As the rebels pressed the advantage presented to them, Bentley and Svend both began to climb up that silken rope that had served as their route to the second floor. It was much more difficult a climb up than down, but Bentley didn’t have that on her mind. Her fingers were stinging and her arms burned, but she scurried up the wire in determined desperation. Breathless, she barely took the time to inhale deeply as the tunnel pushed them out into the water.
The two of them swam to the surface.
The water gardens had fallen into chaos. The wealthy casino patrons were now in a state of panic, their screams joined with those of the androids who lay in the water, sparking and chattering while giving off the sickening stench of burned plastic. The rebels on this floor had lost control of the area, and now were engaged in a more direct conflict with security teams that had seized on the opportunity.
“Where?” Bentley gasped, looking expectantly at Svend. He said nothing, only taking a hard run down the gardens, into the far back where only the servants typically went. The floor was lined with them, like a decoration of tortured victims in this resort heaven turned androids’ hell.
Svend took them to a tall metal wall, a thick blast shield that obstructed their access. He pounded on the impregnable metal, shouting at it. “No! Open up, damn you!”
Bentley stood behind her and put a hand to her earpiece. “Jelly,” she said. “Can you…?”
“Granting access…” Jelly Bean’s connection faded momentarily, then returned just as the shields slid open, revealing the room within.
The server room was small, relative to anything else the station boasted. Seemingly innocuous and routine, as though it had been designed to hide in plain sight. A trio of guards were inside, likely taking refuge in the secure location. They looked shocked to see they were exposed. Bentley didn’t even have time to assist when Svend went at them with a vengeful, determined fury. All of them were dropped in seconds in a blinding flurry of strikes.
“We’re in,” Bentley said to Jelly Bean. “Now what?”
“The hard console in the back. Boot it up and enter the following…”
Bentley moved to the server console and bumped directly into another guard who hadn’t even unslung his rifle. Without thinking, she punched him hard in the face and shoved him to the ground. She didn’t look back, but could hear Svend in battle behind her.
Bentley followed Jelly Bean’s precise instructions, a series of code strings and bureaucratic yes/no choices that she moved through as quickly as she could without risking making a mistake. Each time permissions were requested, Jelly Bean presented quick-fabricated credentials to push her further through.
She made the final keystroke to authorize failsafe deactivation.
“It’s done,” Jelly Bean said. “I’m not sure what else to—”
Bentley unholstered her blaster and began to fire repeatedly into the console, frying it beyond ability to be reactivated. Then she leveled her weapon to the server itself and squeezed the trigger.
Circuitry sparked and melted into nothing. She looked back at Svend. “Let’s fucking fry this whole room.”
Svend nodded an agreement. “Right,” he said. The two of them fled the room firing off shots at every server hub in sight before they reentered the water gardens.
As they made their descent back to the second floor, they came back to see the chaos had not yet waned, though the android’s crisis appeared to be over. They still lay on the ground, wounded from the trauma of the failsafe, but their torment itself had been arrested.
Blackfriar was on his way out, supporting one wounded android on either of his shoulders as he helped them move to safety. He glanced over at Svend and Bentley. “Quick! Grab whatever wounded you can! We must make haste now!”
Svend had already taken up an inert android into his arms as he followed his captain down towards Thralldom’s main gates.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Aboard the Odysseus, Edge of Klaunox-Orion Sector
After the last of the wounded androids had been brought onboard the three ships, the Odysseus had entered full impulse to break from its port on Thralldom, leaving the station behind for what Bentley hoped would be the very last time.
The once immaculate and efficiently staffed bridge looked like a warzone, with shorted-out androids lying across the floor being assessed. Medics looked each android over one at a time and either transported them down to the sick bay or treated them immediately.
Sitting areas were in short supply, so Bentley and Svend both sat on the floor, backs against a wall while they rested and watched Thralldom get smaller and smaller on the main screen’s long-range visual sensors.
Battle-dazed, the mundanity of recovery sank in for them.
“Do you even get tired?” Bentley asked him curiously, noticing he seemed to be as relieved to be resting as she did.
“Not the way you do,” Svend answered her. “But a close enough approximation, yes. If my body didn’t have a way of telling me I’m overdoing things, I’d just keep breaking over and over again.”
“What you were doing there, that wasn’t overdoing things?” Bentley recalled the speed and efficiency with which he’d made way for her to reach the server room. “I’ve never seen anyone move that fast. Not even fucking gods, if you’d believe that.”
Svend nodded. “I can ignore my body’s limiters temporarily when I have to,” he said. “But the results are a bit… well…” He weakly lifted his arm and let it rest closer to her. “I don’t think I broke anything, at least. But I’ll probably have to wait a while before I can find out for sure.” He nodded over at the overextended medical team.
