“Yes, Lieutenant.”
“Then what the fuck are you doing? Get to the ship. We have less than five minutes before the converters blow.”
Bishop considered that. The calculations took nanoseconds, but he already knew before the results came in what he was going to do. Maybe he was, after all, defective. A true Artificial Person didn’t make a decision in advance of data calculations. “I can take a supply of functioning masks with me. Enough for the hostages. I can get to them in time.”
“No.”
“I don’t need to breathe—”
“Bishop, I said no. You’re an asset, and I’m not leaving you to get reprogrammed by Company F, or shot full of holes. You know how much you cost?”
Bishop blinked, not because he needed the lubrication, but because he had to reorganize his information. Lieutenant Larsen doesn’t see me as part of his team. I’m an asset. A machine. An expensive machine that he’ll get in trouble for losing. It was the same cold math that Weyland-Yutani used to decide that they could afford to lose Haarsa Colony, and every human being inside it, to stop Company F and make it clear they weren’t paying ransoms any longer.
They were sending the message in blood, and Lieutenant Larsen was willing to write it for them… but not in synthetic blood.
Bishop, an Artificial Person, turned away and walked out of the atrium, down a sloping corridor, and let Larsen’s shouts echo behind him. He knew Larsen wouldn’t come after. For all the shouts, Larsen wasn’t stupid; he wouldn’t risk his life for this. If Bishop succeeded, he’d take credit. If Bishop failed, he’d blame the pirates.
He heard Larsen’s footsteps, running for the exit, as he reached the first emergency life cabinet and tore it open. The neatly ranked life support masks all showed red indicators, which meant they were indeed disabled, but Bishop took them one at a time, cracked the processor casing, snapped the tiny filament that locked out changes, and used his onboard data sync to flash-program them again.
There were eleven hostages. He took eleven masks, stuffed them into an expandable bag from his pack, and broke into a run deeper into the bowels of Haarsa Colony.
The SECURE AREA door he found was too thick to batter down, but he ran a password breaker—intended only for official use—on the keypad and had it open in fifteen seconds. The timer he ran as a faint display on his left eye showed him that he had less than two minutes left before the converters blew out. It would take time for the gas to reach toxic levels, but Prevox bound to oxygen, which meant everyone breathing would suffocate well before the toxins killed them. The children will die faster. He tried to calculate how much faster, but without more information, it was imprecise, and he erased the calculations and ran faster, stretching lab-grown tendons and pumping hydraulics at a red-line rate.
It was good he was moving so fast, because the first bullets missed him by quite a large margin, and he shifted course and dove behind the cover of a corner as another weapon roared. Concrete chipped and flew in knife-edged shards. He felt a cut, and looked down to see that his synthetic epidermis was sliced across the top of his hand, leaking a thin stream of thick, white fluid. It revealed a marvel of strong, pale synth-engineered tendons, pistons, data channels, glistening hair-thin wires. If he’d had time, he’d have been fascinated. Instead, he opened a kit at his belt, took out a small can, and sprayed skin over the gap. It had an ugly look, but he’d fix it later. If there was a later.
“Hey! Marine!” someone yelled around the corner. “How does it feel to be another gun for hire for the suits? You take an oath to the corporations now?”
Bishop didn’t answer, because he was distracted—not by his wound, but by something else. A sensation, like a tapping on his brain. He’d felt it before, but not for years, not since…
Not since the day he was born.
“He’s not a Colonial Marine,” said a very familiar voice. His own voice. “He’s a synthetic. Like me.”
The sensation he was feeling was a sync link trying to connect. They were programmed that way, to share data across models. He rejected the sync and said, in a calm tone that was somehow entirely different from his brother’s, “Not like you, Rook.”
“His name is Bishop,” Rook said to the others on his side of the corner. “He isn’t a threat. We’re not programmed to fight. He won’t even have a weapon.”
That much was true. Bishop didn’t like guns. He’d never really thought of that as programming, but it probably was. Still. He wasn’t Rook.
