Liberation's Vow (Robotics Faction #3)
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Liberation’s Vow
Robotics Faction Series
Wendy Lynn Clark
Contents
Summary
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Robotics Faction Series
Sneak Peek of Liberation Origins
Copyright ©2016 Wendy Lynn Clark
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1-943110-00-X
ISBN-13: 9781943110001
Created with Vellum
To my dad for reading to me every night as a kid. Your awesome shelf of science fiction classics—Chalker, Heinlein, Hubbard—filled many a summer night with starry dreams.
Summary
He wants redemption. She’s using him as bait. They’ll sacrifice everything for one passionate embrace…
Aris is tortured by his past. The regional governor and aristocrat once traded his half-sisters’ lives for power. Seeking to redeem himself, he makes a deal with a shady agent that could get him killed.
Resa is a zero-class assassin. Her predecessor was a murderous nightmare, and she has no choice but to fill those bloody shoes. She attempts to infiltrate Aris’ life to draw out the android-corrupting rogue agent. The mission reveals forbidden desires that change everything.
Aris is using Resa too, but similar feelings cloud his judgment. With their passion unleashed, a secret may be revealed: the real reason the Antiata family has been sentenced to death. Resa and Aris are the only ones who can stop a human-robot war that destroys all worlds forever.
Liberation’s Vow is the third book in a series of sci-fi romances. If you like android assassins, creative world-building, and sizzling chemistry, then you’ll love Wendy Lynn Clark’s latest roller coaster romance.
For updates about new releases, as well as exclusive promotions, visit the author’s website and sign up for the VIP mailing list at: http://wendylynnclark.com.
Chapter One
Resalynne grabbed her brother’s Mach 8 cyber-rifle and squeezed the trigger. “Bam, bam, bam!”
A distant tumble-rock, which could have been five feet away or five hundred on the airless planetoid Seven Stars’ surface, stood dumbly where it started.
She pretended to aim at the rock next to it. “Bam, bam, bam! Another pirate dead.”
Her brother rested his gloved hand on the cold barrel, thumb on the safety. Behind exposure suit glass, his brows cocked. “Resa, what have I told you about guns?”
She released the rifle to him and toggled her in-suit mic. “Deep breath, center your shot, and don’t waste ammo because the next supply drop isn’t for a month.”
“And don’t play with my rifle.” He returned it to his shoulder holster. “You practice like you perform. Real practice, with the safety off. I’ll take you out tonight if you want.”
“It’s not like I really need to.” She bounced after him across the barren wasteland of North Frontier Outpost. “I’m the last person on base who’d ever have to shoot someone.”
“Preparation never hurts.”
She tripped into the yawning mine, flipped closed her solar charging cells, and tapped her exposure glass to lighten the polarized tint. “We’re going to be valuable any day now. If those Antiata raiders or Emperor goons try to jump our claim, Central will send their whole force to save us.”
They waited in the pressurization corridor, suits still on, because only a micrometer-thin skin separated themselves from space.
In comparison, a hundred thousand miles separated their outpost from Central.
Obviously thinking of that, her brother shook his head. “We help ourselves or nobody does.”
The doors popped open on the mine. The growl and roar of tumbling rock pulsed against her chest. A low-grade siren warned that they were entering a nanobot risk area, and to watch out in case the massive drills uncovered a trapped pocket. Nanobots were like invisible bees, collecting their preprogrammed mineral pollen and depositing it into a honeycomb of raw wealth. They were supposed to go inert after they stripped off the valuable minerals, but accidents did happen, and human blood contained minute traces of those same valuable minerals. Better safe in a suit than exposing a cut to a nanobot and losing half an arm before electro-scrubbers could shut it off.
Her brother nodded to the miners they passed, inspecting suits and machinery with a security officer’s practiced eye.
She ducked under a gigantic spring-loader mirror used for balancing space-bound loads. “What if pirates torpedoed us like they tried on Second Star?”
“They wouldn’t bother.” He hefted a heavy load of core samples, hopefully containing more valuable minerals than they had yet discovered. “Work on our economics problem, warrior.”
She dragged a smaller bag into the tunnels. Dust coated their suits in beautiful, worthless magnetized gold. “We could sell confetti at royal balls.”
He grunted. “Pretty hefty shipping costs.”
“We could design custom ship hulls.”
“Solar etching is more durable.”
“We could sell robots attractive, shiny body paint.”
He laughed and patted her helmet.
That night, after they’d logged their share of the day’s profits, studied the core samples for nonexistent valuable minerals, and eaten their evening meal—which, even limited to the starkest reprocessor solids, cost more than their share yet again—her brother headed out on patrols. And, she suspected, he secretly borrowed the outer perimeter network connection and searched survey-ship maps for more lucrative mines for them to apply for a transfer.
She bunked down with her holo viewer of Fantastical Alien Warlords. The romance between the main warlord’s renegade, amnesiac, brainwashed, secret half brother and his fourth-favorite physicist slave was really heating up in the 198th season.
