The woman continued to hold it on him. “What do you want?”
Laughton looked around, trying to keep tabs on everyone. The woman at the back of the warehouse started toward them. The men loading the van seemed happy to let the women handle the police officers.
The woman who had shot Kir with the shotgun was younger than the other two with ice-blue eyes. “Get moving,” she yelled at the men by the van.
The men jumped, and then began moving boxes into the van.
Laughton noticed the shelving units toward the back were mostly empty. “Packing?” he said.
“We didn’t murder anybody,” Twin One said, still holding the gun.
Kir was inspecting the damage where the bullet had torn through his clothes and simul-skin revealing some wires within. “Not for lack of trying,” he said.
“Fuck you, metal,” the woman who had shot him said.
“You okay?” Laughton said.
“Fine.”
“We are packing, to answer your question,” Twin Two said.
Blue Eyes’s mouth dropped open and her eyebrows went up as she glared in surprise at Twin Two, her expression clearly saying “Seriously? You’re going to talk to them?” When she got no reaction from the other two women, she stormed off to help loading the van.
Twin One lowered her weapon. “We see what’s happening. Plan was to get out before they came for us. So when you show up with a robot punching in our door…”
Kir had stripped the ends of a few of the exposed wires and was twisting them together. “I’m one of the good guys,” he said. “Can I actually say that out loud?”
“We’re not here to arrest you,” Laughton said again. “I’m Chief Laughton from Liberty. This is Agent Kir from Health and Human Services. Can we call you something other than the Sisters?”
Twin One shook her head. “No.”
“The one who welcomed us with the shotgun is Lysee Martins,” Kir said. “These two are Marcy and Jenny Leonard.”
“Fucking face recognition,” Marcy said.
“So you’re not all sisters?” Laughton said.
Marcy said, “How can you bring this shit in here?” She nodded at Kir.
Instead of answering the question, Laughton said, “We’ve pretty much got twenty-four hours to prevent martial law, and then they really will come for you. We just need whatever you know.”
“About what?” Jenny Leonard said. “We didn’t have anything to do with Smythe getting killed.”
“Honestly,” Laughton said, “I’m not even worried about that right now. I need the antivirus for this thing that’s killing robots.”
“Killer Apps,” Jenny said. “They had to be clever.”
“Sounds like a human,” Kir said, expressing a rare anti-orgo moment. Laughton blinked in surprise. “Puns,” Kir said, and Laughton nodded his understanding. It hadn’t been anti-orgo, just observational.
“Don’t talk to him with that metal here,” Lysee yelled from the back of the warehouse.
“She’s going to get one of you killed,” Laughton said.
“Or save our lives,” Jenny said.
“We don’t have the antivirus,” Marcy said.
“McCardy does, and we know that he was looking to make contact with you. Has he?”
“No,” Marcy said with annoyed amusement that said it would be a bad idea if he did. Guess he’d been right to seek out Gary’s help.
“Sounds like it would be a bad idea if he did.”
The Sisters didn’t respond to that.
“You know, we did you a big favor last night,” Kir said. He was no longer fiddling with his insides.
“Fuck you, metal,” Lysee yelled.
“Lysee!” Jenny chastened.
“You’re the one who shot me!” Kir called at the angry young woman.
“Okay!” Laughton yelled, and everyone looked at him. “We all want the same thing right now, and that’s to keep the robots off the preserve, yeah?” He waited, looking around from person to person. The loaders had stopped again to watch. “They’re trying to use this to kill the preserve, so we need that antivirus now.”
“We heard about that club,” Jenny said. “We didn’t know about it before.” She looked at Marcy, who blinked her eyes in consent. “We knew Titanium was moving product off the preserve by boat. He’s working off some island out past Johns Island. We figured there was enough to go around, but then Carter’s deliveries became erratic. We thought he was diverting his supply through Titanium.”
“We weren’t going to allow that much longer,” Marcy said.
“Then why kill Smythe?” Laughton said, hoping to catch them out.
Jenny smiled. “Nice try, Chief. We didn’t do that, but Jones thought we did, and ran to Titanium. We figured McCardy must have followed.”
Laughton tried to make that fit. If Jones and McCardy thought the Sisters had discovered their disloyalty and were going to kill them, why was McCardy heading for them? He had either approached Titanium unsuccessfully or hoped to convince the Sisters that he wasn’t party to Jones’s betrayal.
“You have any clearer idea about where Titanium is?” Laughton said.
Jenny’s and Marcy’s eyes met, but Laughton couldn’t tell what had passed between them. “No,” Jenny said, her face open and honest.
Laughton looked at Kir. “What do you think?”
Kir looked back at Lysee, who was sitting at the desk, leaning back in the chair, arms crossed across her chest. “Fuck you, metal!” she yelled. “You’re lucky they weren’t electric tips.”
“She shot me,” he said to Jenny and Marcy.
“You did punch down our door.”
“We knocked first. You could have opened it.”
“Where are you going? Out to your farm?” Laughton said.
Jenny shook her head. “We’re going to change scenes for a few days, off the preserve.”
Laughton shook his head. “That’s not going to work.”
“Fix this situation, and we’ll come right back,” Marcy said.
“Right,” Kir said.
“We’ve got you, don’t we?” Jenny said.
Laughton snorted. “Yeah. And all you can give me is that Titanium was taking things out by boat. We already knew that.”
Jenny shrugged. “We can only tell you what we know, and that’s all we know.”
Laughton said nothing, watching her face, but the muscles remained relaxed, no micro-expressions to give away a lie. Titanium had managed to keep the Sisters in the dark.
“You still can’t take off,” Laughton said. “Don’t make me arrest all of you just to keep you where we can find you.”
Marcy and Jenny exchanged a look, all of the muscles in their faces tightening in the exact same way, almost like a living mirror. “Aren’t your boys in the car out there going to keep tabs on us?” Marcy said. “That’s not good enough?”
Laughton wasn’t surprised that they had spotted the men outside, but he was disappointed nonetheless.
“And your machine here,” Lysee said, rejoining them. “You’ve got our vans on GPS now, don’t you.”