She put the loader control console in the target circle, locked on, and pulled the trigger.
The gun hummed beneath her fingers. Its electrified plasma charge burst out of the barrel and smashed into the loader control console.
Electricity skittered across the interconnected consoles, blackening screens and spitting fire. The loader groaned as power leeched from its arm and physics bent the extenders. Its gigantic mirror lowered to rest on the top of the shuttle, denting its shell.
It would not be going to space today.
Far above, in the sky, the unoccupied pirate transport ship hovered, patiently waiting for its owners to return.
The white suits jumped and ducked for cover. No one knew for sure what had happened. From an outside perspective, the console had simply exploded.
Resa stood up, put on the safety, and disappeared into the tunnel for Dome 2. On her mic, the surprise turned to confusion and rage. They couldn’t call back the shuttle and they couldn’t contact the ship. They couldn’t contact anyone.
Moments later, they realized a worst case: They couldn’t reprogram the nanobots.
That was when they started searching for her.
She reached the secret underground bunker of Dome 2, squeezed into the closet-sized space designed to outlast the bleakest emergencies, and sealed the doors. The comm system took forever to wake up and charge. She wedged herself between a box of reprocessor raws and a moisture cache. Every second, she imagined the pirates finding her tunnel, blasting in her door, and ending her fate.
If they didn’t come….
Sirens started, low and insistent, and the lights flickered to red. Warning of the imminent nanobot invasion, turning all of her cells into powder, vaporizing her to the bones and beyond.
Rescue. She needed rescue.
As soon as the comm console blinked on, she clenched the call switch. “Someone please help me. Someone, come quick!”
Empty space replied.
Oh no. The pirates had destroyed Central. They had—
No, wait. She had to move the communication switch to “receive”.
“Please come quick, someone!” Resa dropped the switch.
Hisses and squeals emerged from the speakers. Interference jammed the transmission, which jumped between snips of women shouting, men crying, and automated voices calling for help. One calm voice droned between hissing fits. She finally made it out. It directed everyone to turn to the alternate frequency and await a request for status reports.
Status reports.
Control. Protocol. She took a deep breath, read the instruction manual for the console, and switched to the alternate frequency.
“—survivors, thirteen casualties, and two hundred survivors, come and get us quick. We cannot hold. I repeat, we cannot hold.”
“Understood, West Plain Outpost Five. You cannot hold.”
“You have to help us!”
“Understood. Moving on. W—”
“Now, please!”
“Don’t jam the transmission. Moving on. Status report, West Plain Outpost Six… West Plain Outpost Six, status report…. West Plain Outpost Seven, status report.”
“Thirty survivors. This is West Seven. Three lost and thirty survivors, and fire everywhere. The pirates are gone, but the fires. Fire assistance is needed now.”
“Understood.”
“No, you don’t understand! We need assistance! We can’t wait!”
She slowly released the call switch.
We help ourselves or nobody does.
“…North Frontier Outpost, status report.”
There. That was her.
She scrambled for the switch. “North Frontier Outpost, um, reporting.”
“North Frontier Outpost, we’re glad to finally hear from you. Status report.”
“One, uh, pirate ship. So far as we know.” Report the enemies first. She calmed. “They breached the dome, killed pretty much everyone, and reprogrammed the nanobots to destroy the bodies.”
Central dropped silent for a long moment.
“You’re, um, going to want to bring something to contain them. I kind of destroyed the control panel when I grounded their shuttle.”
“…acknowledge, North Frontier Outpost. One heavy, which we still see over your location, a breached habitat, and biologic outbreak. I hope the survivors sheltered at a safe distance. It may be… it’s going to be a long time until we can organize a rescue up to there. A long time.”
The power blinked out. Dome fans ceased circulating life support. Her precious communications console flickered over to stored charge.
They found her.
She clutched the spare batteries, gripped the gun, and backed into the farthest corner of the tiny bunker, her aim on the vulnerable door.
“North Frontier Outpost, how many can we hope to rescue?”
We help ourselves or nobody does.
No rich alien warlord was going to swoop down and save her. No skilled older brother or proud, independent miner would pat her head and tell her to take a nap. There was only Resa. She was North Frontier now. Nanobots eating through the metal silently or pirates blasting through with deadly heat; she would give both one hell of a fight.
“One.” She stacked the batteries next to the gun. “And don’t hurry. North Frontier is holding just fine.”
Several centuries later…
The rogue walked up to the silent, dark underground storage facility deep beneath Seven Stars, heart of the Hyeon Antiata empire, and inserted her magic key—a stick containing her universal authorization code—into the locked front doors.
They rolled open.
Security bots instantly surrounded her, red lights warning intruders of termination.
No time to stick them all. She fumbled with her flash code emitter. The lipstick-sized tube slipped from her fingers and rolled on the sandy floor.
Shit.
