by Sara King
Doberman hesitated. Then, “I brought swords.”
“Good. We’ll keep one for you to carry on your person and I’ll relock the atoms of the other into a lattice inlaid into your armor plating.”
“A four-and-a-half foot sword is hardly inconspicuous, Anna,” Dobie noted.
“Of course not,” Anna said. “That’s why we’re going to shunt everything but the hilt into another dimension.”
Doberman seemed to pause at that, then, naturally, because he was an unoriginal robot, said, “As far as I am aware, mainstream science has not developed a way to move between dimensions.”
“I,” Anna said, snorting, “am not ‘mainstream science.’ If I want it done, I’ll do it.”
“Of course,” Doberman said. “I should learn to think outside the box if I want to keep up with you.”
Anna grinned. That was another thing she liked about the robot. He didn’t care if he was wrong, and if he was wrong, he admitted it. In a world filled with narcissists and broken personalities desperate to display their own self-worth and dominance, it was incredibly refreshing.
“You know what?” Anna said. “The main issue with you is your size. I think we’re going to fix that.”
“More interdimensional storage?” Doberman asked.
“Among other things,” Anna said, her mind already churning through schematics. “I’m thinking fewer physical-based weapons would do you good. I’m thinking more energy pulse assaults, less cannons and explosive rounds. Explosives are crude—they take up too much space for what they actually accomplish. They’re clunky, and they don’t work well on robots.”
“I’ve been thinking that very thing.” Doberman nodded his agreement.
Anna rolled her eyes. “Of course you were.”
They went to breakfast and she sat down to scrambled eggs and ham, already planning his assault systems in her head. “Dobie,” she said, shoveling food into her mouth, “Link to the table vidscreen. I want to see any video of you in robot-to-robot combat that you can find so I can pinpoint your weaknesses when dealing with non-organics. Organics are simple—it’s gonna be other robots and possibly Nephyrs that’ll pose your biggest threat. A Nephyr’s glaring weakness is his skin, so we just give you a weapon that can puncture or disarm it. Robots, though… You’re gonna need something more advanced.”
Doberman hesitated.
After several seconds without video, Anna looked up from buttering toast. “Dobie?”
“I’m searching for footage, Anna,” Dobie said. “I’m having no luck.”
“Oh come on,” Anna snorted. “That’s remedial stuff, Dobie. Just hack the airfield security center.”
“I tried,” Doberman said. “Nothing’s coming up. Must have been fried in a blast during the attack.”
Grunting, Anna finished slathering congealed fat on her bread, stuffed it into her mouth, and pulled her r-player out of her pocket to find it herself. Upon seeing the screen, she frowned. It had a different timestamp than the constant tally she kept in her head. Though Anna’s internal clock was sometimes as many as a few seconds off, this time, it said she was five minutes and thirty nine seconds too slow.
“That’s…weird…” she said, frowning down at it. Immediately, she checked the battery to see if it had gone low and somehow incorrectly synched itself with the Orbital computer. Battery was fine. Scowling at her r-player, she said, “Dobie, what time is it?”
“Eleven thirty-three,” Dobie said.
Five minutes and thirty-nine seconds off. “That’s weird,” Anna muttered again. She went looking for video footage of Dobie in Rath.
Someone had deleted it.
Not the entire attack—there were plenty of images of her sister leading the attack on the main city, pulling her gunslinging badass act before her merry band had gotten dispersed by reinforcements—no, it was just Dobie that had been erased from the camp record. There were images of him dropping onto the tarmac at the airfield and then his approach to the secure Yolk facility, then, just as a pack of Gryphons came running around the corner, promising action, the feed went dead.
Someone had carefully excised him from the record.
Anna frowned.
CHAPTER 31: Five Minutes, Thirty-Nine Seconds
7th of June, 3006
The Junkyard (Nonexistent Section)
Fortune Orbital, Daytona 6 Cluster, Outer Bounds
“We need to remove all of your alterations immediately,” Doberman said. He checked to make sure Anna was still sleeping in the bedroom behind him. She was. Nonetheless, he lowered his voice. “Tonight.”
