Currently, thirty-eight patients occupied the fertility wing. The director watched the android exit the elevator and enter their area. Hopeful mothers. Single fathers. Liberation VI’s citizens.
Her sacred trust.
She set aside the glass and tapped Central Command.
“Director.” The pleasantly inhuman voice reminded her just how much of their world, even now, was made up of mechanical devices without even the pretension of humanity. Lucky that none were thus interested in killing her and nineteen others in a fit of all-too-human passion.
“I am issuing general order 48-53.” She rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Authorization code 7-7, 2-5, 8-A.”
“Authorization code accepted. Director, you were visited by an unknown individual within one hour of this order. Can you confirm that this order is your own and that you have not been influenced by an outside force?”
“I can confirm.”
She hoped, for her husband’s and daughters’ sakes, that the Nar who reviewed her actions would concentrate on her humanity and not on its consequences to their deadly mission. Assuming, of course, that a second laser glitch left anything of her or of her institution to judge.
“Initiate a full-institute evacuation.”
CHAPTER TEN
“Mr. Arch.” Dr. Tiam Neeso, a skinny man with hunched shoulders, regarded Xan in the empty examination room with a sickly smile. “I am not usually in the habit of uncrating a citizen of Liberation VI with multiple fractures and dislocations from a takeout delivery receptacle. What is the meaning of sequestering me for an unscheduled cleanup of an unused examination room?”
Xan gripped the mop hard enough to break it. His sterile blue-gray biocleaning suit, lifted from a second-basement staff closet, fit snugly. “Where is she?”
“The patient? She is receiving treatment for her injuries, assumedly caused by you.”
“And that is where?”
“Another room.” The doctor regarded him with pale, watery eyes. “I do not know what criminal activity you expect me to assist you in, but that is not how we do things at this—”
“Doctor.” Xan took a deep breath; sometimes that assisted others in calming down. “I found you via a directory search. Our pursuers most likely have also. We have limited time before they arrive and begin filling the resurrect quota for the off-world shuttles. Please work with me.”
He paled. “Are you threatening me?”
“I don’t need to.” Xan jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Any minute, somebody else is going to burst through one of these doors and do it for me. I’m trying to save lives here. Yours, mine, and Cressida’s. Where is she, and have you altered her ID chip?”
The doctor folded his hands. His rings clinked together. The man was shivering. “I simply don’t understand why you think I would do anything against the law.”
He felt the declination of time ticking down in his brain and fought the distracting urge to hurt something. “Then can you get to it?”
The doctor laughed drily. “Mr. Arch, are you a surgeon now? Do you have any idea? You can shove a hypo up someone’s nose in less than a second, but performing delicate brain surgery takes much longer, especially if your patient is already shot full of chemicals and blue from oxygen deprivation.”
“So you did blood work already.”
“I had to know what drug rendered her comatose with so many terrible injuries. The cruelty necessary to fold a human being such that her spine cracks in three places, deliberately causing quadriplegia if left untreated, boggles the spirit.”
“If left untreated.” Xan peered out the polarized exam window into the hall. The room had no external windows or doors. A miscalculation on his part. “Finished or not, she needs to leave, now, before anyone else gets hurt.”
The doctor was simply shaking his head, sickly amusement coloring his face green. “I would like to help you, or more realistically, I would like to charge you in a court of law for your allegations, but I can’t, of course. I would have reversed the deposit if only I knew.”
Something about his mannerisms clicked. “Are you stalling?”
The doctor turned a paler shade of green. “St-stalling? I want you to leave now, preferably in handcuffs, but I will be more than perfectly satisfied if you never come back.” He licked his lips and rubbed his nose. “You are welcome to leave at any time.”
As he spoke, the lights dimmed and a low siren filled the hall. An automated recording played an all-too-familiar tune. “This is an evacuation warning. Please gather your items and proceed to the nearest exit in an organized fashion.”
Red lights flashed on the floor leading out the closed door.
Shit.
“Out of time.” He jerked open the wall console, causing the thin doctor to jump, and keyed in the overrides. A privacy warning blared across the screen. He hard-booted past it, easily disengaging the primitive security features to access the gridded overlay. He zoomed in to their wing—Fertility. The identification codes only held meaning for the decryption program—
Except for the obvious android ID currently striding down the hall to this room. It lifted its pistol and aimed.
He yanked the console out of the wall, dragging half the plaster with it. “Shit!”
A smoking line of holes appeared in the door at chest level; they impacted the console casing and melted it to goo. The doctor dove for the floor. Xan dropped the console and flipped the exam table on its side, using the rubilum alloy as a shield to scatter the incoming blasts. Its stabilizing gyros shrieked. He shoved it forward to shelter the doctor from the fire.
The door ripped outward as if it had been suction-blasted. The privacy screening folded into crumpled metal.
He rammed the table through the door. The gyros forced it upright as soon as it left his hands. It would be too much to ask for an accessible balcony.
The other x-class stared at him from the center of the hallway, blocking his exit. She lifted her pistol, the barrel centered between his eyes.
He flipped the table upright, absorbing the shots. The doctor, who knew where Cressida was and possibly still had to perform the surgery, dodged behind him.
