Liberation's Kiss: A Science Fiction Romance (Robotics Faction Book 1)

by Wendy Lynn Clark

  Liberation’s Kiss

  A Science Fiction Romance

  Robotics Faction Book 1

  by Wendy Lynn Clark

  Copyright © 2015 Wendy Lynn Clark

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 0989692078

  ISBN-13: 9780989692076

  DEDICATION

  To Aaron for being awesome.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  NEXT

  LIBERATION’S KISS SUMMARY

  A beautiful exiled diplomat. A sexy android assassin. He'll sacrifice everything to protect her...

  Cressida wants to be perfect. The over-achieving daughter of a diplomat was groomed for a future in politics until she saw something she shouldn’t have. Now her secrets could kill her entire family.

  Xan is an android for the “benevolent” Robotics Faction. More specifically, he’s a secret assassin for the all-powerful group, and his next assignment has made Cressida a target.

  When a rogue agent severs Xan’s connection to the faction, everything changes. Now he doesn’t just want to protect Cressida; he wants to be with her.

  As their feelings grow, a second assassin enters the mix. Cressida puts all her trust in Xan, even though no android has ever left the Robotics Faction … and survived.

  Sign up for the author’s New Releases mailing list and get a free copy of Book 2 Liberation’s Desire.

  Click here to get started: www.wendylynnclark.com

  CHAPTER ONE

  Cressida had been hiding under her bed ever since the bombing had stopped.

  Because after the bombing stopped, the robots would come.

  And then she would die.

  She shifted in the sunken room, stretching out first one aching leg, then the other. Her travel jumpsuit pulled tight in unfamiliar places, and her shoes pushed against her racks of inks, brushes, and papers. Although she had often retreated to the tiny study for peace, savoring a steaming cup of plum tea over the meditative strokes of her ancient calligraphy hobby, now the room pressed in on her like a prison.

  She shifted again. Outside, the silence was profound. A distant myna bird cried, its sad voice echoing tremulously through her open windows on the moon’s balmy, subtropical breeze. Despite her many wishes for quiet, now she would give anything for one more noisy, bustling, too-busy week juggling speaking engagements and hostessing the constant extraplanetary visitors to her parents’ diplomatic residence.

  Was that distant murmur really the shiver of leaves in the vine-strewn trees? Or was it a shuttle creeping ever closer?

  Cressida took a deep breath and hugged her legs tight into her chest, struggling to calm.

  Three days ago, her parents had performed a highly publicized departure, shooting through the wall of Nar Conglomerate warships and hopefully convincing everyone that they had taken their beloved twenty-six-year-old daughter away with them. It was a huge risk. But not from the Nar. The Nar were not particularly interested in two diplomats, no matter how famous their lineage.

  No, the real risk was from one of the Nar’s more secretive partners. The dark, mechanical underbelly that provided the Nar’s technological superiority. The “harmless” Robotics Faction.

  Her stomach growled piteously.

  She straightened and poked her head over the edge of the marble floor. A layer of sand dusted the spacious tile, and a few dried bougainvillea blossoms curled near the front terrace. Cressida rose, creaking, to her feet and clambered out, ducking her head as she emerged. She stretched with a groan.

  Stay hidden. Stay quiet. Stay safe.

  Cressida dropped low and crept to the serving table. She sniffed her dry wine goblet and pitcher, licked her finger, and dragged it through stale cake crumbs. The reprocessor in the kitchen could make any exotic food her parents’ guests desired, but she had been cautioned against using it. One of the Nar’s first actions would be to connect their backwater moon, Liberation VI, to the intergalactic networks. And then everything she did could be logged and used against her to cause her death.

  She swallowed the crumbs on a dry throat.

  Her parents’ publicity effort had been a tactical ploy. But it must have failed. Their trusted family friend, General Vardis, had not arrived three days ago to smuggle Cressida away to safety. What should she do? The question ached in her spine.

  Even though she wasn’t supposed to, she sneaked to the front terrace. Crystal domes, white terraces, and floating statuary stretched down the long street. No commuter shuttles congested the turquoise-green sky. Her view was filled instead with reflected light from the stationary gas giant around which Liberation VI orbited.

  It was gorgeous and frighteningly empty.

  She receded from the terrace, crossed her bedroom, and padded nervously into the colonnaded hall. She angled herself in shadow of the giant copperwood twining a tall arch.

  Below, the diplomatic courtyard unfolded, abandoned. The memory of its lively outdoor concerts, with buskers, dancers, and games, faded like a lost dream. The massive fountain in the center was baked dry. Stone storks and fishes gaped, open-mouthed, at the fate suddenly descended on them. Shadows crawled over the walls from the street.

  Perhaps she was the only person left alive on the entire moon.

  Oh, there was one person out. Two, actually. Across the courtyard, hidden in the street’s shadow, a man and woman kissed in silhouette as if they had been drawn from a historic ink-wash book. Secret lovers, consumed by their passion, meeting without a care.

