,”
I said. “Not to mention
why would you want to do that—”

“No no no, that’s not what I meant!” she cried. “I don’t mean we really blow it up. What if we tell him we can?”

“You mean bluff?” asked Checker.

“Yes! He’s the kind of guy—you can’t reason with him. You either have to manipulate him into thinking he wants what you want him to want, or you have to outdo him by so much you flatten him right out of the gate.”

“You agree?” Arthur asked Denise.

“Well—yes, I—I suppose so. I was his supervisor, so it was a little, a little different—ego stroking, mostly—”

“Making him think he wants what you want,” agreed Pilar, nodding.

“But there was one time—he had some grudge against Dana, and I told Vikash if he didn’t stop making snide comments about his code, I’d have Arkacite stop ordering Mountain Dew for the office fridges.”