And from the very awake and still standing state Zero was in, it was clear he’d figured out a way to negate the tranq’s effects. He’d discovered an antidote for my creation before I had even had a chance to do so. He’d probably used notes from my files to do so. He was a step ahead of me yet again. It was frankly bewildering, and not at all encouraging.
“No…” I whispered, the word slipping helplessly past my trembling lips.
Zero said nothing. He maneuvered his hold on my wrist so that my arm twisted upward behind me. Reflexively, my body pressed more firmly against his in an effort to relieve the tension this dreaded hold caused in my shoulder. I grimaced when he continued, going a little further than strictly necessary, and pain began to shoot through my shoulder. I knew this was his way of punishing me, but I refused to satisfy him by making a single sound.
Zero reached down and slid his free hand along my free arm until it wrapped around the gun in my grip. I let it go. It was useless anyway. He took it from me with ease and handed it back to the soldier I’d swiped it from. Then he straightened and took my chin between his fingers, tilting my head back so I had no choice but to look into his eyes.
“Strike two, Dandelion,” he told me. He didn’t raise his voice at all, but if there was ever a vessel of controlled wrath made animate in the world, it was IRM-1000 in that moment. “You don’t want to know what happens when you strike out.” He looked up at the doorway to the bathroom and spun me around so fast I grew dizzy.
Then he put the cuffs on me himself. My shoulders slumped when I heard them click shut. I knew that sound. It wasn’t a mechanical locking sound, it was electronic. These damn things were top of the line, made for androids, and nearly impossible to escape from. They didn’t even have a keyhole. They would only release when the person who’d encoded them was touching them and spoke the release sequence.
Since they’d been designed for humans to use against androids, I could assume Zero modified them for android bio-rhythms, specifically his. But that wasn’t even the only hard part to get past. Zero was an android, so the phrase he’d chosen for the lock could be as long and complicated as one chosen by any computer. I didn’t have a hope in hell of decoding it, not any time soon.
Zero took me by the arm to lead me from the suite out into the hall. He moved briskly, and as we reached the living area, I caught the muffled sound of gunfire and explosions. Hope flooded me. Was it Daniel? Nicholas? Was Jack up there?
Zero kept moving, his stride strong and purposeful. As the other soldiers branched off, assumingly to take up battle positions or join whatever fight was transpiring – wherever it was transpiring – Zero placed his hand to the hidden scanner in the wall and unlocked the sliding door that led to the wing where Lucas was being kept.
I didn’t want to fight him, I really didn’t. But I could feel my feet sliding a little as he took me down that hall, because I was petrified of what he might do, not to me, but to Lucas.
“You don’t have the time right now to hurt him, Zero,” I said quickly, trying the old-fashioned tactic of reason, since it was really my only choice. I knew if he left right now and didn’t waste time going after Lucas, his chances of getting away with me in his possession went way up. But I didn’t care. All I could think about was Luke’s safety. “Your best bet would be to leave IRM-900 alone and get out of here without delay,” I added.
Zero kept moving.
“Because from the sound of it, there’s a real war going on above ground!” I tried some more, stumbling a little as we drew closer to Luke’s cell door and I instinctively put on the brakes. “You’re probably outnumbered!”
Zero stopped in front of Luke’s cell door and turned to me as he pressed his hand to the scanner and the lock clicked. “You’re right of course,” he told me with a purely evil curl of his lips. “Which is why I placed him in the only cell also equipped with a built-in escape passage.”
The door slid open – revealing an empty room beyond.
I blinked, stunned. Zero stiffened.
“Which is exactly why you shouldn’t have put me in that room,” came a familiar and once-again strong voice behind us.
My heart hammered. At once, I tried to turn and face him. But faster than light, Zero reacted to the new threat and forcefully pulled me behind him before spinning around. Luke acted just as quickly however. Before I could register what he was doing and the fact that he’d actually done it, Lucas also grabbed hold of me, ripping me from Zero’s grasp with a series of violent moves that saw Luke’s shoulder in Zero’s abdomen, and crushed my bones beneath Luke’s merciless grip. I tried not to cry out when pain wrenched through me as Lucas succeeded in tearing me away from his enemy before throwing me to the ground several meters away. Even as I fell, the two hard bodies collided in fierce hand-to-hand combat that progressed too fast for human eyes to follow.
