“Death has always been a question—one of the great questions of philosophers and thinkers over the ages. But it can also be an answer, depending upon how you look at it.”
—Billy Jeeling, disturbing comment made to his son on the high walkway
Lainey thought these were very strange aircraft, though not nearly as strange as the function and scale of Skyship itself. She rode in a small module beside Devv, who rode in another. Connected by an electronic interlock system, it was a morph-baby. He had the controls now, although her module was the same as his, and she could take command if she wanted to. But she preferred to let him run the linked assembly. He had more experience operating police aircraft, and she didn’t want to make an operational mistake.
While the most common humbabies looked like fat bumblebees with rotors on top, these units were cubes, flat on all sides so that they could connect to other units in different configurations—side by side, front to back, or one on top of the other—and they had no rotors. Each module, propelled and controlled by tiny jets, had the blue-sky emblem of Skyship on its surfaces. The morph-babies were high-priced, but Billy Jeeling had never spared any expense when it came to Skyship.
Lainey and Devv had been looking for Billy for two days now, without any success. This morning they had flown past the high walkway that Billy favored, and had run scanners to see if he was concealed somewhere up there. Nothing had turned up. There had been no clues.
They’d been discussing the possibilities, whether Billy might have gone somewhere by himself on Skyship, to be alone for some reason, or whether he might have been captured by the enemy and taken to AmEarth. Devv hoped it was not the latter, but if it was, there had been no publicity about him being taken prisoner, and no ransom demand if criminals were responsible. Or, maybe he had been taken by someone, and his kidnapper couldn’t get him off Skyship yet. It was difficult not knowing.
“Skyship is huge,” Devv said over the speaker system between the modules, “but with all the surveillance systems it would be difficult for a person to just disappear. That’s especially true of Billy Jeeling, who is ultra conscious of security and protecting himself. No, I’m starting to think that he’s gone voluntarily to a hidey-hole, some private place he hasn’t told anyone about, one that cannot be detected by scanners.”
The morph-baby hovered over the broad green expanse of the airborne city’s central park. Below, people walked their dogs, and small children played on the lawn.
“Why would Billy hide? Why not come out?”
“Billy ordered me not to tell you about a troubling event, but I’m worried about him, so I’m going to go against his instructions. Lainey, when I was with him in his office Tuesday, a strange silvery substance appeared suddenly and pooled around his feet. Shockingly, it crawled up his body and merged into it. For several moments his entire body glowed silver. Then Billy reverted to his normal appearance, except his eyes remained silver. It was really weird, and terrifying when he looked at me.”
“My God! What could have caused such a drastic change in him?”
“I don’t know, but right after it happened to Billy, the attacking fleet was destroyed by blasts of silver light.”
“Are you saying he had something to do with it?”
“I didn’t see him do it, but it sounds possible to me. Circumstantial evidence points that way, though I can’t imagine his part in it. And right after the attackers were defeated, Billy disappeared. Coincidence? I don’t think so.”
“Very strange,” Lainey said.
“I’ve been thinking about it, racking my brain, trying to dredge up whatever I can. My father said something to me once, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot. He said—”
She cut him off, saying, “I notice you still call him ‘father,’ despite the terrible thing he did to you.” Lainey looked at him through the thin plates of plaz.
Nodding as he piloted the aircraft, Devv said, “Despite my shock and anger over learning I’m a robot instead of a man, and all my feelings that Billy betrayed me, I can’t stop remembering that he did create me after all—just as he designed and built you—and we would never have had the wonderful experiences we’ve had if he hadn’t done that for us.”
“It’s not easy for me to forgive him,” she said.
“But you still love him, don’t you? Just as I do?”
Lainey felt tears in her eyes, wiped them, but they kept coming. She wasn’t human, but had human emotions nonetheless—the emotions of Billy’s lost love Reanne that had been imprinted into her. She sat silently for several moments, trying to compose herself, didn’t answer his question.
“I’m sorry if I brought that on,” he said.
“It’s not your fault. You were about to tell me something Billy—your father—said to you once.”
“He said that the hull of Skyship is not what it appears to be. He mentioned it almost in passing, then changed the subject quickly, but what do you suppose he meant by that?”
Lainey shrugged. The wave of emotion had passed, and she’d stopped crying. “I don’t know. I’ve never understood how this ship operates. Only Billy knows all of its secrets, like Tobek before him. Did you see anything about the hull in the journals?”
“Nothing unusual, though the journals are not complete plans. Those must still be inside Tobek’s laboratories. But I’ve been sensing something about that particular comment Billy made, maybe the way he said it.”
She smiled softly. “You sensed something with your artificial sensors. That happens to me, too. I knew there was something unusual about you, before I learned you were a robot.”
“So both of us sense things, Lainey, though I don’t see how that could be part of our programming—so it must have to do with our human imprints.” He looked around. “I’m going to set the morph-baby down here, and then take it into one of the deep tunnels.”
“You’re sensing something again?”
“I am, and it’s strong.”
