Shit. Shit. Shit. An old man in an undisclosed shop had gotten the drop on him. He couldn’t even concentrate enough to be pissed. Cressida was waiting for him, and the room was counting down. He didn’t have time for this.
The old man came around the counter and walked toward him. This time, the disruptor was aimed at his head.
~*~*~*~
Xelia|Brae walked the length of the crashed satellite’s destruction path, furious. Though, you couldn’t tell it by her sure movements and calculated actions.
Failure tasted strange and bitter on her tongue.
Cameras throughout the building had been disrupted by the crash, which had ripped repeaters from walls and introduced stray concrete dust and magnetic interference. Xan|Arch had done something very clever, which was to have the satellite record the target Cressida Sarit Antiata’s chip ID and then broadcast it. Valuable time had been wasted on the downed satellite and not chasing the target. She had blipped a couple of times on lower floors and outdoors, but by now they could have gotten to anywhere within the city.
While the Transit Authority conducted eyewitness interviews, she accepted their strong request not to participate and instead envisioned the crash. Was it too much to hope for that one or both of them had gotten severely, lethally damaged? She suspected so.
“Representative Brae.” A service bot of the Transit Authority wheeled to a respectful distance. “The shuttle has been traced back to an uninhabited nature preserve in the middle of the ocean. The shuttle engineer says that the criminals were living in an illegally constructed structure.”
“How were they able to access the island?”
“A private yacht dropped them off two days ago on the pre-authorization of a General Vardis.”
She calculated that. “I would like to interview that person.”
“He is a highly respected law-abiding citizen who has willingly obeyed house arrest during the change of leadership. No one has entered or exited any of his private residences since before the first concession.”
So, they preferred for her not to interview him. “Why did he aid in the evasion of the criminals?”
“As a founding shareholder and public lands commissioner, he has pre-approval authorization over all uninhabited, neutral, and restricted zones. The female criminal worked for him and would have discovered access codes at that time.”
She tilted her head, studying skid marks on the ceiling. Blood? She could only hope. “I would like greater surveillance over his estates.”
“We are already surveying him as closely as the law allows.”
She made a mental note to change the satellite cameras to focus on his residences. Then she stepped forward and dropped down the elevator shaft.
The wind blew her hair from her face. She caught the same handhold that Xan must have and swung herself through the broken metal door into the lower hallway, startling the workers documenting the accident.
He had fooled her. On the shuttle, after she’d executed the master-slave protocol, she knew he hadn’t been connected to the network because she had not felt satisfaction in completing half her assignment. But she had thought perhaps he needed to reboot. He had followed her as if in a daze until the last action proved he had been acting on a different agenda all along.
Perhaps what surprised her the most was the program she shot at him had somehow been circumvented. It had never executed. Perhaps it had never even installed.
An x-class couldn’t think for himself. Someone else had to be thinking for him.
Or, whatever was wrong with him, whatever had turned him rogue had also pushed him into a more independent class. She couldn’t turn away from her orders—not that she would want to. But installing or executing a program wasn’t a choice. Not for an x-class.
Thoughts whispered along her neurons. Ideas, half-formed. Some were treasonous, suicidal, and she killed those thought loops and the neurons that had inspired them. Others whispered more creative solutions to do her current work. And the last, a voice in her head with the certainty of an order, directed her to move. She had work to do.
The Faction was creating a new master-slave program. One that would rip out his new independence by the roots and force him to return to their command.
And once he did, her assignment changed. You are no longer to execute the target Cressida.
Xelia|Brae wasn’t to execute Cressida.
A fully reprogrammed Xan would do so. One controlled by the Faction. Xan will execute the target himself, recreating the original conditions of the assignment. A shot in the head, a laser from space, and, they hoped, a trap to lure in the mysterious entity that had originally severed him from the Faction, and must now still be controlling him. Somehow.
“Representative Brae.” The service bot had taken another route and caught up with her. “We ask you again to reconsider disrupting citizen General Vardis.”
“It’s fine.” Her hand passed over the butt of her new shatter pistol. “I know where they’re going now anyway.”
~*~*~*~
Color, chaos, shouting, horror—
Cressida shook awake, sweating and gasping, grasping for anything to stop the out-of-control tumble. Her heart thundered in her chest. Her fingers clawed bedsheets and she kicked air. The world slowly righted to a room, and herself on a bed. The hotel. In the arcade. She lay back, fighting for breath, the nightmares still bright against her consciousness.
She had survived. Xan had saved her. She was alive.
Her body ached and her bruises panged. She shifted, trying to find a comfortable position, but everything hurt more than before. Tears pressed at the corners of her eyes. She rubbed them away impatiently, preparing for the next fight.
When she had woken beside Xan the night before, she hadn’t realized how comforted she had felt, how safe. Now, without him, she felt like a helpless chick afraid to peep.
The room lights dimmed and brightened again. A disembodied voice spoke. “Fifteen minutes. Please vacate the room in the next fifteen minutes or we will force your exit. Thank you.”
So, that was what had awakened her. Should she leave? She rolled to face the door. Xan still had fifteen minutes. She closed her eyes, skirting the dangerous edge of a nightmare.
