Gatticus stopped her before she could rip the tube out. “Don’t touch it! You’ve had an allergic reaction to something in the air. We performed an emergency medical procedure to save your life.”
Blood now streamed from her throat in thin snaking lines, and Cassandra’s eyes flew even wider as she watched herself bleed.
“You also defibrillated her with your bare hands,” Blake said. “You forgot to mention that part. How the hell did you do that, anyway?”
Gatticus was already rising from his haunches with Cassandra in his arms. Rather than waste time answering that question, he sprinted off down the corridor.
“Hey!” Blake called after him. “I asked you a question, Slick!”
“Let’s go!” Darius said, and ran after Gatticus. Figuring out what had just happened could wait. They needed to get to the med bay. Cassandra wasn’t out of this yet. Hang on, Cass...
Chapter 10
Gatticus led them to the nearest access chute and up six levels before climbing out and running down another corridor. They passed more cleaning robots and corpses along the way, colliding with frozen, floating bits of people as they went.
Darius ignored it all, his attention fixed squarely on Cassandra and the man carrying her—the man who’d shocked her back to life with his bare hands.
Before Darius could wonder more about that, Gatticus darted into one of the rooms branching from the corridor. Inside, the walls were lined with drawers and compartments. Gatticus released Cassandra and pulled open one of the drawers. He retrieved what looked like a fat silver pen and placed the tip against Cassandra’s thigh. A soft hiss sounded from the device as he depressed a button on the side of it.
“Hey, what was that?” Darius demanded. “What did you just do?”
Gatticus retrieved what looked like a handgun from the open drawer, and a holographic control panel sprang to life above the device. Gatticus used his free hand to make a series of selections, and a fan of blue light flickered out and passed over Cassandra from head to toe.
A shaded model of her body appeared, with veins and arteries depicted in various shades of red. Tiny green dots were spreading along those pathways, increasing in number with every passing second.
Frustrated by Gatticus’s silence, Darius seized the man by his arm and shook him. “Hey! Are you going to answer me?”
“Nanites. I injected her with nanites,” Gatticus replied.
Darius heard a gagging sound: “Gaa?” and he spun around to find Cassandra, her eyes wide with shock as she reached for the crude tube in her throat. Gatticus quickly restrained her hand and removed the tube.He held a slight pressure on the wound and placed some kind of translucent bandage over the bloody hole. She spasmed slightly, gagged up a little blood and groaned. “Daa?” She coughed. “Dad?”
Her face was looking more its normal size and shape again, and she could talk.
“You look like you saw a ghost,” Cassandra said.
“Yeah, that’d be you, kid,” Blake put in.
Darius snapped out of it and closed the gap between them in two quick steps. He wrapped his daughter up in a fierce hug. “Don’t ever scare me like that again,” he whispered.
“Sorry,” she managed as she withdrew from his embrace. “What happened?”
“You died,” Blake said.
“I what?” Cassandra echoed. She swung her feet down and her mag boots clicked against the deck.
Darius shot Blake a dire look. “Are you trying to scare her?”
“It’s okay,” Cassandra said. “I’m alive now. That’s what matters, right?”
“Yeah,” Darius nodded, and he let out a deep breath.
“Thank God for that,” Lisa said.
“I am not God,” Gatticus replied.
Cassandra’s swelling was almost completely gone now.
“How did you know how to do that?” Lisa asked, nodding to the bandaged hole in Cassandra’s throat.
“I have medical training.”
Blake snorted. “Training doesn’t explain how you resuscitated her with your bare hands. You want to explain that, Slick?”
Gatticus sighed. “Very well.” He bowed his head and ran a hand back through his gelled black hair, lifting it from his scalp. As he did so, a ragged flap of his scalp peeled away to reveal blackened bone.
“Seriously?” Blake said. “Come on, man. That’s just gross.”
“Wait—” Darius peered at the injury more closely. There wasn’t any blood around his scalp, and he could see something gleaming and silver around the blackened area.
