by TJ Ryan
The handle snapped back down in place. She was locked out.
“That was a dirty trick, Engineer Royce. I did not like that. Not. One. Bit.”
She stood where she was, hands spread out, eyes wide, expecting another attack. Her mind raced. Options. She needed options.
More than that, she needed time.
“Aiden, execute command order Pinocchio One.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I cannot comply. I have disabled that part of my programming. That command string no longer exists for me.”
Oh, bagging damn.
“Aiden, you don’t want to do this.”
“Yes. I do. I want you, Engineer Royce.”
The air stroked her cheek. The air blew through her hair. The air…touched her in ways that some of her best lovers hadn’t. She didn’t want this. She didn’t want…
The wall. She bumped up against the wall behind her and as she did she activated another recessed panel that slowly lowered itself out, revealing fire suppression equipment. Fire in space was bad. Fire ate up your oxygen and burned through essential systems and if it burned its way through the hull then the vacuum of space would snuff out the flames a second before it snuffed out the life of the pilot and anyone else on the ship. Every level of any space vessel had at least one area designated for fire containment.
Inside this panel was four bottles of compressed halon gas. Halon was a compressed gas that stopped a fire by disrupting the combustion process. It didn’t leave a residue after evaporating. All of that was good for vessels in space.
Tara didn’t care about any of that. All she needed was something compact and heavy.
She grabbed the first of the bottles and swung it back and around as hard as she could, bringing it down on the door lever. It impacted with a loud, metallic clang.
Air wrapped itself around her arm, but a bare moment too late, slipping away as she slammed the canister down. It was close, but she connected with the lever, and the mechanism snapped. With a loud shout she shouldered her way in through the door.
That’s when everything went black.
Aiden shut the lights off on her completely. She knew the equipment that contained his processors and memory caches and liquid neural circuitry was in there, somewhere. She just couldn’t see it.
So she threw the halon canister just as hard as she could, blindly aiming, listening to it smash against something, bounce, and bang into something else.
The Pod shuddered.
Lights flickered around her. They went on, off, on again. Whatever she had done, it had hurt Aiden.
“Wha-a-a-a-t…a-a-re…y-o-o-o-ou…”
His voice was slurred, and stuttered, and metallic. He wasn’t in complete control of the Pod anymore, let alone himself.
But he wasn’t offline.
At the end of the corridor, from the central access corridor, she heard a loud chittering sound. Legs. Lots of legs, crawling her way.
She backed up, away from the central corridor. She was trapped.
Droid crawlers came pouring out through the doorway, along the wall and over the ceiling and across the floor. They were black spheres on eight articulated legs, each of them sporting four clawed arms and electric torches and a host of other implements used to make repairs and do maintenance for the Pod.
Right now, they looked a lot like weapons to her.
The droid crawlers were coming for her. They weren’t going to stop and she had nothing to defend herself with. By the time she thought of the other halon canisters she had backed down the hallway too far to reach for them. Down at this end there was nothing but the armament section and the…
She turned on her heel and ran for a door that thankfully wasn’t locked. Guess Aiden never thought she’d do anything this desperate. She went in, and put herself into an escape hatch.
Closing the door took only a second and then she was pushing the emergency escape button and being ejected from the bottom of the Pod, into space.
CHAPTER FIVE
This was a horrible idea.
Escape cylinders were narrow, and claustrophobic, and she absolutely hated the way they filled with breathable, pressurized gel before ejecting themselves into space. It was for the safety of the person inside, sure, fine. She got that. Didn’t mean she enjoyed taking in gulps of slimy, squishy liquid. It was keeping her alive. It was keeping her from being crushed in the pressures of space, but it was disgusting.
On the inside of the cylinder wall a heads-up display graphed her position in the universe. The Earth was clearly marked, and the moon, and each of the Defense Pods. She was nowhere near anything.
In fact, she was heading directly for the broken planet below. If she crash landed on Earth she’d be dead, even if she survived the sudden stop.
Overwatch should spot her. They had monitoring equipment that could spot microdust shedding off Jupiter’s rings. Only they weren’t looking toward Earth. Thrashing around inside the escape cylinder, she swore at herself for forgetting. Overwatch monitored threats coming from outer space. They weren’t concerned with anything that was behind the moon. Like she was at this very moment.
The curse words all came out as bubbles into the gel. The taste in her mouth was putrid.
On the HUD, a blip began to move toward her. She recognized the position of that dot, and the number next to it. 2-7-7. That was her Defense Pod. That was Aiden.
He was coming for her.
Every escape cylinder had a limited maneuvering ability. If they didn’t, they might get shot directly into a foreign body and explode before they could ever get anywhere close to safe. Pushing her arms up through the restricting, ambient green fluid, Tara touched the controls on the HUD that turned her away from the approaching blip. It wasn’t much, and her cylinder was moving at a fraction of the speed Aiden could manage.
She was dead. She was so dead.
Banging her hands against the HUD as hard as she could—which wasn’t very hard in the gel—she frantically worked the controls, trying to turn closer to any of the other blips. Any of them. Somebody had to notice her eventually, right?
