by Mina Carter
Risyn’s expression froze.
“You said Miisan-level.”
It was not the answer she had been expecting. She slumped on the bed. “What?”
“Miisan-level but not Miisan herself.”
Realization hit and she laughed, the sound manic and bitter. Maybe a little unhinged. But who could blame her? She’d lost the man she loved. He’d been murdered and she hadn’t been able to protect him.
“No. I’m not Miisan.” She grinned at him. “You’ll never find her. You’re too late. She’s stardust and databytes across the entire empire by now.”
Risyn’s face tightened in anger. “She’s not the AI we need. Draanth!”
He shoved his hand through his hair, more agitated than she’d seen him before. Pointing at Berr, he snarled, “Get us back to that base. We need that AI’s cortex mapping if we’ve any hope of success.”
Keris blinked. Cortex mapping was only used to integrate an AI’s consciousness into a new cerebral housing.
“Wait? What?” she asked, trying to lift in her bonds as the B’Kaar filed out of the room. “Hey! Wait! No… don’t leave me in here with the dead guy!”
But it was too late. The lights went out and she was alone, shivering on a metal slab with only a dead B’Kaar to help her mourn the only man she’d ever loved.
The shuttle was not just destroyed. The B’Kaar had obliterated it.
Jay stood in the entrance to the cave, speechless as he surveyed the damage. It looked like a wrecking ball had hit it. Or a bomb had gone off inside it. The landing struts and the ventral hull was still there, but everything else was… gone.
At the least, it was no longer in the right place. Instead, the rest of the shuttle was spread around the cave as panels, internal support structure, and bulkheads littered the dirt and rock floor. The airlock door was in two pieces just in front of him and the toilet, a similar design the galaxy over, sat upright near the left wall.
He sank to his knees, a low moan in the back of his throat. He’d been worried about figuring out how to pilot the alien craft. It hadn’t occurred to him that the B’Kaar would ensure he couldn’t follow.
He had no idea how long he sat there, looking at the destroyed shuttle. The first sun sank below the horizon, the darkness brief but complete until the triple moons rose, lighting the cave up as much as daylight had.
“You fucking asshole!” he raged, surging forward suddenly to grab a triangle of torn hull plating. Falling and twisting at the same time, he hurled it out of the cave up at the sky.
It didn’t reach that far, a hand darting out to stop it before it could leave the cave. Still on his back Jay yanked the pistol from his waist and aimed, thinking that the B’Kaar had come back to finish the job.
But the alien warrior standing in the doorway wasn’t B’Kaar. He wasn’t in an exosuit, but the more “normal” leathers of a Latharian warrior. Tall, he was broader than a shuttle across the shoulders and vaguely familiar.
“Wanna tell me who you are, blondie?” he growled. “Before I blow your fucking head off. Because I’m in a shoot first and ask fucking questions later mood.”
The alien tilted his head slightly. “You are aware you just asked a question, right?”
“Rynn, leave the man alone,” a familiar voice rumbled and Xaandril, the emperor’s champion, stepped out from behind the bigger warrior. Seeing the two side by side, he instantly realized why the younger one looked familiar.
He was Xaandrynn M’rln, Keris’s brother and the emperor’s chief assassin.
Surging to his feet, he looked them both up and down. “About time you got here. Those asshole B’Kaar took Keris about an hour after she sent that message. We need to rescue her. Now.”
He walked past the two aliens. “Did you bring a ship? I’m going to need some leathers and guns. Lots of guns. And that big bastard Risyn is mine. Understand?”
Rynn turned to his father. “I thought you said Keris had taken up with a human?”
Jay looked over his shoulder. His quick look outside had reassured him that Keris’s family had arrived in a ship—a sleek, compact warship that looked like it meant business. Exactly what he would have expected from the emperor’s champion and assassin.
