They advanced, and found no more interlocutors in the tunnel, at least not any that were willing to meet Bentley’s gunfire head on. Svend flung away his now-unconscious shield and the two of them took flight to the tunnel’s exit.
They emerged from a side door on the second level and found that the beautiful observatory design and entrancing music had been dulled out by flashing red strobes and loud alarm buzzes. The gaming patrons had all either scattered or evacuated. The well-dressed host guards were few and far between, now replaced with squadrons of paramilitary-style armored soldiers in gunmetal grey setting up an area perimeter with long-guns ready to sweep the area.
“Bentley!” Svend called out to her, pulling her to one side to avoid a sniper bolt that came screaming next to her. His intervention made it miss its mark, but not enough to stop it from grazing across her side. The pain of the burn was excruciating, even dulled by the alcohol and adrenaline. Bentley knew she would have screamed if the shock hadn’t emptied her lungs. Svend fired off with his tiny blaster pistol in the direction of the sniper fire and pulled Bentley towards cover.
“Are you okay?” he asked her through the deafening sirens and volleys of gunfire.
“I’ll live,” Bentley answered. She’d had to abandon one of her guns to clutch the wound at her side. It didn’t seem to be bleeding, but she still felt the need to keep pressure on it. “Which way?”
Svend popped up from behind the bar they’d set up shelter in to fire at a few more of the soldiers and then came back down. “Reinforcements will be on the way. We’re on lockdown and we need to get to the first floor. That means our only chance is to push right through them.”
Bentley ignored the sting in her side and came up to fire off in the direction of the gunfire they were receiving before ducking back down. “Guess that’s how it’s got to be,” she said. “Fuck, I wish I could have brought a few tools with me.”
“You and me both,” Svend agreed. “I’ll distract the guns. You try and get the others in close quarters where their rifles won’t do as much good, and I’ll close in.”
“But won’t you—” Bentley was about to voice her concern, but Svend had already leapt over the bar and made himself a target, charging the blaster fire like it was nothing but a nasty rainstorm.
All Bentley could do is trust his strategy. She turned her eye to the stairs leading down to the first level, and spotted the troops marching up from it. She gritted her teeth and did her best to ignore the scorching wound in her side and took to a full run towards them, abandoning her pistol in the process. By the time their rifles were leveled at her, she’d already seized one by the barrel and forced it from his grip, smashing him across the chin with the butt of it. She tumbled between their formation, in a front roll and a back flip, leaving them at a total risk of only hitting each other if they fired on her. A few tried, to that exact result, and she grabbed another in a shoulder throw to fling him down the stairs before leaping in after. The lockdown blast doors of the stairway looked ready to close, and Bentley hesitated, wondering if Svend was even alive.
Two other casino security soldiers came flying through the narrowing egress, and Svend leapt out right after them letting the doors close behind him just in time to snag his jacket. He kept moving, letting it rip free while plucking the precious disk from its inner pocket. They pressed on and made their way towards the large exit gates they’d come into Thralldom through. Unfortunately, they’d shut completely into solid golden wall, lined with armed guards readying their rifles.
Suddenly the gates, and the guards lined against it, were blown away in a massive, illuminating explosion. What remained of the doors were forcefully flung open by what Bentley recognized as the dagger-pointed bow of the Odysseus, making an impromptu dock directly in the casino’s entrance. Its bridge access airlock opened and Barnabas emerged from it, carrying a long blaster rifle with a wooden stock that he aimed carefully while a team of six other androids came to his flanks, shooting off pulses of gunfire to cover Bentley and Svend’s advance. “Hurry!” he called out to them. “Get inside! Now!”
Svend ran alongside Bentley. “Could have timed that a little bit better, but I’ll take it,” he quipped. The two of them leapt behind the line of android riflemen and then quickly rushed inside of the airlock.
Barnabas and his reinforcements came in behind them, and Bentley looked up, lying on the deck of the Odysseus’ bridge. Blackfriar was standing right in front of its main screen, overseeing the direct combat.
“Excellent work, everyone,” he said. “Now get us out of here!”
Loud grating sounds shrieked from around the ship as it wrenched free and tore out an entire section of the casino’s wall.
Barnabas had already taken up space at his station, his rifle slung over his shoulder. “Pursuit by the security fleet has stabilized, Captain,” he reported. “They’ve managed to circumvent our hacking of their navigational mesh network and used auxiliary piloting algorithms. They’ll be in a containment formation soon.”
Blackfriar smiled with an odd zeal Bentley wouldn’t have expected from him. “Good,” he said. “Are they hailing?”
“Not yet, Captain.”
“Prepare the trojan hail for their nav systems and prepare the main gun to fire through their main lines,” Blackfriar ordered.
In a matter of seconds, a line of winged interceptor vessels had set up in a semicircle to contain the Odysseus. Each one fired a small warning shot out at the ship to warn it against advancing.
“Receiving a hail now,” Barnabas reported. “Accepting with encrypted package.”