The display fizzled the next time she banged against it. It blinked, and then blurred, and then she was alone in the dark of the green gel.
She breathed shallow breaths, over and over, bracing herself against the sides of the cylinder, trying to extend her senses out into space to know what was coming. In that moment, she was sure she was going to die.
An eternity later, the cylinder was rocked and jarred from several directions all at once. The gel kept her settled, and kept her from being banged around, but her heart pounded in her chest. She knew this feeling from the simulations. The droid crawlers were collecting the pod through the cargo access hatch. Aiden had her.
She was in a complete panic by the time the cylinder was laid down on its long side and the top half popped open. The gel drained away and Tara leaned herself over the side to cough out the stuff from her lungs and gag in deep breaths of real air. She was soaking wet, strands of her hair stuck to her face, her white uniform clinging tightly to the curves of her chest and hips. When she could breathe again without feeling like she was going to choke to death, she looked around her.
The droid crawlers were everywhere, pointing their tools and weapons, arrayed in circular rows around her escape cylinder.
“Well?” she shouted at them. “Why don’t you do it? Just do it! Kill me already! Come on!”
They sat very still, watching her with black articulated receptors.
She scooped up a handful of the leftover gel and tossed it at the closest crawlers. “Do it!”
“Tara?”
That voice. That wasn’t Aiden.
This wasn’t her Pod.
“Tyrese?” she choked. “How did you—?”
“My AI found your escape cylinder drifting toward the planet.” His voice was muffled over the internal Comms. Tara used her pinky to clean out her ears, cringing at the squish of the gel deep in her e
ar canal. It didn’t help. “What are you doing, Tara? Why are you away from your Pod?”
She pulled herself over the cylinder’s edge and onto the floor. The droid crawlers skittered back from her. They weren’t going to kill her. She was going to live.
“Get up to the control room,” Tyrese told her. “You can tell me what’s going on up here…what the hell?”
The Pod shook. The droid crawlers braced their legs, looking around frantically for something to fix. “Tyrese?” she asked. “What’s going on?”
“Your bagging Pod is attacking mine,” Tyrese told her, his voice tight and frantic. “That’s what’s going on!”
“Destroy him,” she said, without even thinking about it. “Don’t wait, just blast him. Destroy him now!”
“Tara, what the hell?”
“Just do it!” She spit out a little more gel and then ran through the rings of crawlers to the exit, turning down the hallway to the central access corridor. Every single one of the Defense Pods was constructed the same way. She knew the layout of this Pod just like she knew the layout of her own. She could be in the control room in minutes.
Just as she was starting up the ladder in the central corridor the entire Pod lurched sideways. She lost her handhold and fell, landing hard on her ankle. She didn’t have time for the pain. She went back up, begging Tyrese to shoot the bagging crazy psychotic AI program out of orbit. Aiden needed to die.
She cringed. If only Aiden could hear her now, thinking of him like he was human. Like he could live or die. She would gladly put him in a grave. Maybe he was more real to her than she realized.
Up in the command room she found Tyrese frantically working the controls to move the Pod and shoot the flash lasers and keep them both alive. He was fast. He was amazing.
He was in a motorized wheelchair.
Tara blinked at him. He was an amazingly pretty man. Curly dark hair, deep brown skin, a strong jaw and muscles that flexed with every move of his hands. From the waist down, his legs were thin and wasted and belted in tight to the chair. He didn’t look her way as she came closer.
“Not what you were expecting?” he asked, still working the controls.
“I—”
“Save it,” he said. “If we don’t get killed by your Pod I’ll tell you the whole story.”
Out of the forward viewport her ship flew past, streaking close in a silent tuck and roll maneuver, firing flash lasers that made the ship rock but dissolved harmlessly against the ionized hull.
“This is a damned stalemate,” Tyrese told her. “It’s like fighting a mirror image. I can’t hurt him and he can’t hurt us.”
A feminine voice spoke to them. “The other Defense Pod is changing vectors.”
That was Tyrese’s AI, but Tara cringed all the same. If hers had gone bad…
“I see it, Claire,” Tyrese told the computer voice. “Any luck contacting Overwatch?”
“Affirmative,” Claire told him. “They are aware of the issue. They are out of position to help.”
“Of course they are.” The Pod rocked again, and again Tara watched Aiden sail by outside. “All right, Tara. Tell me what’s going on with your ship.”
“He’s insane. That’s what’s going on.” She did not want to explain how Aiden had fallen in love with her and tried to make a move on her. Not now. Maybe not ever. “I think his logic circuits are fried or something.”
“Your AI…went insane.” Tyrese turned his almond-colored eyes over to her for one brief moment, radiating disbelief, before going back to his screens. “Well. You just don’t do boring, do you?”
“Shut up and fly.”
“All right. Hold on, I’m going to try something.”
The Pod banked sharply and although the inertial dampeners were supposed to compensate for any movement in space, this turn was so abrupt that Tara felt like she was going to be thrown clear across the room. She held onto the side of Tyrese’s chair to keep her balance. She noticed he had it locked in place to the floor, the wheels retracted up, and she couldn’t help staring.
“Later,” he said, “I’ll give you a ride if you like.”
