Liberation's Vow (Robotics Faction #3)

by Wendy Lynn Clark

  “Very well.” He unfastened his under robe. “I accede to your medical opinion.”

  “That was a joke.”

  “Aw, how unfair. I believed you.”

  “I apologize again.” She disentangled their fingers and shoved the nerve cream at him, rocking back on her heels. “I’ll refrain from misleading you with my more sophisticated responses.”

  A smile chased itself into his jaw. “My last head of security was a lot more caring.”

  “And look what happened to him.”

  A jab. Joensen had been more caring, from his rough cadet apprenticeship to his more recent, distracted defense, even though he disagreed with Aris’s outlandish attempt to open the eyes of his family to the robotic threat, such as the one currently sitting in his bedroom.

  He applied the creams while she politely averted her gaze, even though he felt perfectly comfortable displaying his full glory any time she desired a piece.

  Which caused him to ask, “Is any part of you human?”

  She walked to the fountain garden window. “Yes.”

  “Which part?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “It’s sure as hell not your legs. They’re fine legs, very shapely, but no human could’ve taken a fall like that.”

  She rubbed her ankles together as though conscious of his words.

  “It’s not your arms. You lifted me like a handful of paper, which is unsettling despite how much I would love to have your arms wrapped around me again.”

  She brushed something from her bicep.

  “It’s definitely not your beautiful eyes—”

  “It’s not a part you can see,” she said quietly.

  Well, how perfectly fascinating. His pulse pounded in his cock. Could she hear it?

  She whirled to him. Although it was too dark to tell for certain, he swore her cheeks once again looked flushed. She strode to the doorway. “Sleep. I’ll patrol your residence.”

  “You’ll guard me more securely with a more intimate patrol.” He patted the couch.

  “Your body needs quiet to heal.”

  “As if I can sleep after a come-on like that,” he complained, but he did so to an empty room.

  He fluffed his pillows and relaxed into them. Good thing she wasn’t programmed to use her body to get what she wanted from him. He had yet to invite a woman to share this private couch; the others never moved beyond his public bed. Resa didn’t count. She wasn’t, after all, actually a woman.

  Under the cover, he pulled out his last communication with the lady rogue.

  Your half sisters were captured by the Robotics Faction and escaped with their lives. They will meet you in Seven Stars secretly. Have you convinced your family of the Robotics Faction threat? We can’t wait much longer. The Faction’s deadly Third Brigade fleet is gathering outside your solar system, and the zero class has already been dispatched to your planetoid.

  Dispatched? Aris erased the memo and reprocessed the paper, disintegrating it to its constituent molecules. How would the lady rogue feel about the zero class sitting on his windowsill? He smiled.

  Someday she would turn her weapon on Aris. Her mission would end and she would eradicate loose ends. Or try, anyway.

  But until then, he would use her skills to push his agenda. He would figure out a way to make her open his family’s eyes to the truth.

  Joensen had died so easily in his arms. He deserved justice.

  When he identified the culprit, Aris would let the murderous robot find justice for him.

  Resa patrolled the perimeter of the governor’s dome, forming a perfect map and noting all the gaps in the security cameras. She wore a pair of clear oculars linked to his security cameras inside, showing her interior rooms, and also downloading the important human data for perusal.

  Multitasking like this took a lot of her attention, but not all of it.

  Aris’s full staff printed inside the oculars. She looked through names, locations, heartbeats to the cityscape around her while she jogged along the ornate outer walls.

  His gentle breathing, silenced under the duvet (she had checked via a video communicator she had secreted in his room), now filled her ears. He drifted trustingly into sleep.

  His vulnerability disturbed her.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d noticed his laxness, but now that she saw it from the inside, the impact struck her more forcefully. Satellites, so often used for surveillance and defense, could easily be manipulated with a few codes. The Hyeon defense fleet, so certain of its readiness, could easily be dispersed with a feint toward a more vulnerable target. Leaving this planetoid, and all inhabiting it, a fragile shell just waiting for someone to crack it open.

  Someone like the Faction’s Third Brigade, a massive fleet full of soldier x-classes and the newest ship-to-planet weapons, only a single Hub away and itching to mobilize at the first real hint of the rogue.

  She walked along the garden wall ledge. Aris’s city clustered around her.

  Through the atmosphere shield’s thin places, the stars shone straight through, and distant vistas appeared as crisp as something at the length of her arm from her nose. The holes of the mines, from which the planetoid received its wealth and from which these domes had been fabricated like so many ornamental balloons, gaped, stark against the barren stone.

  Morning tinted the far southern pole of the atmosphere shield, and evening sat at the far north. Night surrounded the capitol, and the main import/export freight elevator into space.

  Individual domes, such as the abandoned storage warehouse she had unmoored earlier today, could select their preferred time of day and move at will.

  Three governmental residences—Morning, Twilight, and Aris’s Night—formed fixed points holding up the tent of the atmosphere shield. The cities clustered around them contained nanobot-refreshed air and the bulk of the residences.

  It seemed fitting that Aris lived in night.