Quad popped into view beside him, looking dejected. “Awww, really? Even the Quadinator?”
“Especially the Quadinator,” Doberman said. “Anna’s going to want full access to my chassis and internals, and I can’t have an Akithuri Quadrino or an Uncle pulse in there waiting for her to find it.”
Quad frowned. “Why not?” he whined. “She’d think it’s cool.”
“And she’d want to know where I got it,” Doberman replied, terrified at the idea of her getting that information. “She knows perfectly well I don’t have the creative capacity to engineer something like this.”
“So you just tell her I gave it to you,” Quad said. He sounded crestfallen that Doberman didn’t want to keep his equipment.
“I need it all gone,” Doberman said. He had an eerie feeling that if Anna Landborn discovered Quad before he was fully grown, it would end in a dead Quad.
“Why?” Quad insisted.
How did Doberman tell the boy that Anna was dangerous in a way that he would believe? “I think, the moment Anna saw the Akithuri Quadrino or the Uncle pulse in action, she would consider you a threat and do everything in her power to kill you in the slowest, most gruesome way possible,” he finally said. She would undoubtedly see him as an even bigger threat than Pan, whom Dobie gave less than a thirty percent chance of surviving to adulthood. In Anna’s world, only Anna could do the things that Quad had done, and she would be highly willing to defend that honor. Doberman wasn’t sure what would happen if the two ended up fighting each other, but he wanted to avoid it, at least until Quad was world-wise enough to protect himself.
Quad seemed to digest that a moment. “Well, I’m not saying she can’t kill me, ’cause anything’s possible, but it would be difficult.”
“Anna thrives on difficult,” Doberman told him. “If you said that to her, she’d look at it as a challenge and find a way to do it. She’s dangerous, Quad. You can’t trust her. She’s like…” Doberman struggled for a term that Quad would understand, and, in desperation, downloaded the entirety of the Jedi Wolverine holobook collection to find commonalities. “Tritonium. You know how he was completely undefeated because he stole his enemies’ powers? How he crushed everyone who came near him just because he loved to watch them scream? Anna is like that. You give her anything to latch onto—like Tritonium’s tovlar Mind Leech—and she’ll gain the upper hand and kill you, Quad.”
“Oh.” Quad frowned. “Well, that’d be difficult because I’m already dead.”
Doberman blinked. He reviewed his log, then blinked a second time. “Come again?”
“Part of the AlphaGen process. Or, I guess I should say, my AlphaGen process. The old one was a little different. A lot more basic, using nannites and stuff. With mine, this really cool apparatus breaks you apart on a molecular level to permanently recompose you on a multidimensional level. With the old one, it just basically grinds you up into a paste and hopes the Yolk reacts with the Aashaanti livemetal and Kelthari liquid crystal cores and the war programming at just the right moment to re-shape under the power of consciousness.” Quad shrugged. “Sirius was killing half of all his new recruits, so I tinkered with the process and made it better, ‘cept when I told him, he wouldn’t let me use anybody as a guinea-pig to prove it, so I did it to myself, instead. I can actually walk, now. I was in a wheelchair before. It sucked. Problem is, I made it too strong and basicall
y created my own permanent mobile Whorug sphere. Took awhile to get used to all the differences in feedback you get from the other dimensions—and when I say dimensions, I’m talking about the fourth, fifth, six, etc., though I can slide between realities easy enough, too. Sirius made me destroy the research, though. Thought it was too dangerous to allow it to fall into anyone else’s hands. They’re back to the old method again.” Quad sighed. “Don’t know why. Mine theoretically had a hundred percent success rate.”
Doberman absorbed that new information, then said, “Quad, it doesn’t matter if you can jump dimensions. You won’t be able to escape Anna. Think of Tritonium. You’re facing Tritonium.”
Quad’s blue eyes got wide. “Really?”
“Anna Landborn can render you powerless,” Doberman insisted. “And there’d be no escape if she catches you.”
