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

by Wendy Lynn Clark

  She balked. “You want to play? Now?”

  “Now is the perfect time.”

  “We’re being chased. Our faces are plastered across all the news bulletins. Any moment, someone could recognize us, and you want to play a game?”

  “Those losses reset the jackpot difficulty.”

  While they argued, another person walked up in front of them and put in a single ball. Xan swore quietly and waited. That player grasped the controls and promptly lost. He trudged away. Xan forced her forward.

  “I thought you said it reset the difficulty,” she said.

  “He wasn’t very good.” Xan fed balls into the machine, which gulped them down with clanging and flashing lights. She stood to the side while he grasped the controls. A right button press squeezed the box, and a left button press released it. He dropped each box at the last possible instant, balancing them like the teeth of one zipper on a column of air.

  “The crane controller delay is a repeating pattern based on the clock in the upper right corner, and the speed of the moving platform is directly controlled by how accurately you line up the stacks. Eventually”—his stack zoomed outward with every barely aligned box, so that the whole tower swayed like a ribbon in a tide—“it becomes impossible to compensate for the physics of the game.”

  “Then concentrate,” she urged.

  “I am.” He took his eyes off the screen to smile at her. She twitched, suppressing the urge to smack him. “Reaching the final box in quintuple jackpot is, even for someone who can calculate and execute the perfect move, impossible to predict. It is then an intersection of control and luck.”

  Her heart rose in her throat as one box after another floated as though magnetically attracted to the moving skyscraper. A small crowd formed around him.

  He spared her another swift glance. “Hey, why are you getting so worried? It’s just a couple of holos.”

  She pressed her hands to her fast-beating heart. “Focus! You’re going to miss.”

  “It’s okay. I’m only going for quadruple jackpot this time.”

  She had to turn away.

  On the positive side, the horrors of an hour ago had been completely replaced by the immediacy of the game. She wondered if he had done it deliberately, to shake her out of her stupor.

  She had never come to an adult arcade, but every child enjoyed socialization festivals. Mercury excelled at pattern matches. Cressida preferred Zero-G sprints, trivia recitations, and art displays. Proper, quiet, solitary pursuits where her active brain could shine and her heart could remain firmly in her chest, controlled, where it belonged.

  Every once in a while, they forced everyone to do skill and luck games. Others like Xan had the intense willpower to block out the cheering and the eyeballs, but she had never been able to. So many people watching her had always made her think about all of the things she wasn’t supposed to do, and then she immediately did them and lost.

  When he focused on her with that same intensity, that same gorgeous willpower, she lost her control a little more each time.

  “Oops, here it comes,” he said, knocking her out of her memories.

  “Here what comes?” she asked, turning around.

  The tiny pinprick of a box floated past the edge of the weaving s-shape. It took forever to actually fall down the whole length of the screen, and six more pinpricks released, but Xan maneuvered between them, careful not to let the falling blocks destroy his masterpiece. It finally struck the bottom. You Lose flashed.

  “Aw,” said the crowd behind them.

  She startled. When had so many people spread across the carpet and up the tier of steps to watch?

  Balls cascaded out of the machine, overflowing his meager cup and flooding the carpet. Someone shoved a jackpot box under the spout and others rounded up the ones that had tried to roll away, returning them with congratulations. She thanked everyone for their kindness. The flood reduced to a trickle and stopped. New players surged forward to duplicate his success, and they got pushed back, out of the way.

  “How did you do that?” a guy next to them asked, waiting his turn.

  “I timed people’s inputs to the machine’s output,” Xan replied. “But you should probably hold off. It’s going to be at max difficulty until it takes in enough profit to equalize the loss.”

  He fingered the gold balls but remained in line. “How long have you been playing?”

  “This is my first time.”

  The guy stared at him, but the losses started, and he moved up, newly determined.

  “Where did you get the credits to play?” she asked.

  He jerked his head at a wall of probability-pinball slots. “It’s trivial to deduce their win algorithms. I offered to split my take with a guy in exchange for a cup, but he gave me one ball and told me not to lose.”

  So of course Xan didn’t.

  “The skill jackpots are higher. As soon as I earned enough for a game, I switched.”

  Her ankle turned suddenly, and she gripped on to his iron arm to keep herself upright.

  He looked down at her hand. “You’re shaking.”

  “I think your game overexcited me.”

  He scooped an arm around her waist and led her deeper into the arcade. Past the bright game floor, they entered Stim Booths, and the area took on a dirtier, more dangerous appearance. Semi-naked holograms of dancing men and women paraded across the walls and ceiling. Cheap space-jumping thrills, stranger-sex encounters, and monster-slaying stimulations were arranged near the family-friendly front. Murder, victim-stims, and bestial-bondage kink huddled in deliberately dim holographics at the back.

  She moved closer to Xan’s sheltering presence. The muffled screams told of participants enjoying the nonlethal but fully sensated experience of coming to a violent end, without the worry about paying a resurrect fee.

  At the back wall, a honeycomb of rooms were for rent. Blocking the stairs sat a cross-eyed man in a stained employee shirt. A weeping scar marred his forehead.

  Cressida’s stomach churned.

