The Cardinal Rule Read online

  "Nothing more than a reversed protocol," Brandon said hastily.

  Alisha snapped, "The difference between live and hard targets seems to me a rather significant one, Dr. Parker," grateful for the chance to channel some of her fury immediately, rather than having to suppress it. Quicksilver emotions roiled through her body, her fists clenching in anger. "Dare I ask for a demonstration, or will your prototype see fit to mow us all down?"

  Brandon had the grace to look embarrassed. Rafe, cringing, stepped forward. Brandon blocked him with his shoulder and a fractional shake of his head. "I take full responsibility for the error, Ms. Moon. The demonstration should go smoothly."

  Rafe's shoulders stiffened as if chagrin threaded through his body, though in almost the same moment he lowered his eyes, gratitude or acceptance sinking into his posture. He knew he was being protected. Alisha was certain she wasn't meant to know, but it gave her an interesting insight into Parker's character. Certainly there were men who would step aside from the chain of command, allow an assistant to take the fall, but Brandon had chosen otherwise. Maybe the CIA had left a mark on him, after all.

  "Shall we, then." The coolness of disappointment and anger still edged her voice, both of them quite real. The drone had frightened her; discovering that her fear had been set off by a malfunction was embarrassing to the point of infuriating. She'd expected the prototype to live up to Brandon's pitch. Expected, somehow, for him to prove himself one of the good guys after all, instead of a slightly inept mad scientist. She needed to assess him for his own skills and threat level, her own personal hopes and prejudices set aside. Although if the drone was going to prove this unpredictable, the security of the United States had less to worry about than she'd feared. Alisha flicked her fingers, an impatient gesture, and watched the two scientists all but hop to do her bidding.

  With the bug worked out, Alisha had to admit the drone appeared to work flawlessly. Given a set of objectives—Alisha chose them, Brandon's hands darting over the tablet to program them in as he explained, "The drone's approach is autonomous. Once the mission is set, it chooses what it perceives as the best way to accomplish that. Its default programming always opts for non-lethal subdual, though in an outright combat situation it's fully capable of making the decision to defend itself."

  "Second law of robotics." Alisha's anger faded, curiosity getting the better of her. Brandon gave her a startled glance that blurred into a smile.

  "Third, actually."

  "Mmm. My geek is slipping." Alisha dismissed the error, nodding at the tablet. "So it might opt to behave differently if I didn't specifically want it to scale the farther end of the wall, yes?"

  "Exactly. We can run the objectives twice, once with your detailed instructions and a second time allowing the drone to behave in its autonomous and natural fashion."

  "Natural." Alisha's eyebrows rose. "Is it possible for an artificial intelligence to be natural, Dr. Parker?"

  "Philosophy's not my strong point, Ms. Moon. All right. Program complete." Brandon entered the command and Alisha put her shoulders back, watching the drone slip into action.

  It looked like alien technology. The three-pronged metal feet were surprisingly quiet against the ground, even where it was rough. The ratcheting legs allowed it a peculiarly smooth gait, its rounded body dipping and rising barely an inch or two as the drone flowed toward the far end of the wall. The stones there stood at least twice as tall as the drone did, even at its fullest height. Alisha had chosen that entrance point deliberately, curious to see just how well the machine was able to scale obstructions.

  It fitted its clawed feet into breaks in the wall—Alisha could easily envision it using windows in a city to the same effect—and drew itself up, one leg after another, spider-like. A glance at Brandon's tablet showed scans being sent back, allowing the drone's human mentor to see what it saw. Its crown peeked over the top of the wall, light scattering to examine the area, searching for enemies. Then one foot snaked over, claws spread wide as it swung several inches back and forth. Brandon's screen flickered with images, first normal color, then—"Ultrasound?" Alisha asked.

  Brandon gave a pleased nod. "Searching for land mines, C4, anything set into the ground that could damage it. Infrared is most effective on warm bodies, obviously, so we needed to give it a variety of ways to recognize dangerous objects."

