The vehicle had gimbaled wheels, but they weren’t super-gimbaled, so she still experienced the occasional jolt as the SUV hit a depression or bounced off a small hump.
“Gizmo is reporting a series of drones coming from the direction of the ruins,” Will announced, ratcheting up the tension once more.
She glanced at her overhead map and saw seven red dots emerging from random locations among the crumbled skyscrapers. They were all converging on the convoy.
“Hunter killers?” Rhea asked.
“Some of them,” Will replied.
“What do we do?” McGraw said.
“Have the drones made any demands?” Rhea told him. “Or any communication requests at all?”
“Negative,” he said.
“Then keep driving,” she told him. She glanced at her companions. “Turn on your public profiles.”
“What about yours?” Renaldo said.
“Mine stays off.” Rhea’s public profile would be recognized as belonging to the Warden. So instead, she unbuckled her seatbelt and slid into the small alcove between her seat and the seat in front of it and ducked below the window. She turned off her comm node completely. “I hide.”
“Horatio, what are the chances these drones will be able to penetrate the walls of the SUV with their scanners, and detect her hiding there?” Will asked.
“Moderate to high,” Horatio said. “Unless…”
Horatio repositioned himself, as did Rhea.
“I hope that works…” Chuck said.
The drones reached the convey and adjusted their speeds so that they followed along on either side of the trailing SUV. Then they moved forward as a group, one vehicle at a time, no doubt scanning the occupants as they did so, and recording the identities of every passenger via the public profiles and IDs.
The drones flew alongside Rhea’s SUV. Horatio was seated above her; she’d positioned herself so that her torso and arms rested on his thighs, while her own thighs blended with his lower legs. Her knees were bent, so that her calves flowed away from his feet. To an external scan, it would look like Horatio was a single robot with really thick legs and extra-long feet.
The drones hovered outside for longer than they had any of the previous SUVs. Rhea held her breath, certain she’d been discovered.
But then the drones moved on a moment later.
The flying machines reached the front of the convoy shortly, made their last scan, and then departed toward the city.
Everyone remained quiet inside the SUV. If she was human, she would have been sweating bullets.
Rhea waited for the predator attack, but it never came.
After five minutes had passed, she finally let out a sigh of relief, then she slid off of Horatio, who pushed over. She hauled herself back into her seat and reactivated her comm node.
“We did it,” Renaldo said, laughing and breaking out into tears of joy. She couldn’t see those tears in the dark, but she heard them—there was a tremble in his voice, one that could’ve only been caused by a quivering lip. “We did it.”
Yes, they had.
She flopped back into her seat and reached across Horatio to hold Will’s hand. He held her hand right back and squeezed.
16
Rhea kept an eye out for bioweapons but saw nothing on the dark horizons. Gizmo would have seen any incoming creatures before she did, of course, but she liked the certainty that watching with her own eyes gave her.
Beside her, Will had swapped seats with Horatio. Under the light of a small lamp he wore strapped to his head, he worked on hammering the dents out of her arm with a diminutive mallet. He’d replaced some of the damaged servomotors with parts salvaged from the hunter killer, and he was attempting to restore the limb’s normal range of motion. A portion of her upper arm was still catching on the overhanging rim of the shoulder socket when she tried to rotate it, and Will was concentrating on that section now.
“You know, there are some who say the universe is a grand experiment,” Renaldo said while Will worked. “The rules for atoms assigned arbitrarily by the creators, to see what would happen. These creators prepared a vast tapestry of atomic building blocks, a stew of protons and electrons, which joined with one another to form hydrogen atoms strewn throughout space. Despite the vastness, these hydrogen atoms still gathered, because of the gravity that had also been assigned arbitrarily, and formed large masses called suns.
“The creators sat back and watched as the thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen in these suns produced helium as a byproduct, making the latter the second most abundant element in the universe. Other elements were created by that same fusion, the so-called heavy metals, and these in turn were spat out when the stars swelled to the supermassive and exhausted their fuel sources—without thermonuclear fusion to sustain them, they collapsed under their own weight. New stars formed from the resultant expelled gasses, but so did planets, courtesy of these heavy metals, and hence we have the universe as we see it today. The grand experiment is still running, of which that accident known as life is merely a small part. The creators must be thoroughly enjoying themselves.”
“What’s your point?” Will said, still gently hammering his mallet into her shoulder.
“No point,” Renaldo said. “Other than to prove the absurdity of existence. Everything we perceive as reality would change drastically with only the merest revision to physical law. A tweak to the gravitational constant. Dropping a few decimal places in Plank’s constant. Adjusting the speed of light.”
“Yeah well, that’s fairly obvious,” Will said. “Reality is based on the physical laws that undermine it. Change those, and you forge a completely new reality, one inhabited by vastly different forms of life. Assuming life forms at all. Try playing some of the more out-there MMORPGs, like Machine World, and you’ll see what I mean.”
“Can you imagine if those who created
