The Phoenix Code (33 page)

Although he smiled, the expression showed more pain than joy. "I'm what Arizonix hired Raj to create. He thought he would have time to give them his work without revealing me, because they were so far along already. Now they will never know."

She felt as if she were being torn apart. Raj had never been real. "You want me to pretend you're Chandrarajan Sundaram."

"I am him."

Megan didn't see how she could agree to such a deception. "Do you understand what you're asking? You want me to hide one of the most significant advances in human history. You're all we have of the Phoenix Code. How we deal with your kind—it's being determined now, with you, with Ander, with Grayton. If you drop out of the picture, it changes everything."

He moved his hand as if to refuse her words. "I don't
want
to be the father of a new species. Let someone else represent our race."

Ander spoke flatly. "You work better. If the humans figure out why, they can fix me. If you hide, they have to figure out a new way. They might end up with another Grayton. Or worse."

Raj frowned at him. "I'm not responsible for protecting the human race against its own mistakes."

"You say you have a conscience." Ander leaned forward. "Then how could you let more people die?"

"I made my father a vow. I intend to keep it."

"And if Megan threatens to reveal you?"

Raj drew in a deep breath. "I could never cause her harm."

"Not even if I tell MindSim about you?" Megan asked.

He turned to her. "No. Not even then."

"What if Ander talks?"

Raj shook his head as if they were asking unjust questions. "I could no more harm him than I could harm my own brother."

"It may be moot." Ander stood up. "Our covetous gunrunners are headed this way. We need to move on."

Megan scrambled to her feet. "How do you know they're coming?"

"I'm a regular cornucopia of sensors," he said dryly. "Spy tech galore, all in my body."

Holding his side, Raj also stood. When he winced, Megan asked, "Can you feel the pain?"

He nodded stiffly. "Sensors in my body affect my neural nets in ways that mimic sensations."

Her concern surged. "Can you walk?"

"I'll be all right."

"In Las Vegas—in the bathtub..." She stopped, afraid the answer to her unspoken question would hurt too much.

He watched her with his dark gaze. "I feel what any man feels. In all ways. That was real, Megan."

She didn't want to tell him how much his words meant to her. But they also dismayed her. What did he lack that the true Raj Sundaram had possessed? A soul? Only God knew that answer.

Ander was watching as if musing on their interaction, much the way a scientist might observe the mating practices of another species. "We have to go."

"You lead," Megan said.

He pulled out the semiautomatic he had taken from Hiltman. Then he set off deeper into the field. In the growing dusk, shadows pooled in the quadra. They tried to go in silence, stepping with care to keep from crackling the bits of plant that had drifted off the stalks and carpeted the ground. Megan strained to hear any unusual noise, but the symphony of quadra crickets drowned out other sounds.

Then a man stepped out of the shadows.

It happened so fast that Megan thought she had imagined him at first. Ander came to an abrupt halt and she almost collided with him. Raj stopped behind her, his hand on her shoulder.

Ander moved fast, raising his weapon, but the man was already throwing a knife. Silver flashed in the shadows under the grain. The blade sliced across Ander's wrist, ripping off his skin, and bounced off the jack inside his arm. The gun spun out of Ander's hand and rebounded off a stalk of quadra, then fell to the ground out of reach.

The man intended to cripple; if he had wanted to kill, he could have used the Magnum he was pulling out of his shoulder holster. Megan had no doubt it fired the same bullets the men had used in the van. She remembered now. A speaker at the robotics conference had described those bullets in a talk on alloys. When cool, a twist of the alloy kept its shape; when heated, it straightened out. Serrated fins of the alloy curled around the bullet. As the weapon fired, the fins uncurled, turning the bullets into vicious hypersonic assassins.

The man was speaking into a palmtop, watching them, his gun ready to fire. With unflinching clarity, Megan knew he would kill her or Raj if it served his purposes. Given what she, Raj, and Ander knew about them now, she had no doubt their captors would rather destroy them than have them escape again.

Except ...
could
they kill Raj?

