By all that was holy, what happened? She had thought Den would have come here, or they could help her locate him. But she hadn’t expected this…carnage.
What if Den had been caught in this attack? She fell to her knees and started sifting through the rubble. Lord, she was too late. He was already gone. She couldn’t believe it. There had to be hope. “Den? Den?” she said first soft then louder. She pushed down the fluttering wings of panic.
The pieces she found were springs, sprockets, and plastimetal.
No fingers or hair or flesh. Maybe she was jumping to conclusions. Maybe Den had gone somewhere else, and she was letting him burn right now.
Something shifted in the rocks two meters away. She jumped, startled, then launched to her feet and toward the movement. “Den!”
“No.” The sound was garbled as if coming from underwater. “Shaan. I believe I am still Shaan, even without…”
Ionia dug until she found the source and had to bite back a gasp. Shaan, or rather his dented head, looked at her.
“If I wasn’t visually appealing before, I can only imagine my appearance now. Luckily, my pain receptors are disconnected, or I would not be lucid,” he said as if they were discussing what tea to have with lunch.
“Hell and damnation. Wow.” There was no clear response to this. She didn’t know what to do, how to help him.
Nobody remained that she could see. Just ahead. She lifted it from the wreckage. It still had the basic shape of a face with the skeleton on the outside. Uber creepy, but she held his head as gently as she could.
“You look different.” It was the least offensive thing she could think to say.
“You’re one to talk. I can be reassembled,” he said, his voice staticky. Suddenly, he jerked, and his eyes fluttered. “I am called 891248. What is your name?”
It sounded like he had rebooted to factory settings. Which was kinda like dying for a droid. There was no Cortex access down here, so he probably didn’t have a memory backup either.
“What can I do? Can I help you?” she asked.
There was little someone without a tech background could do. If Simon were here, he’d know what to do, but he was back in Antarctica. She never ever thought in a zillion eons that she’d miss that hell hole, but she did.
The movement and voice stopped, and she had a flash of Feinstein’s cave again and remembered Den could be here too. She placed the lifeless head on a chair because she couldn’t bear to put him back into the rubble. He may yet be saved. Whoever had caused this—she couldn’t find a word bad enough—should be prosecuted. These droids had helped her, protected her, and had nothing but a lovely retreat in the flipping sewers, and this is how the government treated them.
Not that CONUS was perfect, or even any better, but she hoped they weren’t this bad. From every interaction she’d had with the enforcement, to the way they looked the other way when the droids had their Thunder Dome battles, she knew how they saw non-human life. But this was horrible. She looked around, scanning for any sign of Den. She dug up parts for about ten minutes but still found nothing that indicated Den had been here. And if he wasn’t here, he could be anywhere. He also could be a pile of scrap metal.
The ambient light flickered, and another wave of unease ran over her. Damn, if the lights went out while she was underground, it would be hell finding her way back to the surface. She should go.
This whole territory was wrong in so many ways. If Den was here, there was little she could do to help, and if he was elsewhere, she still had a chance. Dropping a piece of rubble, she started for the exit.
“I’ll send help,” she said.
She didn’t know how she would, but there had to be some way to fix him. If Simon had been able to download Den into a new body, there was always hope.
The side of her face itched, and she reached up to scratch it. A hard substance, not skin, more like her skin had had a protective coating poured over it. She could still feel, or better sense, the pressure of her fingers but nothing more.
She’d almost forgotten that little bag of horrors. Her face was against her. The eye had been bad enough, but now she was an obvious freak for all to see.
“Calm down.” She said it aloud to somehow reassure herself. She sounded much more placid than she felt. “I can handle this and find Den.”
“Another battle…near the Taj Mahl…” A new voice, not Shaan, and a massive blast of feedback.
She jumped and turned, covering her ears. The wraparound vid flickered lamely, trying to project some event. The scene blared bright indistinguishable objects. The light flooded the tunnel and then faded, only to jolt back to full.
For an instant, the image became clear. Bright blue eyes and dark curls, the face she loved, being pummeled. Her heart leaped then settled. He wasn’t gone or destroyed.
Yet. She had to get to him. The Taj was a big enough landmark for her to find it easily, only a few blocks from the entrance of the sanctuary.
She ran down the tunnels, her eyes suddenly remarkably clear, showing all the objects that may cause her to turn her ankle, like a map drawn over her path. Weird but super useful.
“Bye, Shaan. I’ll come back for you.”
She thought she heard a garbled response, but the sound was probably the display again. Poor, Shaan, she didn’t know what she could do for him. And she didn’t know what the hell was she going to do for Den either. No clue. But she had to try. She gritted her teeth and climbed the rungs of the ladder to the street without looking back again.
***
Den held Chirag’s massive arm hard enough to keep him from smashing Zee’s face. The cyborg’s fist hovered approximately a centimeter from Zee. They were at an impasse, and Den did not have the ability to continue for much longer. His systems were red lining.
Chirag was too strong. Too fast. Too good at battlefield maneuvers.
