by Sara King
“Then again,” Pan said, turning to look up at Doberman for the first time, “maybe I’m wrong on that?”
“That would be my conclusion, Pan,” Doberman said. “Despite my relative youth, I believe I have a better grasp of empathy than my friend.”
Pan turned back to Anna with a smile. “You’re not gonna shoot me because you don’t want to be the one trapped giving speeches at a podium, because you know they’re just as likely to throw rotten eggs at you as cheer.”
“Dobie, stop pointing that stupid thing at him,” Anna muttered, her capillaries increasing in blood flow.
“Yes, Anna,” Doberman said, locking his missiles back out of sight and lowering his arm.
“Thank you,” Pan said.
“So while we’re tossing insults back and forth,” Anna said, still looking ruffled, “what is up with your feet? Are you a fucking Hobbit or what? In the last two weeks, I’ve seen you wear a pair of shoes maybe three times, and once it was because you bought some from a shop in the Junkyard as we were boarding to go planetside.”
Panner flushed. “It’s a bad habit. I forget.”
“What,” Anna scoffed, “forget to put on shoes?”
Pan shrugged. “I keep them in my room, and by the time I remember, it’s a waste of time to go back.”
Anna smiled. “Then maybe I’ll forget not to leave broken glass all over the floor, just to show you how much I get irritated by threats.” She gestured at Dobie. “You. Tinman. You’re my assistant the rest of the day. Looks like the other chickenshits flew the coop, and we’ve only got a couple hours to get the net up and running.” Gesturing, she turned to go back to the bunker.
Panner sighed. “Anna, we both know you can’t get that net up and working in time to catch them with their pants down. It was a good idea, but it’s not practical. The energy source is necessarily unstable. We need to keep excavating, find more of that unique Aashaanti metal to shield it.”
Sneering, Anna said, “Is that your charisma telling you that, Pan? Your special way with words that’s convinced you my themian cage doesn’t have the mass integrity to stop a plasma flushback?”
“It was Peter, Ryan, and Janice who were saying that,” Pan said. “Had you been listening.”
“Peter, Ryan, and Janice are full of crap,” Anna said. “They’re not seeing the whole picture. If they were right, it would have exploded by now, am I wrong?”
Pan looked at a loss.
Making a disgusted sigh, Anna turned to Doberman and said, “Dobie, am I wrong?”
“Theoretically, if they were correct, it should have exploded,” Doberman agreed.
“Ha!” Anna snapped. “See?”
Panner spread his hands. “I’m just saying we don’t have enough shielding material to keep the Krauss-Gobenhauff reaction intact. You were talking about it earlier.”
“Don’t waste air on things you can’t even pronounce,” Anna said. “Go frolic with the brainless ducklings and leave the technical stuff to the experts. Just make sure nobody—nobody—on our side is on the comm when my blast goes off.”
Panner frowned. “Blast? Anna, you said—”
“I know what I said, Pan,” Anna said, cocking her head at him and smiling. “That was to keep the little lovemunch chickenshits from bolting when they realized I planned to unleash an Aashaanti neural explosion strong enough to take out an entire planet, set to ping on every single comm open to it within the closest six systems.”
Pan just stared at her. Finally, he said, “Excuse me?”
“Perfectly harmless to anyone not within ten feet of a working comm,” Anna said, grinning. “Though the fireworks should be intense.”
“Anna, that could kill our own guys!”
“Indeed,” Anna said. “Which is why you’re going to tell them to get off the air and shut everything down. Now.” She turned to go back to the bunker.
Panner caught her arm. “You’re talking about an entire planet, Anna. If anyone doesn’t get the message…”
“They’ll die, and everyone around them will die,” Anna said. “That’s the point. I’m going to be turning people close to any working comm system into Shriekers for about thirty seconds, until the Krauss-Gobenhauff reaction exhausts itself. Give those floaters a taste of their own medicine. If we’re lucky, we’ll only lose like five percent. The coalers will probably lose eighty. Nobody runs around without personal comm these days.”