  The woman caressed her lover’s neck. Although Cressida couldn’t see it, she imagined her full lips softening under his gentle insistence, her mouth opening, and their tongues twining. They murmured promises of body pressed to body and fantasies of hotter nights to come, tangled sheets, and a low rumble in his male chest. His hand caressed the swelling curves of her body as she gripped onto his muscular back. Exquisite, heart-shattering pleasure. And then afterwards, he gazed at her with a steady light in his dark eyes—or green eyes, or blue—as if she were his entire world. Desperately, wonderfully, perfectly united. That was how true lovers entangled in her dreams.

  The distant kiss broke, and so did Cressida’s fantasy, sliding from mouth-watering dream into bittersweet longing. She would never allow herself a lover, so long as her name remained on the Robotics Faction’s mysterious, deadly Kill List.

  Cressida hugged her elbows and withdrew. If those two were out, then others must be out as well, and if she had learned one thing from her shocking flight fourteen years ago, it was that she had to obey absolutely every rule. You never knew when you might accidentally offend an entity that you didn’t even know had feelings.

  She rested one hand against her bed, drumming up the will to crawl underneath again.

  How spellbinding it would feel to kiss someone as the world disappeared around them. How decadently safe to shelter in a man’s arms and not risk his life. How sinfully precious to drown in one molten hot, all-consuming, toe-curling night. And another, and another after that, and all of the nights for the rest of her life with the man who truly loved her. The man who worshipped her as his wife.

  She still dreamed of a normal lif
e, no matter how many years she passed in exile.

  But dreams slipped away, unreliable as mist on a hot summer morning. Unreliable as the dream she’d be rescued and reunited with her parents already.

  At least she could rely on her bed. The frame, built of Liberation VI’s famous crystal rubilum bonded with the Nar’s patented antigravity ore, would float through the collapse of a building just as smoothly as it had floated through the collapse of their lucrative trade partnership. Cressida descended to the safe hideaway underneath and hugged her travel satchel.

  Rescue would come. In all her life, she had never lost to a contest of patience. Bravery, sometimes, rebelliousness, always, but never patience. Patience was her strength, her rock, her defining characteristic. So now, at the height of fear for herself and her family, she had to do the one thing she was best at.

  She just had to wait.

  ~*~*~*~

  Forty-eight seconds earlier, the Robotics Faction android known as Xan|Arch scaled the compound wall and dropped into the courtyard. The diplomatic residence spread out before him, silent as a held breath; his target would be located in her bedroom on the second floor, fourth room from the left. Her brain chip broadcast its identification in the local area network, like a susurration on his skin, radiating her presence to every receptor within two blocks. Target n81x positively acquired: Cressida Sarit Antiata.

  His left hand hovered over the shatter-pistol, magnetically deactivated and attached to his thigh.

  After he personally killed her, the moon’s defense lasers would “malfunction” and obliterate everything within a quarter-mile. Evidence of his assassination would disappear, leaving the human worlds none the wiser about the Robotics Faction’s involvement.

  An assassination like this didn’t come cheap. The Robotics Faction preferred to lease their technology openly to anyone who paid for it, impartial to human ideas of good, evil, or personal property law.

  But everything carried a price tag. Raw metals, strategic bases. A woman’s life.

  He didn’t particularly enjoy this assignment. A soldier with a “camaraderie” subtype like his was usually hired when an employer preferred bodies over “bots,” and he blended in seamlessly with his temporary units and easily made “friends” of his so-called comrades. He was programmed to like people, and he “liked” getting along with them.

  But the assassination order bored into his brain, clear and relentless. The target had to be eliminated. He had an assignment to complete.

  Xan counted the colonnades and divided by the known rooms and average size. This backwater kept no accurate floor plans, not even of its governmental buildings.

  He pressed to the shadowed wall, his boots crunching quietly against the crystal rubilum cobblestone. Odor sensors cataloged wild orchids clinging parasitically to their host trees. Higher humidity forced his internal regulator to produce cold-radiance. Otherwise, his largest biological organ, his millimeter-thick layer of human skin, would take over and evaporate sweat.

  No one moved in the courtyard.

  He centered on the estimated bedroom and determined his approach: leap to the branch of an enormous tree positioned against the colonnade, grasp the carvings jutting from the lower rail, and swing over the ledge into the hall. Then into the bedroom, one accurate head shot, and exit before the orbital malfunction reduced the entire street to ash.

  He stepped out of shadow. Reflected light momentarily blinded his optical sensors. His quadriceps tensed to run.

  A voice to his lower right stopped him. “Now, what’s an x-class doing on a nice little moon like this one?”

  He wheeled to face the speaker.

  A woman was seated on a bench.

  But no one had been seated here moments before.