“I told the B’Kaar and I’ll tell you as well. You Lathar look down on us at your peril. Yeah, we’re smaller. Yeah, we don’t have all the adaptations you guys do. When you lot come up against a problem, you tweak your genetics. Faster, stronger, see in the dark… you can do it all.”
He turned to face them, his hands bunched at his sides. “Humans didn’t get to cheat that way. But guess what? On a planet where everything wants to kill us, we’re the fucking top of the food chain. Absolute fucking apex predators. We adapt, we overcome, without fucking about with our genetic code and wiping out half our species. Now you tell me who the weaker species is!”
Rynn grunted. “I stand corrected.”
Xaan just grinned and strode forward, clapping Jay on the back. “We’re both mated to humans, Major, so we know exactly how superior your species is. Now, shall we get those guns and go rescue my daughter?”
20
Hours later, Keris had figured out that the dead guy wasn’t much for talking, and the B’Kaar made slightly substandard restraints... or operating tables. One or the other because she’d managed to find a rough edge with the restraint on her left wrist. An eternity of seesawing her arm back and forth later, then she hissed in triumph as the webbing strap gave and she could lift her arm free.
Instantly, she rolled over, reaching as far down under the table as she could to try and hit the release catch underneath. She didn’t have much experience with operating theatres—her brother had been an assassin, not a healer—but for some reason the schematics were buried deep in her brain. Why that, such a random piece of knowledge, rather than something truly useful, like the verbal override access for any Lathar ship, she did not know. But she went with it.
“Uuuunnnggghhh!” she grunted, stretching her arm and fingers as far as she could. The skin of her fingertip just brushed the button, but the cramping pain that shot through her shoulder forced her to roll back and breathe deeply until it had passed. She was just about to launch herself over the edge again and hope that her bodyweight would give her that extra reach when the sound of heavy footsteps in the corridor froze her in place.
“It’s the wrong AI but that doesn’t matter,” a voice she didn’t recognize said. “The procedure should work anyway.”
Risyn, Berr, and another B’Kaar walked into the room. It was not one she’d seen before and unlike the others—all warriors as comfortable out of their suits as they were in them—it was evident from his thin, almost wasted frame and his gaunt face that he rarely, if ever, took it off.
“We need to know the transfer codex that allowed it to integrate with the organic matter, not the entire cortex map,” he said as they approached the tables in the center of the room. His gaze washed over Keris and she shivered. It was empty and devoid of any emotion, no empathy, not even a flicker of recognition that she was a living, breathing thing. He looked at her with the dispassionate assessment of a scientist.
“I just need to dissect and analyze the subject’s brain structure and then we can remap my fa—Lord Arris’s brain and reintegrate the stored consciousness.”
“Wait… what? No. No dissection!” she exclaimed but Berr had already stepped in front of the suited B’Kaar, hand on his chest plate.
“Are you sure that’s necessary, Soriat? We have nano-molecular scanners. That should be enough to analyze the brain structure. She doesn’t need to die for this analysis.”
“She?” Soriat curled his lip and then looked at Risyn. “My lord, may I suggest First Warrior Berrick is removed from this project? He has obviously fallen prey to the AI’s tricks and believes in fantasy.” He sneered at the bigger warrior. “Next you’ll want us to believe it’s a viable female capable of reproduction.”
“Could it be?” Ris
yn paused to look at the gaunt B’Kaar. For a brief moment she got the feeling he didn’t like the scientist. “Capable of reproduction, I mean? Bio-printed bodies with AI consciousnesses would go a long way to producing the next generation.”
“What ’e said,” Berr growled.
She could tell from just a look that he really disliked the wasted and withered B’Kaar. She searched her memory, something itching at the back of her mind as she tried to remember every databyte she’d ever accessed about the cyberwarriors.
Ahh… there it was. Integration sickness. There wasn’t much information on it, probably suppressed by the B’Kaar themselves. But sometimes warriors got addicted to the interface with their suits, the endorphins and hormones produced during use acting as an immediate high. Soriat was one of the afflicted.
