Zero Rogue

by Matthew S. Cox

  If not for every fiber of his being yearning to grind her into salsa, he would have regarded her as gorgeous. Too pretty; she probably spent a lot of time in Reinventions. She flashed a mocking smile and yelled something, which from a hundred meters away sounded like a simple bark. From a ground-level door, a small army of security bots emerged: five on treads, two orbs, and three walkers.

  Aaron didn’t bother looking for cover, since the metal trench offered none until the ship pad at least ninety meters away. A telekinetic yank ripped the rifle out of Talis’s grip. Aaron frowned, disappointed the gun-turned-missile hadn’t torn anything off her. For a brief second, the whites of her eyes appeared distinct, and she dove below the level of the windows. She knew he had to see her to pull her out of the window. A rush of anger dulled his wit; he felt stupid for targeting only her rifle. That error twisted around and became her fault too.

  He slowed the sniper rifle enough to catch and took aim at the advancing robots.

  “A gun, Aaron? That’s rather pedestrian.”

  His first shot detonated the head of one of the walkers. A shower of orange sparks spewed like a sparkler from the neck as the rigid body fell over.

  “It’s effective, isn’t it?” He shot the second walker in the chest, staggering it. It and the third walker both opened fire with assault rifles. Clicks and pings echoed all around them. A second round from the sniper rifle blasted it apart. “I’m saving my energy for the bitch.”

  Anna ducked the whisper of bullets passing overhead. “I’ll get the orbs; you’ll never hit them without cheating.”

  He let out a dark chuckle.

  Tracked bots whined as they pushed themselves up to full speed, about twenty miles per hour. Anna waited for the much faster hovering orbs to get closer. Their size limited them to using pistol-sized weapons, which gave them a close engagement range. Orb bots relied on extreme maneuverability as well as their smallness for survival. Gangbangers and even most seasoned soldiers often ran from them rather than waste ammo trying to hit such a tiny, evasive target.

  Anna smiled. To her, they were metal wrapped around power cores. What she had up her sleeve for them couldn’t miss.

  Aaron sighted on the third walker, lining up the space between its optical sensors before pulling the trigger. Despite his inexperience, a scoped rifle at a mere hundred meters made accuracy trivial. Fortunately, the automatic targeting system adjusted itself to compensate for range, so Aaron’s lack of knowledge regarding windage and bullet arc meant nothing.

  The walker’s head unit bent backward, crushed as if sledgehammered. It dropped its rifle and flailed about.

  Flickering light flared in the dim trench. A brilliant electrical arc lapped from orb to orb. Azure flames belched from the gun port of the one on the left as its magazine went off. It exploded, causing a legion of dust scuffs on ground and wall where bullets and bits of shrapnel ricocheted. Its companion fell with a resonant clang. The inert ball of metal rolled past them, still moving about forty miles per hour.

  Aaron’s final two bullets hit the front end of the leading tank bot, appearing to do little more than make it stop driving. However, when it remained still, he wrote it off as destroyed without fanfare.

  One by one, Aaron seized the remaining four tracked bots with telekinesis and heaved them up and out of the trench. Two opened fire; bright blue muzzle flare spinning about, setting off a fusillade of pings and clanks overhead and spraying him with a few stinging pieces of micro-shrapnel before it tumbled out of sight.

  Anna squinted at the sky, looking down after the last distant smash. “Well, I think you broke her toys.”

  Aaron stormed forward, focused only on the knowledge the bitch was in the building up ahead. Anna had to jog to keep up with his stride.

  “Don’t do anything rash,” she said.

  He walked on.

  “I mean it, Aaron. Please don’t do anything stupid.”

  Enough gap between the engine mounting pad and the trench bottom existed for him to walk under it without ducking. A grid pattern of light bathed the area from the lattice overhead. He coughed, his nose balking at the overwhelming reek of chemicals. Nothing appeared wet. The metal itself exuded the stench of fuels that had been tested here. It couldn’t have been healthy to inhale; he imagined a year off his life with each breath.

  Aaron didn’t care.