Pan blinked at her. “How about we go back and discuss this with the other Babies…?”
Anna’s return smile was icy. “How about you go back to the Orbital and plan out how to make the masses love you, and I’ll go back to work saving Fortune from a full-scale military attack before they get their minds off Yolk and organize themselves.”
She gestured at the otherwise unobtrusive hole in the ground near a twisted piece of ‘rock’ that they had realized was melted and exposed Aashaanti hull. “See, Pan, I am the greatest mind on Fortune, and I’m currently wasting my time talking to a peacock. Get the comms turned off. Manually, if necessary. Fry them yourself if you have to. Peter should be able to do it. Just do whatever it takes to keep our losses minimal.”
Pan gave her a long, unreadable look, then said, “Remember what I said about changing your tune.” Then, without another word, he turned and walked off.
Once he was well out of earshot, his slender body just a small shape moving towards the Babies’ shuttle hidden in the jungle, Anna asked, “Dobie, could you put a grenade through his left ear from this distance?”
Dobie considered. “My grenades are not designed to punch through solids, but if he was turned to the left and I increased the ejective load by sixty percent, I might be able to accomplish it, if the added combustive force doesn’t blow apart my arm.”
“Good. Do it.”
Doberman immediately brought out his grenade launcher, increased the launch load, plotted a course, then waited for the blond Baby to turn his head for proper grenade insertion.
“And make sure it’s in his head before it goes off,” Anna insisted. “I wanna see particles of Panner rise to the occasion.”
“That was my plan, Anna.” Doberman followed Panner’s movements carefully, waiting for the correct opportunity.
Panner had reached the shuttle and was just starting to turn to look back at them when Anna said, “Aw, fuck it. Never mind.”
Doberman immediately returned his midrange grenade launcher to his left bicep and lowered his arm.
For a long moment, Anna just watched Panner climb aboard the shuttle. Then, as the shuttle took off and left them there, she grinned and said, “I like him.”
Doberman didn’t bother pointing out that that was the gift of charismatic people. “Of course, Anna,” he said.
“He’s got some real titanium cojones,” Anna said, still beaming as the shuttle departed south down the Tear. “I like that.”
“He’s a leader,” Doberman said. “He has a lot to add to your cause.”
“Of course,” Anna went on, “I let him think he had struck a chord with that stupid crap about me being hated by the masses—boo hoo, mommy, they all hate me!— ’cause he thinks he’s got me over a barrel with that one.”
“You mean he doesn’t?” Doberman asked, curious. “It’s obvious your incompetence with the emotional aspects of human experience bothers you.”
Anna sobered. For several minutes, Anna said nothing. Then, “Dobie, my gut tells me that Pan and I aren’t going to always see eye-to-eye. It’s becoming apparent we’ve got inherent differences in opinion.” Slowly, she turned to look up at him. “So the question is, do I spare myself the trouble later and get rid of him now, or do I get as much use out of him as I can before I kill him?” She seemed caught in a genuine dilemma, a little frown on her forehead.
Doberman considered. While Pan would definitely be useful to Anna’s cause, there was always the strong possibility that he would see her ploy and attempt to preempt her. Even more likely, the re
ason Anna was alive was because Pan needed her to work the creative side of things as much as Anna needed Pan to handle the politics. “He’s probably thinking the same thing,” he said finally.
“Oh, I know he is,” Anna chuckled. “Question is, which one of us will pull the trigger first?” She shook her head with what looked like admiration. “Come on, Dobie. It’s just you and me to finish the system.”
Doberman, who had been carefully evaluating communications theory while watching Peter Green fumble with the installation, said, “My calculations don’t support a successful cascading reaction within the next two hours, even with the augmentations you’ve made.”
Anna snorted. “Your calculations are wrong. It’s already rigged to go. Just needs a good bump of juice.”
“My calculations are never wrong.” After all, he was using simple mathematics with exact precision. “Unfortunately, Anna, I think you may have misunderstood one of the theorems.”
She just threw back her head and laughed at him.
