Night Sessions, The (20 page)

“I had thought of that,” said Skulk.

“You had?”

“It occurred to me as soon as I heard that Hardcastle's back-up file had been moved to a secure server on the Atlantic Space Elevator. I quickly learned online that there have been numerous scenarios for such an eventuality ever since the idea of an elevator was first mooted. It has been the plot of so many movies and televison miniseries that it is no longer worth even making an elevator pitch, so to speak, for another. In the real construction, maintenance and security arrangements of the structures, terrorism has been planned for as thoroughly as accidents, freak storms, meteor strikes and military attack. Every conceivable window of vulnerability has been closed. It's not impossible that another might be found, but it's deeply implausible.”

“Oh,” said Ferguson. “Missed the memo. Glad to hear all that. Consider me reassured. All the same, I'll bet they haven't factored in fanatical suicidal religious robots.”

“They have,” said Skulk. “
And
there was a movie about it. Bomb-disposal
combat mech in the Faith Wars, becomes self-aware, captured by insurgents while pondering the meaning of it all, yadda yadda, converted to Islam or at any rate to Islamism by its captors, years later gets work on space elevator intending to accumulate explosives and blow it up, but is itself blown away at the last moment by the hero, who just happens to be the robot's soldier partner from the old days, now a security expert, whose ex-wife just happens to be the teacher in charge of the crawlerful of happy kids whose imminent fiery demise we've all been on the edge of our seats over, tearful reconciliations all round, credits roll, the end.
Return of the Jihadi
. I'm surprised you haven't seen it.”

“Somehow it passed me by,” said Ferguson. “I should get out less. Still, I'm not reassured. This should be investigated. I'll pass it on to the PNAI, with a forward to the Elevator security organisation.”

Doing that took a couple of minutes.

“Done,” Ferguson said to Skulk. “Meanwhile—any progress in there?”

“That's what I came out to tell you,” said Skulk. “Most of the business documents on the slate refer to Hardcastle's work with Hired Muscle. A few, however, relate to small robotic engineering jobs, carried out under the name of Graham Orr. This is, of course, consistent with what we were told by Mr. Connor Thomas. There are also several receipts for larger and considerably more lucrative jobs subcontracted from an engineering company based at Turnhouse but rather confusingly called Livingston Engineering, apparently after its owner, a Mr. John Livingston. One of them was for maintenance and repair work on six of the Fife coastal mechs—the ones covering St. Andrews Bay.”

Ferguson imagined he heard a note of smugness in the timbre of the leki's voice.

“Well done,” he said. “Well done indeed. Have you contacted the company?”

“Yes. Its website is down and its phone rings out. John Livingston's personal phone seems to be turned off.”

“Not even an answering service?”

“No.”

“Does the company still exist?”

“Oh yes,” said Skulk. “A quick link to security cameras around Turnhouse shows the office, closed and shuttered but apparently in use.”

“Closed for Sunday. Well, we can check that out tomorrow. About the coastal mechs. Did you ever get anywhere with the—what was it?”

“Forth Maritime Security Centre. No, I did not. When I called their emergency number I was told that my suspicion was not an emergency, whereupon my call was passed to their public-relations desk. I got the distinct
impression that I was not being taken seriously, even though I referred to my agreement with the Fife Constabulary. I would have raised the matter with you earlier, but other events have taken a higher priority.”

“It's a priority now, all right,” said Ferguson. “Imagine if the coastal mechs started shooting inland. Now that would be one damned impressive slaughter. Quite aside from the little matter of solving the bishop's murder. Tab me that number, would you?”

He called the emergency number and was given the same runaround as Skulk had been given.

“Fuck this for a game of soldiers,” he said.

He called Polanski.

“Stay in the space,” she said. “Let me deal with this.”