The suited male shrugged, the shoulder plate of the suit moving at the same time. Unlike most kasivar, it wasn’t heavily loaded with weaponry but had extra attachments she didn’t want to think about the purpose of, not after he’d mentioned dissection.
“They’re not viable for reproduction.”
He was lying. She knew that down to the marrow of her new bones. The data unpacked in her brain and she skimmed through it. The bio-printed bodies were all fully operational and functional. She was as fertile as if she’d been born to any Latharian family.
Risyn didn’t move for a moment, but then his gaze flickered over to the dead guy and the suit standing there.
“You can’t bring back the dead, Risyn. You know that,” she told him. It was one of the unwritten laws of the healer’s hall. Sometimes a warrior was just too far gone and even though their technology could bring him back, what came back wasn’t the same person. “The godd—”
“Silence!” Soriat screamed, slamming his hand down on the edge of her table. “You will not speak, abomination!”
“She’s right,” Risyn shook his head. “This project is against all natural Latharian laws. Shut it down. We will hold vigil for Lord Arris in the proper manner overnight tonight.”
He and Berr turned to leave, but Soriat remained motionless behind them, his face frozen into an expression of utter shock. Her gaze flicked from him to the two warriors walking away, silently urging him to go after them and argue—out in the corridor preferably. That would give her time to get off this draanthing table and escape through the cleaning bot tunnels. It wouldn’t be long before they tracked her down and found her, but hopefully she’d have discovered an access panel by then. She needed less than a minute to wreak havoc, and if she couldn’t bring down the asshole who had killed Jay, she’d destroy the entire ship instead.
Fury washed over Soriat’s face and he swung around, going after the two warriors.
“Look out!” she screamed, but he’d already brought a heavy, suited arm down across the back of Risyn’s neck, dropping the tall B’Kaar leader to the floor. Berr bellowed in challenge and launched himself at the afflicted B’Kaar, the pair toppling over in a crash of metal.
Servos and grunts filled the air as she threw herself to the side, almost breaking her shoulder to hit the release button for the restraints. They gave, dumping her on the hard metal of the floor. She gasped as pain exploded over her body, needing a second to suck a breath in. Then she was up and running.
Instinct took over and she didn’t head for the maintenance tunnels but the other table. The dead B’Kaar was a grisly sight, with his sightless eyes filmed over and his ke’lath exposed in that way. Now she was here, she could see what Soriat had been doing. He’d jacked the dead lord’s ke’lath directly into an interface unit… she shuddered. He was trying to reanimate the dead. It was heresy, an insult to the goddess herself, which was ironic coming from an AI installed in a bio-printed body. At least she wasn’t dead, though, and never had been. Arris B’Kaar was dead and had been for what looked like decades.
A crash got her attention and she yanked her head up just in time to see Soriat throw Berr across the room. He smashed into a couple of equipment carts, sending them flying. Instantly he was on his feet again, teeth bared in a bloody smile with his fists up.
“Get out of here!” he bellowed as he threw himself at his suited opponent.
But the lab doors were closed, the heavy pounding on the other side evidence that Berr’s kasivar was trying to get to him. Instead of running, she turned around.
The suit.
It was the work of a moment to scramble into it. It was a heartbeat for a human but an eternity for a former AI, her analytical nature telling her all the ways this could go horribly wrong. She ignored it all and turned, her back hitting the metal of the suit as it folded around her.
The world went black and then exploded. She screamed, her voice echoing in her ears as a tsunami of… everything assaulted her. In the space between one nano-second and the next, her biological body interfaced with the exosuit, feeding her more data than her organic brain could hold.
So she didn’t. Rather than panicking, she closed her eyes and rode the wave until she’d centered herself. Only then did she open herself up again, letting the torrent roll through her and only picking up the parts she needed.
Opening her eyes, she found Soriat storming toward her, a snarl on his face.
