Metal Fatigue by Sean Williams Read Free Book Online Page B

seat.
    "If I'm not back by ten," he said, "I'll make sure they send you a replacement."
    "That's okay. I don't mind waiting. Just keep the car-phone with you, in case I need you urgently."
    Roads revved the engine and drove away, watching Barney recede in the rear-vision mirror. She stood alone, waving, silhouetted against the street-haze of the rising sun. He had a brief vision of her, the crowd, and him — the parade of robots — being separated by a wash of yellow fire from the solar sheets ... And then he turned the corner.
----
    The headquarters of the Regional Security Department lay in the green centre of the bullseye that was Kennedy Polis, a fifteen-minute drive from Old North Street. Along the way, Roads passed cyclists and pedestrians enjoying the first few minutes of the new day, while occasional flashes of light reflecting off Rosette cabs gliding along active tracks highlighted the movement of people on their way to or from work. He encountered only two other vehicles on the road: one RSD patrol car much like his own, and an Emergency Services clean-up squad heading back to the Works Depot. The latter, he assumed, finished patching yet another blot in the city's landscape; nothing major in itself, yet part of a series of similar band-aid fixes that amounted to a significant, and growing, problem.
    The city was, for the most part, built on level ground. As he neared the centre, however, he crested a gradual rise that enabled him to see above the buildings around him and into the distance. Not far away was the innermost and therefore smallest ring of the Rosette, one and a half kilometres across. The city's heart served as a nexus for the radial freeways, and as a convenient location for various administrative buildings such as Mayor's House, the MSA Academy and RSD HQ. A green belt containing Kennedy City University, and a now defunct zoo and arboretum, echoed the shape of A ring, separating the centre from the suburbs.
    Ahead and beyond the city lay a low range of ragged hills dotted with communication towers and scrub forests: the former acted as the city's northern line of defence, with spotters mounted on each tower to monitor and counter any inward movement from Outside; the latter had once comprised the city's obligatory carbon sink, but now provided wood and fibre for a variety of uses, plus medicinal and industrial compounds farmed from genetically modified tobacco, hemp and potato plantations. Between the hills and the edge of G ring were food and animal crops, tended the same way they had been for decades: with maximum efficiency. Little innovation had been added to the system since the Dissolution, and it still served the city well, complementing food factories elsewhere.
    To the west, visible as a dozen large tank-like shapes looming in the distance, were the two-hundred-metre-high air towers that provided a large proportion of Kennedy's general-use power and helped clean the tainted air and water released as a by-product of industrial activity. Apart from turbines taking advantage of the nearby river's kinetic energy, the city's only other means of mass-producing power was also to the west: the Kennedy Prototype Fusion Reactor, a low blister situated midway along the arc of air towers. The facility had originally been a research centre designed to test the feasibility of kick-starting a small-scale fusion reaction by employing single bubble sonoluminescence and the cavity effect — or, as Roads understood it, using sound to create bubbles in water that collapsed at temperatures and pressures greater than those found at the centre of the sun. A working model had been built in 2036, with the space industry very much in mind, and power production had begun in 2039, just one year before the first outbreaks of the War. By the time the Dissolution had set in, KPFR had been running at full capacity.
    Automatic gun emplacements atop the air towers protected the flatlands to the west, just as they did on