Devv kept the craft on hover-mode, looking for a place to land. Lainey heard the smooth, humming sounds of the small flying vessels around them, and beyond that, the busy, clamorous noises of Skyship City. She also heard the chronic spinning sounds in her head, the background noises that had always disturbed her so much, though now she knew what they had to be—her own robotic systems, perhaps when her mechanical pulse was higher than normal. That part she hadn’t analyzed.
Devv hit a series of controls, and suddenly loud rock music went on inside Lainey’s module, startling her. Many of these police modules were operated by robots, and she’d heard about this deep-bass, throbbing music, because for some reason the normal robots liked to listen to it when they were on patrol. Devv grinned, corrected his mistake, and landed.
On the ground, the unusual aircraft shifted its modular configuration, so that Lainey’s and Devv’s units were no longer side by side. After a bit of shifting and clicking, her module locked into place directly behind his. He was still at the controls as they rode a cushion of air up a ramp that spiraled past buildings, to the upper sections of the great ship.
“Billy favors the high walkway,” Devv said, “so I think we should actually go onto it, instead of just flying by and scanning it. Let’s check inside every connecting passageway personally, to see where he might have gone.”
“You could be right about this,” Lainey said, “because you and I both know Billy keeps secrets, and the ones about us could just be the tip of the iceberg.”
“Yeah, Skyship is huge, a vast network of secrets, and Billy is the gatekeeper.”
“Though I still care deeply about him,” Lainey said, “I hate that he betrayed me, leading me along and manipulating me for his own purposes—or for the larger purpose of Skyship, it would be more fair to say. But he should have been honest with me, should have told me in the beginning that I was a robot. Instead of playing my heartstrings, making me think we had something special between us, something deeply personal.”
Devv didn’t reply, just steered the morph-baby through the passageway as it spiraled upward.
“And you, too,” she said. “Instead, he played games with both of us—or maybe we were just a cruel experiment for him, and he took detailed lab notes on our robotic operations.” She paused, took a long, agitated breath. “Maybe I shouldn’t say so, but it is troubling the way he handled us, and stressful now that we know about it.”
“We both still care deeply for him,” Devv said. “But what does that mean for you? How does the way you feel now compare with the way you used to feel?”
“Hmm, I guess I feel badly bruised, so much that I don’t want to love him anymore, but I can’t help it. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yeah, I feel something like that, too—except as a son to his father, instead of your damaged feelings for the man you love.”
“Whatever I still feel for Billy,” she said, “I don’t think it’s a forced, programmed thing. No, it’s something else, something I developed during my relationship with him—because of my human imprint with the personality of his dead wife, and all she felt for him—but also because my original programming enabled me to come up with my own experiences, adding to the imprint.”
“Sounds plausible.”
Devv guided the morph-baby through a doorway, and onto the high walkway. Then he turned the craft slightly sideways and stopped, so that both of them could see a good distance down the central maglev track, and the walkways on either side for non-handicapped people. There were a handful of managers bustling along in both directions, as they often did, going from one building to another, or just getting some exercise during work breaks.
Using his security code, Devv opened several doorways, one after another, smooth and quick. Some led to storage rooms or additional ordinary enclosures, while others led into corridors. He narrowed the search parameters, tailoring them to where Billy might have gone, and finally he found two windowless corridors with maglev tracks. One was short, and led to a private reading room with a small library, one of several that Billy maintained on Skyship.
Another maglev corridor was much longer, and had rampways that led upward to the highest levels of the huge vessel—to areas that Lainey had heard from Devv were for maintenance and various mechanical operations. He’d also told her that some of the rooms in this area, and in other sections around the perimeter of the ship, contained atmospheric-stability and thruster equipment, as well as access points for the many nozzles that sprayed formula-gas into the atmosphere. The morph-baby rounded a turn, went smoothly up another ramp. At the top, they came to a stop at a blank perimeter wall, and Lainey saw something else.
She caught her breath, found herself staring at Billy’s famous maglev chair, and it was empty. He was nowhere to be seen. Her heart sank, as she worried about him.
Looking equally concerned, Devv stepped out and examined the chair, then brought out a hand-held scanner, which he pointed down two corridors, one of which ran to the left, and the other to the right. The scanner shone a pale orange light ahead of it. Then Devv ran the scanner along the outer wall they were facing, methodically checking every portion of it.
“Nothing,” he said at last, shaking his head. “The scanner shows no openings, no cavities behind the wall. It says we’re next to the exterior skin of Skyship, the hull, and if Billy got through it somehow, he’s outside the ship.”
“So we’re at a dead end?”
“Maybe,” Devv said, “but I’m going to do a little further investigation. I want to drill into the wall here, and see what’s beyond... if anything.”
Alarmed, she said, “Drill into the hull of Skyship? Couldn’t that cause a catastrophic loss of pressure?”
“Not the way I’m going to do it. Before drilling, we’ll seal this entire area off from the rest of the ship.”
“Like an airlock, you mean?”
Devv Jeeling narrowed his gaze. “Exactly. I’m not going to give up easily. I could be wrong about this, but we’ll see.”