  Although he more than proved himself a playboy, flirtatious even to her, essentially an inanimate object in comparison to his biological humanity, and a deeper level of sincerity powered his tossed-off phrases. Even she found herself susceptible. Of course, she wasn’t entirely inanimate.

  No, she had one living human part. Not a part that anyone could see. If someone cut her open to the core, they wouldn’t find a bit of skin or heart buried in the robotic case. Her fragment was a memory. A ghost, or a piece of a ghost, that had lived so long ago even she didn’t know her age. She brushed her hands across her human-soft metal skin. This body seemed to be a few decades old, perhaps as old as the governor. Her memory… it had an ageless quality. But even though she couldn’t open herself up and point to the living piece, it held as much sway over her as any metallic thump of her heart.

  Her living human part craved his touch, his notice, his casual kindness.

  A weakness, her robot pointed out.

  As much as she hated the weakness, it existed. She acknowledged it so she could move on.

  Not so she could consider how to protect him from his violent family. Her protection would mean nothing once she completed her reconnaissance, successfully discovered the hidden location of the rogue agent, and dispatched them both.

  He called her beautiful. Again.

  Her hands flexed for her missing guns.

  Control your emotions, her robot instructed.

  She knelt at the edge of the wall separating his inner gardens from the publicly accessible fountains. Any person could don rebreathers and swim through the sewer drain into his side. She made a note to systematically install drone-offensive grating.

  Of course, with the rogue gone, perhaps there would be no need to dispatch Aris. The power would be gone, perhaps. He could live a long, normal life fighting with his family, leaving her alone.

  She shouldn’t crave his compliments. Or his jokes. Or his rough hands on her body, pressing her tight against him, like the one good memory from the cascade of bad.

  Below, movement
in the public gardens made her pause. A street sweeper, simple and direct, vacuumed debris into its molecular reprocessor.

  Goosebumps rose up on her arms.

  Why?

  She watched the small, hovering vacuum while the planetoid turned and turned. Something about it was wrong. An eyeless, earless, brainless street sweeper without even the logic processors to work out how to leave its area or the appendages to do so, yet contained a disturbing malevolence. She felt it. And for once, her robot shut up about feelings and gave her the peace she needed to figure out why.

  It was watching the house.

  Chapter Four

  The street sweeper patrolled the public gardens all day.

  Its presence infuriated Resa. How dare the Faction agents encroach on her assignment? She was the zero class. She was the one who watched Aris; she was the robot assigned to pump him for information and secure him when the rogue was apprehended.

  But not the only one, her robot pointed out, unreasonably calm and logical. Of course there are Faction eyes on him at all times. Look around.

  She did.

  Resa carefully, calmly, and logically located all the possible ways in which the Faction could watch over her assignment.

  And she systematically disabled every one of them.

  A wave of possessiveness surged through her chest as she cut the last relay to the overhead satellites. Perhaps there would be consequences. But Aris was her assignment, and no one else would take him away. Not even her Faction.

  Zenya felt as you do, her robot said, poisoning her satisfaction. She refused Faction assistance. Her pride got her killed.

  Perhaps so. But Resa was not Zenya. She would not mistake pride with survival.

  As proof, because the street sweeper was only a floating vacuum, she left it alone. So it patrolled the public gardens all day while she watched over her assigned human target.

  And a busy day it was for Aris, governor of the Hyeon family’s productive mining interests.

  Despite his injuries, he lead three performance review meetings, hosted six heads of state, and negotiated a new trade agreement for their sparkling magnetic gold dust, all before noon.

  Then he had a two-hour remote luncheon with his father, who was journeying to visit from his capital ship overseeing the solar system, about his future. Mostly Aris listened; a few times, he tried to speak.

  “My cousins are behind this attack. With your assistance, I will prove it in the next promotions.”

  “Your injuries,” his father stopped him, “will only focus attention more closely on yourself. Use that attention to promote our districts. And quit your ridiculous, divisive talk about the Robotics Faction.”

  He gritted his teeth. “They are a threat. We must develop and install our own systems now before they crack our domes or turn our atmosphere shield against us.”

  “That talk is what makes your allies hope your opponents succeed in assassinating you.”

  “Father—”

  “You care about this deeply,” he acknowledged. “Your mother’s false rumors hit their mark in your generous heart.”

  “They’re not rumors! My half sisters were attacked. The Antiata family has documentation that their restore points were destroyed—”

  “Then why hasn’t the Antiata family issued a fatwa against the Robotics Faction?” His father dismissed the argument. “Concentrate on our trade interests, not the drama your mother’s family invented to explain their shocking fall from favor.”

  Aris covered his mouth. His gaze slid to Resa.

  She stared obliquely back. Challenging him to make her reveal herself to his father. He understood her silent challenge and looked away again.

  “Outmaneuver your enemies and they will only try harder,” his father lectured. “Identify and befriend them, and they will depend on you forever.”

  The shadows under Aris’s haggard eyes told Resa that he had no intention of following his father’s advice. Neither befriending his enemies nor using them to lever himself into the more powerful Antiata family’s graces.

