“Pavel,” he called back to the droid. “You said you read a heat source?”
From under his base, Pavel switched out the wide treadmill wheel to two large all-terrain ones, then climbed the stacks of clothes to stand in the center of the tiny room. His dome rotated in a circle as he scanned. Then he extended an arm and picked up a gray cylinder—the gadget Aly had stepped over to get to the bed.
“It’s some kind of external heat device,” the droid said.
The pressure felt like too much, like everything was bearing down on him. He didn’t know what to do. He looked around the room—really looked—for the first time. Vin had always been messy, but this was different. All of his drawers had been pulled out and emptied on the floor. Tiny machine parts were scattered everywhere. Everything that had been up on his bulletin board was torn down. Someone had searched Vincent’s room, it seemed. But who? And what had happened to Vincent?
Aly felt cold. Vin had disappeared just after Aly had found the royal escape pod and sent out a hail across an open cube channel. It couldn’t be a coincidence.
“Who else is on board?” he asked Pavel.
Pavel looked distressed—for a droid, at least. “I detect no additional heat signatures.” So Vincent had left—or had been taken.
Aly felt a quake starting inside his chest. With a sweep of his arm, he sent everything on the desk flying. A familiar hammer landed on the floor. It was his. Vin was always stealing his tools. He could never keep track of his own. They’d gotten into a fistfight over it once. He suddenly regretted how stupid he’d been; he should’ve just given it to him.
“Cube transmissions are scrambled,” Pavel said flatly. “Something is wrong.”
“No taejis something is wrong.”
But at that moment he saw a shadow eclipse the doorway: a humanoid droid—tall and shiny, made of a high-grade alloy. Military-grade alloy. It was the NX series, but from a model that hadn’t yet been released. Aly didn’t know why or how it had boarded the Revolutionary, but it stood at least eight feet tall and had to duck through the doorway.
Technically he and the NX droid were both soldiers for the UniForce. They were on the same side.
So why did Aly suddenly want to piss his pants?
“Private Alyosha Myraz,” it said, scanning his vitals. Its eyes flashed once and then turned red. “Mark identified.”
Alyosha’s knees buckled. Definitely not on the same side. No wonder Pavel had detected no additional heat signatures on board. UniForce—it had to be UniForce—had sent a droid to do their dirty work.
As the droid went for him, Aly grabbed a drawer off the floor and flung it at the NX as hard as he could, but the metal behemoth swatted it away. It smashed against the wall and splintered in two. Alyosha scrambled for more things to throw. The droid was on him quickly, and kicked its heel into Aly’s chest. Even with the giant suit Aly was wearing, the impact was like getting shot. He flew backward against the wall and took down the bulletin board, collapsing on the desk, gasping.
The military droid took hold of Aly’s leg and yanked him off the desk. Aly landed on his back on a pile of clothes, and he thanked god that Vin was such a slob. He might have broken his neck on the bare floor otherwise. And then he remembered that Vincent had taken off. A feeling wormed itself in, right there up between the pit of his stomach and the back of his heart—not just anger or sadness, but both, a sense of the unfairness of it all.
To his left he saw the hammer, and he grabbed it before the droid could kick it away. He knew it was no use. This model of droid couldn’t even die, really; it would just reboot. Still, he whacked it blindly in the direction of the droid’s control panel, roaring with sudden rage, unwilling to die in a heap of Vincent’s dirty laundry.
Then the droid ripped the hammer from his hand. It grabbed his neck, and Alyosha’s brain blinked out. He was going to die . . .
The droid went suddenly still. Its eyes went black. Its whole body began to spark. The terrible steel hands around Alyosha’s neck released, and he sat up, coughing and gasping, massaging his throat. The droid was on its back now, twitching like a dying insect. Aly turned to Pavel, who was humming loudly in overdrive.
“What . . . what did you do?” Aly asked, through the pain in his throat.
“I uploaded a virus to its operating system.” The way he said it had a lilt. Aly could almost hear the shrug in his voice.