Bentley reached out to hold his hand. “These ones are lucky. Maybe Jelly might know a thing or two, but I can’t see the rebels having any idea what to do with fried android circuits.”
“There will be plenty of time to heal once this is all over,” Svend said. “I just hope none of them are too far gone. All of these people… they’ve sacrificed enough without having to pay that kind of price.”
The screen now showed the Odysseus moving further out into deep space, out into their rendezvous point well beyond the casino’s ability to sense.
“The LaPlace will be looking for us after this,” Bentley said. “You can be sure they won’t be happy to see their pet project wrecked.”
Svend squeezed her hand. “You mean unlike before, when they had nothing but good things to say about androids, rebels, and… whatever it is they have against you?”
“True enough,” Bentley conceded. “I guess we were all fucked from the start, huh?”
Svend laughed weakly and winced. “Maybe,” he said. “But we also helped a lot of people by freeing them from the worst kind of suffering. People who the rest of the universe would have just as easily forgotten about. That counts for something.”
“I guess,” Bentley muttered. She thought on it seriously and considered that up until now all she’d really been fighting for was her own survival. She hadn’t had much of a choice, of course, but having fought to make things better, rather than just keep them the same felt different. She finally felt as though she had a memory she could be truly proud of. “Yeah, I guess it does.”
“Still think you’re no good for me, then?” Svend asked her playfully, though with just enough seriousness in his eyes that she could tell he was truly interested in the answer.
“One good deed doesn’t erase a lifetime of bad ones,” she responded. “And maybe that’s not what I’ve got, but I still feel like, you know… Whatever’s there…”
Svend pulled her hand closer to him, clutching it a little bit tighter. “We can still find out, you know. Who you are for real. I know the captain will let us use the scanners if that’s what you want. We owe you that much, at least, for what you’ve done for us.”
The ship reached its rendezvous point, and the familiar sights of the Zion and the Chesed displayed on the ship’s screen.
“Incoming hail…” Barn
abas announced.
“On screen,” Blackfriar ordered.
Shango’s face appeared on the ship’s main screen, flanked by Loco and Olofi. They looked past Blackfriar on the display and Bentley could feel them looking right at her.
“Friends,” Blackfriar addressed them. “I know this would not have been possible without your help. Know that you will always have an ally in me and my ship.”
“It is noted,” Shango replied. “And appreciated. However, for now, I am eager for my crew to be made whole. As we will do for yours.” He turned his head towards the laid-out androids on the Chesed’s own bridge, with Jelly Bean moving between them as quickly as she could.
“Of course,” Blackfriar agreed. “We will extend our airlock passages for transfer immediately.”
Svend looked at Bentley with a renewed urgency, and a hint of sadness. “You don’t need to do it if you don’t want to,” he told her. “I’ve seen who you are. You’re a brave, compassionate, foul-mouthed, feisty girl, and I wouldn’t change a damn thing about what brought you up to it.”
Bentley couldn’t help but blush at the compliment.
Svend continued. “But if you want to know who you were, if that’s really important to you, then now’s the time to find out. I have a feeling that we’re going to part ways soon, and we may not have an opportunity to do this again.”
Bentley finally pulled her eyes off the exhausted android and looked back at her fellow crew on the Chesed. She’d resented them for seeing her as just a tool connected to the sword, but when she looked at them now she could tell there was more to it than that.
But her connection to the sword, whatever it was, lingered over her. She knew that until she saw things through with it, she would always have unfinished business. She would never be free.
She looked back to Svend. “Yeah. Let’s do this.”
+++
Medical Bay, Aboard the Odysseus, Edge of Klaunox-Orion Sector
Even with the dire shortage of staff in the sick bay, Blackfriar hadn’t hesitated for a moment when Svend came to him with his request for Bentley. His gratitude, which he professed so strongly every time he met with one of his accomplices, was as sincere in deed as it was in words. He even ordered his chief medical officer to come away from her busy work of attending to her endless stream of patients to oversee the procedure personally.
The retinal scanner machine was different from any other device that Bentley had seen on this ship. Not in the sense that it had a decidedly unique function, which it did, but rather in its design and appearance. Everything she’d seen here had a strange beauty to it: a mix of synthetic symmetry and intelligent art, as though the Odysseus’s androids sought to make a statement in all of their works about who they were.
Not so for this scanner.
It was a big chair of metal and plastic that she was strapped into, with a series of lenses, the innermost of which were brought to her eyes while an apparatus cinched around her crown and neck to hold her in place. It wasn’t beautiful or unique or symmetrical.
It was creepy, and that wasn’t something Bentley had come to expect of anything these androids had built.