  There was no reason for his appearance other than personal choice. Ocular retraining was a short outpatient procedure covered by state funds, and he could probably heal the scar with any over-the-counter skin cream.

  Xan scooped up a handful of winnings and offered it to the employee. “How long will this buy us?”

  He patted an intake funnel.

  Xan dumped the balls in. The machine churned, the readout flashed 15 minutes, and the waist-high gate swung open. The man patted the time display and stepped aside.

  Xan dumped in balls until the display read 2 hours. Cressida shied away from the mentally unwell employee and gripped the railing. At the top of the stairs, they followed blinking lights to an open door. Xan pulled it shut behind them.

  The room was just big enough for a single bed, not antigrav, but the owners had bolted it to the wall as if it were. Grease marks on the wall suggested that plenty more than one had fit on it in the past. A tiny, closet-sized, offset room was the combination garbage-sink-shower. Thankfully, it smelled like a cleanser so aggressive it made her eyes sting.

  Or perhaps that was tiredness. She sagged, exhausted, while Xan peered around the room, checking corners and under the bedspread, listening down the drains. He returned to her and removed her helmet. Her neck creaked, grateful and sore. She patted her flattened hair. “It’s safe?”

  “They’re running an anonymizer.” He bent closer to her. “I can only hear you from this close.”

  Her breath hitched. His sudden nearness made her throat dry. “You can hear me?”

  He nodded, wry. “Me and usually every receptor in a two-block radius.”

  Her knees wobbled.

  He put down his tray and gently hefted her onto the bed. Pain radiated from her right hip, and she sucked in air through her teeth. The tears came to her eyes unbidden.

  He frowned as he lifted her legs up, settling her for normal sleep, and carefully positioned himself beside her,
his muscles bulging like the dancer he had claimed not to be. He cupped her sore ankle. “May I?”

  She nodded.

  He pulled apart the fastenings of her boot and slid off the material. The stiff sole softened in his hand, allowing anyone to roll it into a small ball for transport and storage. Beneath, her skin broke into dark purple discoloration.

  He stared at it for a long minute. His jaw worked.

  Somehow, he seemed more upset than she was. After all, she had survived a fight and a fall, against all odds, thanks to him. She put her hand on his stilled bicep to comfort him. “It doesn’t really hurt.”

  “Honestly, I’m surprised you could walk.” His voice sounded harsh. He cleared his throat and unpeeled the second boot. Like the first, it was bruised, although not as severely.

  He traced the striping up her legs, peeling apart the magnetic seams of her flight suit, across her belly and chest, dark as fractures around her collarbone. A lot of it matched where the magnetic strips had held her to the cargo, but others were clearly just bruises.

  She stopped his fingers at the lip of her undergarments. Of all the times he should see her naked, this, when she was at her least attractive, was not one of them. “It’s just bruised. Nothing is broken.”

  He allowed her to move his hands away. “I’ll get you something.”

  She fought to sit upright while he eased off the bed and picked up his tray. “You’re leaving?”

  “You need to get to a hospital.”

  And once there, he would want to change her ID chip again. She blinked back tiredness. “Can’t we just get me an anonymizer like this room has? Then I could pass by sensors without worry.”

  He ended that hope with a swift shake of his head. “You can’t anonymously board a shuttle.”

  “Well, then how are you going to board it? You can’t even operate a house interface.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Xan?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Yes, it does. You’re a member of my team, and that matters.”

  He focused on her.

  “What?” she asked.

  He looked away. “I’m a member of your team?”

  She tasted that on her tongue. Cautious. “Yes.”

  “Since when?”

  Since he said she wasn’t useless. Since he swore that she had changed him. Since the kiss that had reprogrammed him, and maybe started to change her, too.

  But all that was too dangerous to confess.

  “Since you said that your life doesn’t matter. There has to be another way.”

  “If you know one, now’s the time to share.”

  She didn’t, but leaving Xan to be caught by the android woman and disassembled was simply not an option. “We both get off planet or nobody does.”

  “Cressida…”

  She flopped open the bed covers—light and airy, despite the grime of the rest of the room, and smelling of the washer—and scooted under. “The general promised to get me off planet without changing my chip.”

  Xan growled. “And look at how far he got. What a champ.”

  “At least he was going to try.”

  His jaw flexed. He shouldered his wealth.

  She rose again, fighting tiredness. “The room expires in less than two hours.”

  “I’ll be back before you wake up.”

  Her body throbbed. Everything ached, from her ears to her knuckles to her pinky toes. She settled in the body-conforming cocoon. It couldn’t be as nice as the bed the previous night, but for all the world, it felt as if she were floating. She didn’t even hear the door close.

  ~*~*~*~

  Xan slipped out, down the stairs.

  The monitor grunted in surprise.

  “The room’s still mine,” he said, and hopped the turnstile when it refused to register his presence and open for him.

  He did a quick check, almost hoping he would see the other x-class or a whole host of sentries moving in, but no one paid him any attention. He returned to the game floor, ducked out a side exit, and entered an underground mall.