“What virus?” Whatever Pavel had done, he was glad for it.
“A virus I just invented. I coded it now.”
Aly could’ve hugged him. He staggered to his feet, his head still dizzy and his chest like a bombed-out crater. But he was alive.
He knew the droid was being tracked, though—all military droids were—and shorting it had made them more high-profile than ever. Military droids didn’t travel solo, and reinforcements must be getting ready to storm the Revolutionary now. Aly ripped out Pavel’s comm unit, an external cube he had installed so the droid was wired to the network. Then he powered down his own cube, and stumbled. It felt like a fist had wrapped around his brain to wring out all the juice, the connectivity. He was offline. He couldn’t record anything. He couldn’t look anything up. But at least their GPS would go dark. Still, they had Aly’s heat signature to take care of.
“Let’s go,” Aly said, taking one last glance at Vin’s empty bed. He grabbed the hammer off the floor, praying Vin had bolted before some titanium beast had crushed his head like a grape.
Please let Vin be okay.
Then they ran—rather, he ran and Pavel rolled.
“How much of the medical bible do you have downloaded?” he called over his shoulder.
“Approximately thirty percent. First aid and basic surgery.”
“Anything on anesthesiology?”
“No. I’d need to go back online.”
“We can’t go back online.” Not until they were out of danger. If they were ever out of danger. Why had Kalu’s UniForce gone on the attack? Aly knew it must be because he’d found evidence the Princess might still be alive, but he was too jacked up to untangle any more of the puzzle.
They entered the medbay, and Aly barred the door behind them. He tore down medicine bottles and smashed salves onto the floor until he found what he was looking for: gel nitrogen compound. He shrugged out of the suit, then pulled off his shirt and pants and began covering his body to insulate the heat. “I need to lower my body temperature. What’s the baseline so I lose my heat signature?”
“Below twenty-two degrees Celsius, you become undetectable by standard scanning techniques. But every computable attempt carries an eighty percent chance of fatality by hypothermia.”
“Not if you resuscitate me first.” Aly started to cover his face and smeared a thick layer across the crown of his head, gooping it into his coarse hair.
Pavel was clearly flustered. Metal attachments extended and retracted as he scanned med labels and did calculations on the fly. His movements were jerky, like the old-school service droids that worked in the Wray. Pavel held up a newly filled syringe. “If I inject cathariiuum into your blood, your temperature will lower down to twenty-five degrees, and I can resuscitate you with any of the illium ions within seven minutes to prevent death.”
“You said I had to get it down to twenty-two degrees.”
“True,” Pavel said. He held up a second syringe. “But the heat sensors have a margin of error. There’s a seventy-seven percent chance you will remain undetected.”
“Not good enough.”
“Then our only alternative is the tauri-based compound. You’ll drop down to twenty degrees. But after three minutes you’ll suffer painful paralysis, and after four minutes you will be dead. Also, the sucra serum meant to reverse it is highly unstable.”
“What I’m hearing is: We use the tauri. You inject me with the juice, and we make a run for the escape
pod.” Aly picked up the sucra serum. It was purple, like the dawn. Last time he saw the sunrise he’d been on leave and went to Jeth’s on Chram.
“I strongly recommend against it,” Pavel insisted now.
“P, there’s no other choice.” He grabbed for the second syringe and plunged it into his heart before Pavel could stop him. A black hole rose up to meet him, and he fell into it—through the air, through the floor, into the dark space that crushed all matter.
He was both trapped in the body and floating above it, his soul split in two. Then all the matter of his body re-collected at this point in space and time, bouncing back in a fraction of a second. He shot up. Everything felt numb and powerful at once. He wanted to crush something with his hands, and he was suddenly angry. Really. Angry. He’d mow all the capital sons of choirtois down now.
But when he tried to take a step, his legs wouldn’t work. He would’ve fallen again if Pavel hadn’t rolled over and buffered his fall.