The security bots closed, menacing. Their red lights beeped faster, counting down the moments until the facility registered her presence, shot an alert to the resurrection facility half a mile above and triggered an anti-theft explosion.
She dropped to her hands and knees.
The security bots milled, starting to beep the final countdown.
Her fingers closed over the flash code emitter.
The facility flashed red. Intruder alert.
She scrambled to her feet again and depressed the button.
Her flashed authorization stopped the nearest bots. Their lights turned white and they dropped quiet.
She pushed through the deactivated security bots, flashing the rest until they all relaxed and the facility lighting changed back to white.
Too close.
She wiped a drizzle of sweat off her brow—it was hotter so deep beneath the surface, aside from her near miss—and packed the flash emitter back into her utility belt. She selected one of the bots and inserted a local network connector. A few moments later, the data from her ship wrote across the security bot, inviting her to enter the name of the person who had recently died and needed to be resurrected.
Aris Hyeon Antiata, she typed.
The planetary governor of Seven Stars might be surprised to find himself dead since he was currently in a meeting arguing that the planetoid needed to reduce its reliance on Robotics Faction technology. Even though deadly mining nanobots no longer endangered the citizens, having lost his two half sisters to robot assassins, Aris was uniquely qualified to make the argument. Unfortunately, no one believed him. The Robotics Faction had given their technology too freely for too long; decoupling now was worse than unthinkable.
It was expensive.
A security bot carried the governor’s name into the facility. Deep within the interior, rollers pushed the gigantic armored box forward, easing out a single brick in a massive data wall. Reverse magnetization floated the several-ton box gently, past a thousand other bricks representing the important friends and relatives. The data box rested in the loading pedest
al.
This was one of the newer restore points in the facility. Most would consider four centuries too little experience to govern a planetoid; the current governor barely possessed four decades. Barely an adolescent, as his rivals constantly crowed, meant he was in no position to quit their Faction contracts.
No one believed he was right.
No one but the rogue and Aris’s two half sisters. And, of course, the Robotics Faction.
The giant black box rotated to display all sides. Its claimed durability—the armor was said to survive the outer rim of black holes and partial solar explosions—was about to be tested.
The security bot signaled its inspection complete.
The rogue intercepted the signal.
Normally, the facility floated a data box up to the resurrection facility and staff ensured the new body’s memories—chemical predilections worn into brain grooves, electrical dendrites networking learning, and shapes and sizes all measured by precise interior phrenology—grew into the new brain and a whole man stepped forth from the recovery chamber, his entire self intact.
She recast the signal to remove the restore point from the pedestal.
The facility accepted the new signal and looped it back to the bot. The bot tethered the floating restore point and dragged it to the front doors.
So far so good.
She directed the bot to continue out to her ship.
The bot hovered through the gaping front doors and into the caverns. As it passed the doors, it dropped a physical wheel and rolled on the dust.
The restore point passed across the threshold and smashed into the ground.
Tremors echoed through the cavern and rattled the facility.
Full security powered on.
Uh oh.
Bots raced out. Sensors activated. Infrared pulsed over her and the restore point.
She stopped her bot.
The other bots queried the open door, the gap of the missing restore point, the signals and signs of something out of order. Problem. Alert. Enemy engaged.
She ran to the facility terminal and shoved in her universal authorization code. The terminal powered on. She intercepted every signal and added one code piece: as expected. The door was open as expected. The restore point was missing as expected. The signals and signs of something out of order as expected.
Enemy engaged as expected.
Everything calmed. Alerts dissipated. Lights returned to darkness.
Whew.
She had forgotten the magnetic floor ended outside the facility. What a silly error. One that had almost cost her entire mission.
Hilarious that she should outrun Faction assassins for several hundred years and then nearly get blown up by stupid human deterrence measures. Twice.
Someone had once said she would trip on her own boots if they didn’t sport compensatory gyros. She smiled to remember the ancient phrase, and the even more ancient technology, spoken by someone long, long gone.
Well, since the bots had reactivated anyway, she summoned the entire cadre to the grounded restore point. They put down wheels and lifted the heavy tonnage enough to traverse the lost mining caverns to her ship. The bots loaded the restore point block next to others and backed out. She flash-erased their memories and unhooked her network connector from the bot who had carried her, unknowing, through her entire plan.
She flash-erased its memory too.
As it rolled back to the storage facility, she calculated how long it would take until the Robotics Faction learned what she had done.
There were nine keys to the Robotics Faction kingdom, and she possessed the ninth. Each universal authorization key, against which no security could resist and no encryption could hide, always issued a command to phone home. The next time someone died and they activated the facility, which happened every few days, her key would find a network connection and broadcast itself out.
Like the calling card of an evil villain, her action would reach the Robotics Faction.
She sat at her ship’s controls and opened a transmission up to the planetoid’s surface. “It is done.”
On her screen, Governor Aris Hyeon Antiata grinned back at her.