  "Very nice.". Brandon gave her a half sour glance that made her check an impulse to defend herself. If he was going to sell his drone to Alisha's fictional buyers, she needed to approve. Nonetheless, after the years of work he'd put into it, having a complete stranger make cooing noises over his prototype had to be somewhere between amusing and insulting.

  "I'm glad you think so." His voice gave away nothing of the emotions Alisha thought he might feel, and humor pulled at her lips. There was nothing like an old-fashioned spy game to make her day. Everyone holding their cards close to the chest, everything kept under wraps, to see who ended up with the best hand.

  I love this job. Even with the upset created by the prototype's malfunction, Alisha's smile grew into a grin, and lingered. The drone skittered across the field on the far side of the wall, still sending feedback to Brandon's screen. Rafe touched Alisha's shoulder, nodding toward the break in the wall.

  "There's a platform just on the other side, where we'll be able to see everything more clearly. It's about to reach the more dangerous areas now."

  "Excellent." Alisha climbed over the low stones, Rafe offering her a hand, and laughed, studying the platform. It was only five or six feet high, tall enough to see the entire field from. It was also tall enough to let the men look right up her skirt.

  "I think I'll come up last," she said mildly. Rafe frowned, then blushed, his ears turning scarlet. Brandon, a few steps behind them, brushed by and climbed the ladder with absolutely no notice of the byplay at all. He even offered Alisha a hand as Rafe stepped out of the way, once on the platform.

  "Thank you."

  "Sure. Now," he said, nodding at the drone, "you set it to take the most straight-forward path to the west edge of the field. No avoidance of possible obstacles. This is what it's seeing." He handed her the tablet, tapping its screen. "Land mines, primarily. Not a friendly place to go walking in."

  "Really," Alisha said dryly.

  Brandon gave an absent nod, apparently not picking up on the sarcasm. "You'll want to watch out there. The first mine is coming up on its left—"

  Without altering its fluid walk, the drone scooped a stone off the field bed and threw it several meters. It landed with military precision on the mine, nothing more than a blip on the screen before the explosion rattled the platform Alisha stood on. "It's always preferable to use what's handy rather than its weapons to activate unfriendly artifacts," Brandon yelled above the noise. "A random explosion might be a local animal getting in trouble," he added as the boom faded. "Whereas weapon fire is always pretty obvious."

  "Although six land mines going off isn't likely to be a whole series of unfortunate animals," Alisha said a few moments later, as the drone worked its way through a string of bone-shaking detonations. Only once, on a concrete pad that had obviously been added to the field for just such demonstrations, was it obliged to resort to its own internal weapons systems to discharge a mine. Two bolts of red smashed from its guns, concussive force and heat exploding the mine with what Alisha thought of as violent satisfaction. "What about live targets?"

  Brandon held up his hand as if to say, "Wait." The drone reached its first objective—the west edge of the field—and turned north, running with liquid metal grace. "Over smooth terrain, it can reach twenty-five miles an hour," Brandon reported. "Eventually larger drones will be able to move much more quickly than that, but it's already a lot faster than a human."

  A human-shaped target, complete with an AK-47 in silhouette, slid up from the ground. Alisha's stomach tightened, recognizing a threat. The drone reacted nearly as quickly as she did. Information flowed into the tablet, an ass
essment of danger that she struggled to keep an eye on while still watching the drone. The whisper-whine of laser fire sounded as she jerked her gaze back and forth, the "insurgent" on the field flattened by the force of the drone's blasts. As it hurried north, another dozen targets popped up, some wildlife, some human, one or two of them unarmed. One, no more than child-sized, "ran" forward on a mechanized slide. This time the drone reacted faster than Alisha could: her gut said "harmless," even as details about the "child's" bomb-laden coat poured across the tablet's screen.

