Liberation's Vow (Robotics Faction #3)

by Wendy Lynn Clark

  Resa gripped Aris like her life depended on it.

  With the ongoing silence and the terrifying attack, which she was supposed to know about but had already slipped out of her control and fractured all around her, she felt like it did.

  Resa suddenly slumped against Aris, hugging his arm and hiding her face in his shoulder.

  He sheltered her. How odd that a robot should need sheltering; odder still that Resa, the strongest woman he had ever met, should require it now. And distracting.

  But in a time of trouble, he wouldn’t turn away from her.

  “Governor, sir!” A security staffer raced to the room, ignored Aris, and bowed at Poyo. “The old substation distress signals are still working, sir!”

  Poyo frowned. “They can’t be operated since we have an atmosphere shield.”

  “An intact atmosphere shield. Now there are holes in it.”

  Poyo grimaced. “Good work. Start the substation. I’ll join you shortly.”

  His security head bowed again and raced for the internal elevators, shooting straight up to the top of the dome, the least defensible place.

  Aris patted Resa and turned to his cousin. “You will become a target of our attackers. There is a high chance that you will die.”

  He hardened. “My father will record the transfer for his own purposes. My restoration is assured. I will die with my people, fighting for them.”

  Just what Aris was hoping to see. When the Hyeon family was threatened, they put aside their internal squabbles and stood together. Strong. Aris gripped Poyo’s shoulder. His cousin accepted the grip, looking more and more like a governor.

  His cousin matched his gesture and turned away.

  Aris didn’t know if they would ever meet again. But if they survived, Poyo had the strength of will necessary to govern. If any of them were still standing.

  He and Resa entered the old shuttle and sealed it up. Unlike the luxury of the planet, the spartan seats bolted to the dusty floor. Few nanobots clustered here, limiting oxygen time.

  Fucking hell. Attacked by the Faction, cut off from their fleet, isolated from the Antiatas.

  And yet, finally, after all of the waiting, all of the plotting, all of the preparations, they had reached the end. Aris had traded his father’s burden to a better man. Responsibilities fell away. His fate and the fate of all of them rested on the path he adventured.

  He had never felt so alive.

  Resa moved through the shuttle, window to window, staring out through the gaps in the scaffolding at the vast, open orange plains.

  “No one can get to us here,” he said.

  “I know.” She rubbed her elbows.

  He pulled her into his lap. She allowed him to curl her arms around his shoulders, to mold her to his body. “You’re safe.”

  She shook her head.

  “What are you afraid of?”

  She remained silent for too long.

  Sadness leaked into his gut, poisoning him with her doubts and fears. She didn’t believe in him. Didn’t trust him. Hell, he didn’t trust her—

  “I don’t want to distract you,” she said finally.

  “Seeing you like this, lying to my face, is the worst distraction.” He stroked her neck. “No matter what it is, no matter how terrible, just tell me.”

  She stilled, then relaxed. Her breathing evened. “There’s nothing you can do.”

  “Tell me all of it.”

  She sighed and allowed him to twine their fingers, seeming to take strength from his casual touch. “I am afraid.”

  “Of?”

  “This assignment. You. Myself. Everything.” She squeezed his fingers. “I’m not a whole person.”

  “Sure you are—”

  “You sense the difference,” she insisted. “When I go cold, I’m only a robot.”

  “You’re not only a robot.”

  She sighed. “I don’t want to do my assignment, but there’s some sort of… I don’t know, ‘opening’ in my robot, straight to the Robotics Faction. A malevolent thing gets into my brain and… and forces me to do things.”

  She shuddered.

  Fuck.

  He stroked her fingers. “Can you fight it?”

  She shook her head. “It’s too powerful. It’s going to make me kill you. Or, I don’t know, something worse.”

  “What can we do?”