Den had a large number of downloads on defense. He had needed them to protect Ionia, but that was not his function. A hard-knuckled stomach punch knocked Den back against the transparent paneling. There were bloody imprints of where his body had struck the restraining wall over and over. He tried to rise and dodge again, sought his logic circuits for some strategy to beat Chirag, but it would seem that Chirag had access to much of the same information and countered every move.
He did a quick, acrobatic leap to rise and step away front the next blow. Chirag did not seem to want to destroy him. He’d had three chances on which he could have removed Den’s limbs.
It almost seemed like he was waiting for something, but it could have been he was taking pleasure from the torture he was doling out so easily. Chirag’s heart rate was still within normal range. He wasn’t even perspiring.
Den bypassed the fear wave from his emotional circuit and focused his attention on the fact that Zee was safe for the moment, and she had the opportunity to escape.
Chirag took a handful of running steps and cut off Den’s next parley, gripped his arms, and lifted him into the air over his head. Den struggled against Chirag’s grasp, pulled with all his hydraulics.
He should have been stronger than Chirag, who had many flesh and human parts. Parts that could still feel pain. But nothing Den did seemed to make an impact on him. He was a juggernaut.
Chirag dropped Den to the ground hard on his back, and the crowd cheered. Fifteen point eight seconds ago, they had been cheering for him. Fickle fate. Fickle audience. His processor located a phrase, to the victor goes the spoils.
The impact of hitting the polyplastic flooring sent shock impulses through his chassis. His central nervous system fritzed. His end would come soon.
He had hoped to help Zee, but he was failing. She deserved a better champion. He had not performed well enough to save them, but he had done the best he could with his current capacity.
A warm flutter of impulses shifted through his emotional chip, causing him to recall when Ionia had praised him for some task. He wished he could interact with her once more bef
ore the end of his existence.
He had done his utmost, and now he would lose function for the cause. One or two more blows to the cranium, and he would be scrap. And without his access to cloud backup, it would truly be death. But he wasn’t going to lie upon the arena polyplastic and allow Chirag to end his existence without putting up a large amount of resistance. He sent the message to his legs to crawl, and they responded, sluggishly.
Chirag followed, bent on his destruction.
Then Chirag’s head buckled downward. Zee had roused from her stupor and leaped on Chirag’s back. Another cheer from the gallery. Again, the populous seemed to be on the side of whoever was winning.
“Why do you even bother?” Chirag batted his head, but Zee kept her legs locked around his neck, trying to pull him off balance.
“I have nothing left to lose,” Zee said.
“Do you think if you survive this you will be free? Do you think any of us will be free? You’re deluded. They see us as monsters, and I’m not strong enough to change their minds. Either they will accept us or fear us. I’m fine with the fear.”
Zee slid down his body, clinging to Chirag’s back like a primate, beating him about the head and shoulders. He reached up and snatched her by the back of the neck and flipped her over on her back. The impact stunned her. He raised his foot as if to crush her skull with his heel, but she rolled out of his reach.
Den’s left side was not providing feedback. An offline message trickled back when he sent impulses to move. He dragged his non-responsive leg behind him. His odds of surviving this interaction had fallen to just fifteen percent. Unless some unknown variable occurred, Den would be no more.
***
Ionia snaked through the crowd keeping her head down until she heard the collective groan and pulled her hood back enough to see the main arena floor.
Giant screens showed Den in the fight. Damn. Damn. Damn. He was not faring well.
Den pulled his body up from the ground like a phoenix rising from the ashes.
He looked bad. She knew the bloodiness didn’t hurt him, but the image still struck a primal chord in her, winding her shoulders into knots. Worse, she knew there was more wrong from the way his body jerked when he almost fell. No more lithe grace of a jungle cat. He was damaged.
Another body lay close, and above them was Chirag. Chirag, with his full coat, finally removed, exposing his massive robotic arms. He reached down. She couldn’t hear any audio over the din of the crowd, but Den’s mouth was moving.
She knew that face well. Even though he was a droid. He was a droid with a full emotional spectrum. And he was hers. This was his I-will-die-defending-you face. He was defending whoever was lying on the coliseum floor. It was hard to say who the lump was, and it didn’t matter. Den was about to get his head handed to him. She had to find a way to stop him, end the fight, and escape. Easy.
Yeah, easy as deep sea diving without an air tank.
The clawing desperation ran through her as people brushed past. Most were oblivious to her. Everyone was watching the match.
The enforcement was watching too.
She couldn’t just run out into the middle of the field, or else she’d be back at the law station being studied or fitted for a mark of her own. Her mouth went dry. What could she do anyway?
Chirag lumbered toward Den and lunged for him. Ionia’s breath caught in her lungs as if a giant fist had grabbed her and squeezed. She wanted to yell at Den to watch out, but her throat was locked.
Den clumsily stumbled to the side, just fast enough to avoid his grasp. Den and brought down his closed fist on Chirag’s back. Chirag laughed and spun. This was wrong. Bad. And five shades of not-ok. There had to be a way to call the fight.
Chirag gripped Den by the shoulders and lifted him straight up. He had to have a massive amount of augmented strength to be able to hoist him up like that. He was like monster-of-the-week crazy strong. She could finally see Den’s real face. Blood ran down from some injury to his head, but his damage appeared to be mostly external—for now.
