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

by Wendy Lynn Clark

  Because he was an android whose specialization was in getting humans to believe him.

  She stood. “You destroyed hundreds of sentries within our first five minutes. Just because you haven’t killed me yet doesn’t mean you aren’t going to. I’d be like nothing. So easy you wouldn’t even feel it.”

  “Cressida.” His expression squeezed in agony. He stood as well and stepped toward her, seeking her hard elbows, her taut neck. “I shouldn’t have spoken so carelessly.”

  For some reason, her nose prickled. Unshed tears warred with relief. She rubbed it. “No, you shouldn’t have.”

  “I’m sorry.” He cupped the back of her neck and drew her forward until their foreheads touched. His voice radiated pain and sincerity. “I’ll do whatever necessary to protect you. You’re the most important person to me in the entire universe right now. Okay?”

  Her chest throbbed.

  He rubbed the back of her neck, seeking to release the tension in her cords. “I’ll die before I let anything bad happen to you.”

  She sniffed. “Why?”

  “I’d give my life to protect any member of my team.”

  “When did I become a member of your team?”

  He leaned back. Confusion crossed his face, and then that distant look. At the end of the day, he was still a robot. They were constructs of logic, not of passion.

  Even though he was doing a very good job of convincing her otherwise.

  A shooting star flared behind his head, over the beach.

  He turned to follow her gaze. Something fell with a black streak and landed on the beach. His lips twisted to the side. “Well, damn. That was faster than I anticipated.”

  She tensed. “What was that?”

  “Our ride.” He looped his fingers around her loose wrist and tugged her toward the beach. “Let’s go stick out our thumbs.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Xan’s plan had actually worked, which, despite his conversation with Cressida, was a great way to start the day.

  They stood on the windswept beach at the edge of a smoking crater. He stepped over the lip and slipped down the side to the bottom, at thigh depth. His new human ligament wobbled, reminding him that he had to be careful with his knees. The sand was cool from being unearthed, but was quickly going up to ambient temperature.

  He picked up the gold satellite. Although smaller than some of the hellbenders in the lagoon, it weighed about two hundred pounds. Again, his left knee joint squeaked a warning even as the rest of him performed hydraulics at maximum efficiency.

  Cressida cupped her face to hold back her violently whipping hair. At least she had come this far, considering that no matter what he said, she was determined not to trust him.

  Of course he was also mad at himself. He remembered what he had said with the clarity of absolute recordings that could be played back in his brain. He could see where she’d been standing and where he’d been standing. He could watch her eyes widen in fear. His self-of-memory hadn’t cared. He could punch his self-of-memory.

  She craned her neck at the satellite. “What is that?”

  “One of your surveying satellites.” He clambered up the side of the crater. “First generation. After this place was settled and surveyed, when you started having families, they got repurposed into an external defense network.”

  “PirateNet.” She followed him across the beach, into the woods. “I didn’t realize it was still running.”

  “It mostly isn’t,” he said, ducking under foliage, “but there’s still a few thousand in orbit, and the Faction hates to waste anything. Most likely they got reprogrammed to look for us.”

  She blanched.

  He carried it into the resort to the kitchen and rested it on the floor next to the counter. He’d already identified the data access points in the house, but waving his hand over the outlet did nothing. As expected. He turned his attention to the satellite.

  This ancient satellite’s access panel required a tool called a magnetic screwdriver, which would be extremely difficult to find even in a modern robotics laboratory, but he directed Cressida to create the pieces in the reprocessor. She brought them back a few moments later and watched him work while she ate a parfait of mango-pineapple-strawberry in one delicate hand.

  The reprocessor was like new; he could feel the subtle waves of magnetism from the meteorite as an exact replica from the Phylas Comet wake. He held the forks together and stroked the meteorite chip in a downward motion eighty-four thousand times, which took about two minutes operating his arms as fast as their pistons would allow, and raised the local temperature by three full degrees.

  “Are you checking to see what caused its malfunction?” she finally asked.

  “It didn’t malfunction.” He fitted the two edges of the fork to the screw head. “I programmed it to come down.”

  Her spoon paused. “I thought you couldn’t access the network.”

  “I can’t.” He laboriously twisted the screw a quarter turn. Success! He did another few hundred thousand strokes.

  She was still staring at him, her blue eyes distrustful, which kicked him in the gut.

  “Look, I can’t even use the household appliances. I about lost my fingers after dinner last night.”

  Her frown continued, but she finished her bite and scraped the bowl.

  He felt the need to keep talking until all of her doubts flew away. It shouldn’t matter all that much, but wherever Cressida was concerned, it did.

  “Since you asked, these satellites are built for visual mapping in a debris-filled atmosphere, right? They’re built to survive impacts from asteroids, and the most common problem is an inability to communicate. If you can’t communicate, you can’t transmit a damage report or initiate repairs. During a reboot, they open to all their input fail-safes, from long-wave radio—which no one has used for about ten hundred millennia—to quantum nudges. So, I triggered the visual input system.”

  He put the screwdriver to the grooves and began lifting out the screws.