He yelled over his shoulder, “Run, doctor!”
The table flipped unexpectedly, the long edge catching him on the jaw and snapping his mouth shut.
The x-class leaned around the table and leveled her pistol on the center of the fleeing doctor’s coat, tails flying behind him down the hall to the freight elevator.
Xan punched into the x-class’s arm.
Her aim didn’t waver. A white blast seared Xan’s ear and a red scatter pattern appeared across the doctor’s back.
He stumbled and disappeared between the closing elevator doors. The outer doors closed, absorbing her second bolt.
Xan levered the exam table between them.
She threw the bed out of her way and caught him by the throat in one fluid motion. She slammed him into the ground and held him immobile. A human throat would be crushed under her pressure; his only lost its oxygen as the tube slowly crumpled. Her eyes reflected deadness.
Fuck. He did not want this. He did not want to go back to the Faction. The Faction could fucking fuck themselves.
She stowed her pistol and placed a small metal tube in front of his right eye. He tensed. Light flashed him.
Reboot sequence.
He became aware of the distant sirens before his eyes focused on the other x-class again. She was twitching and blinking in the standard pattern of a seizure, in this case most likely caused by a data dump from their overlords crowding out her usual operating controls.
Move, he urged his body, but it remained dead to his command.
She focused on him once more, opened his unresisting mouth, and stuck in her tongue.
This time, the program files installed and executed.
After a few minutes, the full force of the Robotics Faction pumped into him, extracting his data from the moment he had last lost cont
act, filling him with the certainty of his mission. The information about the rogue that had disconnected him and started this odyssey was sucked away. New instructions flowed back into his brain.
Cressida Sarit Antiata had to die.
Xelia|Brae stepped off of him, and he rose.
A full systems check revealed damages, the nearest places to repair them, and that such repair was unnecessary. What mattered now, and had always mattered, was the elimination of the target. How strange he had ever considered it a good idea not to complete his mission—no, even more so, to do the exact opposite.
“Where is the target n81x?” Xelia|Brae asked.
“Somewhere in this building,” he said. “The doctor knows her location.”
“Collect him.”
Xan|Arch summoned the elevator. It arrived, but the last shot had warped the outer doors and melted them together, and he wasted half a cycle brute-forcing them apart. The amount of blood streaking the cold metal of the inside box gave him a vague sense of displeasure; a dissonance that his training told him was an inefficient waste of resources. “He’s probably dead.”
Xelia|Brae looked down the opposite hallway.
Xan|Arch released the doors and turned. “If all have evacuated, finding the ones unable to do so will be simple.” He opened the nearest wall console, tapped in the override codes, and navigated to the different areas of the hospital. Children’s wards, elderly care, disability therapy.
Xelia|Brae demagnetized her pistol. “I accept the process of elimination.”
He reviewed the screen. Her suggestion increased his dissonance. There was no need to eliminate anyone but the target.
He tapped the lower floors of the fertility clinic, sifting through extraneous life signs to only those that could plausibly be n81x Cressida Sarit Antiata. “Let’s start here.”
~*~*~*~
Cressida crawled from a long, narrow tunnel into the light of the waking world.
The light of the waking world fluctuated with the long, slow breaths of her body.
She stared at the red-spattered ceiling, peacefully experiencing the ebb and flow. It echoed strangely in her ears, and it smelled like antiseptic, but it didn’t actually bother her. Something wailed in the distance, and words were being spoken off to her right. She tried to turn her head to see.
Her head wouldn’t turn.
She pushed against the resistance. Her head was wedged to something. No, strapped. She lifted her hands to remove the strap, and they jerked against their own restraints. She was strapped down at the waist, the knees, and the feet.
She wiggled and shifted. Her thumb caught on the edge of a release. With a hiss, the bond let go. She released her left hand, lifted it overhead, and thumped glass plate. Fear spiked. She was inside an incubator, still wearing her chemise. Her joints throbbed with a dull pressure, possibly from the Bruisease.
Wait, where was Xan? Had she been captured while they were both asleep? Was he okay?
She quickly undid the rest of her straps, pushed open the incubator, and sat up. The rush of cooler, less oxygenated air made the room reel and her belly clench. Pizzese roiled, a ball in her belly threatening to bounce up. She lay down again until the sensations passed and her vision cleared. Then she slowly pulled herself upright.
She was in a small, L-shaped storage closet. An overhead light illuminated shelves of boxes stenciled with “sterile” and “single-use” and “caution.” She gripped the edges and eased herself out of the incubator, sliding uncontrollably onto the floor. The same spattered redness she’d noticed on the ceiling streaked wetly beneath her bare legs and stained her thin chemise. It smelled like blood.
She looked up.
The ceiling was no longer spattered. Oh, it had been on the outside of her incubator, on the glass. Maybe Xan’s blood? No, his was usually contained by magnetese. He could survive in outer space, after all. The coolness touched her and she shivered. He had to be okay.
Cressida pulled herself to her feet, closed the incubator, and hung over the spattered glass while the room stopped moving around her. Her legs shook. She gulped for breath. A headache centered behind her nostrils. She rolled her head to the side, and the pressure dissipated.