  Deep sonic waves, sharp enough even at the distance, and not aimed at her, to churn Alisha's belly, hammered the "child." Beside her, Brandon flexed his arms, an aborted signal of action and pride. "Errs on the side of caution," he said. "It's not perfect: if a suicide bomber is timed instead of self-destructing, I haven't yet figured out how to quickly and safely disable bombs, but even in the face of imminent danger when a target appears to be less than adult the drone will choose incapacitation over death. In the worst-case scenario a drone can be programmed to cover a suicide bomber's body with its own in an attempt to mitigate the damage to the general populace."

  "What happens when your AI develops a sense of self-preservation?"

  Brandon frowned. "I'll cross that bridge if we come to it. We're a long way from developing artificially based sentience, Ms. Moon."

  "I hope you're right." Alisha turned her attention back to the drone, which had ignored a frightened family of refugees and incapacitated another threatening figure as it reached its northern-most goal, a white flag. Incapacitated. Alisha gave an almost silent snort. More like obliterated. "Can its program be changed so that it just returns by the most expedient route?"

  "In a real-life situation it would always do that," Brandon said with a nod. "It's a matter of turning it over to the AI. Here." He brushed his finger over the tablet, indicating the sequence Alisha should put in. She echoed the actions, then sent the command, watching the drone break off from its original eastern path and simply flow back toward the platform in an almost straight line. Its only deviations were to avoid the landmines that cropped up on its sensors, which Alisha watched on the screen she held. When it encountered a half-circle of mines directly in front of it, it paused, scooping up stones to throw, and moments later swarmed through the smoke and rubble unharmed.

  "Have you tested it against living targets yet?"

  "Only in extremely controlled situations." Discomfort still strained Rafe's voice, as if he hadn't gotten over the drone's malfunction earlier. And he shouldn't have, as far as Alisha was concerned. "We've arranged for a demonstration in the morning. Will that suit?"

  "That'll be fine. I'll have time to make a written assessment of the drone's capabilities as I've seen them so far for my employers." The clinical answer covered the truth: that a morning demonstration would give her all night to snoop around the base and search its computers..

  The drone glided up, dropping the white flag onto the platform before hunching back down to its hobbit-height to await further orders. Alisha crouched to pick the flag up, smiling over her shoulder at the two scientists. "A truce," she said lightly. "In the name of scientific exploration."

  "Why, Ms. Moon." Brandon offered his hand. "We're not on opposite sides."

  "Of course not." She took his hand, letting him help her to her feet. Of course not.

  Chapter 6

  Brandon escorted her to a small, spartan dorm room in the main building's second level, and offered her a door key that Alisha bet almost everyone had a copy of. "All yours, for the duration, Ms. Moon."

  "Thank you, Dr. Parker. Is dinner a communal affair?"

  "Much to General Hashikov's dismay. The officers' mess is downstairs to the left. I'll come by around six to escort you, if you like."

  "That would be lovely." Alisha closed the door on him, locked it, and leaned against it to observe the room. Someone had already brought the carry-on suitcase she'd traveled with to the room and placed it on the most utilitarian luggage rack she'd ever seen, which was saying something, since luggage racks weren't usually built to be visually pleasing in the first place. A security camera lodged above the bed swept the room at an angle that left the bed itself mostly unobserved, but the only real privacy in the gray-walled room was in the bathroom. She crossed the room to use it. A frosted window in there had a glow of artificial light behind it and a shower, toilet, and sink so close to one another Alisha could reach everything in the room while sitting on the toilet.

  At least the main room was a little better than that, a plain black desk and a plastic chair beside the luggage rack, with a large, dusty vent cover above the desk. A narrow window set close to the room side of the base's deep concrete walls. An industrial-grade olive green carpet emerged from under the bed and stretched toward the desk without quite reaching the far wall. The whole thing felt exactly like what it was: a Cold-War-era bunker, built to—hopefully—withstand a nuclear strike.

  Aloud, but under her breath, Alisha murmured, "I've stayed in worse," and sat on the chair to kick her shoes off and massage her ankle. The swelling had gone down, but walking across the drone's demonstration grounds in low heels hadn't done it any particular favors. With a sigh, Alisha unzipped her carry-on and took out a sheaf of paperwork, literally hand-writing the report for her erstwhile employers. Nothing—nothing—sent online could be absolutely confident of remaining secure, and the sort of people she supposedly worked for liked absolute confidentiality.