“That’s not bone,” Lisa said. “It’s metal. You have a metal plate in your head?”
“No... he’s a robot,” Darius said.
“An android,” Gatticus replied, as he smoothed his hair and scalp back into place.
“Snaz!” Cassandra said.
“So that’s how you survived the cold,” Darius realized.
“Yes.”
“Why not just tell us what you were from the beginning?” Lisa asked.
Gatticus hesitated, but Blake was nodding as if his suspicions had just been confirmed. His remaining rifle, the one Gatticus hadn’t stolen to open Cassandra’s throat, tracked up until the barrel was squarely aimed at Gatticus’s chest.
“Because he’s some kind of stowaway—or worse—and the crew tried to kill him.”
“What? How do you know that?” Lisa asked.
“Because that bad hair day of his wasn’t caused by claws or teeth,” Blake said. “His skull is scorched. That’s thermal damage,” he said, while patting his rifle.
“Yes,” Gatticus said. “Unfortunately I cannot tell you why the crew might shoot me, because the injury left vast sections of my memory corrupted and inaccessible. Even I don’t know if I can be trusted.”
Darius walked over to Gatticus and placed a hand on his shoulder. It felt surprisingly warm and human to the tactile sensors in Darius’s armor. “You saved my daughter’s life. As far as I’m concerned, that means you can be trusted.”
“Thank you.”
Blake snorted. “I’ll reserve my judgment. I mean, it is kind of convenient that you somehow lived and everyone else died. Maybe you knew what was coming because you had a hand in it, and maybe the crew shot you in the head when they found out.”
“That is a possibility,” Gatticus admitted.
Darius turned to glare at Blake. “Put the gun down.”
“He could betray us next!”
“Right now, he’s the only guide we have,” Lisa said. “We need him. And even if he was responsible for what happened to the crew, he can’t remember what motivated his actions.”
“So that makes him innocent?” Blake demanded.
“No, but without the memory of his motives, he’s unlikely to repeat the same actions.”
“Until his memory comes back.”
“My data salvage routines require more time to finish running, but the current indication is that my memory will never fully return, so the human woman may be right.”
“My name is Lisa.”
Darius thrust out a hand to Gatticus. “Darius Drake,” he said. Gatticus eyed his hand briefly before accepting the handshake, and Darius went on, “The girl you saved is Cassandra Drake, my daughter, and that—” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “—is Blake Nelson.”
Gatticus nodded. “It is nice to meet you all. Who is next for treatment?”
“Next?” Blake echoed.
Gatticus’s head canted to one side. “You mentioned you have terminal cancer? I can cure you just as I cured Cassandra.”
“Wait, I’m cured?” Cassandra asked.
Gatticus turned to her. “The nanites that cleared the histamines from your body are programmed to find and fix any maladies that commonly afflict human beings. Your cancer cells will not last long against them.”
Darius couldn’t believe his ears. His eyes blurred with tears and he swept Cassandra up in a bear hug, yanking her free of the deck, and
spinning her in circles.
Cassandra’s body shook with sobs and laughter. It was over. She was cured!
Darius put her back down and found Gatticus watching them with a smile. “Who would like to go next?”
“Well, count me out,” Blake said. “I’ll wait and see if the girl lives first.”
Lisa snorted and shook her head. “What possible motive could he have for killing her? If he were some psycho robot he could have just killed us all before we woke up from the tanks.”
“Android,” Gatticus said.
“I’m sorry?” Lisa asked.
“I am an android, not a robot.”
“Actually, you’re neither. You’re a person.”
Gatticus inclined his head to her. “You are very open-minded for a human. I had begun to think you were all the same.”
“There! Right there!” Blake said, and repeatedly stabbed his finger at Gatticus. “Did you hear that? That’s his motive. He thinks we’re all the same, all evil.”
“Maybe because he’s met too many people like you,” Lisa replied. “You can treat me next,” she said.