“We can always use another synth,” the other voice said, the one that wasn’t a mirror image of his own. “Come on out, Bishop. We won’t shoot. Consider yourself a new member of Company F.”
“It’s not that easy,” Rook said, and he still had the same strange cadence, the same monotone delivery that Bishop remembered. Just enough wrong to make Bishop think, but am I really right? “He’s been programmed for loyalty to the Corps. You’ll need to reprogram him.”
“Like they did you?” Bishop asked. That got a general wave of cold laughter.
“Naw, we didn’t have to push a button. This is Kee Parker, by the way. Leader of Company. Old Rook, he was ours to begin with. Got shot up on a mission, they scrapped him, we salvaged him. You’re with Lucky Larsen, right? Damn, small universe. I was there when he got his face sliced open. Ugly enough to make me want to puke. Company F’s just like the Marines. Only we pay more. What do you say, Bishop? You in?”
“Sure,” Bishop said. “As long as you release the hostages. You have—” He flipped the timer back to visible, “—seventeen seconds.”
There was a murmur among the soldiers, and a woman said, “The fuck?” while someone else said, “Fucking synths, we should just take him for parts,” and a hostage began to cry.
Sixteen.
Fifteen.
Fourteen.
At ten, Bishop calmly called the time again, and said, “What does Company F stand for?”
“Company F, for Fuck You, and also, fuck your countdown, synth. Step out and we won’t shoot. Stay there and we’ll cut you to pieces.”
That wasn’t the plan, which Bishop knew because sync link or not, he was somehow aware of Rook moving. Rook was circling around to come in behind him, most likely to take him prisoner, but possibly to shoot him in the back.
Bishop turned, ran in the direction Rook would be coming, and timed it to turn the corner just as his brother, his mirror image, reached it.
Face to face, again.
Except they weren’t mirrors anymore, if they ever had been. Rook looked expressionless, plastic, lifeless though he moved like a person. Bishop was undecided on the human concept of souls, but a look into Rook’s empty eyes was enough to show that his brother definitely didn’t possess one.
Rook didn’t hesitate. He lunged forward, and there was a knife in his hand, a black combat model with a six-inch blade. Bishop met him halfway, twisting that hand enough that the stab missed him. Then he slammed the heel of his palm into the spots where he knew Rook was vulnerable—he’d taken time to learn his own vulnerabilities—and in three seconds, Rook was down, the knife skittering away from his open hand.
Bishop knelt on his spine, picked up the knife, and said, “I’m sorry,” before he plunged the knife down into just the right spot to sever the nexus that fed instructions from the brain to the limbs. Rook wasn’t dead. He just couldn’t move. Eventually, he’d power down, and finally, in several human lifetimes, he’d go completely dark.
Bishop stood, flipped the knife expertly end over end, and caught it by the blade before slipping it into his belt.
“Just because you’re not programmed for something doesn’t mean you can’t learn it,” he told Rook, though Rook was long past learning anything. The head was turned sideways, and one eye stared up at him. The mouth opened and closed, but nothing except a gout of white hydraulic fluid came out.
Bishop watched the timer, and when it reached zero, he crouched down against the wall. He’d calculated this pa
rt, too: this wall was mathematically the least likely to be damaged by the blast.
Boom.
That was how they wrote the sound in books he’d read, but it wasn’t a boom, really; it was a roar, and deep and shuddering thunder that rattled the entire complex, shattered structural bones, and tore through his body like a solid blow. Bishop thought of the ruined beauty of the marketplace. It would be gone now, and those he’d red-tagged and witnessed dying would be buried in ruins.
The blast had hit the opposite corner hard. Bishop restarted the counter. He had less than a minute to get these masks on the hostages, if they’d survived.
He ran that direction, and came to a fast, skidding stop when he saw most of Company F was lying dead, crushed and broken and bleeding, but there were four or five still standing, and they were all aiming weapons at him.
“It’s Rook,” he said, and kept his voice the mirror of his crippled brother’s. Flat, unfeeling, and above all, calm. He drew the knife from his belt and showed it to them, then put it on the ground. “Bishop’s dead.”