  “I don’t know. Hide.” She shuddered again. “I’m supposed to be disconnected. I’m supposed to have autonomy; my robot inside is supposed to keep me in check. But something is connected, like a tumor, growing a thread from me to the mainframe. I don’t know when it will activate. It could happen right now.”

  Okay. He knew what to do. Even though it risked everything. For her, it was worth it.

  He pulled out the MAC necklace.

  She touched it. “This connects you to your sisters.”

  “There’s more.” He twisted the controls the lady rogue had embedded deep within what had once been an ordinary necklace.

  Resa blinked and stiffened, then slowly relaxed into his arms. She rested her head on his shoulder. “What did you do?”

  “This necklace has a silencer in it. Anything that connects to the Robotics Faction will be severed, and it will jam any signal.”

  She breathed slow and deep, as though she were falling asleep.

  “Now you’re safe,” he said.

  She snuggled. “But you’re not. They’re still coming after you.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I can’t hear anything.” She shifted, holding him harder. “I don’t want to kill anyone.”

  He tucked her arm safely under his. “Then don’t.”

  “It’s not so easy.” A shiver raced through her body. She huddled against him. “I might not have a choice.”

  “Look.” He lifted her chin, meeting her eyes. The liquid irises studied him with such fear. Such hope. “I am not my father, and you are not your predecessor. You’re different. What you’re doing now is who you are. These actions. Not the past, and not what might have been.”

  She buried her face in his neck. “I want to believe you.”

  He stroked her beautiful crinkly hair. “Then do. I absolve your past. You’re strong enough to make choices now without it.”

  “I don’t want to end up a robot like Zenya.”

  He pulled her back from him. “Then what choice do you make now?”

  She cupped his cheeks. Her soft fingers caressed his rough cheeks, rubbing the sandpaper that had emerged with his interrupted grooming routine. He clenched his teeth.

  Her lips parted, and her pink tongue touched her lips. “I want to feel.”

  “Feel what?”

  “Something…” She shook her head. “Something. Anything. I want to feel….”

  “Then feel me.”

  He waited for her smart response.

  Instead, realization seemed to flash through her. “Yes. Let me feel you.”

  His cock twitched to life.

  Her nostrils widened as though scenting the drop of arousal dampening his robe. She licked her lips. Her thumbs caressed his parted lips. He nibbled on them. Connection flared between them, and passion.

  He drew her against his body and covered her face in kisses. Her petite nose, her determined forehead, her fairy-wing lashes, her soft cheeks, her kissable jaw. Her mouth followed his until he stopped and she caught him. Liquid wetness exploded heat.

  She moaned into his mouth. His cock pulsed hard as a marble column. She writhed against him.

  He lifted and carried her to the long bench in the back. Laying her down gently, he kissed along her hairline and buried his nose in her hair. Her feminine scent filled his nostrils, tender and sweet.

  She caressed his shoulders, exploring his shape. “May I?”

  He eased beside her and opened his robe to her perusal. “You may.”

  A ghost of a smile crossed her face. And then she touched him. She, who had feared to allow herself to relax under his c
aress, who would only stiffen in response, now fed her hunger to know him with small, tentative hands feeling every bulge and hollow.

  Something felt wrong. The real Resa would never admit weakness or allow him to touch her.

  Or would she? Maybe the hesitation was only his imagination. The real woman writhed beside him.

  He caressed her. As his hand brushed the side of her breast through her flight suit, she held her breath. Her nipples hardened and her back arched, swelling into his palm. He granted her wish, rubbing her firm breast and brushing a thumb across her pearled nipple.

  She let out her breath in an aching moan.

  His mouth captured hers and he plunged into her depths.

  She chased his passion with her own, rolling on top of him and arching against his body, urging him with ragged gasps and heady desperation. Fuck. He followed her writhing undulations down her flight suit to the dampening vee between her legs. She moaned and pressed herself against him.

  He gripped her flesh. He wanted nothing more than to rub his hardness against her softness, bury himself in her, rock into her hot, wet cleft, pound her to the edge of ecstasy, and fall over the other side. Together.