Ferguson wished that he'd picked a more comfortable spot than the alley to work from. The empty bottle-crate he was sitting on had no doubt already printed a pattern of hexagons on his buttocks. He sighed, shifted, and concentrated on the headspace, which he now shared with Polanski and with Donnie Wishart, the operator of the Fife coastal mechs. Wishart, whom Polanski had reached after chewing through the PR flack and several other grades right up to Wishart's superior officer, seemed to know what he was doing.

Like most coastal defences—forts, concrete pillboxes, land-mounted long-range naval guns, fortified moles, sea walls with gunpowder stores and archery slits, and the like—the North Sea coastal mechs had been built in response to an invasion threat that had passed before their construction had been completed, and that they would have done little to repel if it hadn't. Ferguson wasn't entirely sure from memory whether the scare of the time had been Spetsnaz assault teams, Norwegian commando raids, Iranian aerial drones or Flemish dinghy swarms, and he was damned if he was going to waste a second in checking it out, given that the matter was almost certainly the subject of protracted and inconclusive debate between different gangs of Faith War military-history obsessives.

The mechs weren't entirely obsolete. Striding along the shoreline or hydroplaning across the water, they now and then rescued swimmers or sailors in difficulty, intercepted the occasional boatload of militants from liberation fronts liaising with local refugees from liberation wars, and carried out remote inspection of incoming and outgoing ships for radioactive or other dangerous materials. Ferguson suspected that this last was a bluff.

Right now Ferguson was looking at one of the coastal mechs, via the
pov of a Fife Constabulary surveillance drone, buzzing along in front of the machine as it waded knee-deep in the sea along the stretch of shore still known as East Sands. It was on the grassy breakwater of that long-vanished beach that the Bishop of St. Andrews had been walking when he'd been shot. The machine looked like a small boat on long legs, standing about four metres tall, with a multibarrelled gun-turret and a bristle of sensors on the top of its hull. The legs could fold to bring the knees above the head, grasshopper-like, converting the machine's long flat feet to hydrofoils when it settled into the water and engaged the jet engine at its stern. This particular mech was freshly painted in naval grey, with only a stipple of young barnacles and a few green tufts of algae on its flanks.

“That's one of the six that got refurbished a few months ago in the yard at Inverkeithing,” Wishart said. “Their control centres were taken out and passed to Livingston Engineering for maintenance.”

“What kind of maintenance?” Ferguson asked.

“Just mechanical, like. Replacing some of the steel parts with shaped diamond and bucky and other carbon tech gear. You can make a housing as tight as a barnacle's arse, but as long as you have to have anything coming out of it, you need some kind of aperture, the sea air will get in, and then you'll get rust and bacteria. Slow but sure.”

“Could the software or firmware have been affected?”

“By the sea? No.”

“I meant by the repairs.”

“Oh, aye,” said Wishart. “The engineers would have needed access to the chip to check the controls were working.”

“So they could have corrupted it then.”

“Aye, in theory. But Livingston Engineering is a very respected firm. Started off supplying the military back in the Faith Wars. Still high security rated, you ken. Even has contracts to work on the space elevator.”

“Does it, indeed?” said Ferguson. “What kind of work?”

“Roller bearings and other moving parts for the crawlers,” said Wishart. “They things wear out fast, but Livingston Engineering's stuff wears out slower than most. They have a good reputation in that regard.”

“Well,” said Ferguson, “let's see if the firm's lived up to its reputation this time. Are we ready to roll?”

“I've got the shut-down command code set up,” said Wishart. “Ready when you are.”

Ferguson expanded the view, keeping the drone's close-up pov as an insert
while taking in a satellite image with the mechs’ locations tagged. Two of the mechs were farther back around the headland, another was patrolling the shore to the north beyond the harbour, while the other two floated a kilometre and a half out to sea and about two kilometres apart, in among the usual Sunday-afternoon jet-skis and sailing boats.

“Wait!” cried Polanski.

“What?”

“Just had a thought,” she said. “If these things are corrupted, or one of them is, mightn't the stand-down command be one of the triggers for them to run amok? It would be a warning that the jig was up and there was nothing to lose.”