Quad seemed sobered by that thought. He looked down at the couch glumly. “She doesn’t seem all that bad.”
“She is,” Doberman said, “If you had actually talked to her, you would know.”
Quad’s head came up, but he conspicuously didn’t say anything.
Doberman felt a pang of horror electrify him. “You talked to her?”
“Yeah, but she doesn’t remember it,” Quad said quickly. “I reversed time on her. She has no idea because, for her, it didn’t happen. I used one of TimeMagus’s backskip marbles.”
Doberman cocked his head, trying to determine if the child was being metaphorical somehow, then decided he was probably being totally literal. “Look, Quad, I need you to remove the upgrades you installed before Anna finds them. I’m afraid to do it—I have a feeling if I make a mistake, I could implode this sector of space.”
“Indeed you could!” Quad said, grinning. Then, upon seeing Doberman’s desperation, he sobered with a sigh. “Fiiiiiiiine. But could you at least keep the claws? It took me a long time to figure out the claws.”
Doberman had a feeling that, to this particular six-year-old child, a ‘long’ time could mean as much as a few hours. Briefly, he considered telling the boy he needed to expunge the claws as well, then decided that if Anna asked, he’d fudge it. “I can keep the claws.” After all, he’d enjoyed ripping through the altrameter musker with nothing but his fists, especially with Quad cheering for him in the background.
“Great!” Quad cried, clapping. “Just hold tight while I grab my tools and some sunflower seeds. Can’t work without sunflower seeds.” Then he blinked out of sight.
Doberman extruded the blue light-claws from their sheaths between his knuckles to get another look at them in the privacy of his own apartment. Immediately, he grinned, delighting in the bwaop, bwaop sound they made as he twisted them this way and that, remembering how they’d sliced through his fellow robots like their bodies had not even existed.
Yes, he thought, he would definitely keep the claws.
Two days later, Anna was scanning the wall of a lab as she oversaw the sensitive genetics experiments and her eyes caught on the clock in the corner. She frowned when she realized her mental tally was five minutes and thirty-nine seconds off. Again. Cocking her head, she made a note.
Later that night, Anna was poring over different concentrations of the drug G-2716, the most promising of the addictive-yet-undetectable Yolk additives when her r-player simply jumped ahead five minutes and thirty-nine seconds. Dobie had been outside, guarding the door in case any of the Babies got too curious. Narrowing her eyes, Anna jotted another note.
The very next morning, Anna was finalizing her schematics for Dobie—she’d put an extra day into the project than she’d planned, thereby making him, once he had his new upgrades, the most powerful machine since the Triton Wars—when her timer to go to breakfast with Pan went off five minutes and thirty-nine seconds before her mental clock told her it should have. She glanced around the room. The blueprints had been moved on the bed. Calmly, she surveyed the rest of the room. She saw two sunflower seed shells beside the nightstand. When she bent to pick one up, she noticed a wadded sheet of paper on the floor half-under the bed had been cut cleanly in half—rumpled on one side, nonexistent on the other. When she opened it, she found it to be half of a particularly vexing photonic armor concept that hadn’t quite worked out yet—a concept draft that she had been only minutes from throwing at the wall in disgust, but hadn’t yet. She still had her own copy where she had been sitting on the bed.
Deliberately, she put the crumpled sheet precisely back where she found it and determined that it had been six feet and two inches from her person, and the slice through the wadded paper was in a large arc that corresponded to a detonation point six feet from the paper.
“It’s got a radius,” she mused to herself, a slow smile spreading over her face.
The next time Anna experienced the odd time jump, she was lying in bed two days later, staring at the ceiling with the blueprints strategically positioned around her, waiting for her alarm to go off. As she expected, it went off five minutes, thirty-nine seconds early. Ignoring the alarm, Anna went to the wall, accessed the tiny surveillance camera she had installed in the wall the day before, and replayed the video of the last thirty minutes.
“Gotcha,” Anna said, grinning.