“Ten minutes.” The disembodied voice startled her awake a second time, rocketing her upright, blinking against gummy lids. “Please vacate the room in the next ten minutes or we will force your exit. Thank you.”
Something had gone wrong. Something had changed. Reason fought against the exhaustion sucking her body back towards the bed and lost. Xan wasn’t coming…
“Five minutes.” The disembodied voice woke her for the final time, the lights deepening to a crimson shade of warning red. “Please vacate the room in five minutes or we will force your exit. Thank you.”
She sat up, hugging her knees.
Where was Xan?
~*~*~*~
Xan stared up at the old man. His jaw tapped his teeth together like a castanet; paralyzing shocks raced through his body. It could be worse. From the look in the old man’s eyes and the way he held the neural disruptor, it looked like it was about to be.
“I often thought about what I would do if I came across one of you again.”
His voice softened, somehow younger than it had been moments before. The old eyes veiled a sort of inevitable determination, a criminal who had long envisioned his last meal, or the escape route that needed only a single error on the part of the guards to set him free to terrorize again.
“After my wife died, after our kids, after all of our neighbors. After everyone in our city plat. They shut off the oxygen to the whole asteroid, you know that? We didn’t even get the choice to surrender.” He shook his head. “No one told us we were at war.”
Xan couldn’t respond. His history of the Alpha Brava section wasn’t in immediate memory because it hadn’t seemed necessary for his assignment. But isolated colonies on the edge of two larger powers often fell victim when one
or the other decided to make an example. And depending on whom the Faction had supported—possibly both, if there was advantage in it—then some of the enforcers would certainly have been robots.
“Why did I live when so many others died? I thought about it when we got rescued, when I was one of the survivors and not the bodies lying all around me. I thought about what I would do the next time I stared into your soulless, blinking red eyes.” He tilted his head, well out of touch range. “But you know, it isn’t as satisfying as I expected. Maybe if I kill you, it’ll fill that void you created, seeping out like a black hole, consuming everything meaningful from my life.”
He focused the barrel.
The door swung inward and bumped Xan’s twitching shoulder.
The old man pulled back.
A teen artificially advanced to his third decade, his youthful skin oddly stretched from cheap age-advancement drugs, stuck his head through the opening. His mouth gaped and his backwards cap flopped askew. “Hot rocks, Great-Great, d’jou ice a guy in your own shop?”
“Come in,” the old man said, removing his index finger from the trigger. “Lock the door.”
The kid kicked balls out of the way, nudged a square delivery suitcase past Xan, and obeyed his extended relative, flipping switches. Iron-alloy bars descended from the ceiling, reinforcing the glass. The dim light turned dimmer. The kid scooped handfuls of loose balls into the tray. “He was loaded.”
“Get a wand,” the old man said distantly.
Once again, the kid obeyed, returning with a magnetized wand that he used to sweep the loose balls back into the tray. His stained uniform was from a pizzese restaurant, and the cap advertised speedy delivery. He hummed while he worked, excited but not apparently concerned. “What are you going to do with him? Call my dad?”
The old man studied Xan. “You know how I feel about the Transit Authority.”
“I guess we could dump him in the incinerator. People burn up pretty fast.”
“He’s not a man.”
The kid dumped in the last balls and came to his relative’s side, leaning over Xan. “No way.”
“Get back.” The old man repositioned so that his next shot, if he needed it, would hit Xan in a head unobstructed by his adult-sized child.
The kid studied him with interest, but at least he knew better than to poke the skin when electricity still arced across it. That changed from confusion to the worst. Recognition.
“Move away,” the old man said again.
The kid shifted back, still well within hostage reach. “Everybody’s looking for this guy.”
“Oh?”
“He destroyed the diplomatic quarter and killed nineteen people in the Central Transit Hub. And an hour ago, he wiped out a whole floor in the plastics distribution sales building. Him and some woman. They’re chaos revolutionaries. ”
His gut clenched.
The old man tilted his head at Xan. “Chaos revolutionaries?”
“Yeah, they hate colonies and want everything to be a conglomerate.”
“The Nar are already doing that.”
The kid shrugged. “I saw the vids. He’s pretty brutal. You want me to toss him outside?”
Xan forced his teeth closed. The discharge was wearing off. “Lies.”
The kid jerked back, scrambling to his feet behind his elder. “Hot shit. He survived.”
“Of course he survived,” the old man said irritably. “Put away your stuff.”
The kid moved reluctantly, fear tight in his eyes, and then anger at the fear. He put the full tray on the pizzese suitcase and wheeled it to the back, raising his voice. “You’re going to die, you stupid terrorist. You came to the wrong shop.”
Clearly, that was true. Xan struggled to clamp down on the tremors. “It’s…lies. She isn’t…a terrorist. The Faction is trying to k…kill her.”
The old man scratched his lip. An old scar, small and white, he had elected not to heal. “Your bosses.”
He gripped his trembling fists. “Former.”
“Forget it, Great-Great! He’s a criminal. They’ve been looking for those two for days. They destroyed a city block.”
Xan jerked upright, slamming his back against the door, fighting the spasms. “That was the Faction.”