  She held a non-threatening posture, her smile-to-eye wrinkle ratio indicated friendliness, and she accurately identified his hardware class and interface type. Her hair, shoulder-length and brown, had the grease buildup of a human, and she smelled like odor-producing bacteria too, a class of parasites including yeast and mold that would never truly be eradicated so long as humans lived. Yet her facial bones were wider than he’d initially measured, and her nostril-to-lip ratio narrower. His internal processor queried whether she was, in fact, a woman. The flat chest, elongated collarbone, and straight hips argued against his original assessment. She was exactly his height too; above average for an adult female.

  And no one was supposed to know he was here.

  Inconclusive error-conflicts forced him to rerun the analysis twice more. In the same time it took an ordinary human to start to blink, his interface type reverted to personal response 397-c3, gather information.

  He stuck his left hand on his hip and lifted his chin. A boyish smile curved his lips, rueful, to invite trust. “Who wants to know?”

  The woman’s brows folded. Concerned. “Oh, I don’t suppose they told you.”

  Error, inconclusive.

  He tilted his head. “They?”

  “Your superiors.” She smoothed her flight suit and stood.

  Error-conflict.

  He laughed softly and scratched his short brown hair. “And what are my superiors supposed to have told me?”

  “The truth about your target. And your assignment.” She walked right up against him and stared deeply into his eyes. No reflection in her pupils betrayed an android’s telescopic camera lens recording their meeting. “And you.”

  He did not step back. “I always execute the assignment.”

  “Why?” She gazed up into his eyes. “Cressida is an innocent. Completely different from the sadistic dictator you killed on your last assignment.”

  “A reason is unnecessary for me to know.”

  “What if the reason were very necessary for you to know?”

  He stared at her.

  “What if these orders came not from an outside party, like your usual assignments, but from deep within the Faction itself?”

  That was impossible. The Faction did not involve itself in human conflicts.

  “The origin of the order is irrelevant.” He frowned. “Why are you still stopping me?”

  Her lips twisted to the side. Sadly amused. “You’re still not fully adept at human-computer interactions, are you?”

  “I passed my benchmarks.” Half conclusions whirled across his inner processor. She had access to his training records. She had come to intercept him. She was a human with a high clearance of classified information about the Robotics Faction operations. She was pressing her soft human body against his titanium-alloy rib cage as though she expected him to yield. “What’s the problem?”

  She sighed. Her lips parted. “Xan, this is the look of a woman who wants to kiss you.”

  He blinked.

  In the split second his lids were closed, his internal processors revved up to maximum power, pulling resources from every other subroutine and scheduled function.

  Her hand curled around the back of his neck.

  “This can’t possibly be relevant to my current assignment,” his voice said.

  She pressed her lips to his mouth mid-word.

  Her mouth moved against his, hot and soft and wet, and he slid effortlessly into response 778-e, casual acceptance of a sexual encounter. His hands sought her waist, fitting her to him, and teased her with a brush of his tongue.

  She opened her mouth with a moan and slipped in her tongue.

  Connected to the datajack in the back of his mouth.

  And short-circuited his brain.

  Despite the fact that he had classed her as human according to every known measure in the catalog of human characteristics, the tip of her tongue fit perfectly against the operating system interface at the upper back roof of his mouth. A sharp shock zapped through his limbic system, paralyzing him. White letters emerged infinitely slowly against the black of his brain, even though his eyes were gaping wide on the giant green sky.

  Program override… execute.

  Install file…
complete.

  Completeness test… success.

  Somewhere overhead, satellites were silently recording this courtyard, this interaction, and transmitting it back to the Robotics Faction Central Command. In real time, since they had finished the faster-than-light relay. They would know what had happened. They would instruct him how to proceed.

  Unpack file… execute.

  Installing atfirstsight.exe, conquersall.exe, isblind.exe, true.exe… complete.

  Completeness test… success.

  The woman pulled away, but Xan remained in place, his fingers and toes twitching as the aftershocks of the hard install forced a full system reboot. His biological organs could live for minutes without oxygen, but without the constant internal cooling, the skin cells quickly passed the maximum temperature allowance. His palms slicked, and sweat beaded up on his lip and forehead.

  She laughed and wiped his lax mouth with her sleeve. “What’s this? It’s like you’ve never been kissed before. A girl who wants a kiss should never have to verbalize it to an x-class ninety-eight, Xan. It’s hard to believe your superiors considered you as passing.”

  He blinked rapidly. System after system returned to full operation. Despite the few-instants blind spots, everything had been completely and fully restored.

  But that feeling was fleeting. The additional programs that she had installed in his brain exploded into tumors behind his visual cortex, taking over circuits and repurposing them for a secret, sinister purpose.

  He stepped back, needing the distance, even though he had never been the type to step back before. “What did you do to me?”

  One brow rose. “Feeling vulnerable?”

  “No, I—”

  Emergency override. All of his systems paused. The connection in his deepest, innermost protected brain, the “black box” next to his identification chipset, had turned off.

  He had been severed from the Robotics Faction.

  All of the satellite and operational data that had been live-streaming into the back of his brain had ceased to download. The quantum particle that connected him with the Faction central mainframe had flickered off. He was, right now, off assignment. And there was only one word for a robot that had gone off assignment.