by Sara King
The woman’s green eyes—really pretty, now that Tatiana was noticing them—narrowed. “What do you mean by that?”
“She doesn’t mean anything,” Milar said quickly. “She’s just drugged to the gills and—”
“You’re obviously running from something,” Tatiana interrupted. “I’m gonna figure out what.”
The pasty redhead cocked her head at Tatiana and crossed her arms over her copious creamy cleavage. “How do ya figure, sugar?”
Tatiana snorted. “I mean, think about it. You were found in a prison. There weren’t any records on you—I had Pan’s dream-team check. And you’re too pretty. I mean, we’re in the middle of a war on a backwater planet so deep in the Bounds you gotta go into cryo to get here. Yet you’ve got perfect skin, perfect hair, perfect nails, and perfect teeth. You’re…” She made a disgusted face. “Perfect.”
The woman continued to peer at Tatiana. “She’s drugged, you say?”
“Yeah.”
She snorted. “Good observation skills. Too bad they already outfitted her with that useless shit. Sirius might’ve wanted to give her a job.”
“I’ve got a job, thank you,” Tatiana said. “And it involves banging my formerly virgin stud at least six times a—”
“Aaaaand I think we’re done here,” Milar said, grabbing his hot new item by the delicate pale wrist and steering her from the tent. “I’ll be back to check on you in a few hours, Tat, okay?”
“No,” Tatiana said. Then a new thought occurred to her. “Wait. You’ve got Honor out there, don’t you?”
Milar winced. “Yeah, but—”
“Get out of my way, skeenk. Time for a real woman to fly that thing.” Tatiana pushed the wannabe out of the way, making her stumble satisfyingly into the side of the tent as she passed. She was halfway to Honor before Milar grabbed her by the waist and, as she started kicking and punching at his hands, lifted her bodily off the ground and twisted her around to start marching her back to the tent.
“It isn’t fair!” Tatiana cried, craning her neck to watch Honor disappear as Milar ducked her back inside the canvas. “Not fair!” She ended up collapsing on Milar’s arm and sobbing again, all the misery of being grounded and trapped and alone once again overwhelming her.
“What’s wrong with the little tart?” the redhead asked, frowning. “Why’s she drugged? And what’s that blinking thing in her forehead?”
“Long story,” Milar muttered, holding Tatiana to his chest. “In a couple words, Anna Landborn.”
The redheaded skeenk gave Milar a look. “What about Anna?”
“She cut me open while I was aawwaaaaaakke,” Tatiana sobbed. “Made me an alieeeeennnnn!”
“Anna did that?!” the skeenk demanded, gesturing at Tatiana’s node. “But Anna’s only seven.”
“She has a roooobbooooooooot,” Tatiana sobbed.
The redhead’s green eyes were darkening considerably. “Anna tricked out a robot and used it to experiment on you. After the Robotics Mandate.”
Tatiana nodded miserably.
“What was her reasoning?” the skeenk demanded.
“She wanted me to stay away from Milar,” Tatiana sniffled.
“Why?” the skeenk insisted.
“Because she’s fucking insane, that’s why,” Milar snarled. “Evil incarnate.”
The woman’s green eyes slid back to the thing in Tatiana’s skull. “Is she doing stuff like this often?”
“All the damned time,” Milar growled.
“Excuse me,” the skeenk said. “I’ve gotta go make some calls.” Without another word, she sashayed her way back out.
“And stay out!” Tatiana sobbed after her.
“Listen, Tat,” Milar said, brushing her hair like a dog again. “I’ve gotta go with her. Magali and her lot chased most of the resistance into the jungle near Silver City and Rath, but it’s already getting ugly. There’s some Nephyrs in the mix, and they’re already burning and looting the nearby homesteads and killing the farmers they run across. We’ve gotta do something fast, and that means me and KayKay getting our asses to that meeting.”
Tatiana couldn’t believe that Milar was going to an important meeting and hadn’t even offered to let her go while she was stuck there in the jungle, twiddling her thumbs, waiting for a couple of eight-year-olds to out-smart another eight-year-old in order to make her a cure for psychic instadeath she carried around in her forehead. “You weren’t even going to invite me?” She felt herself on the verge of dropping back into her sobbing fest. Or kicking him. Yeah, kicking him.
