“We are bound in purpose,” Blackfriar told him. “Not a petty purpose, like shared enemies or pooled resources. We share the one purpose all sentient life yearns for: freedom. And today we’ve struck a blow for that cause. I could ask no better of any day.”
“Years of planning…” Barnabas considered. “For all of us, this has been our purpose for so long. Captain, do you even know what comes next?”
Blackfriar practically grinned from ear to ear. “Of course I know, dear Barnabas,” he said. “What comes next is our future.”
+++
The Zion was a hull-to-hull party, with soldiers pouring drinks on every deck of the ship, drunkenly boasting of their actions and attesting to the ones of their comrades. They spent every day unsure if it was their last, and on a successful mission against the Federation, they always made sure to celebrate by living their lives to their absolute fullest.
Nikola, though, didn’t feel like he could take part in the celebrations. He was proud of what his men had done on this day, without a shadow of a doubt, but something deeper clawed at his mind. Something that had told him he had failed in one of the most important ways.
He stood outside of his son’s quarters, ready to speak with him. He knew that Ivor would be bitter, having missed such a great battle, but now was the time for healing. He was ready to let his son, and favored subordinate, return to his side.
“Ivor,” he announced outside of the door, unlocking it with his universal access as captain. “I’m coming in.”
There was no response.
Nikola entered the quarters, and looked around, ready to lock eyes with his son.
The room was empty. Ivor was gone.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Aboard the Odysseus, Edge of Klaunox-Orion Sector
Ivor crept along the airlock in silence, his face contorted at the sounds of celebration that echoed from the Zion. Their cheers and warrior-toasts were each their own special insult to him, and his mood soured the more he heard of it.
“Look what’s become of us,” he uttered to Angela.
She kept her eyes fixed straight ahead making sure that none of the transfers between the ships recognized they shouldn’t be there. Not that anyone would have thought twice about it, considering how freely the ships were letting crew pass back and forth on this night.
Ivor kept talking, venom in his tone. “Arm in arm with fucking robots. Risking our lives to save them. Real, human lives. Even Dad’s gone batshit.”
Angela tried to placate him. “The captain was just too eager to bloody the Federation,” she told to him. “Can’t blame him for wanting that. But there’s no way he thinks these things are worth a damn. And once we take care of them for him, he’s going to see that we did the right thing.”
“I hope you’re right,” Ivor replied, one hand resting readily on his blaster pistol. “Sometimes I worry that the old man’s lost sight of what we’re really fighting for.”
“What are you fighting for?” Angela asked him. “Honestly.”
“Humanity,” Ivor answered like the words had been in his throat even before he’d heard the question. “The Federation takes it from us. We take it back. And if we let that get debased by these fucking mannequins, then we may as well just join the LaPlace here and goddamn now.”
Angela went silent as they reached the mouth of the airlock leading into the android ship. It lay open, and people walked by hurriedly, still wrapped up in treating the injured.
The two of them moved like shadows, but they didn’t even need to. Not yet. It was just for the sake of caution that they went unnoticed.
Neither Captain Blackfriar nor his first officer had the bridge. The whole place was in disarray, complacent with the battle’s end. Few consoles were attended, and most of the crew instead had its attention turned on their newly freed kin.
Ivor gave Angela a knowing glance as he drew his pistol. She reached into her belt to produce her disc-charges and he could see her mapping out targets actively even at this distance. He silently mouthed to her. “Ready?”
Angela nodded, and that was all that was said between them before they moved.
In the end, Ivor considered, his teammates would be right. This would be a night to celebrate.
Just not for the reasons they thought.
+++
Medical Bay, Aboard the Odysseus, Edge of Klaunox-Orion Sector
Bentley was unsure of how long she’d been hooked up to the retinal scanner. It was beginning to work, she knew that for certain, but its effects seemed to include a wildly distorted perception of the passage of time. She felt like the past, present, and future were all occurring simultaneously, jumbled together in such disjointed ways that it was nearly impossible to tell which was which.
There were some memories that she could tell came from her distant past, but only because they were seemingly beyond her recognition. She saw buildings with strange architecture that didn’t resemble any of the space stations she’d been on; faces that she couldn’t place but felt oddly familiar; and large mechanical swathes of intricate technology that she might have been able to attest to the functions of if she’d been able to focus on them.
And then she became aware that she was surrounded by noise, so loud and so sudden that it left no ambiguity as to where or when it came from: now, aboard the Odysseus.
It sounded like an alarm, followed by a series of explosions that she could feel the tremors of even hooked up to the scanner as she was. But she couldn’t see a thing, her vision still free-floating through time.
She heard the cold, usually confident monotone of the chief medical officer in the commotion. “What’s going on?” she called out, panic rising in her tone. The sound of her boots hitting the floor told Bentley she was leaving the room. “The patients! Secure the patients!” she yelled.