  “I’m amazed a little stick can keep anything together,” she commented, back to normal.

  “It’s prehistoric technology,” he agreed. “One step up from hammered peg construction.”

  “So you just waved a flag and the satellite came down.”

  “More or less.”

  He’d spent the night calculating the known trajectories for all two thousand satellites, which had shut down every nonessential function and shunted everything to brain power. Not bad for an x-class; he ought to get a frickin’ medal.

  “I arranged reflective silver boulders in the exact pattern of their ‘target: land here’ directive, and boom. Satellite. Someone will come looking for it, and we’ll beg a ride for the mainland.”

  “Wouldn’t starting a fire be easier?”

  “It calls the wrong kind of people.” Besides, with a downed satellite, he could get a lot more information.

  He set the screws aside and levered up the satellite access panel. It appeared to be in fairly good condition, considering its forced reentry and whatever buffing failures had caused it to crater. As a bonus, though, he didn’t have to sweep the message field because the satellite had done it for him. One downed satellite was suspicious; more than one was a red flashing beacon.

  “Now,” he said, “I need you to open the house data jack.”

  She knelt down beside him. “It really doesn’t work for you?”

  He waved his hand over the small square at the base of the bar island. Nothing moved.

  She repeated his exact gesture, and the square rolled neatly inside, revealing a variety of port types. “Are you sure you’re not giving it some command not to work?”

  Her continuing skepticism grated. “Why would I want to make my life more difficult?”

  She simply looked at him with lovely blue eyes and didn’t reply.

  His brain floated several nonsensical ideas, including “throttling” and “kissing” until her skepticism turned into wi
de-eyed faith, but his inner processor accurately predicted that such actions would not lead to the desired outcome.

  Instead, he pushed the satellite access panel toward the data jack. No signal. Well, it would be just fantastic if the one satellite he’d captured had a broken transmitter. He snugged it right up next to the jack. Nothing. He was at the point of yanking out his magnetized forks to see what could be further pried apart when Cressida made a sound of surprise.

  “The bar,” she said.

  He watched the bar blank out to gray snow. It was weird not to get the central nervous-system feeling of “knowing” that the object was at full connectivity. He missed that.

  Data shunted into the bar interface. He navigated through topographical maps—or he tried to. The data remained irritatingly stationary. He turned to Cressida, standing beside him, studying the framing with amazement. He fixed her with what he hoped was his most disarming plea. “I need your help.”

  Instant skepticism. “What kind of help?”

  He opened his arms for her to step into them.

  She crossed her arms. “Can’t you just tell me what to do?”

  “A reclamation crew will be here in less than an hour. I want this back on the beach and us standing innocently far away from it before they arrive.”

  She simply looked at him. Studying him for the lie.

  He counted to eight million and back. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand her fears. But he wished that she would stop seeing him as a representative of the empire and start seeing him as himself. “Just trust me, Cressida. It’s the only way. I promise you.”

  ~*~*~*~

  The red flag appeared on the planetary topographical map rendered in 3-D. There were so many others that the human eye would be unable to pick out one more, but inattention to detail was not Xelia|Brae’s weakness.

  She magnified the area.

  A small island within day-travel of the main city, with private yachts departing daily from the Central Transit Hub? A possibility. She magnified again.

  The flag related to a downed satellite, the second since they had started the reboot sequence. The other had flung into space, thrusters hurtling it uncontrollably toward the galaxy core, where it would either be arrested by passing traffic or become detritus swept off a flight line. Statistically, two such instances were insignificant.

  She hailed the Planetary Works Office. “I would like to go on the reclamation mission for downed satellite PN-87a.”

  “That crew has already departed.”

  Her interest rose. “So quickly?”

  “They were already on another scheduled run in the area.”

  She steepled her hands. One flag out of hundreds. The percentage likelihood that it pertained to her assignment was uncomfortably low. Manipulating a satellite in space without the message being intercepted by her sensors was astronomically unlikely.

  The highest percentage stated that her targets were still within the Central Transit Hub; the second-highest area of interest was the fire-bombed diplomatic quarter. She had exhaustively reviewed the Central Transit Hub, personally reassigned every camera to create a scale model in live time, and covered every inch of the old diplomatic area by orbital cameras and drones.

  And she had already dispatched deep space drones to collect the spaceward satellite and rip open the insides.

  She stared at the wall of flags. “Where will it deposit the reclaimed satellite?”

  “The East Continent facility.”

  She was already dwelling in the realm of astronomical insignificances. “Hail them.”

  ~*~*~*~

  Just trust me. So said the robot who made her unable to trust her own self.

  But he did seem unable to affect the household network. And now that she thought about it, the house hadn’t greeted him on arrival the way it had greeted her. In all the interactions that she’d had with sentries, with the boat crew, even with the miner’s uniform, he had had to cover her head but not his own. Was he really floating through the world like a ghost?

  Then, there was only one thing to do.