I couldn’t catch myself as I fell, so I hit the stone floor hard with my entire weight landing almost solely on my right arm, the same arm Luke had used to rip me away from Zero. I heard something terrible happen in my elbow and felt a jarring pain in the same shoulder Zero had threatened earlier. Again I tried not to cry out, honestly I did, but this time the pain shoved stars into my vision and a buzzing noise through my ears, and through that buzzing I heard what sounded an awful lot like me crying out in pain.
“Samantha!” Luke’s voice followed after mine, but I ignored it in favor of trying to get up while handcuffed and clearly injured. I couldn’t think. My mind was a jumbled mess of confusion and agony. Lucas had just…. I gritted my teeth and fought back tears. I had never seen him behave like that, so violently. Not toward me.
Maybe I was confused. Maybe I hadn’t seen what I thought I’d seen. Androids moved so fast, after all. Or maybe Luke hadn’t had any choice and had miscalculated his strength. Or maybe there was something else wrong with me altogether.
I used my boots to push myself to the wall until I felt the cool stone against my right shoulder. There, I took a moment to breathe. Out of the corner of my eyes, I saw two figures struggling, one in gray and one in black. Both were dark enough however, that unless I looked directly at them I couldn’t tell which was which. Their speed and similarities were too much to keep up with.
“Sam!”
“Angel!”
“Sam!”
A harmony of voices called out to me at the same time, and I turned my head to find that several tall figures had rounded the corner at the end of the hall and were running toward me full-throttle. I pushed off the wall, my eyes widening.
“Jack! Daniel! Lex!” Oh my God, I thought, Oh my God they’re alive. They’re alive! My own pain was momentarily forgotten. “Holy shit, you’re not dead!”
Jack made a derisive sound as they reached me, and he and Daniel knelt beside me to help me up. “Not at the moment,” Jack said, “though I’m pretty sure I died a few times last Sunday morning. Belgian ale. Not meant to be chugged.”
I laughed, despite the pain that the jarring motion caused in my arm and sent shooting straight to my brain. Daniel either noticed my involuntary grimace or he had just scanned me with his android abilities, because his expression became immediately concerned. “Your arm is broken in two locations,” he told me.
“What?!” Jack exclaimed, “You gotta be fucking kidding me!” I studied at Jack as he gently turned me toward him, concern etching his features. “What did that plastic fucker do to you?!” He no doubt referred to Zero. I wasn’t going to correct him.
Jack was sporting two black eyes, indicating a broken nose. And there was a healing gash on his forehead. The knuckles of his right hand were bloodied and bruised, the left less so but still bearing the evidence of at least one good fist fight.
“I still look better than you old man,” I told him with a wry, if tight, smile. I was so happy to see him alive in that moment, I could have endured two broken arms and still smiled.
His gaze cut from my shoulder back to my face, and his features softe
ned. “Yeah, you do,” he chuckled, shaking his head. Then he let me go and turned around.
Behind us and further down the hall, Zero and Lucas continued to struggle. My eyes slid from the men around me to the two androids, and I knew even before they stopped moving what I would find. Just as I’d suspected he would, Zero had again used his exclusive programming to assume Luke’s appearance, changing his clothing and the minute details of his appearance to match that of IRM-900’s.
I have got to get ahold of that program, I thought. Prometheus could use it.
“Son of a bitch,” Jack whispered. Even the Vulcan blood that should have shown on his white shirt was missing. Both IRM-900’s were clean, and they were moving too fast for me to tell whether one of them was taller than the other. “I fucking hate it when he does that.”
“I’ve never seen them last this long against each other,” said Daniel.
