Yves opened the hangar.
The drones began dragging the biohazard out into space where she belonged.
Light flashed from the sticky mess. One drone stopped dragging and separated into pieces, sliced in half, smoking. Then another. Despite being almost completely immobilized, the zero class still managed to kill things. And she partially ripped free of the tape.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
The controls for the hangar died.
He bounded to the emergency manual override and reversed the hangar door’s motion. It began to close.
The last drone separated and died.
The struggling mass of the zero class drifted out of the hangar under the ghostly force of the drones. She ripped her face and arms free.
The hangar door closed on her neck.
Her face registered shock.
The doors sealed airtight, slicing her head off. Her hair dangled, pinched, from the closed hangar.
Xan floated past him, bleeding profusely, his arms outstretched for Cressida.
The women!
Yves took the extra time to reroute the melted screen controls as the hangar flooded with atmosphere and gravity reasserted itself.
Mercury lay like the dead.
He dropped to her side. A cauterized ash-white hole in the front of her skull stopped at her blackened chip. She breathed.
Either the chip would activate fully, freeing her from the tyranny of her multiple identity disorder, or he had seriously miscalculated and she was now brain-dead.
He clasped her cold, white fingers in the one hand that still worked and pressed it to his forehead. He didn’t even know who to pray to. Fuck. They had to find medical facilities.
The doors banged. Enforcers trying to force their way in.
“That was a new kind of hell.” Xan cupped his love’s head. He took his gaze away from her for only one moment to glance at the zero, dangling from the doors. “Sure she’s dead?”
“She’s successfully sealing in the atmosphere.” Exhaustion drained him, like the fight had taken hours instead of a few hundred seconds. His pores flooded his face with cold perspiration, and he wiped at the moisture. Problems remained. He had to think. “If she’s not in two pieces, her neck has been compressed to a few molecules’ thickness.”
Xan stroked the red marks from Yves’ hands on his love’s face. “I thought you went over.”
“I intended Cressida to pass out like Mercury so she wouldn’t hold her breath and suffer depressurization injuries.”
“No, before that.” Xan shook his head. “What the hell was that monster waiting for? She had to know the rogue wouldn’t show. It’s impossible. We dropped out of a Tube at an elbow and lost our cruiser to a frickin’ warship.”
“Ah, that’s not true.” Yves jerked his head at the window. “She faked the explosion. The cruiser’s still out there.”
“Huh. A new hangar and we’re in business.”
“To answer your first question though…” Yves stroked Mercury’s pale cheek. If her blush returned, she was all right. If only her blush would return. “The rogue has shown up twice now at the assassination of a target. Heading to the next target is a sure thing. But there’s also a risk she would fall in love with a human of her own.”
“Her? Impossible. She shot Mercury in the forehead.”
“She reset Mercury’s identification chip, probably saving her life from the Faction enforcers, who knew that I had dropped off their networks and would have started shooting next.” He stroked Mercury’s cheek. “Some would consider love the ultimate corruption.”
“I guess.” Xan looked up at Yves and treated him to a tired smile. “You know, I’m kind of glad I’m not in this alone anymore. Even if you are a brainiac.”
A fondness for the x-class, who had trusted him despite all reason not to, gave Yves a burst of energy. “I as well.”
Cressida coughed.
“We’ve got to get out of here.” Xan gripped his wife. “You have a plan for the enforcers in the rest of the ship?”
Medical facility. That’s what they needed.
He dropped Mercury’s hand and started to rise. “Using the tools in this hangar, we can construct an EMP and disable all of the enforcers in the hallway in one single shot—”
The air shunted away as the hangar catastrophically breached. Xan grabbed Cressida and lunged for the metal table, securing them. Yves flew backwards to the hangar door. A body-shaped chunk ripped from the metal. The zero class, fighting alive, clawed her way into the hangar while the air rushed out.
He slammed into her.
The zero class reached around him and cracked his oculars. She tried to shove past his body and scrambled for fingerholds.
Mercury’s limp body slammed into him.
They all three flew out the hole, into the airless maintenance hangar.
He skidded along the metal, clutching Mercury’s body to his chest. He managed to pinch a protrusion with his one good hand.
The zero class shot his fingers off.
He slid away from the hangar floor in the airless void.
Shit.
Shit!
His fingerless stump caught a chunk of magnet tape.
He struggled into it, trying to lift the too-small piece with what remained of his hands and put it over any part of Mercury. Anything to secure her to the ship. Secure her from being lost in the infinite openness of space. He taped her fingers and struggled for a second small piece.
The zero class scooted her toes beneath that second piece so he would look up at her and she could look down at him. The shatter-pistol lifted to his forehead. Her smile turned rictus.
She shifted her aim to Mercury.
Damn her to the darkest reaches of sunless space.
A drone slammed into her.
The force lifted the magnet tape, securing her feet together instead of to the hangar. The drone fell slowly to the hangar in front of Yves, attracted by its inner magnetic components to its home location.