“Get out of that, you filthy abomination!” he snarled, rounding the table with Arris on it faster than any un-enhanced Lathar could. He reached for the release catch on the breastplate, obviously intent on tearing it open and removing her by force. “You defile it with your very presence and no untrained being could ever hope to operate it—”
She blocked his hand with hers, the blow from her suit’s open palm slamming into his arm and sending him lurching sideways to stumble over the table with his dead leader.
He whirled, shock on his face. “How? You shouldn’t…”
“Be able to operate it? Did you forget I’m a Miisan-level advanced A…” She cut off her spiel and grinned at him. “I’ve got a big brain, alright? Much bigger than your pathetic organic one. After being a ship? This shit is easy.”
He threw himself at her, using the strength of his suit to hammer blow after blow into her arms and legs. She blocked, walking backward as she worked out how to control the thing. It was bigger and more lumbering than Soriat’s but she couldn’t access weapons control, and even if she could, she couldn’t fire anything in here. Not with Risyn and Berr both still in here. Well… more Berr since he’d actively tried to save her.
Since he had, she couldn’t blow up the ship with him on board and kill him. Her subroutines weren’t stopping her anymore, though. She’d shed them with her mechanical body. Something else was. Something deeper down, buried close to where her heart beat. She ignored the puzzle and concentrated on the fight.
Soriat might be one of the afflicted, unable to fight outside of his suit, but he was still a warrior in it. And she… wasn’t. Whatever she tried, she couldn’t get away from him, or get to the door to open it. Before long, he had her backed up into the corner, a feral grin on his face as he brought a laser cutter down to bear on her chest plate.
“I’ll draanthing cut you out if I have to!” he hissed, a manic gleam in his eyes and the lights behind him turning his straggly thin hair into a halo.
This was it. He had her pinned and there was no escape. Once that cutter broke through the suit’s shields, it would kill her. With a sigh, she closed her eyes. She didn’t want the last thing she saw to be his face. Instead, she called up an image of Jay as a tear streaked down her cheek. At least now she would be with him…
“Get away from her, you cunt!”
The dangerous growl was in a voice so familiar she gasped, her heart aching. For a moment she froze, convinced she’d heard Jay as the room filled with heavy footsteps, both warriors’ boots and the heavier clump-clump-clump of B’Kaar cyberwarriors. But it couldn’t be. Jay was dead. In her grief she was imagining him. Her organic brain was offering her comfort as she faced her own death in the only way it knew how… by giving her the
one thing she wanted most in reality.
“I’d do as he says,” another voice broke in. “I don’t know how much you know about humans, but this one’s batshit crazy. Keris, close your eyes.”
“Rynn?” she whispered, as a laser blaster fired. She squeezed her eyes shut just as something went pop. There was a wet splatter across the front of her suit’s shields and then a dull thud as something heavy hit the floor.
A wash of information from the suit tried to get her attention, but she ignored it, opening her eyes. The head and torso shields of her suit flared for a second, burning off the… matter that had been on them. Then she could see.
There, standing in the middle of the ruined lab, stood Jay, a heavy assault blaster balanced on his hip. Dressed in combat leathers with a grim look on his face, he looked every bit as dangerous as the two taller Lathar who flanked him. Xaandril M’rln, the emperor’s champion, and his son, Xaandrynn.
Her family. All together.
21
Keris’s eyes tracked Jay as he walked toward her. With barely a thought, she triggered the release mechanism on the suit and the whole front of it opened up. She tumbled into his arms, wonder filling her as she touched his face.
“You… how? You were dead?” she whispered as his dark stubble abraded her fingertips. He must be a figment of her imagination… or a dream. Any moment now she’d wake up on the cold slab of the table with only the dead guy for company.
She burst into tears, clinging to him. “Please be real… I don’t want this to be a dream!”
“It’s not a dream, sweetheart,” he chuckled, pulling her close and sliding a finger under her chin to make her look up at him. His eyes were warm with amusement and something else. Hope, longing… love all tumbled through her as she smiled, biting her lip.