  He stopped in the shadow of the observation deck by a plain metal door decorated with bands of rust. The knob refused to turn, and the control panel beside it had likely been dark for years. Aaron backed up two steps, glaring at the shattered windows. The deformed walker bot clattered into the wall a few meters behind him and fell over. Anna finished it off with an electrical discharge, which passed over it, spider-crawling up the metal tunnel wall.

  Aaron faced Anna; his murderous glare softened to a feeling of protectiveness. He looked again to the broken windows and latched a telekinetic feeler onto the ledge.

  After giving her a brief, concerned look, a trivial effort launched him airborne and through the window, leaving her outside by a locked door.

  aron didn’t expect Talis to be in the observation room, but he still spent a minute throwing desks around while ignoring Anna calling him a reckless bastard from outside. Workstations sat in two rows, facing the window. Panels of test equipment lined the side and rear wall, except for where two enormous holo-panel projectors were mounted. From the size of the room, he imagined at least a crew of twenty involved in testing the engines. Aside from the smashed windows, the room had three doors. The one in the left corner went to a bathroom, the right corner to a break room. An access panel by the remaining exit, a sliding set of double armored doors, looked to have been shot out.

  He laughed at a pair of rifle magazines, loaded with twelve rounds each, lying abandoned on a desk. Hope that bitch was pissed she didn’t get to use them on me. Aaron squinted. How did she know to set up here?

  Anna’s angry screams grew faint as he made his way into the corridor. Datapads and old coffee cups littered the floor amid tipped carts laden with tech parts. His shoes crunched with silica grit, buildup from years of open windows swallowing sand. The place sounded, and felt, deserted. He bypassed meeting rooms, labs, and offices, trying to estimate the most open path a fleeing psychopathic bitch would have taken wherever the floor had no dirt with footprints.

  His route led him to a non-working elevator. A woman’s handprint broke the dust on the stairwell door to its left. One kick opened it, and he quickened his pace on the way down. Four stories of switchback steps brought him to ground level and into a room resembling the waiting area of a starport. Three banks of chairs faced a physical display screen as big as a billboard. Were it not cracked, it might’ve been worth money as a historical relic.

  Mercenaries lay scattered about, eight women and two men. All had the same vacant stare as the ones outside. None reacted to his presence. Aaron stepped over them, collecting three handguns, which he tucked into his belt, and another assault rifle.

  A door to his right flew open. He swiveled and squeezed the trigger, but the weapon buzzed, safety on.

  “Sweet shit!” screamed Anna; she looked ready to kill him.

  “Go outside.” He pushed the door closed with telekinesis.

  “I’m not leaving you alone in here.” She slammed herself against the stuck door twice, popping it open again. “What if she influences you all over again?”

  He was grateful for the anger in her heart at that moment. Worry, or something else, would’ve made her eyes look too much like Allison’s. “That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.”

  She trotted over, rage fading to concerned hesitance. “Oh, Aaron… You think she’ll…”

  “Go outside.” He pulled away from her, stomping in the direction of a large hospital-white hallway. “She’s going to try. She can’t command me to do anything now… I think.” He stopped, looking at her. “But if she tries, I won’t be able to control what happens.”

&nbs
p; “What about telempathic influence? She could make you calm and placid. Will changing your emotions set you off?”

  He stiff-armed a flapping door out of his way. Debris jammed the corridor on the other side; broken lights spat the occasional spark or weak flickering element where a scrap of LED remained intact. Unseen rats scurried and scratched. A scrap of black fabric on a protruding metal chair leg spurred him onward.

  “I don’t know. I missed my second appointment with the medics for an evaluation.”

  “Don’t be a twat.” She followed. “I’m serious.”

  “I think she’s mind wiping her former servants so the department can’t mine them for intelligence.”

  Anna gulped. “You never said she was a mind blaster.”

  “I only skimmed her resume.”

  “Twat.” She slapped him on the shoulder.

  A surprise flange from a twisted shelf stabbed him in the thigh when he walked into it. He yelped and jumped back, hand clamped on the cut. In a fit of rage, he sent a wave of telekinetic force down the hallway, crushing the junk into, and sometimes through, the wall.