The old man backed away a few steps. “Not really any of my business.”
“That’s right, Great-Great.”
“And not that I believe you anyway.” The old man’s eyes fell on the contents of the counter. He paused. Half the contents would clearly do no good for a robot. He eyed Xan.
“Please.” Xan hugged his shivers. “She’s an ordinary human and…I’m trying to keep her alive. Until she can get away. And be safe.”
The old man picked his teeth. It was the action of a much younger man, revisiting a segment of his past that had long slept dormant under the crushing weight of the memories since. “Who’s paying you?”
“Nobody. I have to.”
“Says who?”
“It’s sure as hell not the Faction.”
“You sure?” The old man eyed him. “Say she gets away. What happens to you?”
“I don’t care.” But he wanted more, so Xan added, “They’ll catch me. When they do, they’ll disassemble me down to the constituent atoms.”
Only a slight tremor. Soon, he would have the ability to rise. And then he would chance his escape.
“When,” the old man repeated, the weight suddenly returning. “Careful with that who-gives-a-damn attitude. Volunteer for enough suicide missions and imagine how you’ll feel when you find you’re the only one who survived.”
Xan gritted his teeth. “I only care about her.”
“Yeah. Me too.” The old man looked at the neural disruptor in his hand. His jaw clenched and released, clenched and released. He gave Xan a long look from the side. “All we wanted was to be left alone. Left alone on Brava IV, left alone on Liberation VI. Now your Faction comes here, under the new name of the Nar. Pretty soon, you’re going to overrun the whole old empire. There will be nowhere to get away from your kind.”
“I’m just a guy—”
The neural disruptor snapped to his forehead. “You are not a guy! I’m a guy. My second wife’s great-great kid’s a guy. All the people you killed, all those innocent people, they were guys. You are nothing! You’re a hunk of metal molded into a man shape. You are nothing.”
The disruptor wavered.
The tension in the shop drew tight.
The old man’s mouth trembled.
Xan waited. He couldn’t move fast enough yet. Another shot would set his recovery back another ten minutes, a quarter hour, giving him that much less time to collect the supplies he needed and get back to Cressida. He braced for the hot arc of death.
But the old man’s hand started to tremble. He glanced down at that. A little tremor, either from holding the unfamiliar weight of the gun in a well-trained but long-ago-used position, or because…. His lips flattened.
“Do it, Great-Great.” The kid behind the counter salivated with interest. “He has it coming.”
He grimaced and lowered the disruptor.
“Aw,” the kid said.
The old man shook his head at Xan. “It’s not worth it. I can’t be bothered. It makes me tired.”
“I could do it,” the kid said.
He jerked his chin at the counter. “Package that up.”
The kid’s mouth dropped open. “You’re not helping him.”
“Move.” The old man walked around the back, flipped a switch, and took his previous seat. The iron-alloy bars rose to the ceiling, and the light outside the shop turned on. Inside, the lights brightened.
The kid moved around him, grumbling. He tossed the brown unlabeled bag at Xan, which skidded across the ground and spilled. Xan crawled over to it and scooped up his precious supplies with shaking, cupped hands.
“Give him his change,” the old man told the kid, who measured balls with a sorry expression, dumping them
into the tilling slot while the auto-counter read the total. About half was probably going back to him.
Xan sat back on his heels. “Actually, there’s something else I want to buy.”
The kid paused.
The old man looked over the top of his jeweler’s glasses. “Like I said before. You’ve got a lot of balls.”
“That’s what I’m talking about.” He staggered unsteadily to his feet, more than aware of the neural disruptor following his every move. He was pushing his luck, but he finally had an idea of how to get Cressida into the hospital undetected. “If you agree, you can keep the change.”
CHAPTER NINE
Cressida was trying to ease her badly bruised limbs into her unwieldy clothing when the light changed back to normal. “You have twenty-four more hours,” the room chimed. She was catching her breath when the door creaked open and Xan pushed in.
The power of her relief at seeing his familiar face nearly made her light-headed. She fell back into the bedding. “You cut it close.”
He pushed a pizzese delivery cart into the room and clicked the lock. “I had an unscheduled stop. But look!” He opened the cart. Inside, the deliciously greasy promise of calorie-dense food teased her nostrils and woke her stomach with a growl. “Fresh and hot.”
She smoothed the bedspread across her lap while he rested the food beside her. Thick, chewy noodles baked into a crisp-on-the-bottom crust topped with fresh mayonnaise, corn, and salty squid eyeballs. Her mouth watered as she pulled the very first wedge free. Steam released where the noodle-crust parted. She bit into the pie, enraptured by the wonderful food. “Oh, I never got this. Thank you. Oh, yes.” She closed her eyes and savored the mix of flavors. “I think I love you.”
He stroked her cheek, a sweet grin on his face. “If that’s the kind of thanks I get, I’ll have to bring you street food more often.”
Her cheeks flushed with heat. His eyes, mist and forest, focused on her. She ducked her head and concentrated on eating.
He hummed to himself while he moved around the room, arranging items from his outing near the shower, folding his paper bag.
“You should have some of this,” she called out, just to say something.
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