Outside, in the hallway, she could make out the calm words and tones, familiar from her school years. “This is an evacuation warning. Please gather your items and move to the exits in an organized fashion. This is an evacuation warning. Please gather your items and move to the exits in an organized fashion. This is an evacuation warning. Please…”
Okay. She couldn’t walk, and she couldn’t rest her head in the forward position, but she had to evacuate the building.
She crumpled to the ground, crawled between the shelves to the aisle and down it to the door, and then tipped her head back against it and gathered her strength. When she felt strong enough, she waved her hand in front of the sensor. It did not respond. She smacked the manual open button, and the door slid to the side.
The lights in the hall flared and dimmed. Aside from the evacuation warning, the whole building was oddly silent.
The door slid closed behind her.
A hospital was never silent, but she could hear the distant squeaking of a ventilation fan and the closer thump of someone going down an evacuation chute. She followed the sound across the hall, past overturned chairs and tables. There was no access point, only solid wall. She rolled from her hands and knees over to her butt and rested the crown of her head against the wall. Fluid filled her nose—mucus?—and ebbed again. She closed her eyes.
Noises again—an elevator opening. Voices, a man and a woman. Her heart squeezed into her throat, and she came head-poundingly awake. She eased into the shadow of the tables, angling herself so that the doorway was blocked by shadow and furniture. Careful and quiet.
“Your intuition was incorrect,” a woman’s voice snapped coldly. “The doctor obviously had enough blood left in him to survive.”
“You didn’t question my calculation.” Xan’s rough reply made her start. He was okay! She pressed her trembling lips together as his voice got louder. He was coming to get her. “Don’t you appreciate his Hippocratic dedication? It’ll lead us right to n81x. See, he stashed her in the closet, ran across the hall, and then took off for the evacuation chute at the end of it.”
“I’d better appreciate the target dead.” The woman stopped directly in front of the room. Cressida could see the tip-top of her head. “You will kill her this time.”
“Whatever you say.” Xan’s forehead came into view. His hair was a darker color and fuzzy-short, but she would know his voice anywhere.
“You will do this because it is required,” the woman said.
“More than happy to,” he replied. “I can’t think of why I ever changed my mind.”
A cold darkness formed in Cressida’s belly. These were not the conciliatory words of a man pushed into desperate circumstances to mislead an enemy. These were the cold, calculating words of a man who had awoken to his original mission.
“If you hesitate, I will immobilize you,” the woman said.
The door of the storage closet slid open.
“Does your type turn every agreement into an argument?” he asked.
The woman’s answer was lost in the sealing of the hall door.
Cressida’s chest tightened in a hard lump. Xan had returned to the Robotics Faction. They had reprogrammed him. He was a robot, so that could happen. Despite everything he had said. Despite what they had done together only a short time ago in the hotel room—
No, no time for that now. They were in the storage closet for seconds. Fractions of seconds. She had to get out. He would follow the blood trail. He would realize it wasn’t the doctor who had smeared it across the hall into this room. He would find her and kill her with his bare hands.
The urge to stay and hide immobilized her.
But no one else was coming.
She had to rescue herself.
I am not useless.
Xan had told her to believe.
Cressida broke through the paralysis, crawling out from around the tables, past the overturned chairs. Her foot hooked on a jutting chair leg, and the whole stack shifted. Her heart hammered in her throat. The door loomed; the hallway fluoresced. They would find the incubator immediately; the closet was only a few meters wide.
She turned away from the door and down the hall, away from them. Her hands trembled. She clawed the wall, pushing herself to her feet. Her legs shook but held. Her bare feet slapped the tile. Steps, agonizing steps. Almost to the end of the hall. There, around the corner, the escape chute.
Voices again. The storage closet behind her slid open.
“—saying she can’t have gone far,” Xan said.
Cressida froze.
Two androids exited the room. Xan centered on Cressida. His face split into a familiar grin. “Cressida.”
The woman stepped to the side. Observing.
Xan’s hands rose. In them was a pistol. Pointing at her.
She staggered around the corner. Hot pain bit her elbow and charred her hair. Fear roared in her ears louder than any shot blasts. She yanked open the chute and collapsed into it, sliding down the molecule-greased tube shoulder-first. Another blast of white heat seared her leg, and a puff of warmth filled the long space, and then the chute slammed shut. Gravity pulled her away from the superheated metal shrieking above her in the darkness.
She ejected onto hard concrete, tumbling to a flop. The world continued to rotate, and her stomach rose into her throat. Her head glazed with pain. Oh, yes. She rolled over onto her back. The pressure retreated from her nose. She clawed upright.
She was outside the hospital in a loading dock between sidewalk and gardens. To one side, a group of physicians resuscitated an accident victim who had lost a lot of blood. Beyond them, sentries held back the crowds.
One sentry stomped across the carefully sculpted gardens, tracking mud on its serrated boots. It addressed each doctor by name and repeated the same message. “Please proceed to a safer distance.”
Liberation's Kiss: A Science Fiction Romance (Robotics Faction Book 1) Page 17