She saw understanding flicker in his gaze, followed by grief. He feared he would have to kill again. He and Ander were shadow and light. Ander had no compunction about killing when he deemed it necessary. But no, that wasn't completely true; it would have served his purposes plenty of times to kill her or Raj, the hackers, or their mercenary, yet he had held back.

"We'll walk back to the path." The man put his palmtop away and drew a second knife. "Don't try to run. I've backup within a few hundred feet."

Although Megan didn't doubt he had backup, she thought it unlikely they were that close. The desert noises weren't loud enough to mask the crackle of people coming through the quadra.

"All of you turn around," the man said. "Ander go first."

It felt like a band tightened around her chest, making it hard to breathe. They had Ander's name—and information meant power. The more their captors knew about them, the worse their situation.

Then Raj moved.

He went for the gun Ander had dropped, lunging as fast as when he disarmed the man in the van. Although he was slower than Ander in enhanced mode, he still had better reflexes than most humans. The man threw his knife, hitting Raj in the stomach. A dark stain spread on his jumpsuit, but he kept going, unstopped by an injury that would have put out a human man.

They were all moving now, the four of them blurring in the shadows. As Ander lunged for their captor, Raj grabbed Ander's gun off the ground. Megan began to drop into a crouch, her motions sluggish compared to the others. Their captor threw another knife, this time at Ander. The android dodged—

And the knife hit Megan.

The world telescoped around her, as if she were staring down a long tunnel. Ander shouted, swinging around to her, his face a pale, shocked oval at the end of the tunnel. Something hit her head hard, she didn't know what, perhaps the hilt of another knife.
Please, not my heart or my brain
, she thought with odd clarity, as if her mind worked at normal speed while the rest of the universe lagged in a bizarre dilated time.

Raj's face contorted in fury. With the same surreal slow motion that affected the rest of the universe, he extended his arm out from his body at shoulder height, aiming his gun at their captor, his motions relentless. The man had focused on Ander, misjudging Raj's ability to compensate for his wound, and he was an instant too late bringing his weapon to bear on Raj. He never had a chance to fire. A flash came from Raj's gun—and deep, slow thunder crashed all around them.

The man fell as if he were mired in molasses, his chest collapsing. His weapon slipped from his fingers, and he stared at them with dead eyes.

Ander was still turning toward Megan, reaching out to catch her. Raj turned now as well. Megan felt heat on her chest, but she had no other sensation in her body. Yet.

As Ander's arms came up toward her, the quadra plants tipped sideways. No, she was falling, Ander caught her, folding her into his arms. The shock of his touch jolted her back into a normal time sense. She gasped, staring at his face while her knees buckled.

Raj kept saying, "No, not Megan, no." He caught her as well, his arms going around her body and Ander's arm.

"I'm all right," she tried to say. No words would come. She made a choked rasp instead.

"Hang on," Ander whispered. Both he and Raj were holding her up now. They formed a trio, all facing one another. Ander turned to Raj, keeping his left arm around Megan.

Then Ander extended his right arm to Raj.

Raj had his right arm around Megan's waist. Facing Ander, he reached out with his left arm. At first Megan thought they meant to strike each other. Then she saw metal glint in the shadows. Raj's wrist was opening. As he shook out a cord with a jack on the end, Ander took a similar jack out of his own wrist. It looked impossible, two living men suddenly deconstructed into machines.

They joined at the wrists, Ander jacking into Raj's port and Raj into Ander's port. For one dazed instant, Megan thought they meant to exchange their blood. Except their life's fluid, the essence that kept them alive, was neither the engineered plasma of Raj's blood nor the lubricant in Ander's body. Instead, they offered knowledge, a passing of intelligence that went faster than any unaugmented human could ever achieve.

A miracle
, Megan thought.
I'm seeing a miracle and I may never live to tell anyone.

Finally Raj and Ander separated. Raj's face was dimming. Or perhaps it was her sight. "Can you run?" he asked her. His voice seemed to come from far away.

"Yes." Megan knew she was in no condition even to stand, let alone move. The blade had torn through her shoulder and chest, ripping huge swaths of tissues. She was losing terrifying amounts of blood. And she felt the pain now, bitter waves of agony that radiated through her torso.

It made no difference. If they didn't run, they would be caught. Far more was at stake here than her life.

