FOURTEEN

 

Carter grabbed the end of the memory metal fragment and tore it from Fallon’s grasp. It felt strange in her hand, cool to the touch, with a texture like a handful of little springs. Fearing that it might ooze out of her grip, she shoved it into her pocket and darted for the right side of the car. She slid behind the steering wheel, clutched, and turned the key. As the engine roared to life, Fallon stuck his head in through the passenger side door.

“What are you doing?”

“Leaving,” she said, putting the car in gear.

Fallon’s jaw worked but she cut him off before he could articulate his protest. “Get in. If you want to fix this, we have to go now.”

“Ishiro, let’s go,” Fallon said without looking away, and then as an afterthought, he muttered, “Shotgun.”

As they climbed in, Carter checked on the advancing robot wave’s progress. They were still about a hundred yards away, and while not built for speed, they were moving faster than a human could run. Two of them blocked the road, while pairs on either side rolled across the landscaped greenspace, crushing topiary shrubs and throwing up huge clods of dirt with their metal treads. Getting around them was going to require more than fancy footwork and a plastic table.

As soon as the two men were inside, Carter let out the clutch. The car shot forward, and she hauled the steering wheel around, requiring almost a full-body effort since the car didn’t have power steering. She carved a tight U-turn that brought them back around onto the road, facing the construction-bots. “Is there another way out of here?”

“That’s the only road.”

Carter surveyed the off-road possibilities. The pavement was bordered by hedges, which the second and fifth robots were obliterating with complete indifference. Beyond the hedgerow, there was a grassy expanse about twenty yards wide. It ended at Lake Geneva’s shore on one side and a stand of trees on the other. But most of the open space was dominated by the robots at the ends of the formation. “Do those things have any weaknesses?”

Fallon blinked as if he found the question insulting, but then shrugged. “They’re built for heavy labor…construction. They aren’t war machines.”

“Could have fooled me.” She considered the statement a moment longer. “What does that mean exactly?”

“It means they don’t see us as an enemy. You can’t just splice in a line of code and turn a construction machine into the Terminator.”

“So you’re saying they’re here to… fix us?” Try as she might, Carter couldn’t see how the distinction mattered.

“I’m saying they don’t think strategically.” Then he added, “And they can’t turn worth a damn.”

“Why didn’t you say that in the first place?” Carter accelerated again. She pushed the gas pedal, let out the clutch, and the car shot forward like a robot-seeking missile.

“What the hell are you doing?” Fallon cried out, flailing his arms as if trying to stop himself from falling.

When the wall of robots was just fifty feet away, she slammed on the brakes and cranked the steering wheel, sliding into another U-turn, now only a few feet ahead of the advancing machines. In the rear-view mirror, she could see hydraulic manipulator arms unfolding above the tracked chassis like the legs of some gigantic praying mantis reaching out to crush them in its pincers.

Carter floored the gas pedal again, and the car shot forward as one manipulator arm, tipped with an over-sized circular saw, came down. There was a shower of sparks as the blade struck the pavement, mere inches from the rear bumper. She cut the steering wheel to the right and the robot made another grab for her, but as it did, it veered into the path of the neighboring machine just as it also tried to attack.

The air behind them was filled with an ear-splitting shriek and the crunch of metal being torn apart, as the two machines tried to occupy the same space. Chunks of debris began raining down all around, pelting the back of the sports car, even as Carter cut back the other direction.

The two robots were hopelessly entangled, and after only a few seconds of struggling, they gave up the fight. As the advancing line moved past the wreckage, the others closed ranks, making sure that the road was blocked. And they kept coming.

Carter made a wide sweeping turn, leaving the road surface, crashing through the hedges on the roadside, and carving twin furrows in the lawn like a teenager on a joyride. The tires slipped on the soft ground, spraying out loose dirt as they dug down, looking for something solid to grab onto. The car fishtailed and slid sideways as she fought to maintain control.

When the arc of the turn brought them back around, she straightened the steering wheel and gave the car a little more gas, headed toward the machine moving along on the right side of the pavement. Another human, or an artificial-intelligence capable of strategic thinking, might have realized what she was planning to do and taken steps to head her off, shifting the entire formation to block her. But the construction robots stayed on course, as if daring her to a game of chicken.

When she was still a good fifty feet away, she steered to the side, angling for the wide open gap between the machines and the trees. The robot responded, but its slow, jerky turn gave Carter all the time she needed to zip past.