  With a growl, he seized a desk less than thirty feet away and launched it straight up. Talis looked up from where she had been hiding behind it, exposed without cover in a patch of sunlight from the hole he’d made in the roof two stories above. Her cockiness had gone out to lunch. She looked like the victim of a slasher vid come face to face with the supernatural creature hunting her.

  Before she could get on her feet, Aaron wrapped telekinetic force around her, crushing.

  “No!” She yelled. “Put me down!”

  The psionic suggestion smashed into his forebrain with the weight of a load of bricks. Reality melted away to a chaotic swirl of energy. Psionic force tore at his mind, a sensation like hands pulling at a jelly mold. When awareness returned, he gazed at parting clouds of mist. An attempt to take a breath resulted in coughing. He moaned, putting a hand on his face. Something’s wrong. I shouldn’t be conscious this soon. I don’t feel hung―ouch.

  His back burned. A line of pain crossed from the base of his left ribcage to his right shoulder, as though someone had whipped him with a red-hot steel cable.

  “Oh, that’s mildly unpleasant.”

  The ceiling wobbled. When it happened a second time, he realized Anna stood over him, kicking him in the side. Her lip appeared somewhat swollen and blood trickled out of her nose.

  “Did you just kick me?”

  She did it again.

  “What’s that for?”

  “You flung me into the bloody wall.” She fumed for a moment, but calmed. “I know it wasn’t on purpose, but I tend to react to pain with violence.”

  “You zapped me, didn’t you?” Aaron’s scabbing back peeled away from the metal ground as he sat up. Whatever other witticism he intended to bestow upon her emerged as a piteous squeal.

  “Stopped your rampage, didn’t it?” She pushed a stimpak into his shoulder. “A brain’s all electrical energy dancing around… Guess I hit the reset button.”

  Agony became mild pain for a second before turning into maddening itches. A mental image of tiny crab-like nanobots crawling all over his back didn’t help.

  “Got a few extras from Aurora. You did slam Talis into the wall, but she got up.”

  Aaron snarled and scrambled to his feet before stomping forward. Anna’s pleas for him to slow down echoed off walls pockmarked by debris. His brief eruption leveled most of the hallway, opening paths into numerous conference rooms and a section that looked like a cafeteria. Thick, white dust hung in the air like fog, glowing in halos around flickering LED light tubes dangling from wires amid mangled frames. The haze obscured vision much past about fifteen feet.

  He followed the corridor to the right at an L, surprising a muscular Asian man in body armor. Aaron had the drop on him, though Talis watched around the corner at the end of the stretch of hall. As soon as she saw Aaron, she darted out of sight.

  The man stared at Aaron’s rifle, raising his hands. “I ain’t got no idea what the hell I’m even doing here, chief.”

  Aaron disregarded him, intent on pursuing Talis, leaving the mercenary to figure things out on his own. He sprinted toward the sound of a slamming door, running away from Anna’s yelling.

  “Stop! I don’t trust it. She’s leading you.”

  Through a small window in a pair of red free-swinging doors, he caught a glimpse of a wave of thin, hay-colored dreadlocks. This close, nothing would stop him short of Allison herself stepping out from beyond the veil.

  “Talis!” he screamed, slamming the doors open and leaving his arms outstretched to either side as they flapped closed behind him.

  His shout echoed over itself into infinity, coming back to him from the walls of a cavernous space. Large metal constructs, long, cylindrical, and shrouded in an intricate tangle of pipes and wires, hung in a massive chamber with a three-story ceiling. Suspended in a grid, the enormous machines formed a forest of abandoned technology with thousands of hiding places. Chemical seep oozed from between panels and from ruptured hoses. Flared cones near the bottom suggested they might be starship engines. Regardless, they sat here too long to be of any use, dangling like colossal pigs in a slaughterhouse. Echoing footsteps called to him from the other end, splashing. He advanced among the engine carcasses, using them for cover like trees, a soldier stalking his prey across a manmade jungle.

  Anna crept along behind him, staying two pillars back. Talis whimpered somewhere up ahead.

  “I’m not buying it, bitch,” said Aaron, surprising himself by not shouting. “You’re not the weepy type.”

