Unnatural

  * * * *

  The telltale washing machine greeted them for all of one second before Uriah closed his vision to everything but the hemispherical device on the ground. “Jane, did Marshall tell you anything about this?”

  “No.”

  “Did he say something about a machine that could activate trillions of nanobots at once? What about cryoprotectants attached to the nanos?”

  “Nope and nope.”

  So Marshall had only told Jane enough about his scheme to indulge some hypothetical desire to have someone listen to his ramblings, yet not so much that she could spill the beans and accidentally land him in prison. He wouldn’t be surprised if he discovered Marshall had called Jane “it” as well.

  Uriah peered inside the hole with one eye, then, seeing nothing useful, he examined the machine from many angles. He knew he should be thinking hard about the problem at hand, but his deduction was obscured by the thought of what had happened to Sabrina. What could Zolnerowich be hiding? If it was his fatherhood after all, why the secrecy? At worst, he would feel guilty. Maybe she thought his knowledge of his paternity would make him more likely to want …

  He stood, wishing for some sort of probe for the interior. Why was Marshall’s doomsday device in Livingston’s basement in the first place? Had he planned this, his own death? There was at least one way to find out. But first –

  “Hey, cops, can ya hear me?” The Good Angels just might be useful, reluctant as he was to admit it. “I think I found something, but I need a –”

  A voice in his head said, “A delivery android will be with you shortly, Mr. Uriah.”

  It better be, with this time limit. He turned to Jane. “Has Marshall ever displayed suicidal tendencies, Jane?”

  She was, of course, repulsed. “No! Why would you ask such a thing?”

  “You’ll find out. I don’t suppose Livingston led you to a video of your conversation with him?”

  “No again,” she sighed.

  “Don’t worry. Every answer helps. Do you remember what he said to you?”

  “He told me that you killed all these people.”

  Uriah had almost clasped his hand over Jane’s mouth, but it was moot by this point. That would look suspicious anyway, and if these next twenty-three hours went the way they were supposed to, his blunder would be rectified. “What else?”

  “He told me that if I helped him, we could ‘wake up’ the world.”

  He knew a way? Or “knows,” if I’m on the right track.

  With no new information coming from Jane, they waited a couple minutes before the bot arrived. The probe was a minuscule piece of machinery equipped with a grapple and a wire that could stretch a thousand feet. Uriah fastened the grapple to the edge of the hole and commanded the probe to begin its inspection.

  The grapple included along with its control panel a split screen for live viewing of all the probe’s surroundings. For several seconds all he could see there was a rubbery lining of an exasperatingly long tunnel. At last the tube terminated at the mechanical brains, which appeared functional as if no electromagnetic pulse had fried them.

  By some mechanism the tunnel must have converted his gun’s pulse into energy not only harmless to machinery, but conducive to its sending a signal across the globe – and only across the globe, if Luna’s collective survival was any indication. Just the notion of it reeked of magic, even keeping in mind that it had been years since he was in a position to know about the latest technological advances. Yet it was the best explanation he could conceive.

  “Okay, that’s as much as we’ll find here. Next stop, EMFI.”

  Twenty-five minutes and a great deal of awkward silence later, Uriah found, in the room in which he had first met Sabrina Lockhart, the very sight he’d expected. That made it no less heart-sinking to see the place totally absent of Isaac Livingston’s body.