“Paralysis set in early. Three minutes and twenty seconds out.”
He was draped over Pavel now, his feet dragging behind them. He walked, or tried to, which meant that he kicked his feet out weakly and focused on the hum of Pavel’s wheels. They had exited the medbay, and he was cold. Shivering, teeth-chattering cold.
“Aly? Your heat signature is now undetectable. Answer if you can hear me.”
He let out a groan.
“Two minutes and forty-five seconds out. Irreversible damage will set in soon. On your order, I will inject the serum.”
“The serum?” It sounded familiar, urgent even—like a very important part of a very important plan they’d discussed. But what plan, Aly couldn’t quite recall . . .
“I believe you are experiencing temporary memory loss. It may mean your brain is being deprived of oxygen.”
But no. He could remember. He was back in school, with the Fontisian missionary, trying to pronounce Vodhan’s name for the first time—and how weird the word felt in his mouth, all the sharp syllables rolling off his tongue in exactly the wrong way. Still, he’d liked the idea of one god, one master plan. Sometimes it still felt like Vodhan talked to him in whispers, and he felt just a little bit lighter and a little bit less alone.
“Do you see a light, Aly? If so, be aware it is an electrical surge in your brain, and it means you will likely die.”
“You’re a bummer, Pavel.” Aly’s jaw felt heavy, his tongue swollen to three times its size. “I can’t bring you anywhere.”
“Good, Alyosha. Attempts at humor mean the frontal cortex is still intact. Two minutes and fifteen seconds out.” But just then Pavel came to an abrupt halt. “I detect movement.”
Pavel backtracked through the hallway toward the access ladder that led down to the engine room. “A temporary solution,” the droid said in a low voice. “Based on your bone density and the height of the fall, you should not sustain serious injuries.”
“Fall?” he asked, even as Pavel laid him down and rolled around behind his shoulders. “What fall?”
The droid pushed.
Aly dropped. When he slammed against the ground, his head hit the grating and he saw stars—but it didn’t hurt. Nothing hurt. It was only cold. He thought of the day they’d gotten the news that his mom and Alina had died. He saw his dad standing over him all over again. Be a man, he was saying. Be a man . . .
“Two minutes out,” Pavel called down to him. His voice at the top of the ladder sounded tinny. Aly realized where he was—steps away from the engine room. Then Pavel disappeared.
“No,” he tried to yell, but his mouth wasn’t working anymore. He was alone, shivering, his head busted open. How, exactly, did he get here? He’d never seen snow, but this was what it must feel like to be buried in it. Even his brain was freezing over. Memories flashed from his life: walking alongside his dad, water dripping off a corrugated metal roof. Someone was coming toward them, but he couldn’t remember who or why. They were on their way to fly a kite . . .
Aly slipped out of consciousness and then woke again. How long had it been? A second? An hour? He heard the NX marching. The hiss and zip of expensive hydraulics boiled the blood in his heart.
He was seven. His dad’s enormous hand pawed at his shirt and pulled him close.
“Don’t speak unless spoken to. And don’t say anything smart.” His dad had whispered the last word like it was something foul, shameful. A Fontisian was passing, but he wasn’t like the missionaries who taught Vodhan’s word in the droopy makeshift prayer tents. The Fontisians were generally larger, with pale skin and pointy ears the kids would whisper about. It was rumored they could hear anything, anywhere. But this particular man had dark tattoos all along his neck that looked like they were clawing their way out from under his shift.
“What’s this?” the Fontisian had asked, as he grabbed roughly for their kite. Aly was too scared to speak—and the man had repeated himself, this time in Wraetan. He’d accented it in all the wrong places. And when his dad told him it was a kite they’d made together, the Fontisian’s answer was cold.
There is only one way to get to heaven, and it is not by flying.
Now Aly felt the cool grate against his face. How much time had passed? More than two minutes, he was sure.
He was going to die. Maybe he was dead already.
