The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III Read Online Free PDF Page B

tune, so long as they paid the piper.
    “The KT pays all operational expenses of its personnel. It’s taken care of,” the AID said, with what might have been just a hint of gently mocking humor in its voice.
    A cab dropped out of the sky and touched down in the middle of the street. It sidled over to the curb on its hoverskirt and opened its door in front of Al. He climbed in and sat down. “Tell the cab to opaque windows and take me home,” he told the AID testily. “And fly via non-direct routes.” The KT wouldn’t want him to be able to look out the window, or calculate his starting point from measuring the flight time.
    Which meant he had a flight of long and indeterminate length to look forward to, hours of sitting inside a blacked-out cab with nothing to see or do.
    The cab door shut, the windows blacked out, the interior lights came on, and the robot cab whooshed into the sky. Damn them. Damn them all and the games they played. And damn me, too, for playing with them, as if I had much choice, Spencer thought.

    ###

    The near-silent thrumming of the cab’s engines, the dim interior lighting and the enforced inactivity conspired to put Allison Spencer into a light doze. He slept as the kilometers whispered past, his hand now and again clench ing around an imaginary switch.
    It took only the slightest shift in the cab’s motion to awaken him. His eyes sprang open the moment the cab’s nose pitched downward, and it took him a second or two to remember where he was. “Cab, what is it?”
    “Additional passenger proceeding to same destination has hailed me,” the cab answered in a dull voice.
    The same destination! The cab was supposed to be taking him home! He hadn’t planned on providing target practice just yet. He reached out and broke the seal on the emergency manual operation switch. He pushed the switch in hard, waiting for the manual controls to pop out so he could fly himself out of here. It scared him when nothing happened, but it didn’t exactly surprise him.
    The situation was not good. Here he was, unarmed in a cab he could not control, heading toward a landing, a meeting with someone who had to know who he was. “AID! See if you can find a KT distress band and send an SOS. Flash under attack. Whatever the hell the KT calls it.”
    “We are not under attack,” the AID announced calmly. “This stop was prearranged.”
    Al Spencer felt his blood go cold. “You knew this was going to happen?” he asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Who is it we’re picking up?”
    “I am not at liberty to tell you.”
    Al felt the sweat beading up on his forehead. His AID told him this was no attack—but his AID willfully had withheld information from him. How far a step was it from there to lying? If he were about to be attacked, could he trust this machine to tell him what it knew? “AID, who the hell do you work for?” he asked. He only had a few seconds to straighten this out.
    “I am now employed by the Kona Tatsu, and have been assigned to your case.”
    What sort of case was he? Spencer wondered irritably. Medical? Mental? Legal? Intelligence? “You are incorrect. I am employed by the Kona Tatsu. I own you. You are one of the tools I use to do my employer’s bidding. And I am expected to discard and destroy any tool that does not perform up to specification, before it could endanger a KT asset, such as myself. The specification for an AID includes keeping its owner informed and apprised of all pertinent data. Do you understand?”
    “Yes.”
    “Who do you work for?”
    “Captain Allison Spencer.”
    “Then, AID, who the hell is waiting to meet this cab?”
    “A KT operative, name, rank and mission unknown.”
    “That’s more like it. I think.” It wasn’t any more informative, but at least the AID was admitting it didn’t know. Spencer was inclined to accept its ignorance: AIDs weren’t usually very good liars. And even if the new arrival was a KT agent, that didn’t necessarily mean all was