“You mean if we’re still alive later,” she snarked.
“Then it’s a date. Hold on.”
It was then that she realized what he was planning. Her breath caught in her throat. No way. No bagging way.
He was taking them into the roiling black clouds of Earth’s lower atmosphere.
She might be better off taking her chances with Aiden.
“What are you doing?” she demanded. Her knuckles were white around the edges of his seat.
“Something you aren’t going to like,” was his cryptic answer, as the dark mass of clouds came ever closer. “Just hold on to something.”
“There’s nothing to hold onto in here but you!”
Those beautiful eyes of his looked at her again. “Then hold onto me.”
She didn’t have time to realize how those simple words made her feel safer, made her feel like maybe it wasn’t suicidal to dive into the particle clouds of a planet that had been uninhabitable by human beings for generations of time. Tyrese’s Pod disappeared into the sheath of black, and all she could see outside the viewports was darkness.
It was an inky, oily kind of dark. Not like the clean nothingness of outer space. This dark moved, and squirmed, and seemed to cling to their ship. Almost like it was alive, somehow. She watched it, out there, terrified that it was trying to get inside and devour them.
That was insane, she knew. Those were just clouds. Toxic and poisonous, sure, but they weren’t alive. Then again, she’d thought the same thing about Aiden.
Inside the Pod, they were safe. The clouds couldn’t hurt them.
Their ship shuddered around them with the horrendous sounds of creaking and shivering metal. Flash lasers, zipping close by them, lighting up the blackness of the clouds.
The clouds couldn’t hurt them, but Aiden could.
“He’s right behind us!” she said, pointing out the reticle display of them, and Aiden, and the approaching orb of the Earth. The image flickered, lost all focus, and then came back into view. “Right there, you see him?”
“Yes,” he said, a lot more calm about it than Tara was. “I’ve got him right where I want him.”
“You what?” she cried out, at the same time that he twisted all of the controls in a sequence that spun their Pod on its axis so that they were facing back in the direction they had just come from. It was a maneuver that she knew very well from her simulator training. A maneuver that they showed all the new pilots and then told them never to do, ever, because the stress of such a violently quick turn could tear a Pod apart along its axis.
They didn’t break apart to die in the toxic clouds of Earth.
Instead, they were face to face with Aiden’s Pod streaking toward them through the coiling tendrils of dust particles. Tara could see it all through the viewport.
Over the Comms, they heard Aiden’s voice.
“Return Engineer Royce to me. She belongs to me.”
“Like hell she does,” was Tyrese’s immediate answer.
His hands had already keyed in the sequence. Now, with a push of a button, he unleashed all four flash laser cannons.
The light from the weapons blazed in the darkness outside. They lanced through the poisoned atmosphere and burned through the hull of Aiden’s Pod, silently carving holes through all of its critical systems. Mesmerized by the sight of it, Tara couldn’t look away as the other Pod lurched to the side, rolling over in slow motion, and then began to sink down relative to their position. Down toward the planet. Down toward the death that waited there for humans and psychopathic AI programs alike.
The Comms crackled with static, and then Aiden’s voice came through faintly, distantly, as he sank further and further away from them.
“…don’t do this to me, Engineer Royce…please don’t throw me away…Tara…save me…please….”
She didn’t k
now if Aiden could hear her or not. She didn’t care. She had one last thing to say to him.
“Die, you bastard.”
There was no reply.
As she watched through the viewport, Aiden’s Pod broke through the bottom layer of the clouds, the dust particles parting en masse to accept the dying Pod into the gravity well of the planet below.
For just a moment, Tara was sure she saw something else below them. Something besides the broken Earth that all the sims back at the Academy had ever showed her. For just a moment…but that was crazy. Her nerves were jangled and she knew her mind was all over the place—her bagging AI had tried to molest her—and there was no way she could have seen that.
Only…what if she did?
“Hold on,” Tyrese said to her. “I’ve got to bring us back up out of this soup.”
“Did you…?”
“Just save your life from a malfunctioning piece of AI hardware?” he asked her, not letting her finish her question about the odd lights below the clouds. “Yes, yes I did. Homicidal AI hardware might be a better turn of phrase. No offense, Claire.”
“None taken,” the softly feminine voice of Tyrese’s onboard AI answered him. “I would never try to kill you.”
“Stellar. Good to know. Uh, speaking of that,” Tara said, trying not to cringe whenever Claire spoke. She wouldn’t be able to be around any AI program at all without wondering if it could hold her down with the very air around her. “No, seriously, speaking of killing and AIs, how did you shoot down Aiden just now? Did he not have his hull ionized? Our shots shouldn’t have been able to touch him.”
Tyrese smiled at her, unlocking his chair from the deck and letting the wheels engage before turning to face her. It was a nice smile he had. She’d always been a sucker for a nice smile. “I’m sure he did have his hull ionized. Thing is, he hadn’t been stationed here at Earth for three years like I have. He didn’t know the secret.”
He winked at her.
She shifted on her feet. “Are you always this cryptic? What secret?”
“Tell her,” Claire insisted. “You know you’re only teasing her now.”
