The Last Good Man

Cold Morning

True and Alex wake to an intrusion alarm. It’s 0432. Both grab tablets from their respective sides of the bed. True holds hers at a distance so the image on the screen is sharp. The screen shows a video feed with the source labeled Brighton-Delgado-3. One of the squirrel mimetics. The device is moving in the forest canopy, skittering through low branches, gliding when it needs to, as it works to keep up with an intruder on the ground whose slender shape is intermittently visible past evergreen deadwood and half-gone autumn leaves.

True recognizes it. So does Alex. “It’s the mech from last night,” he says, anger edging his voice. “Heading straight for the house. Fucking mediots. What, they don’t think we have defenses?”

True watches the feed, on edge, her heart racing after being startled awake. She is struck by the speed and grace of the device as it dashes through the rough terrain. It disappears into darkness. “Damn, it’s fast,” she says, with growing trepidation. “BD3 can’t keep up.”

“Did we just lose track of it?” Alex growls.

“’Fraid so, love.” She tries to be reassuring. “The gargoyles will pick it up when it gets close to the house—but I don’t like this.” She shoves the blankets off. Stiff muscles protest the movement. Chill air shocks her bare skin. She reaches for a thermal shirt and jeans. “That thing is no mediot’s toy. It’s too sophisticated.”

He’s up too, pulling on trousers he left draped over a chair, tablet abandoned on the nightstand. “Who, then?” he asks. “Are you thinking El-Hashem’s people—”

“No,” she says firmly, dressing as quickly as she can. “There is no way they could have tracked us down already, gotten a weapon in the field.”

“A weapon?”

She pulls her shirt down over her belly and considers. “I don’t think it’s a weapon. I’m sure it’s just a spy device. Fairly sure—but I don’t want it close to the house.”

“Neither do I,” he growls. He doesn’t bother putting on a shirt, disappearing out the bedroom door.

She grabs her tablet and follows him downstairs, leaning hard on the banister and hobbling to ease her painfully tight calves. He ducks into the office, where they keep the gun safe. A series of sharp beeps as he punches the combination on the electronic lock.

She heads for the mudroom. Just as she reaches it, the tablet trills a second alarm. A glance confirms that the gargoyles have detected the intruder.

Her heart rate ramps up. It’s not a weapon, she thinks, reminding herself there was no visible gun, no room to hide one.

If it is a weapon, it’s a kamikaze. Fuck. Not a reassuring thought.

The tablet’s screen shifts to display a video feed streamed from a gargoyle on the roof. She watches it as she steps into a pair of rubber boots. The mech is thin, lithe, and nicely camouflaged, so even with adaptive night vision, it’s hard to see as it moves slowly to the edge of the undergrowth separating the forest from their wide front lawn.

She’s relieved to see it stop there. Its stick-thin legs bend as it sinks to the ground. Its torso can’t be more than eighteen inches long, shaped like a flattened loaf. Processors don’t take up much space, so most of that volume probably contains battery and sensors—or maybe explosives?

The neck retracts, leaving the stereoscopic camera only an inch and a half above the grass. It’s like the mech is settling in, taking up an observation post from which it can keep the house under surveillance. Given its matte-brown camouflage, it would be damn hard to see, even at noon on a sunny day.

The mudroom is cold. It has a musty smell. One of its doors opens into the garage, the other onto a concrete pad outside the house. The mech will be able to see that door open.

Alex joins her. He still hasn’t got a shirt on, but he’s got a shotgun in hand.

True shows him the tablet. “It’s at the edge of the lawn.”

“Got it.” Not bothering with boots or a jacket, he shoves the door open, brings the shotgun to his shoulder, and fires. True watches onscreen as a spray of leaves and dirt erupts from the spot where the mech was just a moment before.

“No good,” True says, shivering in the frosty current of air flowing in through the open door. “It must have been trained to react to the sight of a weapon. It was gone as soon as it saw you.”

“It’ll be back,” he says grimly, coming inside and slamming the door behind him. “Probably before we get the coffee brewed.”

“The gargoyles will let us know.”

But the gargoyles remain quiet. If the deer mech is out there, it’s smart enough to stay beyond the range of their sensors.

The sky is beginning to lighten as Tamara speeds along the rural road to ReqOps, passing small farms and stands of young forest. She’s heading into work early, but she’s not the first to arrive. Four compact cars are there ahead of her, parked on the road’s shoulder just outside the security gate. They’ve been there long enough to collect a sprinkling of yellow maple leaves. Worried that something is wrong, she approaches slowly.

Five people, wearing jackets against the cold, block the driveway. They turn to look at her. It’s a geeky gathering. Two wear AR visors. The other three are recording video of her with their phones. Independent journalists, she decides.

She edges her car into the driveway. They move back, but one man taps on her window glass, shouts his request for a short interview. Tamara rolls forward far enough to trigger the gate’s automatic inspection routine. Then she lowers the window, gives her best smile, and says, “I’m not authorized to speak for the company.”

The journalist tries to press his case but the gate opens. Tamara makes her escape.

She gets her second surprise of the day when she sees Lincoln’s truck already in the parking lot. As soon as she steps inside, she asks, “Friday, where’s the boss?”

The upbeat, androgynous voice answers, “Lincoln is sleeping in his office.”

“Has he been there all night?” she asks as she crosses the uninhabited lobby.

“He’s been there since twenty-two hundred.”

The security door behind the reception desk opens for her. “When he wakes up, tell him to take a shower before he comes to drink my coffee.”

“I will do that, Tamara.”

