* * * *
What was going on? Had Sabrina miscounted and accidentally disabled his parachute somehow?
That was absurd. She might’ve done something wrong with the weapon ring, perhaps fired the pulses before Livingston could finish locking on, but a mechanical parachute would be grossly inefficient. Could Jane have a firearm, or …?
All Sabrina knew was that Livingston’s Plan B didn’t include the advantage of landing in a safe area. She was headed straight for a sector of what appeared to be a microcosm of space travel machinery, which looked about six miles away from Plesetsk.
She hated herself for taking comfort in the helplessness of her situation. She’d learned to view death in much the same way, as something morbidly beautiful in that man’s confrontation of it is his one chance to accept that he is impotent to change it, and to make the best of that submission. Perhaps the soothing aspect of inescapable disasters is that there’s no reasonable fear of failure to overcome anything. A fear she was no stranger to.
The mini-city transformed before her eyes into a cluster of towers near a launch site. So it could be worse. Sabrina landed on the roof of a tower, chilled to the bone in the Russian early morning air.
Livingston was nowhere to be found, and he wasn’t responding to her comm. It suddenly struck her that she’d left the Hybrid on the plane as well. Stupendous.
Could Jane have killed Livingston? It was a demoralizing thought. Either he was still alive because he would surely be capable of subduing Jane as easily as any other robot, or Jane was more formidable than anyone on the moon could have imagined, enough to bring down one of the only two Dethroning survivors.
If he hadn’t died back there, she could see no obvious alternative explanations. Jane wouldn’t be so dim as to target Livingston’s parachute and not his life-supporting apparatus, knowing he was an Unnatural.
Sabrina reached ground level as a sickening possibility occurred to her. Perhaps she’d killed Livingston herself.
No, that was equally ridiculous as her breaking his parachute. Livingston was smarter than Jane if Zolnerowich’s word was to be trusted, and would he gamble his life on Sabrina’s ability to count to fifteen precisely?
This didn’t add up. After all, how advanced a defense mechanism could Jane, a tool for gratification, have? It was the only option she could honestly accept, especially since Livingston would’ve manipulated the bot earlier were it feasible, but it simply made a mockery of all reason.
Her ears and fingers grew numb as she ran to the landing site Zolnerowich had specified yesterday, weighing the probability that the other ambassadors were in danger of sabotage. Basically, it was a question of whether Jane was intact.
Or was it? She didn’t like to think of Livingston as a potential menace. He could be dead, and even if not, he’d given her little reason to doubt his sincerity. His methods were questionable, of course, but so were Zolnerowich’s. And her own. Could a man with that much tact and warmth be a murderer?
Still, as Sabrina kept her eyes ahead toward the base, seeing her breath like a specter that solidified her uncertainties, she considered the likelihood that that was all it was – charm, honor, and good humor, subtly comprising a classic case of the halo effect.
Was it at all probable that Livingston was capable of risky skydiving, impeccable deception designed to convince her that he would stay with her until the ambassadors’ safety was secured, and even the possession of malice and means necessary to thwart the latter goal?
Skydiving. She shuddered. He could’ve sealed off his apprehension.
Was he just as apt at the physical requirements of a five-hundred-foot parachute deployment? Livingston had been so far down ahead of her that he could’ve had his parachute out without her distinguishing him from a free falling body, and she hadn’t dared look down at all as a first-time diver.
Sabrina checked her digital clock. The shuttle wasn’t due for a couple hours. She sat at a bench, her face buried in her hands. What about the lies? One couldn’t yet call Livingston a pathological liar, clinically speaking, but as someone with “a way with robots,” he could simply have an antisocial disorder. He’d only made a passing remark to Sabrina about the horror of seeing so many people, loved ones included, stricken dead without any warning. Then it was just business as usual.
Plus, there was something that her intuition found unsettling. The emotional mastery, yes, but also a sense of unreality in him. Inhumanity, even.
Whether Livingston was vindictive enough was hazy, but he certainly had everything he needed to pose a serious threat to the Strange space shuttle. Give him a place to stand, and he could move the world with his technological sixth sense. The proof was overwhelming. Livingston could command vehicular bots. He could fool the strictest security bot. He could redirect one Sonicap and lock the weaponry of another. Who was she to say he couldn’t destroy a shuttle from the inside, or worse?
She looked to the murky sky and hoped Livingston was dead after all. Another reason to despise herself, and even that was a source of positive sinful feedback. Jesus had said hate was akin to murder, thus this was suicide.
But there was no hacking her genes. She could only hate a person who would wish almost certain hellfire upon any soul. That presumption of his eternal fate was itself spiteful.
She felt like a living paradox.
Her only consolation was that she needn’t fret over whether she should stay to protect the shuttle’s landing. She saw a burst of light in the dark dome. It came to her that she could determine if Livingston was alive by attempting contact with Luna, but this wasn’t necessary to know what that light show was.
There it was again, the complacency of having no choices.
He was alive, but Sabrina still had reason to send out a call to Luna. Unsuccessful. Cut off from society on a planet with only two other humans, she decided to pursue the one who was less likely to send her to an early grave.
She checked the fuel gauge of the hydro-car she’d picked from the nearby parking garage. It would last her to Belarus. There was no telling where Livingston would go next, but she figured the odds that he wouldn’t even be aware that the plane she’d take existed were in her favor.
Just how far had his network of robotic slaves extended? He had to actively deceive the androids in Kazakhstan, so perhaps it was safe to act on the assumption that robots in Belarus wouldn’t lure her into a fatal trap.
Getting across the Atlantic would be the easy part. It was the prospect of facing the Eastern American robots, which would more likely lie in Livingston’s domain, that frightened her. Even if she landed without being blown up by pyromaniacal bots, what chance did she stand against the army he had out West?
How had she not seen the terror of her predicament until just now? Perhaps, she considered on her drive into the belly of the beast, it simply takes the human mind a concrete example of a previously abstract problem to comprehend a radical circumstance like this. Was this what it felt like to be Zolnerowich, when confronted with death on a massive scale?
At least she’s not in the line of fire on Earth. She took in the wooded scenery with peripheral vision. Not like Livingston can hijack machinery on the moon.
Sabrina was tired and jet-lagged, but another voice in her told her to be optimistic. Supposing Livingston was alive and heading out on a bounty hunt for Uriah – bonus points if he gets in good standing with the Lunar government for this after blaming Uriah for the Strange disaster – it wasn’t certain he wanted her dead. He’d said he wanted to “clean up this mess.” That could be code for protecting Earth from the ravages of government, and if such an objective precluded any human migration between Earth and the moon save one woman he saw as, at best, harmless, so be it.
That Livingston had spared her so far was evidence against her paranoid model of the situation. Was it all a ploy to get under her clothes, a mission aborted when he realized she knew too much
or was simply unattractive? If so, he must’ve been quite scatterbrained at the time, alternating between secrecy and remarkable openness.
It was all useless conjecture in the end, and whether she liked it or not, Sabrina’s moral duty was to stop Livingston from murdering Uriah. Strange. Having a goal that could get her killed made her feel more alive than she had in years.
She hoped to be in the sky over the western border of contiguous Europe by noon.