  He moved to the next engine, swinging his rifle back and forth. Nothing. His next rush put his back against a hanging titan hard enough to make it sway a little. At a creak, Aaron glanced up past the jumbled mass of pipes and wires along thirty feet of rotting engine. He couldn’t see the immense chains holding it aloft, and hoped they didn’t pick that moment to give out after however many decades they’d been abandoned here. He aimed down all possible paths, finding each one empty. Wind howled from overhead vents, throwing the room into a disorienting clamor of shifting machinery and clanging metal.

  I don’t like this. Anna’s voice pierced the din, straight into his mind.

  Banging from ahead sounded like a fist on a disobedient door. The desperate pounding of a helpless woman running away from a monster. Too helpless. Aaron’s doubt popped like a soap bubble. This wasn’t a trap; she’d seen the start of what would happen if she tried to invade his mind. Anna had saved her life. Aaron had become the monster of Talis’ worst nightmare―an off-the-chart telekinetic immune to her best ability.

  She’s not acting. Anna reacted to people being terrified of her with shame. For Aaron, Talis being terrified of him caused a flood of vindication. He reveled in it.

  I am a monster, you bitch, and I’m coming for you.

  He threw caution to the wind and lunged out from behind the chemical-bleeding machinery into a ‘corridor’ formed by rows of swaying engines. Frantic banging echoed in the distance, rhythmic, and mesmerizing, each hit echoed back once in the cavernous room. Aaron moved up to a jog, ducking the occasional damaged component or windblown sway. Fluorescent green liquid splashed underfoot where numerous collected puddles merged into a toxic lake. Fluid reached less than an inch deep, but meant the loss of another pair of shoes. Aaron didn’t care if he had to pull an Aurora. He’d walk naked through the entirety of West City to have this moment.

  The end of the corridor led to an open space between the last row and a dingy concrete wall covered with a layer of blackening over three quarters of its height. Stains ended at the approximate level of the curved nacelles atop each engine. Imagining the amount of liquid necessary to fill this chamber enough to dip starship engines in made him feel small on an atomic level.

  Talis flailed at a door in the periphery of his vision, a blur of motion that made him smile. He opened his coat as casually as if going
for a Nicohaler, and took out his E-90. He studied his face in the mirror-like surface of the department-issued energy pistol and wiped a dark smudge from his cheek.

  Aaron pivoted on his heel and walked closer to the pathetic figure cowering against a twenty-foot square blast door. She gave up slapping on the access panel and stared at him, flattening her back against the wall.

  The E-90 beeped when his fingertip touched the trigger, indicating it accepted his fingerprint.

  He smiled. “Hello, Talis. I’ve been looking all over for you.”

  aron held the pistol tilted forward, using the round portion of the ring-dot sight to frame Talis’s wide-eyed face. It bothered him how timid she acted; he’d spent months tracking a haughty, arrogant, soulless bitch. With each passing week, the enigma that was Talis grew from a woman to a creature from the deepest Abyss. A demon in female form. Unstoppable, fearsome, inhuman, and cruel. The person cowering in front of him seemed none of those. Perhaps she knew he had once been a softie and hoped to exploit him yet again.

  Alas for her, she had killed that Aaron.

  “Wait. We can talk about this,” she whispered, raising a hand as if it would stop his laser.

  ‘Just-joined-the-force’ Aaron would’ve looked for any option to avoid hurting a woman. That man would’ve personally driven Strawberry to a shelter. His former self would have dragged Andrea to a social services office kicking and screaming. Pre-Talis Aaron would’ve worried and pestered Shimmer until she agreed to come to the dorms.

  Aaron lifted the pistol to aim. The glowing blue dot on the front post sight rose into the ring, covering her face.

  “The last time you talked, I killed my wife.”

  Anna emerged from the hanging maze; echoes of her boots on the metal floor clicked back across the cavernous chamber as she ran up alongside him. She gave him a wary look and glanced at Talis.

  “I had no idea she was your wife,” yelled Talis. “I swear. I just saw two cops.”

  “This is the same weapon that took Allie.” Aaron shifted his focus; the gun blurred, Talis became clear. “Goodbye.”