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

by Wendy Lynn Clark

  “I really do owe your parents a great debt,” he continued, “and I was happy that I could bring them here, to this moon, under the embrace of my hospitality, and again that I could assist them with leaving it.

  “Their daughter, on the other hand, was unimaginably expensive to import. A false crate packaged in a life-support freight and transited at faster-than-light speeds?” He shuddered with the memory.

  Here it came. His second push.

  “I won’t lie. To your parents I have owed, and do still owe, much of my business. You, on the other hand, Cressida Sarit Antiata”—he finished the snifter in a long gulp, set it on the ruby-inlaid tray with a glassy click, and fixed her with black accusation—“I could honestly never see the use for.”

  His words rolled through her like a cracking foundation.

  The wall casing behind him swung open, revealing a fully functional control room, but one she had never seen before, one from which he must conduct his secret business. Out of it strolled the two androids: Xan, hand cupped behind his neck, cheery grin on his oddly emotionless face, and the woman, a cold picture of death.

  Cressida froze into a solid statue of ice.

  “Sorry, Cressida,” the general said, coming up and patting her hardened shoulder. “I did ask you to go upstairs. You could have died easily in your sleep.”

  Her breath came out in a whisper. “Why?”

  “They are paying me an awful lot of money.” He patted her again and stepped back. “Not as much as your parents did, but one can’t live in the past. You understand.”

  She nodded slowly. She did understand. “I trusted the wrong person.”

  “A mistake born of desperation. You’re not the first to make it.” He flicked his fingers at the androids and turned away. “Take her.”

  Xan stepped behind her. She felt his familiar presence, his familiar heat, and smelled his familiar scent. Even mixed with machine oil and the oxidized odor of a new flight suit, the knowledge of him, undeniably him, pricked beneath her skin like so many tiny needles. She rubbed her bare arms. The stained chemise felt too thin for what had passed between them, and although she sensed his gaze on her, she couldn’t force herself to meet it, for fear of finding his old loving expression crushed beneath the inhuman flatness instead.

  The female android addressed the general. “Our instructions have changed. You are now required to vacate the premises.”

  The general turned. His voice was flat, his eyes hard. “What?”

  “We must recreate the conditions of the original execution for the purpose of trapping an uncatalogued rogue. Please exit the premises now to reach a safe distance with any of your precious belongings.”

  “This residence is my precious belonging,” he snapped.

  “We will not destroy all of it.”

  “You won’t destroy any of it.” He flicked to Xan and back to the female. “That wasn’t part of the deal.”

  The female paused. Then she repeated herself. “Our instructions have changed.”

  “I don’t give a damn about your instructions. You wanted the fugitive. I handed you the fugitive. Our business dealings are done.”

  “Your government has elected to cooperate.”

  While the two argued, Cressida felt something against the back of her head. She flinched away from it and turned.

  Xan’s hand arrested mid-stroke. He looked at it and then at her, blinking for one fraction of a second into himself; then flattened into the unfamiliar creature with a hot gun pressed to his side.

  Cressida’s heart squeezed in her chest. “Are you reconnected?”

  “Yep.”

  Her last memory was their argument. “Because of me?”

  He shrugged. “It was inevitable.”

  Her chest sank. Yet another person damaged by her proximity. Another person she had touched, cared for, and would now pay the ultimate price for her mistake. “Then you will still get disassembled.”

  “Soon as we’re done here.” He jerked his thumb at the female android. “She’ll guarantee it.”

  Cressida had wanted to save them. She had wanted to save all of them. “I’m sorry I didn’t trust you more.”

  “It’s okay.” His eyes remained flat. Unfamiliar.

  She swallowed down the hurt, but that only opened her to fluttering fear. “Are you going to complete your old assignment?”

  He nodded.

  Her fear spiked. “Th-then, are you really going to kill me?”

  “Sorry, Cressida.”

  Oh. As she had always feared. But somehow, hearing him confess it so honestly actually made her fluttering drift away into regretful acceptance. He was going to kill her. That made her sad.

  He read her sadness, and it seemed reflected in his tone. He cupped the back of his neck, boyishly embarrassed. “It’s orders.”

  Ah, his programmed stance. She watched it play out in his body like a marionette, the strings drawn by some inhuman superpower a hundred thousand nebulae away, and it just made the sadness that much heavier.

  She rubbed her tingling cheeks. The pressure built behind her sinuses, and then she remembered to tip her head, and it waned again.

  She asked the other question she had long feared the answer to but now had no reason not to ask. “Will it hurt?”

  His eyes had drifted to her hair again. He blinked on her face. “Nah.”

  Not reassuring. “Really?”

  His brows drew down for a fraction, released, and he shook his head, examining the sides of his new boots. Greased for power running. Ready to scale a wall and throw a bed out a window and keep on running. “We’re calling down a space laser. Anyone caught on the edge might get burned, but you’ll be right in the center, crisped to plasma before you feel a thing.”

  Crisped to plasma. Fear drew through her again, tight and sudden, a wire guillotine choking her at the throat. She wanted to run or cry or beg. Or…

  Xan’s pistol was unattended on his thigh. Quick, now, while the others were distracted. She could grab it and shoot the woman, threaten the general, maybe steal his private Upstairs shuttle—

  But she couldn’t shoot Xan.