Her brother propped an elbow on her makeshift bunk. “A marker’s out on the south second quadrant. I’m taking the maintenance guy.”
“Overtime again?”
He ruffled her hair. “Got to pay for dinner.”
“Stay safe. Keep in verbal contact.”
“Suits don’t hold enough charge.”
She knew that, but she wanted him to anyway.
He seemed on the verge of saying something else, but then smiled and hunkered down on his proper bunk below her to put on his suit again.
She rolled over on her side. “Hey, Evanni?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m not sorry I left Central and everybody behind. I didn’t think we’d strike it rich with our first mine. I mean,”—she hugged the imaginary fortunes in her frayed and patched blanket—“it would have been so amazing if we had, and I could buy a hundred living dresses and two spaceships and every-single-day resurrection points for both of us, like total emperors.”
He snorted.
“Maybe,” she kept dreaming, “we’ll invent something for that gold, like pretty dresses or houses or gold-plated domes.”
“Nobody’d waste their profits on something so useless.”
“Yeah.” She sighed. “But honestly, I’m just glad the supe let me stay, even though I’m barely starting my third decade, and they could have sent me home. I’m glad to stay anywhere so long as I’m with you.”
>
He was silent for a long minute.
Then, he popped above her bunk again. “I’m heading out.”
She made her hand into a gun. “Call if you see pirates.”
“Want to practice shooting them?”
“What do I have to practice for when you’re out there to protect me?” She rolled her eyes and put alien warlords back in her ears.
Her brother left.
Too many episodes later, she rubbed her eyes and shut off the viewer. Where was her brother? She set the holo viewer on its charger, pulled off her earphones, and got up.
Strange. The air was off.
She padded into the hall. Her grubby inside shoes squeaked on the mesh floor and her slim biceps shivered with coolness.
The solar grid was probably out again.
She searched the familiar, eerily silent rooms. Finally, she found people in the mess hall huddled around their single reprocessor. Unlike the ventilation fans, the reprocessor sat on permanent power. Almost the whole mine, minus the few out on patrols, clustered around tiny map screens.
Her older brother tapped the map. “We should get to Dome 2 and activate the emergency communicator to Central.”
“It could be dust,” a miner said, rolling her grimy sleeves over her powerful biceps. “We’re not little kids, crying home to Mama.”
“Alerting Central is the proper response when a perimeter outage—”
“What are they going to do anyway? We’re too far out. We fix it or we’ll be suffocated before they send a recon probe.”
“—and when we cannot reach the other mines. Proper protocol states—”
“Dust. It’s been storming since the second watch. Weather’s as miserable as the mines.”
“Hey, little princess,” one of the miners saw her in the doorway, and his wrinkled brow lightened. “Don’t you need your beauty sleep to catch your lord?”
“Warlord,” she replied, because they all knew her silly fantasies. “What are you all doing?”
The old miners looked at her brother.
He pointed back the way she’d come. “Suit up and bunk down.”
She stifled a yawn. “I’m not tired.”
The miners chuckled.
“I can help.”
Her brother nodded. His emergency oxygen rebreather swung gently from his neck. “We have a perimeter out and we can’t hail the other mines. Suit up and get to the safe room in Dome 2.”
“I want to help here.”
Her brother fixed her with a hard look.
Yes, she knew bickering caused the other miners to treat her like a child. She tamped down her worry—it was probably nothing—and went to the doorway. “When I get there, I’m going to call in an emergency.”
The miners groaned and complained.
Her brother’s tiredness lightened. “Follow protocol.”
She left the mess hall and sealed the door—following safety protocol already, look at her—and started to recite the call orders she’d read in the manuals.
The world roared.
The walls boomed and buckled, throwing her to the floor. Metal mesh rattled at her face. Low moans echoed deep below the building. Behind her, a horrid shriek screamed from the broken seals around the bulging mess hall door.
Oh no.
She pushed herself to her feet and ran to the door. It canted on its hinges. Through the cracked fist-thick glass, she could see the dome ceiling in shreds. It revealed billowing sand and a star-studded, no-atmosphere-crisp sky.
Oh no. No, no, no.
Bodies were strewn across the floor, some arching and gasping, others unmoving. Her brother…. Yes! Her brother gripped the reprocessor platform. He held the emergency rebreather to his mouth. He survived.
White-clad foreigners stormed into the shredded dome, heat lasers blasting. The few miners who had survived the first assault fell. Her brother lifted his arm. His chest disappeared in a barrage of sinister light.
Shock paralyzed her.
Her brother slumped onto the reprocessor. The rebreather fell from his lax mouth.
Her heart stopped dead in her chest. A strange hollow sensation filled her bones, and her ears floated next to her head.
No. This hadn’t happened. It wasn’t real. Her brother was still alive in there. This hadn’t happened. It wasn’t real.
