"Already did. She said it'll just take time." I scanned the many scattered parts. "Are you sure you can put it back together?"

"Put it back together? Heck, Mack, sweetie, I'll even add a couple of improvements."

"Lucia . . ."

"Relax, big guy. This is what I do, freelance technologist consulting." She wiped sweat from her forehead. "You don't see me questioning your ability to smash things, now, do you?"

"Smashing things is easier than putting them back together," I said.

"Maybe for you, hon."

Humbolt, carrying a telephone, descended the lab staircase. "Yo, Mack, call for you. Says he's a cop."

It was Sanchez. I figured it would be. No other cops were interested in my activities as far as I knew.

"You got a minute?" he asked. "There are some things I'd like to show you."

"Actually, Sanchez, I'm kind of busy right now."

"It wasn't a request, Mack."

Either the earpiece was loud enough for Lucia to hear the conversation or she pieced together Sanchez's end all by herself. "Go ahead, Mack. I'm not going to be done with this for another hour or two."

Sanchez must've heard her. Or maybe he just didn't care.

"I'm waiting downstairs," he said. "Don't keep me waiting long."

He hung up. No debate. I could tell he meant it. I may have been a tough bot, but if I was going to keep digging, it couldn't hurt to have Sanchez on my side.

"I'll be back in an hour, Lucia. Two at the most."

"I'll be ready, handsome."

True to his word, Sanchez was waiting for me at the bottom of Proton Towers.

"How'd you find me?" I asked.

"It's my job."

He took a long drag on his cigarette and tossed it aside. A two-legged automatic vacuum hopped over to clean it up with more enthusiasm than was healthy even for a drone.

"So what's this about, Sanchez?"

"We found Tony Ringo."

Might've been those pesky foreign behavioral dictates my maintenance protocols had yet to purge, but I feigned surprise. One of the advantages of having a bare faceplate was that I didn't have to be a good actor. I didn't say anything.

Whatever I didn't say must've struck something in Sanchez's finely honed cop instincts. He could always read me like a technical manual. His expression didn't change, and he didn't say anything. But there was something about the way he didn't say it.

We took Sanchez's Ambler to the Think Tank. It was a lousy ride. Instead of wheels or treads, amblers had six pneumatic legs. Don't ask me who thought that was a good idea, but whoever it was managed to convince someone with a factory to crank out a few thousand. At first, they'd been a commercial failure, but then word got out. Amblers never broke down. Never. You could shove a piece of lit dynamite in the power coil, and the only noticeable effect would be a little more smoke when you started it up. Only a little more. It was the kind of technological reliability that was hard to find in Tomorrow's Town. So people bought them. And used them forever or until they got sick of them and sold them to someone else.

No one bought an Ambler for any other reason than practicality. Cheap, dependable, and built to last. No one bought a new model when they could find used ones, and the launch of several brand-new styles did nothing to encourage sales. A couple of fancy fins and some high beam headlights didn't make the ride any cooler or smoother. The Ambler Motorcar Company went out of business, proving that a quality product isn't always a worthwhile endeavor. But its ghosts still haunted Empire, thousands of lurching, rusty machines with chipped paint and cracked windshields hopping their way down her streets.

Sanchez's Ambler was still in decent shape. It didn't make the ride any smoother. By the time we got to the Tank, my internal gyros had taken a beating. I nearly fell over when I got out of the car.

"Thank G.o.d I don't vomit," I said.

"Don't be such a pansy." Sanchez didn't look worse for wear, but even if he had turned green there was no way of telling under that fur.

We entered the Tank. All the bells and whistles went off with my arrival, but Sanchez waved off the incapacitor. Parker, the front gate watchdog, wasn't too happy about that. He made Sanchez sign a couple of waivers, in triplicate, then called for confirmation. The whole thing took so long, it would've been easier to clamp the incapacitor on.

After we got through security, Sanchez led me to the elevators. We stepped in. He lit a cigarette, puffed on it slow and thoughtfully. "You didn't ask."