“Hmm,” said Ferguson. “That's plausibly devious. Any thoughts, Mr. Wishart?” Wishart's face popped into view, the lines on his forehead deepening as he frowned.

“Hard to say, inspector. The emergency shut-down is hard-wired and it's in its own loop, it doesn't run through the mech's main decision centre. It's supposed to be tamper-proof, but with enough time and skill…I don't know. It's possible.”

“Well, shit,” said Polanski. “How do we get around that?”

“I'm thinking,” said Ferguson. “Give me a moment…”

“If I may make a suggestion,” said Skulk, “it does seem unlikely that all the mechs would react to a shut-down by going into action. After all, any corruption of their programs will be very difficult to detect. If it has been done, whoever did it could well expect suspicion to fall on only one of the mechs—the one that, in my hypothesis, was used for the assassination—and hoped to preserve the others for later use. However, we don't know at the moment which one was used, so the risk remains unacceptable. I propose that Mr. Wishart arranges for a spurious signal to be sent to the mechs indicating an emergency to which they all would have to react together, and that would lure them to a location with no nearby civilian targets. I would also suggest that we ask the Scottish Air Force at Leuchars to have an attack helicopter on standby.”

“Tall order,” muttered Wishart. “It's no exactly empty countryside along this coast.”

“Could you patch in the Forth Maritime view on the nearby shipping?” Polanski asked.

“Aye, sure.”

The view expanded again, now dotted with the locations of incoming and outgoing ships as well as the leisure craft.

“Skulk,” said Polanski, “could you run an analysis for us—find a ship close enough to reach but having a location en route to it optimally distant from possible targets?”

“None of this looks good,” said Skulk. “But the Russian container vessel SS
Morgenstern
, fifteen kilometres out and bound for Leith, is within the operating range of the mechs. Allowing for set-up time, the movements of other vessels, and the normal speed of the mechs, there are several locations where they could be stopped several kilometres from any potential target.”

“That'll do,” said Polanski. “Well?”

Ferguson tried to balance the hypothetical risk of the mechs’ reaction to a shut-down against the even more imponderable risk that they could be sent into action at any moment. It was impossible. He had no choice but to guess.

“Let's do it,” he said. “Mr. Wishart, can you flag up the
Morgenstern
as a high security risk, and let the mechs react to that?”

“Goes against the grain,” said Wishart, “but I can do it. Better warn the captain not to worry, though.”

Wishart went ahead with that, while Polanski called the base commander at Leuchars. In the ten minutes this took, Ferguson walked to the end of the alley, exchanged some chat with the constable on duty, and returned.

“Ready now,” said Wishart.

“All set,” said Polanski. “Leuchars standing by.”

“OK,” said Ferguson. “Hit it.”

The mechs responded instantly to the sudden upward spike in the security-interest assessment of the Russian vessel. The surveillance drone tagging the one Ferguson had been observing shot skyward, expanding the view. The mechs on the shore turned and thrashed into the water, and joined with those already seaborne in deploying their hydrofoils and starting up their jets. Six tracks streaked across the sea, at first almost parallel, then slowly converging.

Minutes passed. Ferguson could guess by eye just when they had reached the optimal position, and he was pleased to hear Skulk confirm that unspoken assessment. “Now would be a good time for the shut-down, Mr. Wishart,” said the leki.

“Sent,” said Wishart.

The effect was immediate. Five of the six white tracks stopped dead in the water, momentum carrying the mechs onward until friction slewed them to a halt. The sixth mech changed course, away from the path to the ship and now heading straight east across the North Sea.

“What the fuck's it doing?” Polanski's voice demanded.

“Fleeing to Denmark?”

“Take a look where it's actually headed,” said Wishart, pulling back their shared viewpoint to a higher virtual altitude. The real-time shot of the hydroplaning mech became a small section of Forth Maritime's image of the North Sea, upon which the remaining oilfields were helpfully outlined.

“Oh shit,” said Polanski. “Straight for the Fulmar and Auk rigs.”

