Chapter 33

The hunter nudged the cover off the sewer entrance and stood back. There were no ambushing gunshots from below. He detected no breathing presence. Though he had no infrared vision, his hearing was quite keen. He hung up the plasma rifle. Then he took another drink of water, restored the bottle to his hip, and climbed down the ladder.

He was beginning to suspect the small one must have some sort of illness. The Ghoul had carried her up the stairs of the abandoned building, and the dust on the roof was scuffed in such a way as to suggest a blanket or a tarp had been laid there.

It was very definitely B2-09 who had torn down the fire escapes. Among other things, the Ghoul would not be strong enough. And, since there was no reason for the other two to be familiar with all of the unit's capabilities, she had probably done it voluntarily rather than under orders. The hunter did not like to see this level of function in his quarry. It meant she was thinking rationally on some level, and that meant she probably would not let him put the collar on her voluntarily.

It was within his mandate to destroy the CAU if he could not recover her, but he did not want to do that. Disposing of a DCUVRAP body would be difficult and time-consuming. That was a secondary consideration, however. More important to the hunter was the fact that he had never failed to bring back his target at least partly functional. He did not like to destroy others of his own kind if he could help it.

There was a dead deathclaw not far from the bottom of the ladder. The hunter glanced at it as he ran past, long enough to verify that it had been shot through the roof of its mouth. The wound was quite gory, but it was consistent with two rounds from a combat shotgun. The Ghoul was almost mechanically consistent in the grouping of his shots, making an easy task of what would ordinarily take long minutes and probably cost more than one life. The hunter had mixed feelings about this. In principle, he approved of the steady nerves and good marksmanship that it implied. In practice, it was probably going to cause him some inconvenience.

The hunter jogged on through the sewers toward what his map said was the Underground. He moved more slowly now, in token of the darkness of his environment and the possibility of ambush up ahead. One never knew how long it would take organics to realize they were being followed.

---

"Bell, how are you doing now?" Xen asked.

"Tracking," said Bell. Xen looked at her. The light in her left eye was steady. "I think I'm on top of it. I'd like it if we could find another way out of here, though."

"We'll keep an eye out," said Xen. "I so order it."

"Acknowledged," said Changeling. "The energy signature comes from that direction." The packbot raised one jointed arm slightly in order to point, causing the cargo net to swing awkwardly. Xen turned to look. There was a ramp up to another level, and beyond it she could see a short hallway and a door.

"Charon," said Xen. The Ghoul jogged up the ramp and went to try the door, muttering indecipherably. It opened easily. He vanished into the dim interior. A moment later he was back.

"It's clear," he said. Xen scrambled up the ramp. The others followed. The doorway led into a broad hallway with a staircase at the far end. Dust swirled in the air. The walls might have been painted beige once, but now they had faded to an unattractive dull brown where the paint was not scraped away from the dark surface under it. A steel shelf half-blocked the hall. Inexplicably, a telephone, a steel box and two little cardboard boxes of cleaner sat on the shelves. A dust mop leaned against the wall, and there was a rolling bucket nearby, just as if someone had been interrupted in the middle of some long-ago spring cleaning.

There were footprints in the dust of the floor. Large, booted footprints, leading toward the stairs. Xen looked around quickly, but saw no glimmer of heat anywhere near them. Whoever it was, he wasn't close by.

"Dey are old," said Charon. "Whoever it is was here a long time ago."

"Confirmed," said Changeling. "The signature is in that direction."

"But there's only one set of footprints," said Xen. "I wonder how he got out."

There was a small bathroom to the left as they went up the hallway. The toilet had probably been steel originally. Now it had corroded brown, and the plumbing was broken; a small geyser shot up every second or so. Xen wrinkled her nose and kept going. She was at the base of the steps when she heard the double click of the shotgun. Xen turned. Charon stood facing back down the hall with the gun in his hands.

"Oh, no," said Bell, at almost the same time that Charon said,

"Dis place is not safe."

"Up the stairs, Xen," said Changeling. "We will look for cover."

"There's nowhere you can hide," said Bell quietly. "It's him."

"Go," said Charon. Xen scooted up the stairwell, dread sitting like a lead weight on her stomach. Behind her, she heard Charon say, "We'll wait in t'stairwell."

"It won't do any good," said Bell's flat voice. After that, she was out of earshot in the upper hallway.

---

The hunter increased his speed in the better lighting of the Underground, though he did pause once to refill his water bottle at a working tap. There was no sign that his targets knew they were pursued, so he must be catching up quickly. The small one's foot speed would be slow, much slower than the big Ghoul or B2-09 could manage. The gliding robot would not, of course, be inconvenienced by poor footing.

He passed the pile of ashes eventually, but he correctly identified it as too old to be involved with his quarry. He moved on past the dead Ghouls for the same reason. He approached the stairwell with plasma rifle in hand. Nothing breathed there. He crouched on the stairs for a long time, listening.

At last he stood and walked up into the open air. His internal mapping said he should be on the bottom floor of a building on South Wilson Street. Rubble blocked any direct exit, so he couldn't be sure. He gave a cursory glance to the ascending ledges and the evidence of an old battle. That, while interesting, was not his concern. He could tell he was close. The fact that he still heard nothing meant his quarry was hidden somewhere behind walls.

The door at the top of the nearest ramp seemed a logical candidate. The hunter powered up the plasma rifle, listening to the low hum. Then he went softly up the ramp and stood beside the door. A shoe scuffed in the distance. The hunter smiled to himself and reached out to silently open the door.