  Fake glass suggested he tunneled through an undersea world full of exotic animals, but he ignored them. Scanning down the long, crowded thoroughfares, he barely avoided slower shoppers, jerking around them so that the remaining balls jittered. Being away from Cressida made him nervous. He had to finish quickly and get back to her.

  But as his legs pumped and his fists flexed—almost unconsciously—he realized it wasn’t nerves driving him to get back.

  It was raw fury.

  The realization came on him like a white-hot flash. He kept walking, relying on his external sensors to keep him out of trouble, but internally his processors were ramping up with awareness. He wanted a fight. He wanted to see his enemy and mess them up, badly. He wanted to destroy something. A wall or a shop window.

  He kept walking.

  Cressida was an ordinary human. When she experienced greater-than-average G-pressures, her skin compressed her veins against her muscles until they broke open, releasing iron into her body and raising swollen welts. If her limbs experienced force on the distal ends, they could snap. If her skull received a sharp tap in the wrong place, it could shatter.

  He could tolerate periods without oxygen, water, or food; he could withstand temperatures that burned up or froze off his outer layers of skin; he could survive shock and trauma until there was nothing left of him but a piece of twisted titanium-alloy core. But she couldn’t.

  She couldn’t.

  He slammed back to active consciousness with the ping that he was standing outside a dispensary. The place didn’t look like much from the outside—a single bulb blinking outside a darkened shop front. He pushed open the door—not automated—and walked in.

  The place immediately took on the same hush as the rental room. Anonymized. Shelves were mostly empty; they held a few ancient snack bags and MREs, and dust so thick he was pretty sure they hadn’t been restocked since the discovery of rubilum farming. Considering what was floating in the atmosphere right now, he was a little surprised the place hadn’t been cleaned out.

  An old guy sat behind a black glass counter at the back. He wore jeweler’s spectacles and rubbed gun oil through a suspiciously shaped tube. He didn’t look up when Xan set the box on the counter. “We’re closed.”

  “Good.” He studied the inventory through the thickly polarized glass. “I’ll take two boxes of hair restorative, two sets of irises, two tubes of skin pigment in 16B and 47A, and a tub of Contusi-Off, super-size. Oh, and some painkillers. Do you have any NociDeceptors or ThalaMute?”

  Despite saying that they were closed, the man set aside his appliance, reached under the counter, and brought out the items. They were in unlabeled packaging, nondescript. “You’ve got a lot of balls there.”

  “I had a lucky hit.”

  “What makes you think I take them?”

  “No tracking.” He formulated his best innocent grin.

  The old man paused, flashed up to Xan’s eyes. Whatever he saw in them caused him to come off his stool. Ex-military, a precision accompanied his movement to rip off the jeweler’s lenses and back out of immediate reach. “You’re a hundred short.”

  Well. Fuck.

  He rested both palms lightly on the edge of the glass and tried for rueful. The old man hadn’t actually counted. Getting another hundred was no problem, but by the time he got back, he suspected the shop would be closed for real. “Can you help me out? I’ve had kind of a rough day.”

  The old man eased his hand behind him. “You’re short.”

  “I’m trying to get back to my girlfriend. She’s laid up, and she really needs this. Anything—”

  He whipped out an early-model neural disruptor, arresting Xan mid-plea. The cold plastic gleamed, well cared for. Standard issue in the Colony Wars of Alpha Brava, among others. His diction descended into a thicker dialect, not entirely familiar, but plausibly colonial. “Get out.”

  N
eural disruptors practically destroyed human brain stems, and a direct headshot would mess up an android for a few minutes while the systems rebooted. The things Xan needed were just sitting on the counter. And he would bet he was faster than the old man, even with military training.

  But taking other people’s shit wasn’t his way.

  Xan let out his breath in a sigh. “Fine.”

  The old man kept his sight on Xan’s chest, unwavering, while he picked up his box and headed for the door. In the reflection of the blacked-out windows, the old man remained frozen, locked in his past.

  Xan put his hand on the door.

  “Wait.”

  He turned.

  The old man’s aim didn’t waiver. Square on the chest. “Where are you going?”

  Something about his tone brought Xan’s senses up to high alert. He calculated trajectories. Dropping under the shoulder, he could roll— Or he could kick through the glass, or—

  Xan kept his own tone easy. “I don’t want any trouble.”

  “You should’ve thought of that on Brava IV.” His barrel was starting to shake as his voice rose. “You should’ve thought of that before you wiped out the kids in those refugee ships. Before you potshotted survival pods. Before you let us go with about three hundred left.”

  Xan eased his fingers around the handle. Part of him didn’t really believe the man would shoot him at the door of his own shop. He was upset, but not stupid. “I wasn’t even conceptualized when those events happ—”

  The neural disruptor discharged. A pulse of pure energy shot across the shop.

  Xan moved slowly, dropping as he had planned but at an awkward angle, and his human knees gave out. The shot caught him above the breastplate.

  Searing electricity danced across his skin, turning the dead top layer toasted brown. His eyebrows singed off. All of his joints spasmed, and his jaw clicked together. The deafening sound of the entire box tipping over and scattering across the tile preceded his dead impact on the ground.

  But because it wasn’t a headshot, he remained conscious while his body spasmed out.