  After noon, he directed state funerals. The dead for the week numbered his deceased head of security, Joensen, and the other guards killed in the attack on the previous day, as well as several unrelated accident victims spread throughout the districts.

  Everyone privileged enough to live on the planetoid received an automatic resurrection. Those under government contract simply received more frequent data backups so that they would be resurrected with more recent memories. The rest might get cycled back several years or, if the unfortunate victim had no way to update their data, could get cycled back all the way to the end of childhood.

  The solemn funeral hosted as many well-wishers as could fit in the front gardens and lined around the street. Aris greeted everyone, his smile pasted over the increasing pain and stiffness in his recent recovery. He closed the event with a heartfelt broadcast.

  “We will miss Garvin Leo Joensen’s cool dedication to his work and his stunning bravery in the face of certain death.” Aris’s politic dirge echoed over the packed audience. “As a close, personal friend, I hope his recovery is swift, and his resurrection is without complication. My condolences to his family and his widow in this time of uncertainty.”

  His second whispered in his ear.

  Aris smiled broadly. “I have just been informed that his brain appears to be re-growing in the pattern of his stored data. He should be fully recovered and among us again in a few short weeks.” He clapped, and like a maestro leading a familiar orchestra, the rest of the audience broke into jubilant cheers.

  He waved farewell to the crowds.

  Once inside, out of their view, he collapsed into the arms of his home staff, who carried him back to his room and slathered him with every healing salve in existence.

  Resa kept one eye directly on the street sweeper until after the public guests departed and the chronometers around Aris’s residence lit the night’s party lights. Rose globes entwined with gorgeous, scented blossoms that wafted a dazzling perfume along the moss-softened walks and ornate, secretive benches. She retreated to reposition an external camera on the street sweeper.

  Aris caught her on the way to his control room. “I need you. My guests arrive within the hour.”

  He needed her. The words tingled beneath her skin, sparkling over her like stardust.

  She altered her trajectory to follow.

  Dressed in an evening robe, lingering bruises covered over with paste makeup and artful garments, the only obvious indication of his ordeal was the limp to his tired gate and his over-reliance on furniture.

  Resa ordered herself not to admire his indomitable strength. He was such a hedonist that he couldn’t go a single night without a party. Yes. That was all.

  In his bedchambers, a wide table sat on a marblestone pedestal, its dishes constantly activating nanobots to refill them to overflowing. Their silent buzz grated inside her metal marrow, but she clenched her teeth and endured the invisible “magic” swarms as she moved furniture, draped textiles, and changed out artwork at his direction. He created a sensual, intimate environment with little nooks and self-serving tables, expensive alcohols and more expensive chocolates.

  As with the fountains outside, the effect was both enticing and affronting. So much wealth shoved so obviously into the envious faces of guests who, she was given to understand, were ordinary office workers at the census bureau, and would not see again in their lifetimes.

  His show irritated and gnawed at her. She wanted to touch and experience and drink in everything. She wanted to be a guest and sip liqueurs and nibble on chocolates. She wanted—

  You feel nothing, her robot reminded her.

  Yes. She regarded it and him with mechanical distance. Her robot did not care for sensual pleasures any more than she did.

  “Here,” Aris led her to a palatial bedroom painted in boudoir shades of red and opened the closet, “select your party dress.”

  Gobs of f
abric, some no more than a few ribbons, others dense gauze-tulle asteroids, lined the wall. Her breath lodged in her throat. Such beautiful things existed in this world, and she longed to press them against her body and rub their textures against her starved skin.

  Feel nothing, her robot ordered.

  She curled her hungry hands into fists. “I have no interest in participating in your little party.”

  He raised a scarred brow. A sardonic smile tugged his sensuous lips. Lips that had so recently pressed against her cheek. A flare of awareness kindled deep in her belly. “Ironic, because I have a great deal of interest in having you attend.”

  “Ironic,” she agreed, trying to silence her awareness.

  He leaned heavily against the ancient oakstone bedpost. “Someone is trying to kill me. I expect you to listen for clues.”

  “Your assassin is one of the guests?”

  “It’s possible. My former head of security attended all of my parties.”

  “Have you considered that your favorite man, Joensen, is very likely the one who collaborated to kill you?”

  Aris froze.

  Ah, apparently he had not considered that possibility.

  His gaze slid sideways to her. “What?”

  “Your would-be assassin yesterday wore a chameleon suit. Your security team ought to have seen at least a flash of his signature.”

  “Anyone could have misadjusted the oculars.”

  “Anyone?”

  Aris studied her, eyes narrowed, disbelief forming his features. “Joensen’s been with me from almost the beginning.”

  “Fine.” She wasn’t here to investigate past security problems. Over the protests of her robot, she fingered one of the ribbons. The fine silk caressed her fingertips. “Did he wear something from this closet?”

  Aris seemed to weigh his reply.

  The fabric called to her. A siren song, pure and gorgeous and tantalizing as Aris’s kisses. The flutter of awareness burned into a hot match.

  She dropped the ribbon. “I need control of your external surveillance cameras.”

  He turned and walked heavily from the room. “I expect you to attend to my security.”