Page 11 of Operation Iron Heart

“The flight won’t last long,” he said, trying to calm her. “Our camouflage unfortunately means we have to make evasive manoeuvres to avoid being spotted by the government’s monitoring stations that are hiding on every corner.”

What corners? thought Marci, who could now only see clouds wrapping the speed glider in a thick fog.

It was all no problem for Silver as the automatic controls kept them smoothly on course.

“I think it’s cool,” said Logan gleefully, pressing his little nose against the glider’s window even though there was nothing to be seen at that moment through the impenetrable white fog.

Suddenly, something came blazing past them, startling a scream out of Marci. At the same time, the glider shuddered and Silver swore fluently as the machine swerved violently to the right and immediately accelerated. “We got scanned and are now under fire,” he commented unnecessarily, as the next salvo of shots flew past them, missing by only an inch.

Jack didn’t say anything; Marci could see how focused he was on a second onboard holocomputer. “Deflecting weapons are armed,” he reported flatly. Marci watched nervously as a shimmering blue plasma ball was launched from the glider and shot off. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a beam of light focus on the ball and then merge with it some distance away. The resulting blast sent another shudder through the glider. She watched breathlessly as Silver made the glider drop, flying so close to the surface of the lake that it sent up a wall of water next to them. Logan looked questioningly at his mother. He no longer seemed sure whether he was supposed to be enjoying this or not.

Meanwhile, Jack was still busy launching more plasma balls that all had the desired effect; more blasts could be seen to the right and left of them, creating bursts of light and sending brief shocks through the glider. Inside, it was completely quiet. Even Logan had stopped jabbering and was now visibly less excited, looking outside with worry clearly etched on his face.

Marci’s whole body was shaking. “Dear God,” she prayed, “if you would at least get my boys out of here, I’ll do anything you ask of me.” Will had always thought her belief in a higher power was nonsense, but Marci had been brought up by a Mexican grandmother and the rules of the Catholic Church.

Willie Junior pressed himself even closer to her. Logan, on the other hand, watched the two robots with a worried expression on his face as they focused intently on their control screens. The only thing that helped her find her bearings was looking at the holographic surfaces that had appeared in front of Jack and Silver, showing mountains alternating with valleys and plains, like a neon, three-dimensional temperature chart. Neither of them said a word. Marci thought they might be communicating silently with one another and with the speed glider’s onboard computer. Will had mentioned something like that once. It only made Marci more nervous that they’d both stopped providing any kind of explanation, while the glider constantly changed altitude and was soon back over solid ground.

Suddenly, a red gridwall lit up on the screen, splitting the land in two – into land in front of and behind the wall. Before she could ask what it meant, Jack turned round and attempted a reassuring smile.

“The Canadian border is just ahead,” he explained. “Once we’ve flown through it, the drones won’t be able to follow us as they don’t have automatic overflight permission for Canada.”

“And what makes you so sure we have that permission?” asked Marci doubtfully.

“We’ve cracked the overflight code to get past the protective shield,” replied Jack, winking at her. “This is an illegal flight that doesn’t keep to borders or laws. Our pursuers might have the same idea, obviously, but unlike us, they’d have to worry about diplomatic complications.”

“And the Canadians are OK with that?” she asked disbelievingly.

Jack shook his head calmly. “They’ll try to nab us as soon as we’ve crossed the border, but by the time they’ve got organised, we’ll be a long way away. So don’t worry.”

Jack can say what he likes, she thought. Her worries remained and didn’t lessen when her pursuer’s most recent shot didn’t hit the glider, but instead made the invisible, electronic border vibrate like a spider’s web does when a fly wanders in and gets ensnared. For a moment, she thought the same thing would happen to the glider, but it smashed through the net like a golf ball and was already on the other side when the invisible wall automatically closed behind them.

Marci gave an audible sigh as the glider continued to speed over vast, dark forests and the setting sun reflected off the special glass in the cockpit like a glowing red star.

Willie Junior, exhausted, had fallen asleep on her chest, while Logan quietly watched the landscape flash past.

“We’re nearly there.” Jack smiled confidently.