The white-suits gathered around the console, pushing aside the dead, and exchanged signals. Most of them turned around and headed for the mines. One headed for the mess hall door.
She stumbled backward on numb feet.
Her brother’s voice echoed in her ears, straight out of all their drills. Move.
She backed away from the glass, turned, and ran.
The wrecked dome moved past her in a blur. Nothing registered. Only her brother’s last instructions echoed in her mind, guiding her numb body. Partial walls collapsed, and jutting floors knocked holes into the tunnels below. She banged into walls, lost her footing, and fell. Her forehead dripped blood. She felt nothing.
In their room, she yanked on her suit with shaking hands. No helmet—that was near the Outside door—suit battery low. She grabbed her extra battery pack, leaving her brother’s—no, she grabbed all the battery packs, including her brother’s spare.
Below the shelf, in the main portion of his locker, rested his gun.
She hesitated.
We help ourselves or nobody does.
She grabbed it.
Voices echoed in the hall. Harsh, foreign sounds between her and the safe exit to the planetoid.
A jagged opening gaped in the destroyed floor. Into the mine. Infested with nanobots.
Run, Resa!
She dropped to her butt and slid into the hole. Her indoor shoes slipped, and she banged her head on an exposed pipe. The voices grew louder. She huddled in shadow. They passed.
Dome 2 hid several miles underground, buried on the other side of the mine.
She started walking.
The miles passed. Reality of what the pirates stole from her turned to sober consideration of what she planned to do about it. Vengeance fantasies played in her mind, every one of them a white suit in the targeting circle.
She gripped the gun.
The caverns opened up and reflective gold dust gave way to generator floodlights and harsh shadows. Sirens had fallen silent, although the grit of the gold dust falling on her cheeks tickled like the whispered warning of unseen dangers. Any second now, she should see her first murderer.
Her suit mic hissed.
She stopped.
The pirates communicated over an open local channel. She tapped her wrist to lower the volume and slowed her approach.
“Is this all they’ve got? We knocked the place and risked our necks for a couple of bills?”
She emerged on the walkway. A white-clad group, suits open to their bellies, milled around the mining control console, arguing. One typed on the nanobot control panel. She knelt in position behind a milled boulder.
“Even one of those miners survives, we got the whole lot of them coming after us.”
“Relax. We wipe the whole station. No one ever knows we were here.”
“Fuck. For this tiny amount, I wish we were never here.”
She set her aim, rested the gun against the boulder, and placed the man’s head in the targeting circle. Deep breath. She pushed the safety off.
The tiniest click sounded beneath her ragged gloves.
The targeting circle glowed red. Live ammo.
The man finished tapping on the controls. “There. The nanobots are programmed to reactivate and swarm the bodies, turning them into an unidentifiable paste. ‘Biologic mode’ is on.”
One of them shivered. “Let’s get out of here.”
“We’ve got an hour.” The man stood, leaving her target circle.
What?
The red circle remained on the console. Oh, she had locked on the console. She unlocked it, wasting precious time, and locked on the man. Again, it centered
on an inanimate object, a loader.
Reality intruded on her fantasy.
She possessed limited ammo and less experience. The white suits were armed, experienced, and ruthless. Some weren’t even here. If she managed to fully unlock the weapon and shot, even killed, a single man, the others would hunt and annihilate her.
It was hopeless.
Her mic hissed.
“Shuttle One, this is Away Team,” one of the pirates said, over her mic. “The miners are dead. Drop ship to pick up the payday.”
“Come and get it yourself,” their pilot responded. “We don’t have enough fucking men.”
“Shuttle One, don’t be a little girl.”
““If I bring down the shuttle, no one’s left on board to pilot the ship.”
“Let me worry about that.”
“Oh yes, sir, commander, sir.” Swearing ended the shuttle pilot’s transmission.
A drop shuttle flew to the surface, and the group emptied the mine’s meager profits into its hold. Disappointed the valuable super-magnetic mineral, magnetese, could fit in a single duffel, the pirates loaded everything else of value, stacking gold bars and mercury-alloy pistoles, sacks of dust and low earning gems.
Resa moved around the back of the dome, sighting and losing the murderers. Her brother’s teachings echoed through her. Deep breath. Center your shot. Don’t waste ammo.
We help ourselves or nobody does.
“All right, the load is almost balanced.” The leader turned to another pirate. “Call everyone in.”
The pilot grumbled as he fought the obviously unfamiliar loader controls, lifting and lowering the several-thousand-ton mirror until it reflected accurate mass and weight. “Maybe they got something out of the dirt-digger’s sympathy letters from their mommies.”
He moved the loader from one side of the shuttle to the other and, instead of taking the extra time to manipulate it around the vulnerable shuttle, he hovered the several-thousand-ton loader mirror directly over the top.
Classic mistake. One she learned about on her first week at the mines. Never, ever, let the loader mirror cross a more fragile load.