“Unauthorized ship,” a man’s voice stated over the intercom. “You are currently harboring two fugitives carrying sensitive materials. Surrender them immediately and submit your vessel to impounding and search, and you will be subjected only to damage payments. Refusal will mean certain annihilation. Please respond.”
Blackfriar’s eyes shone with a dark contempt. “Fire and engage,” he ordered.
The line of ships began to collapse inward, as though irresistibly drawn to a single point. A few of them veered to safety, but the majority of them began crashing into one another. The cluster of ships was subjected to the heavy fire of the Odysseus’s main cannon. Its broad beam of light incinerated the ships in its direct line of fire, and the ones that escaped went spiraling out of control.
Blackfriar’s voice travelled through the bridge. “Advance!”
The ship’s impulse engines sent it straight out of the broken lines, and it jolted its way to freedom only to be rocked by another series of attacks that made the bridge quiver.
Barnabas reported. “We’re sustaining fire at the aft, Captain.”
“Jettison the drone swarms,” Blackfriar ordered.
The main screen became obscured in a giant burst of gray gas, and Bentley stared at it, seeing nothing. The android crew all looked at it as though they understood what was going on, though, and the sound of more explosions rang from outside the hull of the Odysseus.
“That’s right, you bastards,” Svend spoke from next to Bentley. “You deserve every bit of it.” There was a coldness in his voice.
“Full impulse,” Blackfriar commanded. “One last push!”
The ship quivered and Bentley fell to the deck again, deciding to focus only on her wound, the pain of which was suddenly becoming a great deal more apparent.
When the drone mist had cleared, they were back in the expanse of deep space. No pursuers in sight.
“No hostiles detected in this expanse, sir,” Barnabas announced. “We’re safe. For now, anyway.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Medical Bay, Aboard the Odysseus, Edge of Klaunox-Orion Sector
The infirmary on the Odysseus was unlike the one on the Chesed in almost every conceivable way, with the obvious exception of their both employing androids as their chief medical officers.
While the Chesed’s was fairly sparse and understaffed, with the majority of its care fa
cilities repurposed for storage and scientific research, this felt like a floor of an actual hospital, and an upscale one at that.
Their chief medical officer, a tall woman with braided black hair and teal lipstick, only stood at the center, overseeing the other android attendants and nurses who treated the wounded. At the moment, there were two specifically in need of treatment: Bentley, who was laid out in a cushy bed having a cooling gel applied to the nasty sniper-gash that had struck her across the side; and Svend, who was in the bed next to her, having his shirt removed to reveal that he’d indeed sustained heavy fire during his reckless decoy maneuver on Thralldom’s second floor. His chest had three large, nasty blast wounds across it, and Bentley wasn’t nearly so surprised by the fact that it hadn’t killed him as the reason why that was readily viewable. Each gaping wound, stripped of flesh, revealed a complex interior of metal and polymers, rather than blood and sinew.
She sat up to look closer. “Holy shit. You’re an android!”
The attendant applying her gel tried to gently push her back into a supine position, but didn’t insist when she refused. “Please hold still, Miss Bentley,” he asked her. “If you disturb the gel I can’t guarantee you won’t have necrotized flesh.”
Svend stared back at Bentley and looked down at his wounds like they were stains on his favorite shirt. Then he looked back at her with his usual warm smile. “You mean you didn’t know? I assumed you knew this was an android vessel.”
Bentley felt embarrassed at her assumption and felt her cheeks flushing a bit. “I did,” she said. “I just figured they had a human onboard too. We’ve got an android crewmate on the Chesed, you know. It’s not a whole thing.”
“Oh, it’s not like we wouldn’t let a human onboard,” Svend replied. “I mean, you’re here right now, aren’t you?”
“I guess,” Bentley acknowledged. “But everyone on the ship’s an android, then? No exceptions?” She looked around at the crew and could affirm that all of them had that same artificial air.
“I’d be surprised to find a human who wanted to be on our crew,” he answered, smiling even as he sounded somewhat bitter. “It makes sense, though. I was beginning to wonder why you were being so friendly.”
“Hey!” Bentley almost yelled, but winced when she felt her wound reopening from the effort. The attending physician went back to re-apply the gel. “I don’t have anything against androids. Like I said, one of my best friends is an android, sorta… It doesn’t change anything. Or at least it shouldn’t.”
Svend leaned back in his reclining bed while the chief medical officer stepped forward to personally inspect his wounds with a close eye. “I’m happy to hear that,” he said. “I really am. And honestly, I wasn’t trying to hide it.”
“When you said you couldn’t get drunk, you called it a genetic quirk,” Bentley recalled. “What was that about, then?”
Svend chuckled, taking care not to let the rising of his chest disturb the doctor’s analysis. “Android humor,” he said. “I guess that’s why you didn’t laugh, huh?”