  Even if he was no longer himself but an inhuman tool of the Faction, she couldn’t shoot him. Not to kill, not to injure. And who was she really fooling? She’d be a wreck even pointing the pistol at the female android, much less pulling the trigger.

  In her fantasies, when her own family was threatened by the fictional robot empire and she had the chance to end the standoff with a gun, she had always heroically thrown herself in front of the bullets, saving her family only by her own death. Now, the fantasy dissolved into reality. She was going to die. He had told her the method of her death. Now she had to throw herself in front of the bullets.

  But… if she was going to throw herself in front of the bullets anyway…. Her mind worked furiously. There had to be a way to make her death meaningful. There had to be something she could still do.

  “Sorry for scaring you.” He studied her from lowered lids. As though he really did regret it.

  She shrugged. Her shoulders felt heavy again. So endlessly heavy. “I asked.”

  “I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t have to.”

  The general and the android female reached some sort of crescendo. But Cressida couldn’t actually concentrate on it because Xan’s expression had changed again. Confused, as though listening for something too faint.

  “What?” she asked.

  He half shook his head, trying to jar the sound loose. “I keep expecting to sense you.” He reached for her and she stilled. He touched her hair, rubbing the thin red fibers between his fingers.

  The female android’s question cut across the argument, silencing everything. “What are you doing?”

  Xan swung to face her flat scrutiny. “Her hair color changed.”

  “And?”

  “Without the chip ID, it feels like she’s not really the target. You know?”

  “I have positive confirma
tion.” The female returned to the general, sensed that Xan was still caressing Cressida, and jerked back to him again. “Stop touching her.”

  He let his fingers trail down Cressida’s sensitive spine. “Why?”

  “It irritates me.”

  He cocked his brow at the female. Skepticism painted his features. “Are you shitting me?”

  “What a pointlessly redundant question—”

  The general interrupted. “For the last time, will you please all leave?”

  The female android returned to him. “As I have explained—”

  “The destruction of my residence in any part isn’t something I would agree to under any condition. Stop wasting my time.”

  The female android snapped her lips shut. “Fine.”

  Her shatter-pistol bolt melted his face and burst out the back of his skull, creating a dark mark on the wall. His body dropped into a smoldering pile.

  Shock drew Cressida’s diaphragm down to the floor, filling her lungs with uncontrollable volume like a balloon stretched to pop.

  “Now come on,” Xan told the female. “Was that necessary?”

  “Your way was a waste of time.”

  “You did it wrong.” He shook his head. “All you have to do is show him your gun and say, ‘Leave immediately or I’ll shoot you in the head.’”

  “I skipped the pointless threat.”

  The air ejected from Cressida’s throat in one horrified, powerless, uncontrolled scream.

  The female android snapped at her. “Stop vocalizing.”

  But when the air ran out, her lungs sucked in another breath. The general was there, lying there, where he’d been alive an instant before. He was now dead, permanently dead, forever and irresuscitably dead. The android’s words passed through her without sticking to any meaning. He was dead. Dead.

  The female android grimaced and shouted at her over the horror her body was ejecting in the form of noise. Then she raised the pistol at Cressida.

  Xan stepped smoothly forward and shoved the pistol at the ceiling. “Orders,” he reminded the female, his cheery smile unwavering.

  She jerked back with a tsk. “I was trying your empty threat.”

  “She’s too far gone.” He shook Cressida free of her stupor, jogging her scream from her throat, and pressed her face into his shoulder. She took great lung-gouging gasps.

  The female’s voice sounded irritated. “Is that the training of a subtype four?”

  “Yes, and because that was a dick move. Asshole or not, he was her friend.”

  And his body was there, dead on the floor, right behind her.

  Xan half lifted, half dragged her backward, away from the body of the dead general, into the secret control chamber. The walls glowed with input-output monitors displaying vectors and information from around the sector. Steps led down to unassuming doors, behind which she assumed the general—the dead general—kept his secret, illegal Upstairs shuttle. Xan held her, a solid presence, while she fought the horror of the last few minutes.

  “How long are you going to keep touching her?” the female asked from the doorway. “Satellites are passing.”

  Xan, as sensitive to the female’s irritation as Cressida was, rubbed her hiccupping back and pulled her free of him. He stroked her forehead, cupping her skull in a near echo from just a day before, when he was focused on saving rather than killing her. “You okay?”

  She hiccupped, striving for her answer to be true. “I’m okay.”

  “You sure?”

  She rubbed her watery cheeks. “Uh-huh.”

  “I’m going to make a circle on the floor, and I want you to stand in it. All right?”

  She nodded, struggling to control herself. As he removed the pistol from his thigh, the cold barrel a stark reminder of the death she had just witnessed and the one she was about to experience herself, clarity descended on her.

  “Xan, I love you.”

  He paused.

  She squeezed his hand. In the face of her imminent death, it was important for him to know.