“So is this gonna hurt?” she asked, staring blankly through the lenses as she spoke to the ship’s chief medical officer.
“I cannot guarantee that it won’t,” the android woman answered with the oddest bedside manner. “However, if it does, that certainly isn’t part of its primary function. It is not a device of human torture.”
“Uh, good to know,” Bentley answered dryly. She decided not to ask the android medic any more questions until the procedure was finished.
“Don’t worry,” Jelly Bean spoke into Bentley’s ear, the earpiece still where she’d left it. “I’ll be here with you the whole time.”
Jade’s voice came through next. “Me too. Right behind Jelly.”
Bentley laughed, feeling some relief hearing Jade’s voice striking a friendly tone again. She didn’t know if that meant she’d been forgiven, but that was a discussion for another time. For now, she had a much more pressing question to answer, one that she’d had in the back of her mind as far as her short memory could reach: Who am I?
“Let me know when you are ready,” the medical chief stated. “The machine is ready to be activated at any time.”
“You really don’t need to do this,” Jelly Bean assured her, her tone almost worried. “I may still piece together the information we need from my scans alone. If you don’t want to, that is.”
“Do it,” Bentley told the doctor, trying to nod but finding her head too securely in the scanner’s metal trap. “I’m ready. Now.”
The doctor proceeded with clinical indifference. “Understood. Commencing deep retinal scan procedure…”
The machine began to hum loudly, and then the lenses at her eyes flashed. She could feel the focused beams fed through the device going straight into her eyes. Initially, it was just an odd sensation, which gave way to a minor tickle. Then she felt heat building behind her eyes that grew increasingly intense until it brought out a burning sensation. Her vision faded completely, no longer even registering the bright lights of the scanner. That in itself was unsettling, but the fear Bentley experienced next was much deeper.
She wondered how these memories would manifest themselves. Would she have to completely relive them, or would she be able to simply watch it all as though it were another person? Would she be another person? She felt a panicked anticipation at the thought of who she might be. Svend’s words stayed in her mind, that none of this could change who she was now. But she wasn’t certain she even believed that. As sweet as it had sounded from his lips, and as much as it had made her genuinely want to believe him.
But she wouldn’t know for sure until she stared directly into her own past and saw what lay dormant there. As the burning behind her eyes began to become unbearable, she found herself wrapped up in thoughts of whether or not she would emerge from this still seeing herself, or if she would awaken to feel like she’d lived in the body of a total stranger.
+++
Deep Space Rendezvous Point, Edge of Klaunox-Orion Sector
Fresh off their mission, the trio of ships rested quietly in the vastness of deep space. All three of them were joined, airlock to airlock, and for a time they were all as a single ship, bringing the treated androids onboard the Odysseus and returning the rebel soldiers to the Zion.
The crew of the Chesed remained aboard their own ship. They had holed themselves up in the mess hall for a celebratory drink from a long-saved bottle of wine.
“I kind of feel weird about this,” Olofi said as they held out the glasses of complex red liquid in a toast. “I feel like we should be waiting for Bentley to get back first.”
“Well, you’re damn well free to let yours sit on the table until she gets back,” Loco said. “But then we’ll have to explain to Jade why she isn’t in on it, either, and I guarantee you she’s not going to take it well.”
Shango shook his head. “I put aside this wine for the three of us. You recall that day, don’t you?”
Loco flashed him a smile. “Yeah, back in the day when your stuffy old ass remembered how to enjoy a good drink.”
“Indeed,” Shango nodded, concurring with the jab as if it was honest reminiscing. “I saved this bottle of West Orion Red when I truly felt we’d lost our way. And I told you we could open it on such a day that we acted in a manner worthy of our home.”
“I remember a certain someone bitching about that a few times when we were out of whiskey,” Olofi commented, eyeing Loco with good-natured accusation.
Shango wasn’t letting either of them ruin the moment. “Today, we are Iwa again,” he said. “Perhaps only today, but we’ve an eternity to prove otherwise. Now drink.”
The wine glasses clinked, and for the first time in centuries the two of them saw something in Shango’s eyes they’d thought had been lost from him forever: pride.
+++
Ca
ptain Blackfriar was once again in his private quarters, seated in the parlor, with Barnabas by his side. He’d expressed his gratitude to everyone on so many occasions, and now all he could do is sit in silence and truly reflect on what they’d accomplished. He stared at the private screen, letting it move between the Odysseus’s security cameras at the varied scenes of androids in treatment, side-by-side with the rebels who had helped bring them to freedom.
“Human rebels and androids together,” Barnabas murmured in awe. “When you first said it could happen, I honestly doubted you. And now that I see it…”
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