One of the soldiers spat out blood and lowered his gun. Once he had, all the rest did, too. “What’s in the bag?”
“More explosives,” Bishop said. The idea was to keep them talking. One of the fallen Company F crew screamed from somewhere under a pile of rubble, and Bishop looked at it, then back at the leader. Kee Parker. “Do you want me to dig them out?”
“No, I want you to take that bag of boom up top, tell them you’re Bishop, get on board, and blow those bastards all to hell. We owe them that. That’s an order, Rook. Take ’em out.”
The timer said twenty seconds had elapsed since the explosion. Particulates were rising; he set his internal sensors to alert him when they reached significant enough levels to affect Parker. “Of course,” he said, with the same flat delivery. “Anything else?”
“Anything else, what the hell else could there be? Go!”
Bishop angled his head up and said, “The roof is unstable. You should move.”
“Fuck.” Parker looked around. Most of the hostages had survived. Three of the children, and five adults. Three lay buried somewhere in the rubble with his other soldiers. “Get them up. All right, let’s go. After you.”
Bishop set a slow pace as the seconds ticked by. The alert flashed red in the corner of his vision, and he banished it with a blink as he turned to look behind him.
Parker and his remaining three soldiers were still on their feet, but they looked unsteady. Of the hostages, two of the children had fallen, and been picked up by adults. The third, older, swayed and clutched at the woman next to her. They were all gasping.
“Prevox,” Parker managed to gasp, and he lunged past Rook to one of the life cabinets. He unlocked it with a flash of fingers on the pad, grabbed a mask, and put it over his face. Bishop saw him take in a breath, and then another, and another.
Parker turned toward the synth he still thought was Rook. Bishop would never forget that look, that desperate, angry, terror-filled look. Not that he ever forgot anything, but Parker’s expression seemed different.
It seemed important.
“I’m not Rook, and they’re not working,” Bishop told him. He eased him to a sitting position. Parker managed to fumble off the mask. He was trying to breathe—he was breathing, but it didn’t do any good. His skin had gone gray. “I have to save the ones I have for hostages. I’ll help you too. Just last.”
Bishop took Parker’s gun away and put it aside. The other Company F survivors had already fallen. So had all of the hostages. Bishop methodically took the weapons, then fitted the working masks on each of the hostages, starting with the smallest. There were extras, since some of those he’d intended to save were already dead.
When he got back around to Parker, it was too late. Too late for his soldiers as well. I can’t harm a human being, Bishop thought, but he hadn’t. He’d simply prioritized helping in a logical way. It wasn’t his fault that had resulted in someone’s death.
But, he thought, better the pirates than the prisoners. He wasn’t altogether sure he should be making those kinds of judgments. He didn’t know who to ask what was right and wrong in this case.
He picked up two of the children, one in each arm, and set off at a run for the surface.
* * *
They’d left a drop ship for him, but the Marines were gone, and for good reason: the ground itself was unstable. Bishop’s monitors reported multiple system failures, due to the explosion in the converters; it was only a matter of time before the entire thing went up in a fireball. If the reactor didn’t blow, then the oxygen supplies would as soon as the still-raging fire reached them.
Bishop made three trips, carrying two at once, and as he came back for the last two masked survivors, he found them dead.
Also, he found them without masks, their faces gray and still, mouths open and eyes shining silver from Prevox poisoning.
He was still trying to understand what had happened when he was shot in the back.
Bishop didn’t know what pain felt like to a real person, but to him it felt like a burning sensation that cut through him like a hot blade from back to front. Through skill, planning or blind luck, the bullet tumbled through a nexus cluster, and he felt his right side go limp and dead, and he crumped to the ground and rolled onto his back.
Two of the Company F soldiers stood over him, guns aimed down at his chest. They were wearing masks, the masks he’d put on the hostages.
That was a surprise.
His face registered an emotion, but he wasn’t sure how that looked. A tragedy/comedy mask, split like Lieutenant Larsen’s down the middle? The pain hadn’t stopped, his synthetic brain reported. Dying is painful. That was an interesting fact. He wondered if he was afraid. His hydraulic system was redlining, as it had when he was running top speed, though he could hardly move at all. His tongue felt dry. He felt a cold trickle of fluid underneath his body. Bleeding. Leaking. Is there a difference?