CHAPTER 32: Risk of Exposure
12th of June, 3006
Rath (Operations Section)
Fortune, Daytona 6 Cluster, Outer Bounds
Bagham looked up from his review of the parts of his fight with Magali Landborn that the base cameras had managed to catch on tape. Nothing condemning, except for the fact she’d taken a full clip of ammo to the stomach and a roundhouse kick to the face and hadn’t even slowed down. And, unfortunately, that could be written off as incompetence on his part.
The whole thing could be written off as incompetence on his part, and that was eating at him inside. The leader of the rebel insurgency and he’d had her in his hands. He’d left her to die, and somehow, she’d not only escaped, but had started a war. He knew how bad that was going to look to Orion. Guys lost their skin for less.
Dammit. Bagham replayed the video again, frowning. Whatever Landborn was, it was different than anything he’d ever seen. She was slower, weaker than one of Sirius’ renegades.
She certainly wasn’t a full Alpha. The deconstruction process had almost failed on Steele, barely bringing him back to the other side alive, much less with all of an AlphaGen’s bells and whistles, so if it had been an original AlphaGen who had fought him earlier that week, Steele wouldn’t have stood a chance. With Landborn, Bagham had thrown her across the room and broken bones, yet she’d actually gone for EMP as a weapon, instead of just taking down his shields with energized tovlar or brute force.
“What are you, little girl?” Bagham muttered to the screen, watching the two of them burst into the street and wrestle, over and over. She wasn’t human. That much was obvious. To him, anyway. To Orion, she was just a Yolk baby with a focused skillset until Bagham proved otherwise, and it was going to look as if he were responsible for the rebellion, by pissing her off. Even her hurling that final chunk of concrete could be written off as adrenaline.
But that wasn’t what was going on here. Bagham would have bet his life on it. David Landborn and that infuriating bitch KayKay had made something, and they were using it to humiliate the Coalition by passing it off as human. And the people, thinking she was human, were eating it right up, writing off her uncanny skills as luck or their pathetic Outer Bounds Aashaanti patron god shining his light upon them. It was making him look like a fool.
Bagham realized he had crumpled the metal chair under his fingers as he watched the video. He had to draw Magali out before these little victories snowballed into something bigger. He needed to prove what she was to Orion. He had to stop her…
Magali was hunkered down against a wall of Honor’s cargo bay, exhausted, having just led her troops against—and liberated—Yolk Factory 16, when the ship’s com system flashed on. Instead of a message from the pilot, as she expected, Co
lonel Steele’s face showed up on the screen.
“This message is going out on all channels, broadcast on all bands, and is intended for the rebel Magali Landborn,” Steele said. “It will repeat until I get a response.” He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “So Magali. I hear you took another Yolk mine, so I’ll make this quick. I’m curious how you managed to live through our last engagement, and I’m willing to give it another go. In fact, I insist. I’ve still got plenty of Nephyrs, operators, Bouncers, and armaments at my disposal to put a hole in your little world. After careful consideration, I think I’ll start with Silver City. So consider this a challenge. Appear before me, fight me, and whoever wins will take control of Fortune. You hear that? As the ranking official on Fortune, if you agree to fight me and I lose, I will cede the planet to you as per Section 17 of the Wartime Regulations Act. However, if you don’t fight me, and you continue to insist on heinous sabotage and guerrilla tactics, it is within my rights to declare Fortune in an open state of rebellion and I will begin full bombardment of civilian outposts tomorrow afternoon. If you do decide to save a few lives and meet me, however, we can settle this peaceably, one way or another. The match will be completely televised by representatives of all of Fortune’s stations, so that there’s no question of foul play. As an added bonus, if you show up sometime in the next…” he needlessly glanced at his watch for effect, “Twelve hours, I won’t execute your lover for your cowardice.” At that, he panned the camera to show Patrick, shirtless, sitting on a chair, hands tied behind his back, a gag in his mouth.
Someone had tattooed him from head to toe like Milar. He looked whipped, beaten. Hopeless.
Steele yanked the gag out. “Patrick, tell the world something only Magali would know, so she knows it’s you.”