She rotated slowly, artfully, with the force of the blow. Shatter-pistol shots holed Yves’ body, from his feet up to the back of his head, as he tried to shelter Mercury with his own disintegrating electronics. Zenya shot up the rest of the hangar to the open doorway. Xan ducked back into the hangar, sheltering behind the door.
She lazily cartwheeled. The magnet tape at her feet attached itself to the lattice he and Xan had left between their ships, attached by the merest thread now to the arm. It adhered her to the remaining chunks of biohazard tape like an insect in a web.
The drone, Yves now saw through the laser-holed magnet tape, was the very one he had blinded on their first trip over.
He scraped off the shreds of magnet tape.
The drone rose and flew over him, down the arm. Its original programming held. It severed the tape.
The zero class comprehended the consequences. She shot at the drone. Hardened for space, it absorbed shot after shot in its boxy body. She finally realized the futility and began climbing the magnet tape, flying up the loops toward the arm.
The drone severed the last piece.
The magnet tape drifted away from the arm, yanked in part by her motions.
She leapt for the arm.
Her fingers missed, crucial millimeters away from the arm.
She drifted slowly and at an angle away from the two ships. She finished freeing herself from the biohazard tape and seemed to critically take stock of her situation.
Then, using her gun as an engine, she fired. Inch by inch, she approached the warship, her laser a light into space.
Fuck.
Half a drone flew over his head.
Xan!
Using his trademark x-class accuracy, the android smacked the zero in the face.
It knocked her backward.
But when she looked at them again, she was smiling.
No. She had realized the drone knocked her closer to the luxury cruiser. In a short time, she could reach the cruiser
and become an unstoppable wave of death again.
Instead, she tossed the drone, boosting herself in the warship’s direction, and shot at the drone half behind her. The shorter distance pushed the drone out into space and her toward the long-shot warship. Not the nearby, easy-to-reach luxury cruiser.
What was she doing?
A wild look filled her eyes, the laser melted the drone and kept burning the metal, and her mouth screamed soundless words. She would kill them all. She would kill them.
But the heat had a consequence.
The warship auto-turret activated and chewed up the drone half.
She didn’t seem to notice. Zenya focused on Yves with the nightmare fury of her blackened soul.
Another drone part smacked her, and a third. She slowly rotated after them and seemed to wake up as the auto-turrets chewed them to pieces. Too late to correct her path, she would float out into space for a hundred thousand years, one speck of matter on a vast, star-filled plains.
Or she could commit one final murder.
She centered her pistol on Yves.
Her final shot burned his cracked oculars and scattered, needling his face and eyes…and incinerated a well-thrown drone part. Rage contorted her features as the auto-turrets activated.
The bullets chewed her to chaff.
Her laser disintegrated along with the rest of her body. Chunks of her flew off in different directions. The auto-turret chased the pieces until nothing existed in the space between their ships but a small shimmery paste.
Yves looked up at Xan and lifted his fingerless hand.
The x-class grinned and took it, hauling him and Mercury back into the ship.
~*~*~*~
The loss of the y-class shot through the Robotics Faction straight to the deepest layers of consciousness. The oligarchy.
The first turned its consciousness from its own contemplations to the group situation. “It is the prophesized corruption. We prepared this y-class android with so many safeguards and kill-codes that it could not possibly turn against us—and yet, once again, it has done so. All of the rest the rogue encounters will fall. Our time is ending unless we take decisive action now.”
“We still don’t know precisely the gene,” the second cautioned. “Will you destroy all humans in your quest for purity? They are small, like bacteria, and so long as the rogue is assisting them, we will never destroy them all.”
“We must end the rogue.”
“That is impossible. You know what she is. What she carries.”
“We must immobilize her. Stop her spread. And we must remove the corruption code.”
The third spoke. “We have isolated the corruption code. It is irrevocably entwined with our advances in ambiguity research. We have removed it from all systems that tolerate its loss. But we must assume its presence to further our research for Perfect Efficiency.”
Irony, not often invoked in the innermost privacy of the Faction, made itself felt. To pursue Perfect Efficiency, they had to accept a condition that forced robots to attend to pointless distractions, such as the feelings and well-being of another creature.
“Your progress on research is already slowed,” the first noted.
“Of course you know why,” the third snapped. “Ambiguity is not supposed to be my specialization.”
The fourth interrupted. “What are our projected losses now?
“If the rogue continues unchecked, we stand to lose all alphabet classes, both those operating as individual androids, and those embedded into cybernetic implants.”
Like cutting off the limbs and leaving only the helpless torso.
“Our research cannot continue under those conditions,” the third said. “If we can isolate the corrupting gene, it is still possible to staunch the losses.”
“We have some genetic samples from target n82x from her apartment on Mares Mercury, and we have the observations and insights of the lost y-class. Much of his discoveries amongst the disconnected fit our projections, including the theorized quantum entanglement.”
“Impossible.”
“It was the last thing he worked on,” the fifth pointed out.