She then angled the car back toward the pavement. Behind them, the machines were reversing course, but couldn’t keep up with the sleek sports car once she got the tires back on the asphalt.

As they shot down the road, heading back toward the complex of buildings and away from both the array and the wayward construction robots, Carter kept accelerating, winding out each of the gears in the five-speed transmission. As she shifted into fourth, the speedometer was already tipping sixty—miles per hour, not kilometers. Evidently, this ride predated Europe’s embrace of the metric system.

“You know how to drive a stick,” Fallon said. “That’s rare nowadays.”

She shot him an annoyed look. “Are you hitting on me?”

She almost added, My boyfriend won’t like that, but just thinking it reminded her that Erik and the others were all still missing.

“Of course not,” Fallon replied, though the mischievous gleam in his eyes suggested otherwise. “Just noticing.”

Her ability to drive a manual transmission had more to do with necessity than any particular love of driving. She had spent a good part of the last few years in remote parts of Africa, where older vehicles were more common and more reliable—or at least easier to maintain—than the newer, more technologically advanced models. Driving wasn’t a luxury activity for her, it was a necessary thing, and often a matter of survival. Sometimes her own, or sometimes survival for a village full of people a hundred miles out in the bush, desperate for a cure to some tropical disease. That had meant being able to drive whatever was available in any conditions.

Still, Fallon’s car was a pretty sweet ride. She felt kind of bad about what she was going to have to do next.

The turn-off to the garage flashed by. Ahead in the distance, she could just make out the entrance to the compound. “I don’t suppose there’s any way the gate is going to open for us.”

“Probably not,” Fallon admitted.

“Good thing these old cars don’t have airbags.”

Fallon nodded but then realized what she was saying. “Oh, you’re not going to…” Leaving the sentence unfinished, he reached down to the upholstered arm rest on the center console, and flipped it up to reveal several small switches.

“Bumper extensions,” he said as he flipped a couple of them, then straightened in his seat, gripping the dashboard with both hands in anticipation of the impending crash.

Carter didn’t know what he was talking about, and she was too focused on the approaching gate to care. Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed movement. A driverless electric cart, possibly the same one that had delivered her to Fallon’s building, was rolling down a side-road on an intercept course.

She pushed the car harder, winding out fourth gear, and shot past the intersection before the cart could cut her off. There was a slight jolt as the robotic vehicle grazed the sports car’s rear end, but they were going too fast for it to make any difference.

Carter kept watch for more kamikaze carts as the gate drew closer, but the hacker was out of tricks. She gripped the wheel and kept the pedal to the floor, closing the remaining distance so quickly that it came as a surprise when the front bumper slammed into the metal gate.

The barrier flipped up and spun around in mid-air, registering a glancing blow on the car’s roof. Carter felt the impact shudder through the vehicle’s frame and heard the engine whine in protest for a moment, but that was it. She downshifted as they reached the main highway. Traffic was light, and she barely touched the brakes as they skidded through the turn, crossing to the far lane that would take them back to Geneva. Then she accelerated again.

Beside her, Fallon let out his breath in a long relieved sigh. “Not bad. I’m glad we’re on the same side. Though you are kind of hard on my toys.”

“Your toys tried to kill us.” She glanced over at him, wondering if they really were on the same side. “We need to get somewhere safe and figure out our next move.”

“Our next move is taking back Tomorrowland. That hacker may have caught me with my pants down, but he’s played his hand. It’s my turn now, and payback’s a bitch.”

Despite the bravado, Carter knew he was right about their priorities. Removing the memory metal from the transmitter had not shut the Black Knight satellite down, so regaining control of the array was imperative. “I have a friend who might be able to help with that.”

She was about to dig out her phone to call Dourado, but a flash of color in the rear view mirror stopped her. A familiar-looking blue car had just turned onto the highway behind them. “Is that your Tesla?”

Fallon craned his head around. “Son of a bitch,” he snarled.

“I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’ That must be our hacker.”

Fallon shook his head miserably. “No. It’s autonomous.”

Two more cars, one a cream-colored sedan, the other a sleek black coupe emerged from the Tomorrowland gate to join the pursuit. She couldn’t discern the make or model, but there was little question that they were also from Fallon’s stable. “You turned your cars into robots?”

“No, they come that way. Self-driving cars are inevitable, so a lot of car makers are getting a jump on it by pre-installing the hardware in newer models. Actually, the design uses some of my patents, so I guess you could say it was me.”

The significance of that was not lost on Carter. Their unknown foe could turn any autonomous car on the road against them.