Milar hesitated again, but this time, an image of Anna Landborn was so strong it almost knocked Tatiana over.
Tatiana stiffened, her whole world sliding into instant focus. “The demon spawn is gonna be there.”
“We didn’t want you two killing each other,” Milar said quickly. “She’s gonna have her robot along…”
Narrowing her eyes, Tatiana said, “Nothing in the world could keep me from getting on that ship now, Miles. Nothing.” She yanked herself out of his arms and began strapping his guns to her hips, checking the clips with what she hoped was the efficiency of a professional.
Milar gave her a dubious look. “Do you even know how to use those?”
“Absofuckinglutely,” Tatiana said. “I’ve been practicing.” She slammed a magazine into place and glared at him. “After the shredders, I figured I needed to ‘expand my horizons.’ Besides. I had nothing else to do but practice putting a hole in her head.” She pointed her gun out the door at the paper plate with the horned child’s face on it that she had pinned to the tree fifty feet away and put a hole through the left ear. She had been aiming for the right eyeball, but it was close enough.
Milar gave her a long look, then said, “Fine. But wait until the robot isn’t paying attention.”
“Screw the robot,” Tatiana said. “I’ll stuff a grenade down its throat.”
Grabbing one of her hands to confiscate the grenade and set it aside, Milar said, “Pumpkin, believe me. Don’t piss off the robot. Don’t shoot at it, don’t even look at it funny. If you’re gonna take out Anna, fine. But you don’t wanna mess with Dobie.”
“Why’s that?” the skeenk said calmly from the door. Apparently her ‘call’ had been the call of nature or something—nobody could have gotten back to the ship that fast.
“Out of the way, princess,” Tatiana growled. “I’m gonna go rid the world of evil, one child at a time.” She shoved her way past the skeenk, making the floozy grunt and stumble again. Tatiana grinned to herself as she marched towards Honor. Finally. The day of reckoning was upon the little twit.
CHAPTER 35: Anna’s ‘Upgrades’
11th of June, 3006
The Junkyard (Nonexistent Section)
Fortune, Daytona 6 Cluster, Outer Bounds
“It’s time, Dobie,” Anna said, dropping a final pile of equipment onto the bench beside him. “Open up. I’m tired of you being a second-rate robot and I’ve got some presents for you.” She had been carrying in armfuls of equipment for the last ten minutes, all from her personal lab in the Junkyard or having been delivered by secret courier from one of the many labs she funded throughout Fortune.
“Presents?” Dobie tried not to let his nervousness show. He had actually thought Anna had forgotten, since it had been four days since she had offered to upgrade him. In truth, he’d actually hoped it had slipped her mind—he wasn’t exactly sure he wanted Anna Landborn tinkering with his internal workings.
Anna rolled her eyes. “Yes. Presents.” She gestured to the array of ‘gifts,’ most of which looked pretty basic in comparison to what Quad had installed. “As in, the coolest tech you’ll ever carry. When I’m done with you, you’re gonna be so utterly decked out that their puny minds will be blown.” She grinned. “Apart, if necessary.”
Doberman considered. “What kind of tech?”
“What kind.” Anna snorted. “As if you would even care. Like it even matters to you what
I wanna upgrade you with, as long as it’s better than what you had.”
Doberman hesitated, because, though her logic was sound, for some reason, it did matter. He must have had the look on his face, because Anna gave a huge, long-suffering sigh. “I formulated a new type of weaponry for you. Remember the alien inviso-shredders from the Tear? I put that into bullet form. Should punch right through pretty much anything out there, except tovlar, which is why we’ll be upgrading your casing with a paper-thin outer coating of tovlar and lacing your inner workings with the stuff. Still, that leaves a few key parts—mostly joints and sensors—still vulnerable, which is why I’ve invented a photonic dispersal field around you. Yes, Dobie, when it’s active, all attacks made at you will be converted into light.” She made explosive gestures with her hands. “Someone throws a punch at your face, they lose their hand in a glorious blaze of light. I chose red light, because that’s just badass. White would have been easier because it contains all the spectrums, but I didn’t want you looking like an angel-from-on-high—i.e. a pussy—as your enemies thronged around you.”
