Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [299]
‘She’s a fast woman,’ the other Wilde yells back.
Ax observes this somewhat incestuous banter, and looks up at Tamara with a scornful roll of his eyes. Tamara catches this and looks away from Wilde and Dee, with something like a guilty start. Ax sighs and reverts to channelling the news.
‘How long have we got?’ Wilde asks. ‘Talgarth can’t keep Reid and his crew locked up for long, can he?’
‘Nah,’ says Ax, breaking his trance again. ‘Reid’s calling up reinforcements, appealing to other courts, and in general kicking up a stink. I reckon Talgarth will have to let him go within half an hour.’
‘And then he’ll come after us?’
Jay-Dub shrugs, removing his hands from the apparent steering-wheel to wave them about in a manner which Dee can’t help seeing as dangerous, even though she knows it isn’t. ‘He’s after us now,’ he says. ‘He – or his defence agencies – have one or two aircraft and at least a time-share on a spy-sat, and they’ve got us on their scopes if not in their sights. I doubt he’ll take any action until he knows which way the political or legal chips will fall. Unless –’
His attention is diverted by the need to clear a barrier.
‘Hold tight!’
The crawler slows, lurches, almost leaps over a burning junk-heap strewn across the road.
‘Unless what?’ Dee prompts as she recovers from the jolt.
‘Unless he finds out you’re with me,’ Jay-Dub says. ‘Remember those bounty-hunters who came after you? They got burned pretty badly, but they survived and they’ll make a full recovery.’ He grins over his shoulder at Wilde, or at Dee. She isn’t sure just who’s the target of his irony this time. ‘Amazing what medical science can do these days. As soon as they’ve got over the shock and have enough of their faces grown back to talk, they’ll talk. About the fugitives being rescued by a robot.’
Wilde frowns around the company. Dee already understands, but she can’t tell the others yet.
‘What’ll Reid do then?’ Wilde asks.
Jay-Dub is attending to the steering again, by necessity or choice.
‘He’ll destroy us,’ he says. ‘With whatever it takes, and whatever it costs.’
So we cut, as they say, to the chase.
The crawler dives into a dank tunnel under a canal, at the far side of the Fifth Quarter. It stops, engines throbbing, just long enough for Dee, Ax, Tamara and Wilde to get out. Dee is the last to leave. A hatch in the side of the hold slides open, and one of the small crawling-machines rolls over and presents her with a sealed plastic box. She slips it in her handbag.
‘Goodbye,’ says Meg.
‘Goodbye,’ says Jay-Dub, the elder Wilde. He notices her tears and gives her a grin and a broad wink.
‘It’s not so bad,’ he tells her. ‘I’ve been there, and there’s nothing to be afraid of.’
Dee stumbles out. The tailgate slides shut, and the crawler accelerates away, hurtling out of the other end of the tunnel so quickly that, from above, no-one could have told that it stopped at all.
As the echoes of its passage die away, Dee sees tall, human-like figures emerge from the shadowed sides of the tunnel. Their bodies dimly reflect the faded, isotope-powered lights. Tamara and Ax tense, their guns bristling. Wilde has fallen into a dull stoicism, or delayed shock, and watches their approach without visible response. After all he’s been through, silently looming humanoid robots are too much – or too little – to take.
‘It’s all right,’ Dee says hastily. ‘Wilde – I mean Jay-Dub, told me about them. They’re friends.’
The robots gather around the humans, and jostle and peer with disturbingly human curiosity.
‘If you’re friends of Jay-Dub,’ one of them says proudly, in a resonant, high-fidelity voice, ‘you’re friends of ours.’ The eyes in its oval face brighten. ‘We have few friends. The humans here do not accept us, and the wild machines…’
Its shoulders have a human enough articulation to give the semblance of a shrug.
‘Wait with us,’ it suggests. Its eyes brighten again. ‘We have food.’
The humanoid robots – remnants of a bad production decision, decades back – do indeed have