They set off, struggling through the quadra field. Raj and Ander helped her stay upright, but after a while she realized she was also holding up Raj. They barely managed a fast walk.

"They're coming," Ander said.

Megan staggered, her mind hazing. She wondered, with eerie detachment, if she were dying. She tried to push harder, but her feet weighed more than lead and her legs kept buckling. More than anything she wanted to lie down, preferably for a long, long time.

Then she heard it: a crashing in the grainfields, distant but closing fast.

"Ah, no—" Raj groaned, then stumbled and lost his grip on her. With a cry, she collapsed, landing hard on her knees.

"Go on," she rasped. "Both of you.
Run.
Get to Mind-Sim, the real FBI, anyone." She didn't want to think what their pursuers could do with the technology Raj and Ander represented if they caught either android.

Raj hauled her to her feet. "No." Hanging on to her, he reeled forward, pulling her with him. Ander was under more strain now as well. His head kept jerking, and spasms in his arms or legs threw him off balance. He held on to Megan, gripping her as much to control his convulsions as to keep her from falling. The crackling of their pursuit grew louder, like lightning in the quadra.

They had stumbled several feet out of the field before Megan became fully aware of the change. A hill rolled away from their feet to a building far below—a farmhouse with lights on its porch and in its windows.

"Radio waves!" Ander shouted. "I knew it!"

"What the hell?" Raj stumbled to a halt.

"No, it's all right." Ander jerked them into motion again. "I got into the police dispatch system and sent them here. If we can only make it to them in time."

Vehicles were parked in front of the house, police hovercars with flashing red and blue lights. With a spurt of energy, the three of them began a desperate, faltering run down the hill.

Megan held on to Raj and Ander with her last strength. If their pursuers couldn't catch them, the mercenaries would try to kill instead. The scene below blurred, a smear of red and blue, all hazed in white from the porch lights of the house. Shouts echoed, voices calling back and forth. She felt as if her life's essence were floating out of her body, drifting away in the dry air. They had less than a hundred meters, but she would never make it.

"Come
on
," Ander said.
"Run."

Megan tried, but her legs wouldn't obey. They were almost dragging her now.

A shout came from the hill behind them. Then the ground exploded, just missing Raj, blasting huge clumps of dirt and grass all over the three of them. Megan had never liked guns, but after the past few days she would forever hate that violent crack, the sudden unexpected chaos when a projectile hit.

If she survived.

She was falling. Ander called to her, but she could no longer decipher his words. Falling, falling forever...

They wouldn't let her go, neither Raj nor Ander. They kept pulling her through the darkness. Another crack came from behind them. No, in front. Left? Right? She no longer knew. Two police officers were running in a zigzag up the hill, crouched over. Or was it one officer, multiplied by her double vision?

A misty police car loomed into view, its revolving blue and red light smeared across the sky. She, Raj, and Ander lurched into the circle of light from the porch, hanging on to one another as if they were drowning. Her heart pounded. Police surrounded them, their words piling up and flowing everywhere, impossible to understand.

One voice cut through the thickening haze. "—bleed to death!" it shouted.
"Get her in the ambulance now!"

She saw only blurs. More shouts. Raj told someone the blood on his clothes was hers. An ambulance loomed before her, its back doors wide open. She heard Raj's voice, desperate, telling her not to die, fading, fading...

"Raj," she whispered. "Good-bye."

Then she lost her grip on life.
 

The haze never changed. Megan had no sense of how time passed. Early on, Ander's face hovered above her. He spoke, terse and awkward, his voice breaking. Then he was gone.

Raj came often. He sat out there in the mist and talked: Raj, an almost perfect replica of a man known for his inability to converse, a hardship the original Raj had bequeathed to his replica. Yet with her, he had never been that way.

He told her wonderful things about the robots he had built as a child, about his hopes for a new era ushered in by computers and robots, bringing a prosperity that might someday extend to all peoples in all places. He talked about Raj's mother, a British musician who had met Sundar, Raj's father, at Oxford. Then he told her about Sundar's youth in India before the family came to America, weaving pictures both beautiful and heartbreaking of a country she had never seen.