He could still feel the rain from when he’d been tossed outside all those years ago. In his mouth, on his eyelids, sliding down around his ears. It was like the water had been gathering all these years, between then and now, rising. Then it swallowed him up and everything was quiet.
SEVEN
RHIANNON
THE UniForce soldiers would board any second, and Rhee could no longer trust that they would protect her.
“Take the pill. The scrambler takes up to a minute to work,” Dahlen said. There was a new sense of urgency in his voice.
“I’ve lost it!” Rhee peered through the grate into the darkness. She’d made a mess of everything. “Help me get the grate up!”
He cursed in Fontisian. “There’s no time,” he said. He went to the wall and slid his fingers along its gnarled surface. He found what he was looking for: the opening of a hatch that had been invisible. He motioned for Rhee to crawl inside. When the hatch closed behind her, everything went dark.
But it didn’t go still.
The bark shifted under Rhee’s weight, poking and prodding her as she tried to get comfortable. She knew the ship was alive—it was organic matter, after all—but she hadn’t expected it to squirm and wiggle. She felt sick, like she’d digested something rotten. No, like she was being digested.
Outside, the ship had settled into a grav beam, and she heard the bay doors open. Dahlen offered strained greetings, and Rhee felt the weight of the craft tip as though several soldiers had come on board at once.
“Sergeant Niture,” a man said, introducing himself. “Just a routine sweep. Interesting vessel . . .”
“I’ve never seen this kind of droid before,” Dahlen said. Rhee heard the zip and hiss of a machine sweeping across the small pod. Something cracked. “It’s pretty, certainly. But can it be more careful?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” the sergeant said in a tone that suggested he was not sorry at all. “These NX combat droids haven’t been programmed for a soft touch. Sooner we’re done, sooner it’s off.”
“Of course,” Dahlen answered. “Can you tell me, Sergeant, when martial law was declared?”
A tense silence followed. Rhee figured this Niture character must not like being questioned, even if the question itself was a reasonable one.
“Since riots broke out across all of Kalu, that’s when,” the man said roughly. “Lots of people devastated by the Princess’s death, and lots of people wondering exactly who’s responsible. Like the allies don’t have enough problems. Enough dusties to choke off whatever resources they have left .
. .”
Rhee heard a long pause, and she wondered what had been communicated in that silence. She was worried about the riots. She’d have to check the holos next time she got the chance.
As the droid moved closer, Rhee hugged herself and, as if in response, the wooden walls of the ship enfolded her even more tightly. As she waited in the darkness, Rhee thought of when she’d explored the sand caves with Julian, his crooked smile when he looked at her, the rough stone walls against the skin of her palm—it was the first time they’d ever done a cube-to-cube transfer. She’d felt goosebumps, seeing and feeling his life through his memory.
Now, without her cube, even this memory was gone. Distorted, like all organic memories were. The cave walls closed in and all she felt was terror.
Rhee urged her mind to somewhere calm, and a new memory emerged: a game of hide-and-seek with Josselyn, the time she’d gotten lost in the cellars.
Her parents had thought it was filthy down there and never uploaded the layout to her cube to prevent her from exploring the tunnels. She’d been down there for hours, blinded by the torchlight when Joss had finally found her—relief and shame clutching at her insides as she hid her face so her big sister wouldn’t see her tears . . .
“Hmm. The material makes heat signatures impossible to detect,” the sergeant continued. Rhee placed her hand against the wood as if to thank it. She knew so little about Fontisian tech. “You’ll have to enable your cube playback for us.”
“I’m from a Fontisian order,” Dahlen said. “I turned off my cube once I took my vows. It’s against our practices.” She could tell, now, that the calmer he sounded, the more annoyed he really was.
The sergeant grunted. “Fontisians, sure, the great Vodhan, I’ve heard. Freedom to practice and all that is fine and good, but since you don’t have playback, we’ll need to ask you some questions. NX-101, enable interrogation.”
Empress of a Thousand Skies Page 7