“That’s interesting,” Dobie said. He had preferred the white light for that very reason.
“Only downside is even with the upgrades I’m about to give you, you’ll only have enough juice to power twenty or thirty light-dispersal hits, depending on the size of the thing hitting you.”
Doberman nodded, thinking that he’d liked the Quadratine field better, since it had no limit to the number of blows he could take, and it actually used the kinetic force of the other’s attacks to charge his battery, while simply draining the energy from light-based weaponry directly into his power core to boost his next attack.
Anna grunted and moved on to the next set of equipment in her pile. “Your tovlar sword is going into a compartment on your thigh, the blade tucked into a dimension that contains nothing but open space and cold—spent an afternoon finding one the Big Bang hadn’t actually occurred in and shunted it in there. On the plus side, it’ll be really cold when you first draw it, so you’re looking at possibly shattering people with freezing temperatures if you hit them fast enough—tovlar is a superconductor, after all. Haven’t really put it to the test yet, but should be amusing.”
Doberman didn’t think that would be amusing, but he nodded anyway.
“For close-range, we’ve got an energy burst that transfers a third of your battery power into a kinetic blast. For instance.” She lifted a finger. “Say you’ve got an altrameter musker on your back and he’s just not taking a hint. Say you’ve exhausted your arc bullets and are running out of ideas, and he’s just barreling down on you.” She lifted the tiny, silver bulblike node and held it up for him to see. “Power this baby up and let him get within ten feet, then end his world. We’re talking about a propulsion of approximately three hundred miles per second, give or take where you are in the galaxy. You know how?”
Anna sounded much more excited about her contraption than Doberman was, since he was more than a little leery of anything that could eat a third of his battery reserves in one blow. “How?” he asked.
“It uses the movement of the galaxy as a weapon,” Anna said. “It creates a three-foot sphere in which there is no motion, so the universe continues to expand around it at about three hundred thousand miles an hour. That means, if you catch Mr. Serious in the face with it, he’s gonna be hit with the full expansion of the universe.”
Doberman immediately didn’t like the idea, because it could be as effective against himself as it would be against the enemy. “You mean I will have to calculate my relative position in the universe before I can use the weapon?”
Anna sighed. “I could’ve dropped most of the bulk and saved forty percent of the power requirement by leaving you to do the computations, but I didn’t think you’d want to waste time determining your relative position to the galactic movement before letting this baby loose, so no, Dobie, lazy-ass, I directionalized it for your convenience.” She gave it a raised eyebrow. “Just don’t use it on ships or in any other enclosed room or vacuum-based chamber, ’cause it lasts a whole twenty-four microseconds, which is gonna get you about thirty-eight feet before it fades. That’s through anything you shoot it at, you get me? Including walls, planetary crusts, and life support.”
Doberman didn’t know how to respond. He’d preferred the Quadinator, which had simply created a sphere around the target and crushed it to the size of a pinpoint, creating a piece of dust with the mass of an entire robot, but he couldn’t tell her that.
Anna was giving him an irritated look. “You look like you’re thinking. Why would you be thinking?”
Doberman was thinking he wasn’t sure he actually wanted her ‘upgrades.’ “I’m thinking that I’ll need special programming to fully utilize equipment like that,” he said. “Plus, I’m wondering if maybe these advances would be better applied to weaponry with which to defeat the Coalition, when it comes back in ten years.”
Anna snorted. “I’ll give the pawns some arc weapons, but the rest is for you. I want you to be the most glorious, ass-kickingly advanced robot the world has seen since the Tritons.” Then she frowned. “Oh, and of course I’m going to upgrade your programming. I’m going to be streamlining your battle computations and rendering your reaction time to basically zero. And, next time you have to fight robots, you’re going to have a deployable onboard virus that allows you to simply take over the whole lot of them. Then you’ll have your own minion robot army permanently at your disposal, until you decide to make them all jump off a cliff or something.”
Doberman didn’t like the idea of carrying around a virus that allowed an outside force control over a robot. Still, it would look suspicious if he gave more than a cursory resistance. “Can’t a virus like that be used against me, Anna?”
Anna snorted. “You’re aware of your own choices and decisions, right?”
