by M. D. Cooper
FREEDOM
STELLAR DATE: 09.02.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Damon Silas
REGION: Interstellar Space, coreward of the Vela Cluster
With the rough plan in place to take the Damon Silas—for the second time in nearly as many days—Roxy pulled off her SS-R4 stealth sheath, climbed into the autodoc, and laid back.
Roxy bit her lip and nodded silently.
A second later, a voice entered her mind, soothing in its soft tones.
An image of her brain appeared in her mind—at least, she assumed it was her brain. The silver and blue mass largely resembled an organic brain, but it looked like a spider had woven a web around it, even ensnaring the mods that were situated between the sulci and gyri.
Roxy replied.
The idea both enticed and horrified Roxy. She hadn’t even considered such a thing, but here the standard TSF autodoc was suggesting replacing her artificial brain with a real one.
The holo of Roxy’s brain faded, as did the autodoc’s voice and Carmen’s dim presence.
* * * *
Roxy woke with a start, sitting up abruptly and hitting her head on the inside of the autodoc’s pod.
Obeying the voice, Roxy tried to recall where she was, and why she was in an autodoc.
“Yesterday,” Roxy whispered, then a memory hit her. “The Damon Silas! I’m aboard that ship. Did we seize it successfully?”
“Was I injured?” Roxy repeated the question, curious if Carmen would give a different answer than the autodoc’s NSAI.
“Justin…” Roxy whispered the word, feeling it on her lips.
The name brought with it a flood of emotions. At first, they were happy…pleasant and warm. Then others followed: fear, rage, lust, anger, more lust. They crashed into Roxy, subsuming her in a maelstrom of feelings that she couldn’t master.
An explosion erupted in her mind, and she bit back a pain-filled howl. Then—just as fast as it had arrived—the spike of sensation was gone.
“That motherfucking son of a bitch!” she hissed, as memory flooded back into her. Memory that brought unbridled rage.
Roxy pushed open the autodoc and swung her legs over the edge, looking at her azure skin.
“Oh, I’ve remembered, alright,” she whispered. “He’s going to pay.”
A minute later, she had pulled her SS-R4 stealth sheath back on and was exiting the medbay.
A pair of engineers swung into the corridor and began walking aft, causing Roxy to press herself against the bulkhead to avoid being bumped into, though she felt a strong urge to simply kill them and carry on.
Roxy paused, the revulsion of the years she’d spent adoring Justin welling up in her. She was glad that her body wasn’t organic; if it were, she was certain the deck would be covered in her vomit.
* * * * *
Roxy stood at the entrance to the bridge. Carmen had accessed the optic feeds from the ship’s command center. The only people within were Justin, Sam, and Harry, all standing around the central holotank, heads bent together.
An alarm sounded through the ship, three long tones followed by one short pulse.
“Alert! Alert! Alert! Primary reactor containment failure! Runaway reaction, ablative shielding will hold for seven minutes at current levels.”
“Fuck!” Justin swore, looking around the bridge, where every console was lit in the red glow of the emergency lighting. “There’s no way. That reactor was running at minimal levels.
”
“Silas!” Sam called out. “Terminate fuel flow to primary reactor.”
“Fuel flow is already terminated,” the NSAI replied calmly. “The reaction continues.”
“C’mon,” Sam grabbed Harry’s sleeve. “It must be sabotage from the TSF crew. We can kill the manual fuel feeds from engineering.”
The two men raced off the bridge, and the moment they were past, Roxy’s invisible form slipped inside.
Justin was seven meters from her, his back to the door as he shook his head slightly—one of his Link tells. There were two consoles between them, and Roxy crept around them until she was right behind the man who had hurt her so much over the years.
Decades.
“Containment timeline has decreased by four minutes,” the ship’s NSAI announced on the 1MC. “Three minutes until containment failure.”
Roxy nodded silently and then slipped around the last console. Nothing but three meters of empty space lay between her and her prey.
“Roxanne.” Justin’s voice carried a smug note…and a touch of sorrow. “I should have known it was you.”
He turned and stared at her exact location.
“Come now. You don’t think I would provide my teams with stealth gear that doesn’t send out random pings on frequencies I know to monitor? I do it for just this reason.”
“Have a lot of people try to mutiny on you?” Roxy spat the words out. “Not that it surprises me. You never engendered loyalty, you just used secrets to manipulate.”
“I do what works,” Justin said with a shrug. “But you know I do it all to help. Right, Roxy? You know I love you.”
“Fucker,” Roxy swore. “You don’t love anyone but yourself. You made me into this thing and then let everyone use me, like I was your little whore.”
Justin chuckled and shook his head. “How did you do it? Remove the neural lace?”
Roxy pulled off the stealth sheath’s hood—she wanted him to see the rage in her eyes. “I had a bit of help identifying it, and then the autodoc on this very ship did the honors.”
“There’s no way…” Justin whispered, then an ugly laugh coughed its way free of his throat. “The ship’s AI. You never got rid of it…. Clever.”