“At this rate,” said Ferguson, “it'll be in range in less than an hour. Time for that call to SAF Leuchars, do you think?”

“Fuck yes,” said Polanski. “Hey, I've never called in an air strike before!”

“The first time's always a thrill,” said Ferguson. “After that, you just dread the paperwork.”

“Jee-
zus
! How cool is that!”

Dave Warsaw made to replay the scene of the attack helicopter blasting coastal mechs in the North Sea. He particularly wanted to admire in slow motion the chopper's counter-measures to the mechs’ anti-aircraft fire. Jessica slapped his wrist.

“If you want to wank over that again, you can bloody well roll your own,” she said. “I want to watch the rest of
my
news.”

“Oh, OK,” said Dave, settling back in his chair. “JNN it is.”

He was in a physically relaxed but mentally tense mood. It felt unnatural to be sitting at home in the flat at nine on a Sunday evening, but the usual gigs had been cancelled because of the security scare, and he wasn't too keen on showing his face around the pubs, given that he'd always made a little song and dance about what a brilliant bouncer Hardcastle was, and had made it something of a point of honour to have the robot as a signature feature of a Dave Warsaw gig. Besides, Jessica had an early lecture on Monday morning, and hadn't even wanted to eat out. The remains of their takeaway had still to be cleared up, but then, they had still to be completely finished. Dave picked up a pork-chop bone and scraped with his incisors at a spicy scrap on the end.

Jessica flicked a finger and the news selection they'd labelled Jessica's News Network rolled on, complete with an anchorman in the image of the hot Japanese actor who was Jessica's current screen god.

“Elsewhere,” the Andrei Katayama idoru said, voicing the words of some quite other announcer or AI somewhere in the global media, “the unprecedented but long-imagined possibility of a homicidal humanoid robot—and one with a religious motivation, at that—has drawn what seems to be unwelcome attention to the well-known but secretive robot refuge, Waimangu Science Park in New Zealand.”

The screen image in Dave's frames filled with an image of a high ironwork double gate surmounted by an arch decorated with iron cut-outs of Adam, Eve, dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and a long boxy thing that, Dave guessed from the stylised waves of iron scrollwork around it, was meant to represent Noah's
Ark. He'd known, vaguely, about Waimangu as a humanoid-robot reserve for some time, but not that the place was run by creationists. His fist clenched.

Behind the gate was a small complex of low buildings and a picnic area, and beyond that a green and misty morning landscape of woodland with mountains in the distance. In front of the gate was a queue of a dozen vehicles, all of them emblazoned with the initials of Australasian or South Asian news services, and a milling crowd of reporters and journalists.

The pov, evidently among that crowd, pushed forward with visible evidence of elbow work until its camera was almost poking through the gate's grille. Two men stood, feet apart and arms folded, scowling out. One of them was a stocky dark-skinned man who looked about forty, with black hair in a ponytail, wearing a park ranger's uniform. The other was a tall, gangly young white man in a lumberjack shirt and blue jeans, with lank brown hair hanging over his forehead.

“Hey!” said Jessica. “That's—that's—”

“The creepy Christian,” Dave said.

“Good grief,” said Jessica. “It's John-John! John…what was it? Hang on.”

In the corner of his eye Dave saw a sub-screen light up and flicker as Jessica ransacked Dave's own frames’ memory store, muttering, “Last year…August…Carthaginian…”

On screen, a voice.

“Why
can't
we interview at least one of the robots?”

“The park isn't open for another hour,” said the park ranger.

“Then there's no reason not to let us in,” said the reporter.

“You can come in with everyone else,” said the park ranger. “Ten o’clock.”

Mention of the time made Dave sit up. This was New Zealand, other side of the world, ten in the morning—

“This is live,” he said.

“Sssh,” said Jessica, busy.

The gangly young man leaned forward.