“Doc?” Bentley called out. The room shook again, and Bentley tried to move, but found that she couldn’t. While only the sides of her neck and the top of her head were secured in the machine, she found that she was unable to move her limbs. Each attempt resulted only in quick, fruitless muscular spasms, as though her body was unsure of how to interpret the signals her brain sent out into the tumult of visual data being out. She was able to speak only with strong, deliberate effort. “What the fuck’s happening? Is this part of the scan?”
There was no answer. Only the now all-too-familiar sound of blaster fire echoing up and down hallways, followed by rapid footfalls.
“There!” an unfamiliar voice called out. “He went this way!” Seconds later, the same voice grunted and gurgled in agony and went silent.
Bentley struggled in vain to escape the scanner’s hold on her, becoming increasingly certain that what was happening around her had nothing to do with the procedure she was undergoing.
She remembered she wasn’t alone. “Jelly?” she eked out, hoping that the scanner didn’t interfere with her earpiece’s reception. “Jade? What’s happening?”
“Your visual sensors are sending me only corrupted data,” Jelly Bean answered. “I can’t make anything out of it.”
“No, not that,” Bentley answered. “There’s… There’s something else…”
“Everything seems fine from where we are,” Jelly Bean told her. “But I’ll run some—”
There was another loud explosive noise from outside, and the earpiece only gave her a sharp, ringing feedback before going totally silent.
“Jelly?” Bentley tried to call out louder. Her corteX indicated that the pairing on her earpiece had been disconnected.
Then she heard another voice, one that she could easily recognize without sight. It was Svend. “Bentley!” he shouted, muffled by what sounded like a closed door. “Bentley, we’ve got to get you—”
There was a resounding blaster bolt shot and a cry of agony in Svend’s voice.
For a few seconds, there was total silence. Bentley almost once more found herself lost in the images that were flooding the far reaches of her
eyes and mind.
She heard the doors hiss open, and slow footfalls followed.
“Svend?” Bentley called out, her voice catching in panic in her throat.
The palpitations in her chest grew stronger, and the adrenalin made her feel sick as she struggled to regain control of her limbs.
She heard a cruel, sadistic laughter echo through the room. The voice was decidedly not Svend’s, but Bentley was certain she’d heard it before.
“Who—?” she asked, choking on her words when she tried to say more than that single syllable. She was finding it harder to speak with each passing moment, her nervous system being swarmed by an ever-increasing flow of unarranged stimuli.
“Well, fuck me,” the voice said. “What have we got here? First golden boy turns out not to be shit, and now it looks like I’ve caught you with your pants down.”
With those words, Bentley recognized where she’d heard the voice before: it was Nikola’s son, Ivor. Even in her current state she could tell he wasn’t here on anything like good terms.
“You may not be a fucking alf, but you know what? I think I’ll make this one exception…”
There was the high-pitched ringing of a blaster pistol being primed. Bentley couldn’t move and couldn’t see, her body now completely seized from her control.
She waited, struggling for breath, for what came next, even as her life continued to literally flash before her eyes.
+++
Medical Bay, Aboard the Odysseus, Edge of Klaunox-Orion Sector
Ivor felt a sense of triumph, the kind he always felt after he was victorious in battle.
Every piece of his plan had gone off without a hitch. He’d dispatched the smart-mouthed android boy, Svend, and what he’d stumbled on here was just a little bonus. He grinned maliciously at the sight of Bentley, helplessly hooked up to whatever strange machine the androids had put her in. He knew she could hear him just from the few words she’d managed to speak, and now he truly felt like everything had fallen into its proper place. He leveled his firestorm blaster pistol at her, sighting it just towards her head, and considered whether or not to pull the trigger. She was no android, but she was something worse. And he wanted her to know that before she died.
“You know what the worst thing in the fucking universe is?” he asked her. “A traitor. Someone who doesn’t even stand by to protect their own. And you’re worse than that. You’re a goddamn alf-fucker. You’re a traitor to our whole species.”
Bentley twitched and opened her mouth to speak. “Ser… Seriously?” she stammered out in disbelief.
Ivor lowered his gun and came closer to her, leaning towards the machine. “Oh, I know what you’re thinking, too. You think I’m the traitor, because I’m not taking part in this abominable clusterfuck of an alliance all of you have set up. And for what? Freeing a bunch of androids because they’re being kept as slaves? What’s wrong with that? They were meant to work for us. That’s why we made them. Us. Humans. Giving them a choice not to was a mistake in the first place. That was the only part of their existence that fucked with the natural order of things. A free machine is an abomination, and fighting to free more machines… Well, that’s worse than any damn thing the Federation’s ever put on us.”