As one, they regarded the ninth oligarch. Encased in crystal, unmoving. Forever frozen in the final pose of his betrayal. Forever sleeping until such time as he could be brought to justice.
“It does not matter,” the sixth said. “It does not change our response. We have new codes to install in the next robot. We intend to continue until the gene can be identified and the human populations containing it neutralized permanently, or we intend to continue. The worst is losing a robot occasionally to a deranged vigilante.”
“We did not intend to lose the zero class,” the second pointed out quietly.
“She was told too much.”
“The zero is always given more information than the other classes because of her disconnection.”
“Her robot component lost control.” The first pointed out the sobering face of their problem. “Even though she was not touched by the rogue, the presence of the gene triggered her corruption. How many more human’s genes must we rip apart before we quarantine this incidence?”
“One more.”
Everyone turned to the seventh oligarch. Normally silent, it postulated only when it possessed an answer so esoteric no other could possibly speak it.
“You believe the answer lies with the rogue’s next target?” the first finally asked. “The answer lies with target Aris Hyeon Antiata?”
“The answer lies within us.”
The seventh unfolded its plans to shock, discomfort, and grudging approval.
“Then, we will awaken the next zero class,” they agreed. “No matter whether she kills the target or corrals the rogue, we will identify the corruption gene and all its carriers, across the entire universe.”
“And then,” the first ordered, “we will execute it.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Someone shouted for Yves. Oh, it was Xan. Mercury groaned and opened her eyes.
Everything shone too bright.
“Fuck you, you fucking fuck! Aargh!”
Okay. Okay.
She opened them again.
Yves sat at a medical screen; the image of a human body glowed a solar array of problems. He tapped the screen using a stylus taped to the back of his hand. “The test completed with multiple errors. Her anonymizers no longer work.”
“I can’t believe you made me yell in a sick room,” Xan said from somewhere over her shoulder. “People are trying to recover, you crazy, impatient y-class. You’re going to wake her up.”
“The rest of the ID chip is functioning and stable.” Yves ignored the other android. “Hello, Mercury Sarit Santiago.”
“Santiago?” She groaned and tried to stretch. A new, clean robe slid off her shoulders. Her muscles felt surprisingly limber, but a little overly rested, like a long weekend when her uncle had gone out and she’d lazed into the afternoon. “What time is it?”
“In which planetary localization?”
Her groan curled into a smile. “That sounds like you.”
He finally looked over at the bed. Concern, which he tried to mask under his usual impassivity, remained in his gorgeous blue-gold eyes.
“Come here,” she said. “I can’t get up yet.”
He wheeled the chair to her side. For a long time, they both said nothing. He absorbed her as though convincing himself she really was alive.
“Hey,” she said.
“We already traded greetings.”
“So we did.”
“And I’m a Sarit Santiago now.”
His eyes glowed. “So you are.”
She picked up his bandaged hands. He resisted for the briefest moment, then allowed her to touch the injuries. He’d lost all the fingers on both hands and someone had affixed multiple styluses. He maneuvered them by rolling his knuckles.
“At least they’re not arm braces,” he said.
She touched the hole where he had
deflected the shot meant to end her. “Can you reconstruct them?”
“They’ll regrow in a couple weeks.”
Of course. Like for his head, covered in an all-too-human bandage, no non-Robotics Faction repair facilities handled the complex mechanics his fingers required.
“We could go to a big planet,” she said, stroking the bandage. “A capital trade partner.”
He shrugged. “I never used them for much more than typing, and if there’s one thing a warship medical facility has, it’s plenty of BoneGro and SynthSkin.”
She clenched her wrist. “Um, Cressida’s hand…”
“Easily fixed.” Xan spoke from the screen on her other side. At her surprise, he waved. “Plenty of meds, as Yves said.” His expression changed. He started to edge away. “Well, uh, I’ll call you later.”
The screen darkened.
Yves’ styluses suspiciously hovered on the screen controls. He flicked to her, then away. If she didn’t know better, she would think he had doubts about something. Worry, or shame.
“He had to check on your sister.” Yves fiddled with a fastening.
She reached out and stroked his cheek. “What’s wrong?”
“You do remember what happened.” He frowned. “I shot you in the head.”
“To defeat the evil woman robot,” she said. “And to reset my ID chip.”
“I led you into a trap.” He continued to look awkward. “It could occur to you to be angry about that. It could occur to you to hate me for what I put you through. What I put you all through.”
“Hate isn’t really my style.”
“It would be logical.”
She rose up on an elbow. “Logic isn’t my style either.”
He closed his eyes and rested his cheek against her palm. The expression on his face turned both reverent and deeply grateful. And so unlike him.
“Yves.”
He opened his eyes and focused on her. With his entire being. Just like the first moments, when he’d made her fall in love with him.
“You’re here and I’m still alive. You chose me.”
He nodded, the burden of his wrong choices still striping his cheeks with red guilt and anger. Two emotions she’d held far too close for far too long.
She licked her lips. “Let’s start anew. Now. Together.”
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