Neither had I. Both EED’s were bright red and flashing, both handsome faces at last twisted with rage. It was as if neither had ever been truly angry before this moment, and that fury was super-fueling them both. I was especially impressed with how long Lucas was holding out. I didn’t want to admit it, but IRM-1000 really had been an improvement on the battle-side of things as far as design was concerned. But right now, he and Lucas seemed equally matched.
And I began to feel very nervous. No one wanted to intervene. We couldn’t leave here with only one of them, not knowing which was which. And we couldn’t take both of them knowing one of them was Zero. It would be making the same mistake twice.
But time was still ticking, and Zero had control that stretched far and wide in his android armies. Was he calling for back-up right now? Would our Prometheus friends up above – I wondered who they were, who else had survived – be ambushed by hundreds of incoming soldiers any second now?
“Daniel, what happened with Prometheus?” I asked, needing to know right then and there that everyone I loved was okay. “And we can’t forget about Zero’s men. He’s able to call for backup.” I glanced over my shoulder nervously as if some evil android would round the corner and begin firing that second. Unless they had orders not to kill me and they were extra careful, I’d be the first person they hit.
I turned back to Daniel because he hadn’t yet answered me. Daniel met my gaze, and I saw what I had been afraid I would see in the depths of his uniquely bi-colored eyes.
“What?” I demanded softly. “Tell me.”
“We… suffered losses,” he finally admitted. “But Nick Byron’s aid has been invaluable in this mission and he’s waiting up top for us now.”
I opened my mouth to ask more questions, but Jack’s gentle hand on my good shoulder drew my attention to him. “Hey. Let’s focus on getting us all out of here for now,” said the wizened captain. He nodded, peering deep into my eyes. “Okay?”
I hesitated a moment, my mind spinning. We suffered losses…. I pictured the faces of my friends; I couldn’t help it. But then I nodded firmly and turned around so I could show Lex my cuffs. “Lex, is there anything you can do about these cuffs?”
“No, Angel. I’m afraid even I’m no good against those.”
“Byron,” said Jack as he pulled his gun from the shoulder holster under his jacket and faced the fighting Lucas twins. “He can take care of them. Stop moving your arm until then, Sam.” He lifted his gun and aimed at each of them in turn, and I knew memories must have been assaulting him then. “We just need to separate the shit from the shoe and get the fuck out of here first.” He shook his head. “This is getting old.”
I looked away as Daniel and Lex joined Jack in front of me and all three got ready to jump into the fray at the slightest hint of which android was which. But I knew they were too equally matched right now, and Zero had too much to lose to slip up.
I also knew there was a solution. It was there. Somewhere. I just needed to reach out and grab it. I focused on the IRM-900’s and concentrated, biting my lip to distract me from the growing pain of a broken limb as my eyes moved from one blurring, beautiful figure to the other and they hit the walls of the hallway again and again.
Then it hit me. That wall. The wall I’d erected to keep Zero out! Was it still in place? I focused inward and felt its immense, protective presence. I had no idea how I’d done it, but it didn’t matter right now. What mattered was that it was there, guarding me.
Would Zero notice if I “accidentally” allowed a thought to slip past it? No doubt he would. And if he thought it was accidental on my part, would he take it as genuine, and act upon it?
It was definitely worth a shot. Literally.
I moved up between the Prometheus members until I was standing beside Jack and he and the others glanced over at me. I leaned in to Jack’s ear and whispered very softly because despite the noise in the hall, Zero was an android and they had ridiculous hearing. Most likely he was concentrating on the fight at the moment, but just in case he was multi-tasking, I kept it low enough he wouldn’t hear me. “Get ready to fire exactly when I tell you. Aim for the one I tell you to aim for, and whatever you do, don’t hesitate.”
He and the others regarded me in that kind of wonder they sometimes did when they were trying really hard to figure out my thought processes, but willing to trust me even though in the end they couldn’t figure me out at all. Jack nodded, just once.
I faced the battling androids. At this point, they’d hit the wall enough times that chunks of rock had fallen to the floor in piles. The overhead lights were flickering. Outside, the occasional sound of gunfire signaled to me that someone was trying to hold someone else at bay. Time was short.