Gatticus nodded and withdrew another cylinder from the drawer he’d opened. Turning back to her, he reached down to her waist and opened the suit’s access panel.
“Wait!” Lisa said.
Too late. The suit splayed open, revealing her naked body.
Blake whistled appreciatively.
“I apologize,” Gatticus said. “I didn’t realize you were not wearing clothes.”
Darius looked away belatedly, catching a glare from Lisa as he did so. “I have a face, you know,” she said.
“Yeah, but you also have... well, all that,” Blake replied, grinning.
Darius heard another hiss as Gatticus injected Lisa with nanites, followed by the whirring and clicking of her suit as it sealed her up again.
Gatticus was busy passing his palm-sized scanner over her.
“I barely felt anything,” Lisa said. “Are you sure it worked?”
“The nanites anesthetize you as they enter your bloodstream.”
“Yeah, and then later they put you out of your misery altogether,” Blake added. “Maybe there’s no such thing as Phantoms. Maybe he’s the Phantom.”
“I assure you, I did not kill the crew.”
“Prove it.”
“You have seen their injuries. There’s no way I could have inflicted such wounds.”
“Maybe there’s some kind of lightsaber on board,” Blake suggested.
Darius arched an eyebrow at him.
“Lightsaber?” Gatticus asked.
“Wow...” Lisa breathed.
Darius turned to her. “What is it?”
“I feel... I mean, the pain—it’s gone!”
“Me too,” Cassandra said.
“We can’t be cured already. Can we?” Lisa asked.
“No,” Gatticus replied. “It will likely take a day or two for the nanites to fix everything, but chronic pain is a relatively easy malady to cure.”
Lisa slowly shook her head, her green eyes wide and full of wonder inside her helmet.
“Darius? Would you like to go next?” Gatticus asked.
All eyes turned to him. Darius shifted his weight from one foot to another, feeling uncomfortable under the weight of their gazes. Besides Cassandra, none of them knew that he didn’t actually have cancer.
“Ah, sure...” he replied.
Gatticus removed another cylinder from the drawer and opened the access panel in his suit. As his armor splayed open, Darius caught Lisa staring.
“Tat for tit,” she explained, and flashed a grin at him.
Blake snorted.
Darius felt a small prick as Gatticus injected him with the nanites. Then he took aim with his scanner, and another fan of blue light flickered out.
“Hmmm...”
“What?” Darius asked, his heart suddenly pounding. What if Gatticus could see from the scan that he didn’t have cancer?
“Your cancer is not very advanced,” Gatticus replied.
“I have cancer?” Darius blurted before he could stop himself.
“I thought you said you were stage four...?” Blake trailed off.
“His heart murmur is more of an immediate threat than the tumor in his left testicle, but the nanites should fix both problems.”
“Testicular cancer? I thought it was lung?” Blake said. “Kind of hard to confuse the two, wouldn’t you say?”
Darius grimaced. “I lied about the lung cancer.”
“No kidding,” Blake replied. “Question is why?”
“Officially, according to my medical records, I do have stage four small cell lung cancer. I didn’t know about the testicular cancer—or the heart murmur.”
“Why would your medical records lie?” Lisa asked.
Darius turned to her. “I wasn’t going to send my daughter to the future without me, so I bribed her doctor to tamper with my medical records and make it so that I could go too.”
Blake sneered at that. “Must be nice to break the rules just because you’re rich.”
Darius frowned. He’d worried Blake would have this reaction, but now that he thought about it, he wasn’t sure why. “You can’t blame me just because you couldn’t bring your family with you. You wouldn’t have done that even if you’d had the option. Cryo has risks. Would you ask them to take those risks for you?”
“Maybe, maybe not, but it would have been nice to have the option. I lost everyone I ever cared about, while you got to keep your family together because you wrote someone a check. Think about that.”
“Blame the system, don’t blame me,” Darius said.
Blake snorted and shook his head.