In the long south wing to the left of the lobby are classrooms, a bunkroom, and general storage. Tamara turns right, passes the large conference room, and approaches a second security door that also opens for her. She passes through it into a checkpoint. Her shoulder bag goes through an x-ray scanner. She walks through a body scanner. Results appear on wall screens but she doesn’t bother to look. “Find anything suspicious, Friday?”

“No, Tamara. You are clean.”

The system isn’t calibrated to look for weapons, which pass in and out of the secure wing all the time. It’s looking for surveillance devices. Tamara picks up her shoulder bag and heads down the hall, past the break room and suites of offices, doors closed and locked. Next is the tactical operations center for the ReqOps campus and across the hall from it, the mission command post. At the end of the north wing are utility rooms and the onsite network operations center, but Tamara exits the building through a side door before she reaches them, emerging into a section of the grounds kept secure by high fences and intense surveillance.

The cold morning air is moist and sharp with the scent of evergreens. Her breath steams as she follows a winding, wet concrete path down to the Robotics Center. On the way she messages Chris, asking him to assign someone to the front gate, to make sure the driveway stays clear.

Urgent tasks await her attention. Lincoln sent an email last night to let her know he’d locked up the recovered electronics in one of the robotics vaults and he wants an analysis ASAP. And True emailed an hour ago to report a very unusual and interesting mechanical intruder that needs to be identified.

But first things first: Tamara gets the coffee started.

While the coffee brews, she goes to collect the bags. She’s laying them out on a lab table, the coffee just finishing, when Lincoln comes in, freshly shaved, wearing a clean shirt. She nods in approval. “Good morning, boss!”

He ignores this and says, “I want you to look at the shit we pulled out of the Arkinson before you do anything else.”

Her eyebrows rise. Lincoln can be hard to read, but she has definitely seen him in better moods.

“Go over the drives,” he continues. “See if you can extract anything interesting—”

She stops him there. “Anything interesting,” she warns, “is going to be encrypted.”

“Do what you can. Have you got a lab in mind for the microbiota analysis?”

“No, I don’t. I have to research it. I’ve never done this before. Keep in mind though, that geographical analysis of microbiota is a highly specialized field. We could find ourselves caught in a backlog. We might have to wait days, even weeks for results.”

A sideways shake of his head. “No. We don’t have days or weeks. Find an outfit that will get it done. I don’t care if you have to send it to China. I need to know where that Arkinson has been and where it was serviced. I need a lead on Jon Helm.”

She puts one hand on her hip and cocks her head, troubled by his intensity. “Something else going on?” she asks him.

His answer is terse: “Yeah.” He doesn’t elaborate.

Tamara sighs, pours two cups of coffee, hands him one. “You got a budget for me?”

He gives her a figure.

“I can work with that,” she says.

“Okay. Thank you.” He turns to go, coffee in hand.

“Lincoln,” she says in surprise.

He looks back. “Is there something else?”

“Yes, there’s something else. True didn’t call you?”

He looks puzzled, then worried. “What happened?” he asks. “Is she okay?”

“She’s fine. She sent me a video. If you haven’t seen it yet? You need to.”

Lincoln walks back up to headquarters, breath steaming on the cold air, his color-gradient gaze scanning the shadows beneath the trees, the lowering gray sky.

The biomimetic deer is bad news, but more troubling to him is True’s failure to notify him of it. A flagrant intrusion like that should have been reported. That she didn’t do so—that she didn’t even copy him on her email to Tamara—strikes him as a criticism, an indication of broken trust. Does she still believe he lied to her about Nungsan?

He wanted to devise another explanation for her failure to report the incident. Maybe she convinced herself the device belonged to a mediot or an independent journalist—someone relatively harmless—but Tamara put an end to that hope as they watched the video.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she commented as the deer retreated on lithe stick legs, speeding backward into the forest. “Impressive agility, good speed, lightweight, and a versatile form. Just gorgeous.”

Lincoln would never tell this to any of his other people, but he’s seen the signs, read the writing on the wall, and he’s aware that his initial business model—to provide conflict-area intelligence and security, as well as specialized security training—might not survive its first decade, not when he’s in competition with gigantic corporations. So he has steadily boosted the financing behind the robotics department, seeing Tamara’s work as the best hope for the future of the company. Her devices are already generating income. One good patent and they’ll all enjoy an extravagant retirement.

In the meantime, he respects her opinion on all subjects and defers to it in the matter of robotics. If the deer was an off-the-shelf product, she would have recognized it—but she didn’t. “You’re saying the deer is a custom build.”

“I want to research it, but that’s my initial evaluation.”

This is concerning. Mediots and journalists don’t have the skill or the finances to bother with custom mechs. A custom build implies either a serious hobbyist or an operator with meaningful financial resources. A criminal organization, for example. Or another PMC.

Variant Forces?

If Variant Forces fielded that deer, it suggests they have resources or a network already in place in the Seattle area, and that they are way ahead of ReqOps in the intelligence game.

Lincoln wonders again: Are we at war?

Friday unlocks the door to the headquarters building as he approaches. After the chill of the outside air, the heat inside is oppressive. He strips off his jacket. Checks the time: 0728.

“Hello Friday,” he says. “Anyone in yet?”

The AI replies through his TINSL. “Hayden is in the break room. Chris has just arrived in the parking lot.”

A lesser AI would have mentioned Tamara too, but Friday’s algorithms are clever enough to deduce that Lincoln already knows of her presence. More significant to Lincoln: True isn’t in yet.

“Call True,” he tells the AI.

She picks up on the first ring. “Hey.”

“What’s your ETA?” he asks.

“Seven fifty at the latest.”

“I want to see you in my office.”

“I’m on my way.”