And, indeed, she was right. His calculations were wrong, and hers were a lot more accurate than either of them had anticipated. Only seconds after sitting at her portable generator to begin tweaking the electrical inputs, the themian cage disintegrated under the additional load and the Krauss-Gobenhauff reaction broke free.
“Oh shit,” Anna cried, twisting to look over her shoulder as the cage began to flare white. “Pan’s not ready for it to—”
An instant later, Anna’s prophesized fireworks went off, the molten themian cage falling into the Krauss-Gobenhauff purple-black nexus plasma, and the teal-violet explosion that followed knocked them both to the ground, despite the fact it contained no actual material energy. Doberman’s communications equipment had been shut off, as instructed, so the blast merely shorted him out and initiated a reboot.
When Doberman sat up again, the turquoise radiance of the explosion had died down to a bubbling blue-white glow in what was the remnants of the themian cage. The nexus plasma had been completely exhausted, and what remained of their apparatus was embedded in the walls, the ceiling, the floor, Anna’s body…
Anna lay on her side, blood beginning to wet the front of her baggy, nondescript hempen colonist garments. After doing a systems diagnostic to ensure he was fully functional, Doberman did a quick check of her injuries.
A seven-inch piece of the scaffolding had embedded itself between two of Anna’s ribs on the right side, and blood was already beginning to rasp in her chest.
Doberman switched on his comm again. “Children of Fortune, this is Doberman. We have a casualty at the bunker.”
He received nothing but static.
Of course. Because Anna had just fried every functioning comm system and every life-form within ten feet of them—and everyone within fifty feet of them. She’d just initiated a planet-wide chain-reaction, possibly killing millions. Anyone who did get the message would have turned their comm off awaiting the blast.
Doberman cocked his head at Anna’s bleeding body, realizing that he had no way of getting her to surgical assistance in time. He tried to calculate the efficacy of attempting such surgery himself, without nannites, bandages, needles, or thread. He could probably cauterize the outer wounds, but her chest cavity would simply fill with blood until she could no longer breathe.
“Oh shit,” a voice said from the entrance to the bunker. Doberman, who had been concentrating on Anna, looked up in time to see an obsidian-skinned Cobrani child with white streaks in his fuzzy hair looking down into the room with them. Since Doberman did not recognize the child as one of the Babies, he immediately armed some armor-piercing rounds and took aim. It was the click of his weapon deploying that made the kid tense.
In one moment, the kid was looking at Anna. In the next, his blue eyes found Doberman tucked in the shadows of the bunker, guns trained on his head. The child’s reaction was not what Doberman expected. Instead of flinching at the double barrels pointed at him, the boy simply touched the bracelet on his wrist. The moment he did, Doberman’s hydraulics released as one and he uncontrollably slumped to the floor. His processes slowed with the telltale sign of being overloaded to the point of short-circuiting, and the shutdown that followed was an automatic safety protocol that had been built-in from his time as a Ferris, in case of EMP overloads and lightning strikes. It was a protocol that locked down the main pathways and sacrificed the rest, protecting the core against the invasion and leaving the rest to be reprogrammed later.
“Sorry,” the Cobrani boy said, as Doberman faded into the Void. With his final moments of consciousness, Doberman mused that the kid actually sounded genuine—like he cared about Doberman’s demise. It was a reaction he doubted most humans would give a robot—not even Anna.
Anna, Doberman remembered with a flash of panic. I have to help—
Quad looked down at the robot that had collapsed to the ground beside Anna’s still body. The potent blue wash of Yolk fire was unmistakable as it wove through his circuitry, engrained in the very metal of his body, making him look like an inferno of cerulean flames—an absolute wonder to behold, something that Quad hadn’t seen on any human-based tech. Quad knew without asking that this robot was something special. Unfortunately, because it was different, it had to be treated as a more significant threat than its base-type of a secretarial Ferris. He wasn’t precisely sure what the difference was, but judging by the way the Yolk fire was accumulating around and linking his circuitry, he was probably dealing with something that had additional processing and creative capabilities not normally available to a robot.
