Android: Golem (The Identity Trilogy) by Mel Odom Page A

was compromised, he was a dead man. I took out a compress and tried to press it against his chest to control the bleeding.
    “Dispatch, this is Detective Drake.”
    “Dispatch reads you, Drake.”
    “I need EMTs on-site. One of the perpetrators has been grievously wounded. His life is threatened.”
    “Drake, this is Lieutenant Ormond. Where is your partner?” Ormond didn’t like me, and he didn’t like the decision the NAPD had made to add bioroids to the police force, especially the homicide division. In particular, his homicide division.
    “Detective Nolan is in pursuit of a third perpetrator.” I held the compress against the man’s chest and felt his life fading from him. His heartbeat slowed and his blood pressure dropped, but he wasn’t dead. I couldn’t leave him. The decision was clear and unalterable.
    “Leave that man and go to your partner.”
    “I can’t do that, sir.”
    “You don’t leave your partner.”
    “Sir, she left me.”
    Ormond cursed. “Detective Nolan. Shelly.” He knew her on a personal level, not just from work. He had trained her as an investigator. And he’d been the first to protest her acceptance of me as a partner.
    “Stay out of my head, Emil. I’m busy.” Shelly was breathless, hurried. “Drake, when you get free, the perp has reached the hopper pad.”
    She knew the man I was tending was going to die. So did I, but I was locked to him and couldn’t move. The programming was relentless and unbreakable.
    I mapped the egress to the hopper pad from the hotel schematic. The buzz of the nanobots remained constant and my leg’s articulation slowly crawled back toward normal.
    With a final cough, the man I was tending to died. His life signs flatlined. I suspected the aortic arch had been nicked after all, as I had feared.
    I pushed myself to my feet and hurried toward the hopper pad egress. My damaged leg slowed me and threw me off my balance. “Dispatch, the perpetrator is dead. I am en route to Detective Nolan.”
    “Hurry.” That was Ormond, not Dispatch.
    I took hold of the rungs that led up to the hopper pad. The route was an emergency entrance for firefighters that might need access to the water standpipes in the top floor. I hauled myself up. “How far out are the support units?”
    “Uniform hopper ETA is one minute thirty-seven seconds.”
    “Affirmative.” The emergency door overhead had been left open. Rain sluiced into the duct and spattered my face as I crawled out onto the rooftop.
    *
    The rainstorm had grown stronger and now whipped across the rooftop. Despite the gutters built around the roof, water stood two centimeters deep in most places.
    Lightning flared across the sky, searing the darkness like a brand. The rain diluted the Synap’s effectiveness, range, and strength because it had been designed as a passive weapon. The charge automatically began powering down under the existing conditions.
    I ran as best as I could with the damaged leg. I dodged hoppers and chased moving shadows created by the lightning and the surrounding neon lights of other businesses.
    Halfway across the rooftop, I spotted Shelly running along the building’s edge. She held her weapon in both hands, concentrating on the line of hoppers to her right. I focused on the hoppers as well, and I saw the third man before she did.
    He stood in the shadows of a large luxury hopper. His back was to the vehicle. Panic etched his face. He was a man with no way out and he knew it, but he couldn’t go down without a fight. He lifted his pistol and took aim.
    “ Shelly! ” My voice amplified to public address loudness, tearing across the rooftop in a deafening boom. I’d hoped to startle the man as I lifted my Synap.
    TARGET IS BEY—
    I ignored the script and fired. The Synap pulsed and the blue bolt leaped across the intervening distance. The man lit up bright blue, but he remained unaffected and on his feet.
    He squeezed the trigger of his weapon as Shelly turned.
    The bullet