"Ask what?"

"Whether Ringo was alive or not. You didn't ask."

"I guess I just a.s.sumed."

"Guess you did," Sanchez mumbled. He was so short and his voice was so low, I had trouble picking it up. "Not like you to make a.s.sumptions, Mack."

We rode a little further. If the Tank had levitator pods, this would've been a lot less awkward.

"You still didn't ask."

"Since we aren't heading toward the morgue, I figured he was alive."

Puff.

"He's alive, isn't he?" I said.

"Oh, he's alive. Depending on how rigid your definition of life is." Puff. "You didn't ask if we'd gotten any information out of him."

"Did you?"

"Nothing useful."

The elevator doors opened, and he led me further into this web of deceit. Not exactly outright lies. Omitted truths. It had to be Grey's countermands that kept me from fessing up because I couldn't think of a good reason not to admit what I knew. Sanchez might've even known something about Abner Greenman, but I kept it to myself.

Tony Ringo was under lock and key in his own little special white room. Protective custody, Sanchez explained. His blanked mind was evidence. Sanchez didn't admit to it, but I could tell he was worried. Psychic crime wasn't unheard of, but telepathic murder was still a rare occurrence.

Sanchez had been right. Technically, Ringo was still alive. His heart still pushed his blood through his veins. His lungs still drew in gulps of air. His eyes still twitched at the twinkles of light. But he was a sh.e.l.l.

"What happened to him?" I asked, compelled to continue my charade.

"We're not sure. Somebody did a number on him though. Burned his brain. We had our forensic telepath probe his mind. There's not much left in there anymore."

"There's stuff left in there?"

"Little bit. Brain holds a lot of information. Can't scorch it all. Though they came d.a.m.n close. But there was some stuff left behind. Fragments. Mostly random memories. Nothing much of any importance. Oh, and a name."

I didn't ask because I figured I knew what the name was and that Sanchez would tell me in his own due time. I was right on both.

"Mack."

"Yeah?"

"That's the name: Mack."

"Common name," I replied. "Were there any witnesses?"

He sighed. "Ringo was last seen at a jazz club. Some hole in the wall called The Golden Diode. It's the kind of place where witnesses are hard to come by."

"Surveillance?"

"Even harder to come by."

Up to now Ringo had been lying in his bed, drooling and moving his lips like he was trying to say something. Suddenly he sat up like a shot and stared me right in the opticals. He opened his mouth and screamed a harsh, warbling shriek. He started laughing and crying at the same time.

"It's you! It's you! It's you!" He stifled a sniffle and grabbed at his ears. "You, you, you, you!" Then he collapsed, dead to the world. Except he wasn't dead, and he wasn't just a sh.e.l.l. He was a thing that had once been a man but was now a handful of confused memories. Names and dates and places that could never fit together again. What Greenman had done to him wasn't murder. It was worse.

"What'll happen to him?"

"We'll try to dig some more information. Then I guess we'll ship him off to the hospital. I got a feeling it'll be an extended stay."

Poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d. At least a defective robot got the dignity of a quick deactivation. Ringo had gotten mixed up with some nasty business, and he'd come out the losing end of it. That'd been his whole life. While I didn't exactly feel sorry for him, if I'd found him on the street like this I would've crushed his head and put him out of his misery.

"He seems to know you," said Sanchez.

"He doesn't even know who he is. Are we through here, Sanchez?"

"I don't know, Mack. Are we?"

I'd have loved to let him in on my little secret of a possible alien invasion or mutant conspiracy. If anybody would believe me, it'd be him. He was waist deep in this sort of stuff more often than not. Empire had its problems, but they'd have been a lot worse if it wasn't for men like Sanchez, bless his furless little tail and twitchy pink nose.

I kept quiet.

"Fine, Mack. If that's the way you want to play it. C'mon. I'll drive you back."

"In that lurching junkheap of yours, Sanchez. I don't know. I might end up losing a couple of bolts."