“Fucking synth,” one of them said from under her mask, and kicked him very hard, but on the side he couldn’t feel. “Surprised? We had an air pocket under the rubble that saved us. Then we found these.” She tapped the mask she wore. “Thanks for that.”
“Thanks for nothing, you freak,” the other one, a man, said. They both aimed their weapons. At this range, those would shred him apart.
Bishop tried to speak. With half his mouth working, he wasn’t sure it was very successful. “Sorry,” he told them. Which was an odd thing to say, and he was sure he was malfunctioning, because he recognized the feeling that swept over him. It was hot and uncontrollable and almost human in its intensity, and all he knew in that moment was If they leave here, they’ll slaughter the hostages, and it was a moral dilemma that he was not programmed to handle.
Until he programmed himself.
He opened his sync link to the masks, and turned them off.
He saw the exact moment that they realized they couldn’t breathe, that they’d taken in lethal gulps of Prevox-laden air. He expected them to shoot, but instead, they dropped their weapons and grabbed for the masks, slapping them as if that would make them work, then wrenching them off to try to gasp clean air that didn’t exist, and then…
He closed his eyes and didn’t watch the rest. There was a new feeling. Guilt.
For his last action, Bishop synced to the drop ship, put it on autopilot, and ordered it to dust off with the survivors he’d loaded inside. He kept tracing it until it was too far up for the sync to work, and then he had to believe that it would reach the ship, that Lieutenant Larsen would understand that he had done his job for the Marines. I prioritized, he told himself. I didn’t kill anyone. I prioritized, and I protected.
That was important. If he ever told anyone what he’d done, they’d flush him. Execute him. But then again, he was going to die here well before that.
There was nothing else to be accomplished. Bishop went to power save mode.
He slept.
When he booted awake again, he was in a medbay, and someone had their fingers in his back, probing, moving aside hydraulic tubes and connecting hair-thin wires with sharp little snaps of feeling, and suddenly, Bishop was online. Fully online.
Healed.
“Yeah, that’s got it,” said a new voice, a strange voice, and the intrusive fingers left his body and smoothed skin back in place. He felt the cut being sealed, and rolled over to sit up.
The Marine who’d repaired him took a wide step back, holding out both hands. “Whoa, whoa, peace, I’m friendly, man.”
“So am I,” Bishop said. “Hello. Where’s Lieutenant Larsen?”
“Reassigned,” said a big man with a wide grin and an unlit cigar in his mouth. “Said for us to check. Said there was a synth on Haarsa that might still be salvageable, and since we lost ours couple of trips back…” He had a sharp look in his eyes, Bishop thought. “You’re not one of those A2 models, right?”
“No,” Bishop said. “I’m three generations later. D4. My designation is HS17B48XG5-D5.”
“And what do they call you when you’re home?”
“Bishop,” he said, and smiled. “My name is Bishop.”
“I like it. Suits you, synth.”
“I prefer the term Artificial Person, sir.”
“Apone. Sergeant. Don’t call me sir, I’m not a damn officer. Just Sergeant or Apone or both. You got me, Bishop?”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
“Good.” Sergeant Apone held out his hand. Bishop stared at it for several seconds, then reached out and offered his own. He was careful not to crush the man’s hand when they shook. “Welcome to the team, Bishop. This fool’s Private Hudson.”
“Aww, Sarge, I didn’t know you cared.”
“Shut up, Hudson.”
Hudson gave Bishop a wide grin, all teeth. “He says shut up but I hear keep talking.” He offered his hand for shaking, too. Odd. In all his life, Bishop had never been treated like an equal, not like that. Now, twice. “You ever played Five Finger Fillet?”
Bishop shook his head. Apone rolled his eyes, chomped his cigar, and said, “You break him, you buy him, Hudson.” He crossed his arms and leaned against the wall to watch, though. Not interfering.
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