Bentley couldn’t help but smile. Human or not, she couldn’t help but be taken in by him whenever he spoke. “You really just seemed so human, though. Hell, if it weren’t for the gaping mechanized holes in your chest, I’d still believe you were.”
He clasped his hands behind his head while the doctor nodded and let two nurses (or engineers? Bentley wondered offhand if androids used different medical parlance) get to the task of restoring his flesh. “Yeah, that’s the point,” he said with a knowing grin. “I’m what you’d call next-gen. Though that’s a bit of an understatement.”
“Understatement? How’s that?” Bentley agreed, just by looking at him, but wanted to hear what it meant to him.
“My design’s… Well, how to put it?” He shifted in his bed while considering this. Bentley watched with interest as they regenerated his flesh. The tools they used resembled the ones Shango used to modify his devices. “Let me put it this way: what’s an android to you?”
“Huh?” Bentley had only a few conversations with Jelly as reference points. “An android is a synthetically created, mechanical being that has full sentience and intelligence like a human.” Shango’s fantastical story about his origins in this world came by her mind as well at this. “Not just artificial intelligence, but actual artificial consciousness.”
Svend seemed pleased with that definition. “Right. Androids usually have full consciousness and intelligence like humans, but beyond that we don’t have a whole lot in common with you. Sure, we can talk, and be bipedal, and some of us can actually look a lot like humans just from chassis design. But on the inside, we’re something else entirely, coming from an entirely different place. And I guess that’s why so many of you are scared of us, or hate us, or just don’t like us.”
He wrinkled his nose in obvious dislike of the idea of human prejudice.
Svend continued. “My design actually integrates aspects of human biology into my inherent functions. Actual functioning retina instead of sophisticated cameras. Neurons and wetware, even some hormones. Most parts of me have some kind of bio-integration that blurs the lines between a human and an android. Kind of like how some of you do with cybernetic enhancements.”
“Human parts, huh?” Bentley grinned at him and examined his body. She could see what he meant. Even with the obvious machinery revealed by his wounds, she could see the muscles and pores and fine hairs along his skin. She briefly let her mind wander to the question of just how much of him had been made human, but blushed when she met his eyes again and thought he could tell exactly what she’d been thinking.
Svend cleared his throat, almost playfully, as he returned to topic. “It’s accurate enough to fool most scans, too, as you saw,” he said. “And some people think that’s dangerous. The tech behind me gets pretty closely guarded, and a lot of people would like to see it destroyed or at least just held by a select group of rich people.”
“I can imagine. How did you guys get hold of it?” Bentley asked.
There was a mischievous twitch to Svend’s smile. “We didn’t,” he said. “Not until today, anyway. With your help.”
“My…?” Bentley gasped at the realization. “The chip? That’s what it was?”
Svend shook his head. “Not outright. But it’s an important piece of the puzzle that we’ll need to produce the next generation.” The attendants left him to show his body fully repaired. But, even patched up as it was, each wound had a small, pink scar on it, just like a human might after weeks of healing.
“That you’ll need, huh?” This made everything make sense to Bentley now: the vague employment details, the constant changes, the need for cooperation, and the focus on the androids as the primary middlemen. “So then that means…”
“Correct,” a stern, commanding voice called from the med bay’s doors as the opened to reveal Captain Blackfriar, who walked towards them to stand at the foot of Bentley’s bed.
The nurses and doctors all saluted respectfully at attention. “There was never a silent partner. It was we alone that sought the employment of the Chesed and the Zion. Unfortunately, we found it unlikely that either of your crews would feel inclined to take a job from us, knowing who we are. And we needed your help.” He gave Bentley a glowing smile of gratitude that she couldn’t help but feel a bit of pride in seeing. “And you certainly gave that to us. We’re grateful for the invaluable assistance you’ve given us thus far. But the job is far from over.” Blackfriar exchanged a look with Svend before the two of them both looked back on Bentley. “I dare say, now the real job can truly begin.”
+++
Jade’s Quarters, Aboard the Chesed, Edge of Klaunox-Orion Sector
Once again, Jade found herself locked in her room crying.
When she’d first come aboard the Chesed, this had been all too common, but it had been weeks since she’d felt that way. She wasn’t sad about her initial kidnapping or her boyfriend’s death or even the loss of her s
tandard civilian corteX. All of those things she had, through a great deal of reflection and a fair amount of liquor, come to terms with. She’d even begun to feel excited by the adventures that each day’s uncertainty would bring. And as her duties onboard the ship had become increasingly useful. She no longer felt like a mere captive or passenger, and she’d hoped that she could come to see the ship as her home. She also thought she’d found a friend in Bentley, who understood her feelings of being lost and not knowing who she was, albeit in a different way.
Now, though, she didn’t feel like it was her home, because she didn’t feel welcome. The crew ignored her on good days and excluded her on bad ones. And even if Bentley returned from this mission, it would only be to leave, as she’d said. Jade found herself desperately considering what she would do next with her life, as she had to far too many times before. More than she’d ever thought she would at her age.
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