Before we reached the elevator, a uniformed cop chased Sanchez down.

"Sir, you wanted us to keep you up to date on the Bleaker case."

My audios tuned in. The cop stifled himself as if he wasn't sure he should speak in front of me.

"Go ahead, Dougal," said Sanchez.

"They found one of them. The father, sir." Dougal hesitated, but Sanchez gave him a nod.

"He's dead, sir. Bludgeoned to death. Report says somebody worked him over, like he was shoved into a crushing unit."

Sanchez glanced up at me, at those giant hands of mine. The kind made for bludgeoning and crushing. "Guess we're not through here after all, Mack."

12.

You know the scene. Seen it in a dozen crime pictures. Some dumb mug finds himself sitting in a tiny room with a cop standing over him, reading him the riot act. That's pretty much what happened to me.

Except I wasn't sitting. I don't sit much. Most furniture isn't made for my weight, and my feet don't get sore. Also, it wasn't a tiny room. It was a big bas.e.m.e.nt cell, thickly enshrouded in shadows excluding a few a bright spotlights. I a.s.sumed they blew the lighting budget on the three giant cannons pointed my way. And Sanchez, who was barely tall enough to stand over my knee, wasn't reading me the riot act. He was sitting at the table, puffing on a cigarette, letting the ash dangle. Otherwise, it was exactly the same.

I stood in a small red circle painted on the floor. There was nothing keeping me from stepping out of it except the three heavy blast cannons trained around me. Unlike Sanchez, the cannons did tower over me. I was thick-alloyed, but the Think Tank had my specs, so it was a fair bet these weapons could pose a danger. My threat a.s.sessor suggested it'd be a good idea to play it safe and not step out of the circle.

Now that I was here, I wondered if it might've been smarter to make a break for it while I had still been above ground. I might not have been able to bust out of the Tank. The security was tight, and the weaponry dangerous enough to give me reason to think twice, but at least I'd stood a chance. Now, I was stuck.

Sanchez hadn't said a word in the last six minutes. He was content to let me sweat. It was a tactic that had worked a thousand times before. But I don't sweat, and I could wait just as long as he could.

I won the stare-off.

He leaned back in his chair. "The Council approved this room's construction. As a precaution, you understand. Each of these cannons cost more than I make in twenty years. If they go off even once, the Council will have to approve a tax hike to pay the power bill. And from what I understand, they're each only good for about a dozen shots before the unit burns out and has to be replaced.

"I can't get the budget approval for a new automimeograph, but I guess somebody very important thought there might be a need for a special room like this. To hold guys like you."

"Guys like me?" I asked. "Or just me."

"Right now, you're the only guy like you." He stabbed out his cigarette and lit up a new one. It was a miracle those little lungs of his still worked.

"I told the suits upstairs that it was a waste of time and money." Sanchez smiled mirthlessly. "Tell me I was wrong, Mack."

The air sizzled as electricity crackled along the cannons' barrels.

He slid some crime scene photos across the stainless steel desk between us. They were a grisly series of images testifying to the last painful minutes of Gavin Bleaker's life. A catalogue of monstrous bruises and crusted blood and shattered bones. Despite the extensive damage, he was recognizable. They'd made sure to not touch the face. I'd never liked Gavin, but I hoped whoever did this to him had the decency to bash in the back of his skull first.

"Want to tell me something about this?" asked Sanchez.

"What's to tell? I didn't do it. It's a frame-up."

"No s.h.i.t."

He laughed, but he did not seem amused.

"I know it's a frame job, Mack. h.e.l.l, it's not even a very good one. Whoever did it used a red crowbar or something like that. You wouldn't need one, but they made sure it matched your paint job. And if you were going to kill someone, my gut tells me you'd make a lot more efficient job of it and be smart enough to ditch the body someplace the cops wouldn't stumble over. Our forensic scans of your suit and cha.s.sis showed traces of blood, but none of it matched the vic's type."