“Excuse me,” he said, with a sideways glance at the park ranger. “But I'm the robotics engineer here. I look after the park's animatronics, and I, uh, help out the robots with minor repairs and, uh, stuff. And I can tell you, there's no point in your coming in to look for an interview with a robot. It's not up to us. It's up to them, and they don't want to talk to you or anybody else. They're here to get away from human company. They've never harmed anybody, they don't know anything about this supposed killer robot in Scotland, and—”

“How do you know all this?” the reporter interrupted.

Good point, Dave thought. At the same time, Jessica let out a yelp. Dave looked at her. She was punching the air, but her face showed a sort of angry triumph.

The young man looked blank for a moment. “They told me,” he said.

“Does that mean,” said the reporter, “that they'll talk to you?”

“Well, sure, but—”

The park ranger stepped forward, cutting across.

“The robots are not available for interview, direct or indirect,” he said. “They have made that point clear. They have nothing officially to do with this park. They live here, that's all. This park exists to, ah, preserve and proclaim the natural wonders of Waimangu. If any of you wish to come in at opening time, I'll be happy to show you around. As a park ranger, however, I would strongly advise you not to attempt to go off on some chase after robots, for, uh, three reasons. One, it's unsafe, given the geothermal nature of the place—to put it bluntly, you're liable to get scalded. Two, it's against Environmental Agency regulations, as well as the operator's own by-laws, which are a contractual condition of entering the park. And three, it's futile, because the robots are a lot smarter and faster than any of you, ladies and gentlemen. And if you'll excuse us, we have work to do before the park opens.”

With that he nudged the young man's elbow, and they both turned and walked away, ignoring calls after them. As they were about to pass behind the corner of the cafeteria building, Dave noticed two things happen at once.

The gangly young man started, and raised a hand to his ear.

And beside Dave, Jessica said, “Good morning, John Richard Campbell.”

It took Dave a moment or two to trace what Jessica had done. Part of it was simple enough: she'd Ogled the name and face and location and picked up the guy's phone number. Dave would have assumed that would be futile, because the guy would be screening his calls—but he was apparently only blocking calls from the media siege. Far more impressive was that she'd used the search engine to find her earlier encounter with the man, and to zero in on a particularly intriguing moment of it—which, conveniently for Jessica's search, was the last moment before he'd left the club, and therefore the first that her backtracking had picked up.

“Remember me?” Jessica was saying, having introduced herself. “The Carthaginian Club, Edinburgh, last year?”

“Yeah, sure,” said Campbell, in a strained voice with an overtone of forced politeness. “Uh, pleased to hear from you.”

“Oh, don't give me that crap, John-John!” said Jessica. “You're fucking terrified to hear from me. I'm the last person you want to hear from.”

“No, you're not,” said Campbell, with some spirit. “That would be, uh, Arlene.”

At that Jessica had to laugh.

“Very good, John-John,” she said. “Now you listen to me, and listen carefully, because in fact you should be pleased to hear from me. I know something about you that nobody else does, and I'm the only person who can help you.”

“Just a minute,” said Campbell.

They heard an aside: “Cornelius, I'm just taking a personal…Thanks, mate.”

Sound of footsteps, then:

“OK, what's this about?”

“I've just retrieved some archive of your face, the exact moment you saw our security bouncer as you left the club. I didn't see it at the time, this is from the inside door camera. You recognised him, and you were totally confused, just for a second or two, and then you rushed out.”

There was a half-minute of silence.

“Yes,” Campbell said at last. “I did recognise him. I'd met him a day or two earlier. I knew him as Graham Orr.”

“You did, huh? And why haven't you taken this interesting information to the police?”

“How do you know I haven't?”

For a moment Jessica seemed nonplussed.

“Call it a guess,” she said. “Based on that guilty look on your face.”

“How can you—oh, you mean then?”

Jessica laughed. “Yes, and now too, as you've just admitted!”

“All right,” said Campbell. “I haven't told the police. Why should I? They already know him as Graham Orr, and that as Hardcastle he worked in these clubs.”