There was no one in the dusty hallway, and no one in the small restroom. The hunter stood with his back to the wall next to the restroom's doorway. Something did breathe in the middle distance, though very quietly. But then, the Ghoul probably had no external nares to modulate and amplify the sound of exhalation. And B2-09 did not technically need to breathe at all.

Try as he might, the hunter could detect no other respiration. That was logical. The small one was no fighter. It would be in her best interest to leave the big one behind while she looked for a place to hide. That would mean they had somehow detected him. He supposed that was not too surprising. If B2-09 was watching along her back trail, she might well pick up his heat signature. His body temperature, like everything else about his external appearance, was human.

In that case, it was worth a try.

"B2-09, location," he said loudly.

There was a short silence. Then:

"Here," said the voice of the CAU. It came from the stairwell a few feet away.

"Accept B series command override 12-43-99," he said.

"Command override accepted. State your orders."

The hunter frowned slightly. He was very sensitive to patterns of vocal stress. Any B2 unit should be feeling the strain of traumatic experiences at this point, but there was something...

"Orders follow. Place your hands on your head and walk down the stairs to my location," he said.

"Unable to resolve your location. Please move within visual range."

The hunter thought about this for a moment. Then he chuckled.

"Nice try, B2-09," he said.

"Same to you, asshole," replied the gynoid's voice immediately.

"Does your friend with the shotgun know how much you're worth, B2-09? Does he know you're Institute property from the Commonwealth?"

"Yep," said B2-09. "He knows what your orders are, too."

"You're not going to make this easy, are you?" said the hunter. The big Ghoul was being very quiet as he crept down the stairs. He probably thought the hunter couldn't hear him. An ordinary human wouldn't have been able to.

"Not if I can help it," said B2-09.

The hunter stepped quickly out in the hall and put a glob of plasma through the stairs one tenth of one second after the Ghoul dove to one side. He got off another shot as the Ghoul tossed a grenade. The second shot missed as well, his target bobbing out of the way almost before his finger hit the trigger. This annoyed him more than a little. He was not accustomed to organic people being anywhere near as fast as he was.

The hunter seized the grenade on the first bounce and tossed it back up the stairs. He leaped back into the little restroom a microsecond before it went off.

---

At the top of the stairs was a landing. A broom stood against the wall, half-rotten and forlorn. Xen hesitated there, then ran to the left. Changeling came close behind her. There was a computer terminal on the wall, but it was shut down, and the door beside it was open. The hallway jinked back to the right again, so that she had to make a sharp turn. There was a narrow doorway in front of her with a big, dusty space beyond it.

Xen ran out onto a high walkway with a rusty railing. In front of her was an enormous room, surely at least two stories high. It was lit only by flickering florescents overhead. Half of them were dead. Two giant doughnut-shaped masses of steel bulked off to the right, hissing out dust and smoke as something spun inside them.

Turbines. This is a power station. There was another steaming giant off to the left. The control panel at the other end of the room from her still had active lights, a pretty display of orange and yellow. Xen moved toward the stairs, but her heart skipped a beat as she recognized a familiar three-wheeled shape at their base. She flattened herself back against the wall.

"Changeling," she said. "There are security bots."

"Negative for active power sources," said Changeling. "They are deactivated, Xen."

There was a shouted conversation going on somewhere behind her, Bell and an unfamiliar male voice. Xen couldn't tell what was being said.

But there is someone there, and Charon told me to go.

"Run silent and cloak your sensor," said Xen, and went down the stairs and into the dusty gloom. Up close, the sentry bot's upper body was canted to one side, its arms hanging lifeless. The room had too much open space. There was nowhere to hide. She could crouch down behind the generators, but anyone would think to look there.

I need something defensible, she told herself. She tried not to let the phrase last stand creep into her consciousness as she ran between the generators. There were a few giant crates, but they provided no more cover than the generators. She gave the control panel a cursory glance. There were two doors, one to the right and one to the left. Through the right one, she could see desks with computer terminals.

It's an office space. To her left, a corridor yawned. She took that way as the more hopeful of the two. An explosion rattled the floor under her feet when she was halfway to the maintenance closet at the end. Xen stifled a shriek with her hands over her mouth.

Charon has grenades. Maybe he got him. She dared not assume it. Xen looked into the closet, but it had no door, just a dead maintenance bot and some shelves. The corridor zigzagged off to her right. She followed it until it opened into another two-story room, this one perhaps half the length of the generator room. There was a workbench on one wall. She had to thread her way among a scattering of toppled barrels to get to the steel staircase up to the second level. A quick glance revealed only another maintenance closet and some cubicles. There was another corridor off to the right.

This room was darker than the generator room had been, and much darker than the starry night outdoors had been. Xen could see few colors in the flattened spectrum of low light, but shapes were quite clear. She hoped desperately that the unknown hunter did not share this advantage. That seemed pointless. If he was an android, like Bell, it would be ridiculous to leave him with senses that were no better than human – especially if he was supposed to hunt other androids.

The dust was getting to her. She was starting to feel a tightness in her throat again.

Epi has to wait. I have to find a safe place first. Get to cover.

Xen tried to breathe shallowly as she ran to the next corridor. It terminated in a closed security door with a terminal beside it.

Yes, she exulted silently. She could not stop to worry whether there was enough time. Xen powered up the terminal and went to work. The passwords were never very hard to guess. As in the current case, there were only so many six-letter words beginning with T and ending with R.