  “Aris,” she said softly. Achingly. “I want to feel you.”

  He wrapped her hand around his iron-hard cock. “Feel.”

  She gasped. “I want to feel what you feel.”

  “You did this.”

  Her lips parted. Passion glazed her eyes. Her mouth opened. “Me?”

  “This is the power you have over me.” He clenched, thrusting against her hand.

  She gripped the loosened foreskin, circling his shaft. Pleasure radiated from her touch, warming his whole body. Fuck. He contained his pleasure in a grunt. She watched him, fascinated and need-glazed and confident.

  But as soon as he thought that, her confidence crashed. She had lost control, frightened herself, frightened him.

  She gripped his hair. Desperation twisted her features. “Who do you see in my eyes?”

  “I see you,” he said.

  “Who is me?”

  “Resa.” He stroked her shaking hands, unwinding her taut fingers. “I see Resa.”

  She collapsed atop him, tangling his body between her legs, and rubbed her whole body against his, pressing his arousal into her cleft, gripping him as her body thrust once, twice, three times, hard and fast, desperate.

  Oh, fuck yes.

  He caught her rhythm and matched it, chasing her pleasure. The gasp overtook her face and the need sucked against her feet, dragging her down into endless delicious pools. He focused on her until her grip caught the edge of his pleasure and thrust him once, twice, three times—fuck, yes—hard into pouring his release into his tightened robe, spilling between them, squeezing.

  The world turned white and silent in pleasure.

  Then he blinked back down at her, gasping, both of them out of breath and surprised, wondrous.

  His surprise seemed to make her surprised.

  She snuggled against him. “I thought you pleasure women all the time.”

  He stroked her damp forehead. So human-like, even though he had seen it change color in reaction to heated explosions. “Not through clothing.”

  A worried frown touched her lips.

  He tried to soothe it away. “You’re safe. They can’t find you now. You’re silenced.”

  Her worry persisted.

  He was about to reassure her again when something heavy and metallic landed on two feet on the roof of the shuttle.

  And ripped the ceiling off.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Resa heard it inside her before she heard it with her ears.

  Two thuds as a heavy metal object landed on the shuttle. A smaller car would crater. This one with reinforced sides absorbed the impact and held, which made the catch of the blowtorch cutter loud over the ceiling. Metal shrieked and crumpled away.

  She was already moving.

  Rolling off Aris, she hooked his flight suit and rolled him with her, exposing his back to the sparks and catapulting him into the cockpit. She rebalanced the forces so that he would land lightly and safely inside.

  A CXA-17 construction bot ripped a bigger hole.

  She leapt away from Aris, around the other side of the widening hole, using angles to disguise her presence. Her plan consisted of hiding, attacking by surprise, and tricking it into cutting a hole in the side of the shuttle and falling to its death. At a half-ton over her weight tolerance, making the bot fall would be easy. Tricking it could be hard.

  The bot dropped into the shuttle body. The shuttle shuddered. Its weight gyros whined and shrieked.

  She crouched into the upper corner of the shuttle body, feet wedged against two walls and back flush with the ceiling, her hands gripping the metal of the hole. The bot made one complete circle, but the position of its sensors canted downward, missing her presence. Check one of the plan.

  It turned toward Aris.

  She reached for her robot to enact the second part of the plan cleanly.

  But her robot did not answer.

  Her robot was silenced.

  Paralyzing fear flooded her body. Her mind gasped in shock. Her muscles twitched, paralyzed.

  Fear for Aris. She was so terrified of what the Robotics Faction intended to do to him that she couldn’t act. She couldn’t even think. Only a single word repeated, over and over, drowning out all the other words in her brain.

  No. No. No. No. No.

  Aris grabbed the door of the cockpit and pulled himself to a stand. A smart man would slam the cockpit door and try to hide.

  Her beautiful, vulnerable lover forced a grin and set his feet. “It’s customary to request the captain’s permission before coming aboard.”