The blue car was closing the distance. In terms of speed, the Tesla was more than a match for the older, classic sports car, but its real advantage was the computer brain controlling it, informed by an array of cameras, radar, and laser sensors, with reaction time measured in picoseconds and no fear whatsoever. The black car swung out from behind the Tesla and pulled up alongside it, matching its speed. Both vehicles were so close that Carter could see their distinctive hood ornaments—the stylized T with wings of Tesla motors on the blue car, and the blue and white checkered circle that identified the coupe as a Beemer.

Fallon saw them, too, and to Carter’s astonishment he gave a little laugh. “Ha. Watch this.”

He reached for the armrest again, and this time Carter could not help but glance down as he threw one of the switches.

A cloud of black smoke billowed out behind the car, blocking her view of the two pursuit vehicles. “A smoke screen?” she asked, incredulous. “Seriously?”

“Whoops,” Fallon said. “Wrong one.” He flipped a different switch.

Although the two vehicles were still partially hidden by the dense cloud, Carter could tell that something was happening. The blue car swerved into the coupe, and then both cars were spinning as if they had hit a patch of ice…

Or an oil slick.

The BMW went sideways and then flipped and started tumbling down the highway before disappearing once more in the smoke. The Tesla veered off the road and crashed into a fence.

“You made a spy car,” Carter said, with more than a little disgust. “Or are you going to tell me those are standard features, too?”

“They are for this car,” Fallon said with a grin. “This is the actual Aston Martin DB5 from Goldfinger. All the gadgets from the movie were actually built into the car. I got it at auction a few years ago.”

The smoke screen petered out, but there was no sign of pursuit behind them. Or any other traffic for that matter. The opposite lane was turning into a parking lot.

“Someone sold you a car with actual working spy weapons? Oil slicks and machine guns? Missiles?”

“There aren’t any missiles,” Fallon replied, sounding just a little rueful. “And the machine guns were just props. I had to switch those out, but believe me, I wouldn’t have paid what I did for this car unless the gadgets were functional. Never would have dreamed I’d actually get to use them.”

“You just dumped oil all over a Swiss highway, and all you can think is ‘dreams come true?’” Even as she said it, she remembered that she was up to her neck in this mess because of Fallon’s reckless—almost sociopathic—disregard for consequences.

“You said it yourself. My toys are trying to kill us. Well, I just used one of my toys to save us. And I am letting you drive.”

Carter had no argument for either point. “Just don’t use the oil slick again if you can help it.”

“Couldn’t even if I wanted to. It’s a one-shot deal. Smoke screen and oil slick are gone, but we still have road spikes, tire-shredder hubcaps, and of course the machine guns. Oh, and don’t worry about the ejection seat. That was never functional.”

“Pity,” she muttered, entertaining a fantasy of pushing a button and shooting Fallon through the roof. She shook her head to clear the image. “If we can’t get back into Tomorrowland, we may need to come up with some alternatives. What would it take to build a new transmitter?”

“Well, the Roswell Fragment is the critical component. Aside from that, any large radio telescope with a 10 gigahertz frequency transmitter should suffice.” Fallon looked back at Tanaka, as if for confirmation. “There’s at least a dozen of them in Europe. I think the closest one is in France.”

“Finding the right antenna isn’t the problem,” Tanaka said. “It’s time. We’re—”

“Look out!”

Carter had been watching the road the whole time but saw nothing to warrant Fallon’s cry of alarm. Unsure of where to look for the threat, she chose the only route that she knew was clear—straight ahead—and floored the gas pedal again.

The Aston Martin shot forward again. As they raced ahead, she spied movement in the mirrors—not a car, but something else. A flying something.

“It’s a Stork,” Fallon sputtered, anger in his tone for the first time since the nightmare began. He swore, punching the dashboard. “Bastards. They hacked the Storks.”

The Storks, Carter recalled, were Fallon’s robot delivery drones, the source of the fortune that had made everything else possible.

Robots, self-driving cars, and now delivery drones, she thought. This is how the robot apocalypse begins.

The drone—a hybrid construct of airfoils and helicopter rotors about the size of a bicycle turned on its side—appeared in the mirror, falling further and further behind with each passing second. Advanced technology or not, the Storks didn’t have the power to keep up with the Aston Martin.

There was a flash of movement in front of them, and before Carter could react, another Stork slammed into the windshield. The steering wheel spun through her fingers—not a robot seizing control of the car, but simply momentum and acceleration. Then the world turned upside down.