She jerked her hands up as she could to ward off the blow. Chirag brought Den down, slamming him across his mechanized knee. The sound of metal-on-metal screeched. Chirag was going to break Den’s back. She had to get in there and stop the fight. Why hadn’t someone interceded?
The cool voice of logic spoke in her head. Because there’s no one left. Chirag was supposed to be the reasonable leader for the droids’ cause. Den must have pissed him off, or something had gone wrong, and now he wanted someone to pay. He wanted Den to pay.
Maybe she could distract Chirag so Den could escape. She stepped toward the shielding. A jolt of power through her back and her vision darkened then flashed back on. A grid glowed on the landscape before her. She closed her eyes, willing it away, and looked up at the display.
Over the crowd, a pleasant automated voice stated, Removal of any shielding device mandatory.
Crap, she had to take off her coat. Best case scenario, she’d draw attention with her half metal face. Worse, they’d lock her up. But she had to try.
She stood and pulled back the coat. The air was cool and refreshing after the hot, confining jacket, but she felt super naked. She looked around, expecting the whole crowd to be watching her, but only one or two gave her silvery face a second glance. She rolled back her shoulders and tried again to enter the door.
Another blast sent her reeling back onto her ass. Her head spun, and the world wavered.
“Thirty percent augmented. Admittance denied.”
She rose slowly to her elbows. Chirag had lifted Den again, and it looked like he was going to pull Den’s arms off.
The crowd pushed to see what was happening in the arena. Her chance to help Den and get out was over. She couldn’t enter the damn arena. Maybe she could get to the control area and cut power to their grid? She searched the structure and the higher boxes that were usually reserved for the ultra VIP level, politicians, the wealthy, and royalty. The control area should be right around… There. She saw what appeared to be a junction with a pair of droids that had long spindly appendages moving over a panel that glowed.
She picked up her coat and wrapped it around her, draping the hood over her face again.
More people were giving her curious glances. She couldn’t bear to see what was happening to Den, but from the sounds, it couldn’t be good. Her body was wound like a boa constrictor had her. Keeping low and hidden under the hood, she sprinted to the control booth.
She found the makeshift stairs that lead to the upper boxes, but in the seats next to the ring sat… Her heart stopped. It was Ravi and her aunt.
***
Den worked his way out of Chirag’s grasp and scrambled away, trying to get some footing. Chirag suddenly straightened, looking at something in the crowd, then dashed toward the exit. Was Chirag leaving? Did Den have a chance?
Chirag’s mechanical body parts emitted smoke at the seams. Den and Zee’s attack had taken a toll on him. The emotion of hope trickled into Den’s processor. He recalculated the odds of survival and allowed his face to express a smile.
Den watched Chirag greet someone directly outside the battlefield. The cyborg hunched over a small form. Den caught part of the audio.
“Do it,” Chirag said.
Someone pulled out a syringe and stuck it into the small portion of flesh remaining on his upper arm. He reentered, and the automated human protection system announced Chirag’s new percentages.
Seventy percent automated. Approved.
Den redoubled his efforts and finally limped to Zee. “Let me help you break the band. Then you leave,” he said. “I will keep Chirag distracted.”
“How? By crawling on him? You are near your maximum level of output now. I won’t leave you.”
“It makes no logical sense for both of us to perish,” Den said.
“Emotion and logic are not always compatible. I have a character trait called loyalty. I will not leave you.”
“But it’s not—”
“How logical was it for you to enter the ring and attempt to assist me?” she asked.
“There are droids that count on you. Back at the sanctuary and in future games, so many sentient beings depend on you. Your words and your care and your skill. There are droids that will need your guidance.”
“But you need me,” her voice dipped low as she met his eyes. “You’re valid and worthwhile. You deserve my care and loyalty as much as anyone else.”
When phrased like that, he could not disagree. Another feeling welled from his emotional chip. It was both sad and happy simultaneously, and he had never felt anything like it.
“We face Chirag together. Agreed?”
“Agreed.” He could think of no other answer that was suitable. He could extrapolate no scenarios where they exited the arena functioning.
But he would be happy to end his existence…for the sake of a friend.
***
Chirag lumbered back to the center of the arena. Ionia had to consciously shut her mouth, which had been hanging open since she’d caught sight of her so-called family. What in the seventh level of hell had that she-devil done to Chirag?
Ionia hid behind a support pole and glanced into the arena. Den crawled toward what looked like a broken doll. It had to be Zee. Chirag, smiling, brought up his hand, which was shape of a head-sized cudgel. He was going to obliterate them.
Something broke through her terror for Den. Something her brain couldn’t quite grasp. Chirag wasn’t just holding the cudgel. His hand had mutated. Changed from one thing into another. Just like hers had back at the lab.
Dr. Franken-aunt had dosed him with nanobots, and he was using them. Mostly to beat Den and Zee into a pile of parts.
There wasn’t time remaining to locate with the power grid or call her mom or even report the event. The nanobots inside her had been the reason she’d been covered, cowering, and running the entire time she’d been in this territory, but they might just be useful.
Vagabond Souls: The Ionia Chronicles: Book 2 Page 29