  Her chest thumped, as though her decision had been made before she consciously made it. She uncrossed her arms, closed the distance between them, and stepped as close to him as she dared. He waited like a dancer for his partner, like the dance he had mentioned, Swan Lake. She turned and put out her arms, aware of the heat of him behind her from the breath at her sensitive jaw to the powerful form at her back to the heaviness, like storm pressure, against her buttocks.

  “May I?” His voice was gravelly in her ear.

  She nodded, unable to speak.

  He stepped closer, sealing the distance between them, and slid his powerful fingers between hers. The sensation tickled, like feathers being drawn across her lower back. Her body’s pleas finally being answered, and glorying in his delicious contact. She shivered.

  He hesitated.

  “Sorry,” she said. “It’s fine. I’m sorry.”

  He flexed her hands and placed them on the bar screen. Her thumbs tapped images, a kaleidoscope. He paused at one, navigated around it, and flew to another. She tried to see what he saw, but her entire mind was gradually consumed by the heat behind her, sucking her into him, slowly, like sweet molasses. Her cheek grazed his masculine jaw. He smelled so good.

  Against her will, she turned to nuzzle him.

  His hands slowed. He sucked in a breath.

  Their breaths united, in tandem. Waves of desire washed against her, unstoppable as the ocean. His heart beat against hers. They were the same. They had the same desire—

  No, she couldn’t allow herself to be drawn in. She cleared her throat. “Um, what are you looking for?”

  “A phrenologist,” he said.

  His statement rubbed her like sandpaper. She leaned away from him. “I already told you. You have to go off planet to get resurrected; there’s no way a legitimate neural physicist or a Black Society member would settle here. The government won’t subsidize them, and no one could privately afford their services anyway. Liberation VI doesn’t employ indentured slaves.”

  “Not legally,” he agreed.

  Her mouth closed. A little piece of her world shifted. “You’re saying that even before the Nar annexed us, there were already people enslaved? Here?”

  “Whenever population density and national prosperity rises above specific indexes, the statistical likelihood increases to near absolute certainty.”

  Her heart pinched. “Statistics aren’t reality. You could be wrong. We could be different.”

  His thumb rubbed the back of her hand. “I know.”

  The gesture, which was supposed to be comforting, sensitized her to his intimacy. She fought the slow kick of her pulse and the desire to rub herself against the hardness at her back. “We could.”

  He rotated a topographical photo, turning it so that the grids spider-webbed out from the transit hubs like veins through an arterial body, and tapped her index finger against the screen. The image magnified and magnified again. A hospital.

  “There,” he said.

  It was an ordinary complex in the classic double-cross shape. “I’m missing the sign that says ‘black market brain surgery.’”

  “As you said, statistics aren’t certainty.” His voice, rough in her ear, sounded certain. “Having brushes and inks and different weights of paper doesn’t mean for certain that you are an artist. But I would be surprised if you didn’t at least enjoy the hobby.”

  She quieted. He had noticed all of that about her in those few brief moments, under fire, at her home?

  “In the same way, proximity to an off-world transit hub, discreet anonymizing businesses and a diverse conglomeration of resurrect-friendly off-world operations, as well as unusual distance from the nearest security offices and an illegally low number of visible emergency exits doesn’t mean that illegal brain reformulations occur there, but all the conditions are present for an easy-in-easy-out procedure with the right kind of cash
.”

  “What do emergency exits have to do with anything?” she asked.

  “Hospitals have requirements. If the visible exits are inadequate, alternate exits are in places that aren’t visible.”

  “Okay, but physical therapists, salons, license registrations, and an oculist are all places you’d need to go after recovering from a major illness. You can’t just skip out after a convalescence.”

  “You need a new stride, style, and documentation,” he said, agreeing.

  She was silent.

  “Finding a phrenologist is like trying to figure out the highest concentration of people who prefer orange. Once you’re running profiles of orange uniform boutiques against mustard resellers, you build up a situational awareness.”

  He swept the photos aside.

  “What worries me isn’t whether or not this hospital sells the services. They do, and they probably have, at a cut rate from before the Nar annexation. And if they won’t sell it to me, I’ve got a couple other candidates. No, what worries me is what I can’t see.”

  “And what’s that?” she asked.

  “This pattern”—he swept his fingers across the grid—“suggests a dearth of security activity. Where are the drones usually stationed at these corners, watching for traffic? Where have the security cameras gone?”

  “Maybe they’re patrolling other areas,” she said.

  “Or maybe the other x-class has already identified these places.” He did not sound aggravated, not like she would have. Just thoughtful. “What does a lowered patrol mean? If I were still connected to the network, I would know. I hate to think I’m that unobservant—”

  The lighting of the house changed color.

  Xan wheeled to the doorway, sweeping the bar blank as he did so and shoving Cressida behind him. Her heart jerked in her throat. His arms tensed, ready to throw her to safety as he put himself into danger.

  A balding man in a squat engineer’s flight suit climbed the steps.

  “Welcome, Chevalier Olivan,” the house said.

  “Knock, knock,” the open-mouthed engineer said, his neck craning with awe as he walked in. “Quite some place you got here. Not on any maps, though. I’m guessing you don’t pay taxes.”