Classically handsome, with pleasant features and intent blue eyes that bordered on gray, the governor crossed one trim knee with his ankle. His meeting finished; he spoke in the privacy of his personal hover car. Neatly trimmed blond hair threaded with fashionable silver highlights, and his well-muscled body strained pleasingly against his clothes. Regal indigo robes shimmered with gold patterns created from melting the dust mined within the planet, a now valuable material thanks to the artisans who worked it into fantastic designs denoting incredible luxury.
Only his adventure-seeking nature adorned his broad, white smile. “Bring on my hot date.”
She smiled. The cocksure governor had his heart in the right place and just about nothing else. He didn’t know her smile disguised a true, deep sadness. “She’s coming.”
“I can’t wait.”
When the Faction decoded her universal key, they would send someone to investigate. And that someone would be the most dangerous agent ever created: the zero class assassin, a stealthy crocodile clothed in the skin of a beautiful woman. The rogue didn’t expect the governor to survive.
“Be careful up there.” She looked at the powerful, resolute, kind man for what might be the last time. “You can no longer be resurrected. Don’t trip and break your neck.”
“A Hyeon Antiata would never do something so unfashionable.”
She smiled again.
He hit the end transmission button. The connection winked out.
She fired up her ship, navigated the caverns to the North Frontier Outpost, and deposited Aris’s restore point at their agreed-upon hidden location.
Aris’s half sisters both possessed a gene that corrupted robots and made them fall in love. Once the Robotics Faction figured out which gene his half sisters—and all the others the rogue had tried to save—held in common, they would declare war on all humans possessing that gene. Entire planets, entire family lines, entire galaxies.
Aris didn’t possess the gene.
When the Faction sent their best assassin to end him, nothing would corrupt or otherwise prevent the assassin from succeeding. But when they analyzed his resurrection data, the Faction would end up farther from figuring out the truth.
She swore to protect Aris as long as possible. But once the zero class arrived, only a miracle would save him from the Robotics Faction’s crosshairs.
Ironic that the one who tripped over her boots was the one destined to try to save two entire races from a needless war that was beginning to look inevitable. Ironic, and not what she would have chosen. Sometimes, she wondered if this crazy plan would work, or if she sentenced innocents like the governor and his half sisters to death for no reason.
She carried out the plan anyway.
The rogue would never disappoint the ones who invested all their faith in her. No matter the demand.
No matter what she lost or who she left to die.
In the deepest levels of the Robotics Faction, a slick bank of processors churned data feverishly into the night. Secretly and resolutely, steadily and inexorably, it parsed a million billion human genome combinations tracing a ghost.
Tracing a flaw.
If the human genome combination—the “super-nome” corrupting robot processors—was not identified, the processor bank would trace the end of all robots.
New data arrived from a distant star system. A man’s restore point had been stolen by the rogue agent. The data was flagged as the highest importance. He was a half brother to two known carriers.
The main processor consulted the archive data files.
Cressida Sarit Antiata (known carrier)—genomic data collected from remains in a melted incubation chamber at a bombed hospital.
Mercury Sarit Antiata aka Chen Antiata (known carrier)—genomic data collected from remains found at her last known
residence.
The main processor eagerly fed the half brother’s specimen to the bank, churning and churning and churning, dissecting and inspecting. This living sample could determine at last which super-nome spread the flaw.
Disturbingly, the half brother’s super-nome expanded the possibilities. Exponentially.
The main processor returned those results to the authorized layers of the Robotics Faction: Either our entire question is poorly formulated, or the sample of the half brother misses critical genomes. We must review the half brother’s purified restore point to decisively identify the problem super-nome.
The upper layer returned its reply. We will dispatch the zero class agent to conduct a second test.
An assassin conducting a test? Superior to the bank of processors?
Not superior, the upper layers clarified, but, in the end, equally decisive.
Only the zero class could penetrate deeply into human space undetected. Only the zero class could operate off Faction networks, hiding her movements from the rogue agent and others who might be listening in to sabotage them.
But the old zero class, which had successfully executed the Faction’s assignments for six hundred years, had failed to assassinate Mercury and Cressida, and had, in fact, been destroyed by them. How could an indestructible robot have been destroyed by two humans? That costly and unexpected question still ricocheted through their processors. It was a question the Faction as a whole hoped not to repeat.
Is there time to create and train a new zero class?
No, the upper layers returned. We are sending an untrained model.
The shocking cost and risk of sending an untrained agent into this delicate situation stunned the bank of processors into momentary stillness. A whir of fans sounded across the atmosphere-filled, warehouse-sized cranium.
The processor bank finally churned to life. Won’t an untrained model simply destroy the target and herself, leaving us with no possibility of gleaning useful data?
The new zero class has been created from a purified human fragment. Once she goes off-assignment, we will see instantly which gene caused the corruption. Then, we will forcefully reconnect her to the Faction and turn off her human personality, changing her into a full robot.
Liberation's Vow (Robotics Faction #3) Page 2