“And I know you don't think I'm stupid,” said Jessica. “So don't pretend you do. What the police would be interested in, just maybe, is where and how you'd met him before.”

Another long silence.

“That's kind of awkward,” Campbell said.

“That,” said Jessica, “figures. Awkward, yes, that's exactly what I thought. Now, let me make a wild guess here. You'd met him in your capacity as—what was it you said? A lay preacher, that's it. Hence your embarrassment at the time—and now.”

“That's about it,” said Campbell. “That's what I didn't want to tell the
police. I don't have anything to hide, myself, but I didn't want to get innocent, uh, people into trouble.”

“How do you know they're innocent?”

“I know them well enough to know
that
!”

“These are people in Scotland, yeah?”

“Some of them,” said Campbell.

“Well, that's the ones I'm talking about,” said Jessica. “You were in Scotland how long?”

“About a week,” said Campbell.

“And in that week, you got to know these people well enough to be sure they had nothing to do with what Hardcastle has apparently been up to?”

“I've got to know them better since,” said Campbell.

“How?”

“I've been in touch with them, uh, regularly.”

“Oh, right. You met them briefly, and since then you've been in touch. Great. And you're confident they're innocent. So why don't you contact the police here and tell them so? Because believe you me, John-John, the police are going to find these people soon enough. And they're going to find you, eventually. You'd do a lot better to go to them before they come to you.”

“I can't do that!” cried Campbell.

“Why not?”

“Because…” He hesitated, then sighed. “Look, I'll get in touch with them and urge
them
to call the police about their, uh, acquaintance with Orr…I mean, Hardcastle. OK?”

“When?”

“I can't contact them right now,” said Campbell. “It's Sunday where you are, and they don't answer the phone on Sunday. So in, uh, a few hours. Early tomorrow morning, your time.”

“All right,” said Jessica. “I'll know if you have or not, so don't try to dodge it.”

“How will you know?”

“Now that's something
I
can't tell
you
. You'll have to take it on faith.”

“Hah!”

“Who are these people anyway?” Jessica asked.

“They're just a—a small Church.”

“And does this small Church have a name?”

“The Free Congregation of West Lothian,” said Campbell, without hesitation.

“Hang on,” said Jessica. She Ogled.

“Doesn't show up,” she said.

“It doesn't have an online presence,” said Campbell.

“Ah,” said Jessica. “Why not?”

“Because that would compromise it,” said Campbell.

“Compromise its security?”

“No! I mean, compromise it spiritually. It's not that they're against the technology or anything. It's just that—look, this may be hard for you to understand, but it might become clearer if…if you look at all the online religious sites, even narrowing it down to evangelical Christian ones…some of them are sound, and there are precious resources like the Puritan classics and so on, but the great majority are just a source of confusion. The Free Congregation doesn't want to be part of that confusion. Its message would be lost in the noise.”

“I can sort of see where that's coming from,” said Jessica, in a more friendly tone. “But if you want me to believe you, you have to give me a name. Just one name that I can find online and check, if I have to.”

“All right,” said Campbell. “But only if you agree to wait until tomorrow morning before…whatever checking up you're going to do.”

“That's OK,” said Jessica.

“John Livingston,” said Campbell. “He's online as the owner of an engineering company.”

Jessica Ogled again. “Got it,” she said. “OK, John-John. I'll talk to you later.”

“I'm sure you will,” said Campbell.

Jessica chuckled. “You were kind of modest about your talents, last August, weren't you? Lay preacher, huh. Never said anything about robotics engineer. And for the Genesis Institute! Quite a prestigious job, I'm sure.”

“If you say so,” said Campbell, in a sullen tone.

“Oh, I do,” crowed Jessica. “Well, speaking of Genesis, here are a couple of verses from Genesis to think about. One is chapter 11, verse 31. The relevant phrase is ‘Ur of the Chaldees,’ in case you're wondering. The other is chapter 36, verse 31. Read that, then look up the first book of Chronicles, chapter 1, verse 43. Got that?”