Marci felt acutely aware of the exhaustion that fear and uncertainty had inflicted upon her but, above all, the grief around Will that now burst abruptly from her. She fought back the tears, especially when Jack turned round and nodded encouragingly at her. The damn robot seemed to sense how she was feeling, which made him even more human and therefore even more likeable, but she would not forget that he was just a machine, a deceptive semblance of care and compassion that could never replace the loss of Will, even if he was really trying to help her. What’s more, she wondered what he intended to do with her and the kids. Here in this wilderness where nothing was familiar to her and the boys.

She was therefore feeling wary as the glider suddenly dived into a deep mountain valley, enveloped in fog and a stark contrast to Chicago and its residential towers that were so densely packed together that you could spit on your neighbours through the open windows.

“Don’t worry,” said Jack, who had again sensed her fear flaring up as they headed to one of the rock faces in front of them. “Silver knows what he’s doing and we’ve already been identified by an automatic navigation beam that will guide us to our hiding place.”

As if by magic, an almost invisible gateway almost the same colour as the rock opened up and the glider disappeared into a giant cave containing a vast hangar and executed a gentle, vertical landing.

Several more gliders were waiting on the artificial airstrip, surrounded by technicians equipped with holoboards who were checking that the machines were in good operational order. There were men and women, and Marci couldn’t tell from their appearance whether they were robots or humans. She wouldn’t have dreamed of asking Jack because she didn’t want him to think that she was making assumptions based on appearance, in case robots were capable of taking offence like that. But the way he helped her out of the glider, by first lifting the sleeping Willie Junior with an almost indescribable gentleness and then putting him carefully back in her arms once she was standing on the platform, made her wonder again whether he really was as unfeeling as Will had always maintained. The friendly way, too, in which he attended to Logan by letting him climb out of the machine by himself and then picking him up because he was just as exhausted as his little brother, made her heart soften. While Silver sorted out the formalities and handed over the glider to the ground crew, Jack led them to a brightly lit exit that led deeper into the rock.

“I’m taking you to Cathrin Porter,” he explained, as if this was an old friend, but the name meant nothing to her. Jack seemed to feel completely at home in the endless labyrinth of brightly lit corridors, greeting everyone they met warmly.

“Cathrin is our leader and looks after new arrivals personally,” he added gently as they got into a lift heading upwards. “Depending on where they come from,” he explained, as they exited the lift and headed left down another brightly lit corridor, “they are either housed in a rescue centre for stranded refugees, where we mainly accommodate women and children who we’ve rescued from amoral governments and brutal magnates like Monty MacIntyre, or they stay in the soldiers’ accommodation, where we patch up injured hybrid soldiers and former combat robots like me in state-of-the-art labs and prepare them for the fight against the government. But you’ll hear more about that once Cathrin’s met you.”

“Is she a robot?” asked Marci warily, as she walked rapidly next to Jack with Willie in her arms, while Jack carried an exhausted and sleeping Logan.

“Cathrin?”

She nodded.

“No, Cathrin is human. She was Chief Design Engineer at MacIntyre before moving to CRU. After some unpleasant experiences there, she came to the conclusion that she didn’t want to use her brilliance in service of the war-hungry psychopaths of this world by providing them with compliant robot slaves. She also found out that the robots installed with the personality programming she wrote were developing their own inner lives and that they experienced suffering as a combat or sex slave just like a human would in a similar situation. Since then, she’s been determined to prevent any more robots from being created in order to re-establish balance in the world. It doesn’t make sense to add more robots to an already overpopulated world. Especially not for these purposes. It should be clear to anyone capable of halfway rational thought that robots should only be created to replace people currently working as human slaves. Cathrin also believes that those machines who have already developed an inner life have a right to exist that shouldn’t be denied them.” He stood still for a moment and directed a frighteningly intense look at her. “Essentially, we’re not as different from a human as you might think,” he stated insistently. “We experience pain and we have feelings that can be hurt. Above all, we have our own minds. We don’t only think completely independently, we act it too. If MacIntyre or other governments learn of this, they will not stop hunting us down until we’ve all been destroyed. And they’ll ensure that the programming is changed so that it can’t happen again. That’s why we have to get the drop on them and stop them before it’s too late. This is our mission.”