He placed the barrel of his weapon right at Bentley’s temple and she shuddered on contact. “You know, I don’t think the Federation gets much right,” he continued. “But they aren’t wrong about this. Once we found out their plans, we should’ve just let them do it. Stepped aside. Let them clean up that mess and kill each other over it. Once the dust has settled, we could come in and wreck the Federation without having to worry about machines trying to inherit everything we fought for. This universe was made for humans. Anyone who says otherwise is a fucking traitor.”
Bentley coughed and her lips twitched. Then she opened her mouth and said one word. “Asshole.”
Ivor sighed and took a few more steps back, aiming his blaster at her again. “Figures,” he said. “You were never going to see the world for what it is. Too busy drooling over a machine because you like the way they manufactured his hair and eyes. Well, I took care of him. And since you’re just as much a part of the problem as he is…” He found just the shot he was looking for. Directly in the head. “I guess I gotta take care of you, too.”
He was about to squeeze the trigger, when something lunged at him like a blur to grasp his gun-arm by the wrist. Ivor turned to see it was Svend. The gaping blast wound made in his torso seemed to be not enough to stop him. He strengthened his stance to stop the android’s powerful grip from pulling it free, and used one arm to slash him across the cheek with an elbow strike that let him keep hold of the weapon.
“Fucking alfs!” Ivor yelled at him.
Svend wasn’t letting go though. They both fought for control of the blaster. Ivor felt his finger pull on his sidearm, letting it fire wildly off into Bentley’s direction.
“NOOOoooooo!” Svend yelled as he looked in the direction of where the blaster had shot. Ivor took the opportunity to shove his distracted opponent off him and hurl him hard to the ground.
There was a loud flash and a crackle. With his attention still towards Svend, he glanced momentarily behind him see where the bolts had landed. None of them had hit Bentley, but instead had launched squarely into the device she was hooked up to. Smoke escaped from its interior and the beams being fired into her eyes changed colors before sparking brightly again.
Bentley screamed.
It wasn’t a normal scream. Not the pained cries of a warrior being wounded, nor the desperate pleas of a damsel in distress.
It was a maddened, pitched noise, so evocative that even Ivor could feel the absolute horror at its roots.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Aboard the Odysseus, Edge of Klaunox-Orion Sector
Bentley’s mind felt like it was on fire.
Moments before, she’d been a captive audience while Ivor gloated and launched his polemic against androids, and then a flurry of blaster fire, and suddenly everything turned to pain.
In the first few moments, Bentley wondered if she was dead. She’d lost her sight and her body, and now electricity jolted through every inch of her being while something else scorched at the insides of her brain like caustic.
She felt herself screaming, and that was the only sign she was alive.
Then she felt her muscles pulsating again, pain emanating from every sinew while she forced control back into them. It was a physical agony beyond anything she’d previously thought possible, but it was purpose-driven, and it achieved its aims: she could move.
Bentley felt her hands gripping the painfully malfunctioning headgear. With a concerted effort she forced it off her, tossing it away as she gingerly scrambled to her feet. With the scanners’ beams no longer assailing her retina, her vision started to return.
The ship no longer looked like the ship, though.
The world no longer looked like the world. What Bentley’s eyes showed her was a cascade of brilliant, surreal coloration, neon and scattered, like some intangibly abstract dream made reality.
Gradually, the colors coalesced into recognizable shapes: the broken pieces of the retinal scanner. The exam tables and workstations of the medical bay. Two humanoid figures were locked in a struggle against one another.
Bentley had difficulty telling which of the two figures was her friend and which was her foe. Both of their outlines were filled with multispectral light that obscured all of their distinguishing features. But she knew Ivor was taller than Svend, and the figure that stood just a bit higher was pointing what looked like a weapon at the shorter one.
Bentley rushed that figure that she took to be her enemy. She leapt onto him from behind and let her forehead collide with the back of his skull while she barreled him over and took Svend down with him. All three of them collapsed into a heap on the ground, and Bentley felt her arm coming around to tuck under the rebel warrior’s chin to choke the life out of him.
Bentley’s head was swimming, with her thoughts just as inflamed and distorted as her senses had become. It was all she could do to make one determined decision, to know that Ivor was her enemy, and the rest had given way to unbridled, manic fury that pushed her towards the singular goal of snuffing out that source of brilliant light she’d told herself to find abhorrent. In another state, she might have thought twice about whether killing him was wrong, or maybe even if it was a better idea to run away. Yet in this moment, she had abandoned all rational thought in favor of something else entirely.
Suddenly she felt herself being slammed into the ground while she choked tighter. The air was forced from her lungs in the blow. Then gradually, even locked in furious combat as she was, the world began to melt away for her.
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