  “Thanks,” he said finally, removed his hand, and melted a perfect shape in the middle of the floor with his weapon. He slapped it to his thigh and turned her shoulders toward the circle. “Go stand in the circle.”

  “Okay.” She stepped into the center of the smoldering plastic. The elevated floor was solidly constructed; the laser had eaten through the plastic and scorched the top layer of bedrock. “Does it matter which direction I’m facing?”

  “Not at all.” He tapped controls at the side. A slowly rotating grid appeared above him. The satellite network, PirateNet, maybe. “Don’t move an inch, and I promise it will be over before you even know it’s happened.”

  She folded her hands over her blood-smeared chemise.

  The female remained at the doorway, her gaze sweeping the monitors behind her and the nearby areas of the house, on watch for an intruder. “Xan, status report.”

  “A rogue program in my brain is trying to execute, but Faction controls are blocking it as expected.”

  “You’re logging the data for analysis.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He tapped the controls, angling the grid. “To really simulate the original conditions, they ought to have removed all traces of the unauthorized program.”

  “That will be noted for the next attempt.” The female’s gaze swept over the room as if expecting the rogue to emerge out of the air and, in so doing, swept across Cressida. The android’s gun was out, ready, and although it wasn’t pointed directly at Cressida now, she feared its deadliness more than anything else in the room. The robot continued her sweep, but her words were clearly directed at Cressida. “You really are obedient, aren’t you?”

  She lifted her chin. Only eleven minutes for Xan to reprogram the space lasers. Hopefully even this android’s mercurial temper could obey orders for eleven minutes. “Not for everyone.”

  “You did give the general a what-for,” Xan commented from the controls. “I told you I didn’t trust him.”

  “I should have listened to you,” she agreed.

  “Yep.” He started humming.

  The female swept the room again, her brows filled with a divot. “Subtype fours truly are inscrutable.”

  He tapped the controls with finality. “Execution isn’t always the most expedient way to get things done.”

  “Don’t denigrate it until you’ve run a controlled experiment.” But she stared again at Cressida on her next sweep. “If you aren’t so obedient to everyone, why are you so obedient now? Standing in that circle is going to get you killed. You can’t outrun a space laser.”

  Cressida tightened her fingers. “Does it look like I intend to try?”

  The female android studied her stance, but the answer had to be clear even as she moved into her next sweep. She returned to Cressida. “Are you stupid? Or is this a demonstration of the illogical human bonding?”

  “He said it won’t hurt.”

  Xan bent over the controls again, required by the time sensitivity of his calculations to execute the glitch program perfectly.

  The female squinted at Cressida. “You believe that?”

  “Yes.”

  The android stared.

  Xan had promised. He had apologized for his role in her execution. If he were crying or begging her forgiveness, she wouldn’t be able to face this moment with the dignity it deserved. She wouldn’t be able to lull the female android into a false sense of security so Cressida could do what needed to be done. It helped that she believed the truth in her soul.

  She closed her eyes on strength and opened them on acceptance. “I trust him.”

  He suddenly slumped over the controls.

  “Xan!” Cressida started out of her circle.

  “Don’t move.” The female stalked over to him, her pistol never wavering from Cressida’s head.

  He twitched on the ground. Had he sprung one of the general’s traps? Or had something hidden attacked him?

  The f
emale clearly reviewed those possibilities as she continued to sweep the area visually and knelt beside him. She rolled him over onto his back. His eyes rolled for the ceiling. “Xan|Arch, you’re flickering in and out of the network.”

  His hands came up. He squeezed his skull so hard the knuckles shook on the plate. His back arched. And then he slowly rolled down and blinked at the ceiling. He rose upright.

  The female grabbed his jaw.

  He focused on her. “I’m reconnected. It was a short circuit. An overloaded fuse. Nothing.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “You are connected. But something is off.”

  “What’s off? I don’t sense anything off.”

  The female pulled him close. “Open your mouth.”

  He did so.

  She stuck her tongue in, and they made out for about a minute.

  Cressida’s heart squeezed. She looked away and concentrated on her plan. Although the female android was faster and deadlier, Cressida had space lasers focused on her. There had to be a way to use that and save Xan from disassembly.

  The female eventually pulled back.

  “Are you satisfied?” Xan asked.

  Her face registered doubt, but she rose and allowed Xan to do so as well. She moved to the doorway, paused, and returned to stand beside him at the console. “What was your last input?”

  “I entered the coordinates for a focused laser followed by a general-spectrum pulse to crater this entire property. The two pulses are separated by fourteen seconds, calculated for planetary drift and atmospheric resistance.”

  She studied the outputs, but the calculation was clearly taking her some time. “When you slumped, I thought I saw you touch something else.”

  “Everything is ‘touching’ with you.”

  “You are the one who cannot stop touching the target.”

  He rubbed his head. “Do you sense anything else wrong with me?”

  “The external programs have stopped attempting to execute.”

  “If the central databanks don’t find it to be a problem, why do you?” He looked over her head at Cressida. “Maybe you should start watching point before we get surprised again.”

  Cressida tightened her hands into fists. The female android was going to get surprised again. Cressida would die, but she swore at least Xan would live.