  Around six, as promised, a knock sounded on the door and Brandon Parker escorted her down to dinner, past a host of young military men whose allegiance lay, she knew, with the highest bidder, rather than any country or creed.

  General Oleksiy Hashikov had once followed the Soviet, and then the Russian, flag, but in his later years the appellation General was honorary, referring to his previous service rather than his current status. He'd been a freelancer for close to a decade now, and the Kazakhstani mountains offered him a place to be king of his own command. Those mountains offered a lot of people a great deal of freedom, so long as they paid bribes in the right places, and didn't bring obvious international trouble to its long-serving president's door. That, above everything else, was most likely why Brandon and his research team were holed up here, although the almost total inaccessibility couldn't hurt.

  She rather liked Hashikov at first blush. From the tone of his voice he clearly hated the idea of the drone, and thought war was best left to men. Men, specifically, of course, but humans, at the very least. He obviously felt there was no honor in sending a robot out to fight man's battles, but as dinner wore on, he grudgingly admitted that the prototype might have its uses as a front-line combatant and scout.

  Alisha saw more potential for the drones than the general did, and enjoyed arguing in their favor while Brandon, Rafe, and the rest of the all-male research team struggled to keep their opinions out of it. A couple of times Alisha caught Brandon taking notes, as if making sure he'd remember the thrust of her arguments later. The Alpha-10-Gamma's movement capability was considerably superior to the current robot warriors in use, Alisha said; those functioned on track treads, like a tank, but without the weight that allowed tanks to inexorably crush almost anything in their path. Besides that, the prototype could actually scale walls without reducing them to rubble first, making it dangerous not just on a ground level, but even up into buildings. Individuals could be sought out and destroyed by the artificially intelligent drone in a way that current robotic soldiers couldn't match. Alisha could see the resentment in Hashikov's acknowledgments of her points, and steered the conversation to less incendiary topics, like the Ural mountains weather, rather than rile the General up any more.

  Besides, although she knew all her arguments were good ones, she also knew there were far too many places in the world that A-10-G tech could be put to use immediately. The Crimea, the Middle East; between India and Pakistan. Even Northern Ireland, where the fragile peace process had been badly shaken by B
rexit. Elisa Moon might be enthusiastic about the drones' potential, but Alisha MacAleer was shaken by it.

  Hashikov thawed as she kept away from political and military discussions, and by the time dinner ended she'd been treated to photographs of his grandchildren and, to her delight, his Corgis, a breed he'd become enamored with after learning Elizabeth II of England bred them. Brandon, walking her back to her room after dinner, murmured, "I didn't even know he'd been married, much less bred dogs."

  "And here I thought you were supposed to be a people person. I'm looking forward to the demo tomorrow, Dr. Parker. I'll see you in the morning." Alisha closed herself into her room, and, with a sigh, began preparations for her night's work.

  The first part was dull, scene-setting work. She finished her preliminary report, went over it, did some stretching—her ankle still twinged—and finally crawled into bed beneath the camera's watchful eye. After a few minutes of settling in and pushing pillows around, she'd stuffed enough of them under the covers to create a crude facsimile of her sleeping body. As soon as the camera's sweep was at its furthest point from her corner, she rolled under the bed, waited, then slipped into the bathroom. A vent above its door was easier to access than the one in her bedroom, and she swiftly worked the screws out and lowered the vent cover to the toilet seat.

  The downward trill of the Mission: Impossible theme song played in the back of her mind as she lifted herself into the vent. Not every job gave a girl the chance to play along to that music and actually have good reason to. She'd trained herself out of mouthing the sounds as she edged along; it'd taken longer to break the habit of shifting her shoulders in isolations, like a dancer, at the sharp beats in the music. But both those practices had been abandoned a long time ago now, even if the thoughts that provoked them were ingrained, part and parcel.