I chose my thoughts very carefully. When I had what I wanted, I let just a few short phrases drift up and over that thick metal wall in my head: … we practiced at Prometheus before this… attack is primed for both Lucas and Zero… we knew Zero would do this… but Zero doesn’t know… only Lucas… we’ll shoot at the one who doesn’t cover his ears….
I made sure it would all come across sounding genuinely fast, scattered, and scared, the way thoughts always were in stressful situations.
And then, like a ray of sunshine after a flood, one of the Lucases did exactly what I’d hoped he would do. He shoved the other one away and pressed his palms to his ears.
“Shoot the one covering his ears,” I told Jack.
Jack pulled the trigger, emptying round after round into the android I’d indicated to send him stumbling back under the impacts. As Vulcan blood blossomed across the android’s body and his uniform slid into the gray of his undisguised exoskeleton, I knew Jack had used real bullets in his gun, just as I’d thought he would. I could always count on Captain Hugo to do things old school.
And brutally effective.
Chapter Fifteen
As the injured android hit the ground, his clothing program rippled, revealing the original outfit of IRM-1000 and relieving my stress about a thousand-fold all the way down to my soul. I exhaled a violently shaky sigh replete with that relief as the still-standing Lucas – the real Lucas – turned a surprised expression on us.
“But captain – how did you….” He looked from Jack to his opponent, whose bloodied exterior had settled once more into the solid, tall, terrifying, and hopefully dead form of Zero. He looked like he was sleeping, but for the gaping holes in his chest.
“It was Sam,” said Jack, who then spun around and took me gently by my uninjured arm. “She’s the genius here, remember? Now come on! We gotta hightail it the hell out of here!”
Daniel was on my other side in a heartbeat, pushing Jack back with an insistent arm. “Carrying her will be faster,” he said firmly.
All at once, Lucas and Lex both stepped forward and together said, “I’ll carry her.” Lex probably didn’t want their leader’s hands tied during a desperate operation, and Lucas… probably didn’t want their leader’s hands on me. At least, that was the way I was interpreting his expression just then. It was as rare to see him display as had been the v
iolence he’d displayed with me earlier. But there it was. He looked patently jealous, and his EED was still red.
Daniel had already bent to lift me though. He picked me up easily and held me against his chest as he turned to face the duo. “I’ve got her.” He addressed Lex. “Lex, we’ll need your strength for any obstacles on the way out.” He addressed Lucas. “And Luke, you’ve been here longer than any other android. You have inside knowledge we’ll no doubt need as we go.”
The two rebels looked at each other, then looked at me. Lex nodded his acquiescence. What Daniel said made sense.
But Luke’s jaw twitched. Then his fingers did too where they rested down at his sides. I glanced up at Daniel to see if he noticed, but if he did, he said nothing. I looked back to Luke in time to see some of the intensity in his countenance slipping away as he watched me, leaving him with an air that looked truly pained. I saw his gaze slip down to my arm. He blinked and his brow furrowed. I knew he was sorry. I also knew he wanted to tell me as much.
His storm gray eyes flashed with lightning, and though he breathed slowly through his nose, I knew it was an affectation. He didn’t need to breathe at all. He was doing it out of habit, to calm himself down. So despite the immense pain that erupted in the right side of my body when Daniel lifted me into his arms, I smiled at Luke. Clearly the accident had been just that – an accident.
His eyes widened almost imperceptibly, and his EED slipped from red to yellow. I took it as a good sign and closed my eyes.
The pain was spreading for some reason. Now I was not only feeling it in my arm and shoulder, but in my ribs and even the right side of my abdomen. I bit my lip until I felt the flesh give and tasted blood, but I still couldn’t keep down the sound that crawled out of my throat, a low and miserable moan befitting of the dizzy spell the agony caused.
I felt instantly guilty about it. I knew Daniel had lifted me as gently as he possibly could. But I was also downright nauseated by the pain now, and I didn’t hesitate to rest my head against Daniel’s shoulder.
I, Android: A Different Model Page 14