Roxy grinned. “Carmen just met me—and not under the best circumstances—but she’s done more for me than you ever have.”
“Wrong.” Justin shook his head. “I did more for you than you ever could imagine. I saved you after the failed attack on Perimands. You were shredded, but I got you into a stasis pod and reconstructed your mind. It was damaged—you were having trouble focusing on reality, hallucinating, flying into rages. I used the neural laces to help compensate for that.”
Roxy shook her head, eyes narrowing as she regarded the man who had held her captive for years, treating her like a possession—making her revel in being a possession.
“You’re such an accomplished liar, Justin, but your lies won’t work on me. I didn’t buy them before you mucked around in my brain, and I’m not going to buy them now. Everyone else always thought you were so clever as you rose up through the ranks, eventually taking on the directorship, but not me. I always saw clear through you.”
“That was always your fatal flaw,” Justin sneered. “Roxanne. You always behaved as though your opinions were better than mine, like you knew all the angles, and I was just guessing.”
Roxy barked a laugh. “That’s because half the time you were! You’re good at intuitive leaps, but you were wrong a lot. Even so, you’re such a good bullshitter that you weaseled your way out of every tight scrape—‘til that last one. Sera finally did you in. You underestimated her.”
Justin’s face reddened, and Roxy took a perverse pleasure in seeing him so flustered. “It’s not my fault that didn’t work—it was Andrea’s idea,” he sputtered defensively.
Roxy lifted a hand to her mouth, feigning surprise. “Oh, look! Justin’s shifting blame again! It’s the liar in his natural habitat. I bet Sera would be interested to know who it was that really ordered her assassination. Granted, you’re just dancing to that Caretaker person’s tune, anyway; you’re not even the master of your own destiny.”
Justin clenched his jaw and narrowed his eyes. A moment later, a pistol was in his hand—but Roxy knew his tells, and she held one in hers, as well.
“Pulse pistol?” he scoffed. “Should have packed a slug thrower.”
“A seven millimeter ship-safe round?” Roxy asked, peering at his weapon. “It’ll take two shots to get through my stealth sheath, and then another two at least to penetrate my skin. Then what? You hit the food processing mod I never use?”
“I could just shoot your he—”
Justin’s words were cut off as he staggered backward, Roxy’s pulse blast hitting him square in the chest.
“You shot me,” he hissed.
“I’ll do it again, don’t worry,” she growled, and pulled the trigger on her pulse pistol three more times, aiming at the pistol in Justin’s right hand.
Though the concussive impacts threw his arm back, he held onto the weapon, a toothy grin forming on his lips. “You’re not the only one with mods to keep them safe.”
A whistling noise came from all around the pair, rapidly increasing in amplitude, until it became a near howl.
“Do you have a mod so you don’t need to breathe?” Roxy asked, her voice faint in the thinning atmosphere. “You gave me that one,” she reminded him.
A look of true fear crossed Justin’s face, and he swung his weapon toward Roxy again. She fired her pistol to deflect his aim, but in the thinning air, the pulse blast barely had any effect.
Her former captor squeezed off a trio of rounds as Roxy dodged to the right. Two hit her in the shoulder, the impact spreading across her stealth sheath, and the third tore through her cheek and ripped off her left ear.
Good thing I’m not a real person anymore…
Before Justin could bring his weapon to bear on her once more, Roxy had closed the distance between them, her lightwand active and streaking through the air.
It hit his pistol, cutting it in half.
She swung her lightwand at him again, but Justin had drawn his own and blocked the blow. The flash of light was blinding, as photons and electrons erupted around them, the blades’ carefully funneled cherenkov radiation spilling out in a nimbus glow around the impact point.
The pair struggled across the bridge, lightwands clashing again and again as each fought for dominance. It surprised her, how well he was holding up without breathing. Mods to recycle air and pull more oxygen were common enough, but there was a finite amount that could be extracted from what was in his lungs.
His skin would be burning now, feeling as though it were going to crack and split apart. Red splotches were appearing across his face, and his eyes were entirely bloodshot.
She shrugged and tossed her blade into her other hand. w to that. I don’t have to best you, I just have to outlast you.>
Roxy’s lips pulled back in a fierce smile, knowing that her moment of triumph was finally upon her.
She felt Justin’s presence on the Link waver, then disappear. He slid off the console and onto the deck, his body convulsing as his control over his lungs gave out, and he began gasping for breath in the cold vacuum.
Roxy lifted her lightwand, considering finishing him off, but Carmen stayed her hand.
Roxy waited for a long minute after the man’s last breath before she took a single step toward him, only to be interrupted by a shout from Carmen.
Roxy moved to the central holotank and changed the view to the space around the Damon Silas.
Carmen replied, her voice calmer.
Roxy felt the ship’s grav-dampeners activate as the engines began to thrust. She turned to one of the consoles and verified that all the bay doors had closed and the shields were coming online. Then she charged the point-defense weapons.
Beams lanced out from the Greensward, only to play harmlessly against the Damon Silas’s stasis shields.