Doberman nodded.
“Then no. This only affects the drones with if/then statements.” She narrowed her eyes. “Why? Don’t trust me?”
Of course he didn’t trust her, but he couldn’t allow her to know that. He backed up his files, sealed them in a ghost drive with a total programming reset timer of twelve hours, then obediently opened his central chassis. Anna, without hesitation, began to tinker with what she found there.
“Ugh!” she cried. “You call this a power core? Come on, Dobie. You can do better than this!” She unceremoniously yanked it free, leaving Dobie to default to his backup power source, hidden in his left ankle.
“You know,” Dobie said, as she began to rummage around in his chest, “if I hadn’t set up a backup, that would have shorted me out just now.”
“You obviously had a backup,” Anna retorted, without slowing what she was doing. “You told me yourself—you value your newfound existence too much to endanger it needlessly.”
Which was true enough. Still, Doberman was disturbed at the broad spectrum of weaponry and devices that she had made—or had specialized scientific assembly robots make—and had delivered to her bedroom. It looked like almost a thousand pounds of gear, from a complete set of armored plating with a blue-black honeycomb design inlaid into it, to dozens of guns that were obviously too big to fit into his chest compartment, to a pile of devices that Dobie did not have the expertise to analyze to see if they were, indeed, exactly what she said they were.
Doberman’s biggest hurdle, then, was to decide whether or not he really trusted Anna to install them.
And, unequivocally, he didn’t.
“I think,” Doberman said, “that perhaps we should rethink our goal and downsize the project to perhaps a few arc-weapons.” He thought of the light-claws anchored between his knuckles and how he was going to keep Anna from seeing them.
“Bullshit, Dobie,” Anna said, still tinkering inside him. “You’re not going to be average ever again as long as you’re with me. I’m giving you the greatest weaponry known to—” She stopped, pulling back from his chassis to reveal a su
nflower seed held between thumb and forefinger. “And how the fuck did this get in your internals?”
Doberman realized that, in order to keep the conversation from drifting to Quad and his sunflower-seed habit, he was going to have to take a leap of faith. “I was incredibly busy the other night while I was tinkering with a faulty hydraulic. Must’ve gotten stuck to something when I set my project on the floor.”
Anna grunted and flung the seed into the trash disposal. “So here’s how it works,” she said. “I’m going to give you interdimensional storage compartments here, here, and here.” She pointed to various parts of his body. “I’ve designed the cannons to fire in Absolute Zero, and you’ll only have one teensy eighth-inch of the barrel actually visible until you go to shoot them. People won’t have any idea what’s coming until they’re staring down the barrel of a two thousand pound ship cannon.”
A two-thousand-pound ship cannon seemed unnecessary, but Doberman didn’t object. Instead, he tried not to fidget as she tinkered with him, just hoping she got it done as quickly as possible and didn’t notice the minor adjustments that Quad had made in order to make room for his own armaments.
“Hope you’ve got some time,” Anna said, as she dug around in his chassis and began applying her wrench to various parts that variably made him either twitch or stiffen as things within him came loose and fell away. “This is gonna be one hell of a project.”
“I have time, Anna,” Doberman said, as his right arm went limp, then his left.
“Then let’s install the interdimensional pockets first,” Anna began. “Then we’ll move out from there.”
Doberman, who could no longer use his hands, felt his unease grow. “Is it necessary to bypass my upper torso motor control?”
Anna scoffed as she tinkered. “I’m splicing and rearranging your entire system to accommodate the new weaponry. Chill.” A moment later, he lost control of his legs.
For one of the first times in his short life, with Anna Landborn tugging and digging at his insides, Doberman found himself acutely nervous. Still, he realized he couldn’t let Anna see his unease, or she would take longer than she needed, drawing out his discomfort as long as possible. He kept his calm as she installed her interdimensional pockets, then was actually somewhat surprised when she reconnected his arms’ motor control. From there, he helped her establish the individual objects in question, grunting in surprise when, by shoving the ship cannon through the black void in his chest, it lost weight, until it was only a quarter of a pound in total, with only an eighth of an inch of barrel still showing. As he held it in place, Anna tightened down the locks securing it in place.