  The construction bot whirled its torch cutter. Its rudimentary operating system struggled to concoct sounds. “Where is it?”

  The rasping, grating, inhuman growls barely made speech. The speech, however, dripped with malevolence.

  Her knuckles tightened. The metal hissed as the alloy squeezed. Fear hardened her into ice.

  Move, she cried into the screaming silence of her helpless mind. Her fingers gripped the metal as if their lives depended on it. The creak of the shuttle fighting to separate from its bolts under the weight drowned beneath the fear. She had to save him!

  Taier’s crumpled body flashed in her mind. And the other crumpled body—her brother’s—whirled from the flurry of memories and stuck, filling her brain. She would fail. Aris would crumple. She had to act.

  Her robot remained dead silent.

  Aris glared up at the towering monster. “Where’s what?”

  It clacked together its pincers. “Where is our agent?”

  “Your space attack is a violation of the Non-Compete Treaty of the fourteenth Old Empire war.”

  “What are the coordinates of the robot?”

  “Restore our satellites and our communication networks immediately.”

  The torch wheeled, menacing. “Where is the zero class?”

  The question thunked into her, breaking her paralysis.

  She was invisible. Even though she had to save Aris, fear, hate, and anger had crashed into her. Her grip tightened on the metal so thoroughly, it gouged prints in the reinforced alloys.

  His smile widened. “The what?”

  The malevolent Faction intelligence clicked its claws. The pincher was designed to rip off walls. It moved to crush Aris without a thought.

  He struggled in its pincer grip. An alert screamed through the exoskeleton. Human at risk of harm. Still, wincing and sweating, he maintained his smile. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Then you are of no further use.”

  Move.

  The word finally penetrated. Her body twitched, shooting her like a jolt.

  She pushed off with her feet, gripped harder with her hands, and swung herself out the top of the shuttle. Outside, the wind gusted, the shuttle roared, and the scenery rotated i
n a sick kaleidoscope.

  Conscious thought was sucked under by the horror.

  She ran, slipping and stumbling, away from the monster in the shuttle.

  What the fuck?

  Aris struggled against the incremental tightening of the pincers as the harm-alert screamed against the robot’s hollow squeeze.

  Behind the hollow robot, Resa flipped out of the shuttle and disappeared.

  She was going for help. She was drawing the monster away. She was enacting part of a plan.

  Or the wrongness of before simply proved she had suckered him along to this point, only to leave him to die as part of her ultimate plan.

  The exoskeleton rasped. “What do you see?”

  He snapped back to the present. Abandoned or not, the ex-governor of the Hyeon family did not fold for anyone. “My life. Flashing before my eyes. It’s pretty fucking amazing, and you wouldn’t understand.”

  Clicking deep within the skeleton caused it to pause, arresting, squeezing him right at the creaking point of his sternum.

  The robot released him with a snap, springing apart. It turned and laboriously caused its head to tilt upward. There, on the walls of the tube, Resa clung to a reinforcing strut like a child. She squeezed herself into a tiny cubby and disappeared. The shuttle creak-creak-creaked away on the belt.

  The robot growled, low and menacing.

  It threw him aside.

  He slammed into the shuttle wall and lay, stunned, eyes open. The robot clambered out the shuttle and grabbed onto a side belt, bending it as the belt dragged it slowly, inexorably upward to where Resa had disappeared.

  It was coming.

  One terrified glance out the side of her hole disclosed the worst. The CXA-17 had found her. It clawed up the reinforcing strut, its weight gouging full holes in the belt and ripping out chunks. Below, the pieces snapped and the shuttle rocked, gears grinding as it lost traction and fought to remain on the other struts.

  Move.

  She huddled in the strut.

  It would come to her and touch her and get inside her. Without even her robot standing guard, it would crush her down and drown her, until the part that was Resa died and the agent piloted her like a dead exoskeleton.