Armen Gharabegian - Protocol 7

Simon nodded slowly as he looked around. “Yeah,” he said. “I appreciate that.” He turned back to Hayden and said, “It’s incredible. Truly. But what good is it to us-what are you trying to tell me? Neither ship is finished, and you said they’ve cut off supplies.”

“I also said they were idiots. No one seemed to notice that there may not have been enough parts to make two more Spectors here, but there are more than enough to complete one more.”

Simon frowned at him. “One more?”

“Yes. Don’t tell me you didn’t notice the empty bay. Spector I is complete. It’s in the hold of a cargo ship, the S.S. Munro under the command of a captain named Doug Donovan, en route to the Southern Ocean for its test voyage right now.”

“The Southern Ocean? Off Antarctica? Why so far?”

Hayden smirked. “That power source I developed? Very experimental and quite powerful. It may work perfectly; it may not work at all. Or-worst case-it will work far better than we intended, and melt the Spector I and everything else within a ten-mile radius. So, the Southern Sea seemed like a logical location for a test run. Far from civilization, far from prying eyes…and inside the Antarctic ice.”

Simon blinked at that. It was just beginning to sink in. “My god,” he said. “It’s done.”

“Done and gone, yes,” Hayden told him, nodding. “But we can build our own.”

Simon looked around, still stunned. “Here? Now?”

Hayden gestured at the robots sliding between the two cradles. “It’s already happening. The peering eyes think this entire facility has been decommissioned. They ought to; I spent three days isolating it, making it look dead, and then instructed all the reactivated ‘bots inside to begin work on cannibalizing Spector II to complete Spector III. They will finish the job in less than twenty-four hours.”

“And then what? How do you plan to get this thing out of here without some massive airlifter that everyone can see?”

Hayden grinned. “Simon, we’re not just underground. You wouldn’t know it without looking very carefully, but we’re underwater as well. More than a hundred feet under the bottom of the Thames. And these,” he pointed to a series of huge hatches, each one taller and wider than a large vehicle, and tightly closed, “can let in the water at any time, while that-” he pointed to the curved dome of the ceiling. “-can open like the roof of an observatory.”

Simon didn’t know what to say. He looked at the roof, at the water valves, at the Spectors themselves hanging mutely in the air like massive steel thunderclouds. “Do you mean to tell me,” he said, “you can finish this ship in less than a day, then just open up the room and float it into the Thames, with no one the wiser?”

Hayden beamed like a schoolboy. “That is exactly what I’m saying. With the help of my friendly and obedient AIs and the technology you and I and others like us built unawares…that is exactly what we can do.” He was looking up at the massive submersible as it slowly came together. “Hey!” he called, his Scottish brogue growing thicker the more he drank. “What’s the estimated time of completion?”

A harsh mechanical voice spoke from the empty air: “Sixteen hours, thirteen minutes.”

“That’s it then,” he said, turning back to Simon with a mischievous grin. “And when it’s done, we’re goin’ t’ steal this bastard and float it roit outta here.”

Simon couldn’t stop looking at Spector III.

This changes everything, he thought.

Green Meadows

A car horn blared at the front gate, and Ryan nearly jumped out of his skin.

“What the devil?” he said. He pushed himself away from the most succulent pork roast he had enjoyed in a month. “Already?” he said to his soon-to-be wife, Sabrina, and the cook, who hovered worriedly at the dining room door. “I thought they said eight o’clock.”

“Well,” Sabrina said with fragile good cheer, “your friends always have been rather…exuberant.”

He smiled in spite of himself and put his linen napkin to the side. “Exuberant,” he repeated. “Spot on.”

The car horn honked a second time. “Why doesn’t he use the bloody intercom? My god, you’d think he was raised in a tube.” He stalked to the mullioned window and looked out over the spacious front lawn of the estate. A massive black car, Andrew’s Range Rover, was hunched just outside the wrought iron gate, lights glaring, and engine roaring.

The window swept down, and Andrew thrust his wildly tangled blonde head out. “Hoy!” he shouted, ignoring the electronic device almost at his cheek. “It’s me!”

“Idiot,” Ryan said, grinning. He lifted his head and called into the open air, “Fiona, would you please open the front gate for our guests?”

“Yes, Mr. Ryan,” replied the housekeeper AI. There was a distant grumbling as the iron wings spread wide; a moment later the Range Rover was racing toward the oval driveway. It lurched to a stop right in front of the entrance.

Like many of his closest friends, Ryan was very good-brilliant, in fact-with cybernetics. In his case, he was a near-genius when it came to a nasty little sub-branch of the discipline known as Remote Access Intervention, an almost entirely theoretical field that postulated methods of exerting control over artificial intelligences at a distance-robot mind control, to put it bluntly. Ryan also happened to be the scion of one of the country’s oldest and richest families, and with the recent death of his mother, he now found himself the beneficiary and prisoner to one of England’s larger fortunes.

What he loved most about his friends from university is how they really, truly, didn’t give a shit about his elevated class or his mountain of money. Sometimes, though, they could be a bit much.

Sabrina-neat, quiet, steely Sabrina-hovered in the doorway. “All of them?” she said quite seriously. “At once?”

He smiled apologetically. “I’m afraid so.”

The front door burst open, and Andrew flew in, a skittering mass of beer-fueled energy. Simon came in after him, far more calmly. He had his fists thrust into the pockets of his raincoat, and there was a weight, a grimness, about him that Ryan had never seen before. Samantha was close behind Simon, as beautiful and watchful as ever. Hayden, looking even sour, brought up the rear.

Sabrina looked from face to face and resisted the temptation to shake her head in dismay. Above all things, Sabrina was cordial. Well-bred. Polite to a fault. But she had no education in science, physics or otherwise, and even less interest in them. She recognized that her husband-to-be needed friends of his own, especially those who are accomplished in their own fields, but still…still.

She hadn’t wanted to host this little get-together. She had done her best to quash it before it began, but Ryan had been surprisingly and uncharacteristically insistent. “Simon wants to see me,” he said. “He wants to bring Hayden and Andrew and Sammy along. So that’s what we’re going to do.”

Sabrina resented it. She was not the type who enjoyed surprises. She liked-she required-that every detail of a social event be planned well in advance and executed flawlessly. Just throwing a few crackers onto a plate with some store-bought cheese slices and cracking open a keg was not acceptable. And yet, here they were, dripping dirty rainwater in her alcove and just waiting for her to leave.

The things we do for love, she thought bitterly.

Samantha was the first to speak. “Sabrina,” she said, stepping forward and smiling warmly, “I apologize for us barging in like this. I do hope we’re not causing too much of a problem.”