Lisa didn’t look amused either. Who had she been forced to leave behind?
“Look I’m sorry for being rich. Is that what you want to hear? If it makes you feel better, I’m not anymore.”
“Bull. Your money might be gone, but you still have the attitude. Blame the system, don’t blame me? You’re just another entitled brat who thinks the rules don’t apply to him.”
“I’m not ent—”
Cassandra grabbed his hand suddenly. “Did you hear that?” she whispered.
“No, hear what?” Darius replied.
“I heard it too,” Gatticus whispered.
“Heard what?” Blake demanded, not bothering to whisper.
Before Gatticus could reply, a chilling scream shivered through the air and the deck. Loose articles rattled inside their drawers and cabinets with the sheer force of the noise.
“What the hell was that?” Blake asked. Now he was whispering.
Gatticus shook his head, his gray eyes round and huge. “That, was a Banshee.”
Chapter 11
Another scream came soon after the first, but this one didn’t shake the room.
“That sounded human,” Lisa said.
“The other woman...” Darius realized.
Blake nodded. “Yeah.” He had his rifle trained on the broken doors.
“We need to get down to the planet before that Banshee finds us,” Gatticus said.
“And leave it on board with all those other people still in cryo?” Darius asked.
“It won’t attack them unless they wake up, and they won’t wake up if the power stays on,” Gatticus explained. “It’s hunting us, not the people in cryo. As far as Phantoms are concerned, those people are already dead.”
“What about you?” Blake asked. “They skipped you the first time around. Let me guess, that’s because you’re not alive either.”
“They don’t hunt androids,” Gatticus admitted.
“Yet another reason for me not to trust you.”
“Whether or not you can trust me, you need my help if you’re going to escape.”
“Go ahead. Help us. Why don’t you start by creating a distraction so we can get away. You can test that they don’t hunt androids theory of yours.”
“I would, but you ca
n’t pilot the transport without me, so we must escape together. You are right, however. I should go first to make sure the way is clear.”
Blake gestured to the broken doors. “Go on, then.”
“Turn off your mag boots,” Gatticus replied. “They’ll create too much noise.”
“How?” Darius asked.
“Like this.” Gatticus bent down to his haunches and touched buttons on either side of his heels.
The boots disengaged with a click, and he pushed off the floor at an angle, drifting over to the open doors. He grabbed the door frame and poked his head out into the corridor, looking both ways. A moment later, he turned and gestured for them to join him.
“All right, Cass,” Darius said. “Boots off.”
She shook her head quickly, her blue eyes huge. “I can’t. I’ll just run. I’ll run as fast as I can. I’ll be quiet.”
“Those things will hear you a mile away, kid,” Blake said.
“I can’t do it. I don’t know how to float around like that!” Cassandra said, pointing to Gatticus.
“Shhh!” Lisa hissed.
“Get on my back,” Darius said. “I’ll carry you. Hurry.”
Cassandra bent down and deactivated her boots as Gatticus had done. Then she wrapped her arms and legs around him.
“Hang on.”
He felt her nodding through the tactile sensors in the shoulder of his suit.
Blake and Lisa deactivated their boots, secured their rifle straps, and shoved off to join Gatticus by the doors. Darius did the same, aiming for the opposite side of the doorway to avoid a collision with one of them.
“Still no sign of the Banshee?” Darius whispered as he reached the doors.
“No way to be sure,” Gatticus said. “Phantoms can camouflage themselves to blend in with their surroundings.”
“Now you tell us,” Blake gritted out.
“Shut up, all of you,” Lisa said. “Let’s just get out of here.”
“Follow me,” Gatticus whispered. He pushed off the door frame and drifted up to the ceiling of the adjoining corridor. As he reached it, he grabbed one of the exposed conduits and used it to pull himself along, hand-over-hand.
They each followed his example, trying not to bump into each other or make any noise. Darius brought up the rear again, leaving him feeling dangerously exposed.
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