It was something that Quad would have gladly spent months studying, had Anna Landborn not been bleeding to death on the floor between them. Hell, even with her bleeding to death between them, Quad had to fight the urge to run to the robot, instead. Had it been anyone else, anyone else, the girl probably would have been doomed to bleed to death.
The robot can wait, Quad thought. He had to get Anna out of the room before the remnants of the themian cage superheated enough to set off a chain reaction that would simultaneously send out an enormous shockwave—three kilometers wide, judging by the amount of remaining material, which was even then starting to take on the too-white, eye-searing blaze of a Kesst cascade—while simultaneously burning all the oxygen from the air in a mile-wide blast of aerosol nexus plasma that would settle on—and incinerate—all living animals in the area, attracted by their bodies’ magnetic field.
Thus convincing himself that he didn’t have time to examine the Yolk-fired robot, Quad climbed into the bunker with them, grabbed Anna by a wrist, grabbed the robot by a foot, and pushed the three of them to an anchor he had installed in the Junkyard of the Fortune Orbital. A moment later, while he was settling her on the floor of his apartment, Quad felt the blast back in the Tear, a rush of blue-white energy that expanded outward like an exploding star. He flinched as it rushed through him, through Anna, and through the Junkyard as it expanded outward, pinging every Aashaanti anchor and artifact much like her psionic blast from moments before, briefly lighting up every forgotten instrument and portal like beacons in the darkness before they faded again. Quad mentally logged that as a decent way to find unpowered tech from a distance, then returned to his more immediate task of getting Anna to a surgeon.
Because the verbal comm systems of the Junkyard had all been destroyed in Anna’s initial explosion, he made a text-call to an unregistered Junkyard doctor—the kind who specialized in being discreet—and arranged a pickup for her and her ‘companion’ to receive confidential treatment in a private hospital.
Once he’d made the arrangements, Quad hung back watching her, wondering how he would explain himself once she woke. How could he say that he’d been essentially stalking her for almost a week, around the Orbital, then to the secret camp on Fortune and back? How could he explain that he was using an invisibility sphere that he had appropriated from a crashed Aashaanti fighter across the galaxy from Fortune? How could he explain that he could si
mply push himself to any place he wanted to go, whether it was a party on Trinoi or the bathroom stall in her bedroom?
She’ll think I’m weird, Quad realized, and that was the singularly most horrible thing he’d ever thought. She, Anna Landborn, the one person who could possibly understand him, could not think that he was nothing but a weird stalker. He had to find a way to explain away his presence, needed to have nothing to do with her extraction from the Tear and arrival on the Fortune Orbital. Otherwise, she would doubtlessly extrapolate that he’d been following her, and from that deduce that he’d been watching and listening for the better part of an entire week.
Quad felt himself begin to panic, knowing that he should have made his presence known earlier, and that only a weirdo would have just hung around and watched. He knew he wasn’t a weirdo, but he also knew all too well that the rest of the world thought he was. Thus, when the knock came at the door to the hidden apartment that he had scrubbed from all the maps of the Orbital, Quad panicked.
“Hello?” the doctor called, from the service hallway outside. “Is anyone in there?”
Quad swallowed. He needed to be perfect this time, and he couldn’t tell Anna he’d been watching her, or even let her know that he had the capacity to watch her.
“Is this some sort of stupid prank?” the doctor demanded, his voice hardening. “There’s no apartment on the registry here.”
Hearing the adult voice tightening in anger, Quad felt himself instinctively freeze up. “No,” Quad managed into the intercom. “Not a prank. My friend needs immediate medical assistance.” He was shaking all over, and didn’t know how to extract himself from the situation without making things worse. Anna was bleeding to death on his bed, and yet, if Quad answered the door, she would eventually learn that she’d been saved by a Cobrani boy.
There was a very short pause, then a brusque, “How old are you, kid?”
Quad swallowed. “Six, sir.”
A moment of confusion followed. “You opened up a text call to an unregistered doctor—and paid me with untraceable funds—at six? Have I treated your parents before or something?”
