by R. A. Nargi
“Why did you not do this with Lieutenant Messer?” Tarsch sighed loudly, but placed his thumb on the soldier’s pad. “Now leave me. You have already made me late with your dawdling.”
As soon as I was alone with Tarsch, I said, “My name is Jannigan Beck, and I work for Beck Salvage. I’d like to know what we’re doing here.”
The doctor turned to look at me with a bemused expression on his face, as if I was a chimp who suddenly started to recite Shakespeare. Or sing a Stones song, for that matter.
“Mr. Beck, what we are going to do here is what is known as a forcible NAT. I don’t imagine that you are familiar with that procedure, are you?”
I thought about it for a moment. There were so many abbreviations. NAT didn’t ring a bell.
“Neural Array Transfer,” Tarsch said with a smug smile.
My heart jumped in fear. That was what my father did in order to survive on Bandala. He loaded his consciousness into a clone bot. Voluntarily. This psycho wanted to do it to me against my will.
“I don’t believe you,” I said, as calmly as I could.
Tarsch laughed and turned away to his datapad.
“I don’t believe you have access to Aanthangan technology.”
He spun back towards me. “You know about this?”
“Of course,” I said, trying to remember what the Sean bot had explained to me. “Atomic resolution neuro scanning.”
“Hmm.” Tarsch looked me up and down. “What was your position at Beck Salvage?”
“Oh, a little bit of this, and a little bit of that. Mostly I was kept around because I’m Sean Beck’s son.”
“That is good to know.”
“Why’s that?”
“It makes what’s in your mind that much more valuable. Doesn’t it, young man? The Jarl will be pleased. Very pleased indeed.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. Jarl Tuddon was the most psychotic of all the Mayir. Naturally he was their supreme leader.
“To answer your question, we have had some limited success with NAT. Of course, none of our subjects have survived the procedure. But who knows? Maybe you shall be the first, Mr. Beck.”
“How about you let me out of here and I tell you anything you want to know?”
Tarsch barked out another laugh. “Since you have some familiarity with NAT, you will know that one of the great advantages of the resultant array stub is that we remove the friction in the communication process.”
“Friction?”
He moved a headset harness down so that the electrodes rested on my temples. “When you say that you will tell me anything I wish to know, that is friction. Friction of autonomous thought.” He flipped a large switch on the control console and the machine surrounding me hummed to life. “No one likes friction.”
This situation was getting worse with each passing second.
“I respect your position, Doctor,” I said. “Can you tell me one thing, though? Does your procedure account for unconscious knowledge? Because most of what I know about, well, most everything, has been implanted via automated learning and neurocrene dosing. Truth be told, it was the only way. I’m a lousy student.”
“Nice try, Mr. Beck.” He snapped on a VR rig and looked at me through big bug-eyed, multi-faceted goggles. “We’ll be scooping it all out. Conscious, unconscious, and everything in between. Now if you’ll excuse me.” He pulled on a thick pair of headphones and sat back into a controller’s seat.
I was screwed. Tarsch was going to give me the equivalent of a brain enema. But unlike my dad, I didn’t have any choice in the matter.
13
I pressed against my bonds with all my strength, hoping—against all odds—for a faulty maglock mechanism on one of the cuffs.
No such luck.
But I kept trying.
As the machine spun up, I could feel the reverberation in my body. I wondered what it would be like, having my consciousness cored out of me.
Would I just die? Suddenly?
Or would I go insane?
I looked over at the doctor. His hands traced patterns in the air. Precision settings via VR. Too fine for a datapad, I guessed.
I pushed again, scraping the skin on my wrists.
This couldn’t be the way I died.
It couldn’t.
A pounding welled up in my temples and I could feel a trickle of sweat run down the side of my head.
I blinked, trying to focus my eyes, but a red cloud obscured my vision.
Something was happening to me.
I fought against it, but my stomach careened and I felt like I might be sick.
A rushing sound filled my ears as I imagined my mind draining out of my skull into the electrodes and then into the machine that was sucking the life from me.
My chest convulsed in pain and the rushing sound grew louder and louder until it blocked everything else out.
Except for a whispered voice.
Light, musical.
Use the gift I have given you.
WTF?
Use your mind, Jannigan Beck.
The voice was somehow familiar, but I couldn’t place it.
It was my mind shutting down—the last gasp of consciousness before I—
Push!
Now the voice was urgent, frantic. It sounded like a million voices, all coming from everywhere.
Push with your mind!
I don’t know what I did, but my head was suddenly clear.
And my arms and legs were free of the cuffs.
I still heard a rushing sound in my ears and it cut out all external sounds.
The doctor spun in surprise, his lips moving as he yelled at me. But I couldn’t hear what he was saying.
Rage burned through me. I leapt free of the machine and barreled towards the doctor.
He tried to scramble away, but I unleashed a savage punch, putting all my power behind it.
My fist smashed into Tarsch’s jaw with such an impact that the doctor’s head snapped back like a toy puppet being jerked around by a hyperactive toddler.
For a brief second Tarsch looked at me through his VR goggles with glassy, unfocused eyes. Then he folded down, knocking his head hard on the console as he fell to the floor, twitching.
As I stood over him, blinking, trying to make sense of what had happened, my hearing faded back in. Somewhere an alarm was sounding.
Then it dawned on me. I needed to get out of here. I peeked out of the exam room into the lab. Thank Dynark it was empty. No sign of the soldiers.
My eyes darted around the lab, looking for a weapon. Nothing.
I needed to find someplace safe where I could hunker down and figure out what I could do. I had no illusions of being able to escape from a Mayir carrier, but maybe I could do some damage before they took me out.
Carefully, I climbed the crew ladder up to a landing which led to a sealed pressure door. Behind it was the anteroom where Tarsch had inspected me, and further in was the large medical bay. I knew that there would be Mayir in the bay. What I didn’t know was if there would be someone on the other side of the pressure door.
Before I could even weigh my options, the door whooshed open with a pneumatic hiss and an imposing combat bot strode into the room, weapons clacking as it instantly targeted me.
When a two-and-a-half-meter bipedal combat bot—outfitted with a sleek black exoskeleton, full plating, and assault weapon array—gets in your face, you can be forgiven for losing your balance and tumbling off a ladder.
But as I windmilled my hands and cursed, a robotic arm shot out faster than a cobra strikes and caught me by the front of my jumpsuit.
“Easy, son!”
Holy shit. It was the Sean bot—my own father in the body of an Aanthangan clone bot.
“Dad?”
He eased me back on the landing.
“We can catch up later,” he said. “This way! Quickly!” He turned on his heel and led me through the anteroom and into the circular bay. There, the two Mayir lay spraw
led on the ground—either dead or unconscious. I quickly checked them for weapons, but they had been unarmed. I did snag a security fob, which might help us access some areas we might not normally be able to.
“How are you even still alive?” I asked the Sean bot, who was accessing a data port on one of the consoles.
“Long story. Keep watch. We’re going to have company soon.” He pointed towards the empty corridor.
“What are you doing?”
“Finding your ship.”
The Sean bot turned back to the data terminal and I watched him work for a second before turning my attention to the corridor. I still couldn’t believe he was here. A glimmer of hope sparked inside me. But then I remembered what Molda Prundt had told me about my flesh-and-blood father and I crumbled inside.
How was I going to tell him…?
“Let’s move, Jannigan.” The Sean bot strode off down the corridor.
I pushed the dark thoughts from my mind and said, “We need to get up to level 5. That’s where they’re keeping Chiraine, Ana-Zhi, and Narcissa.”
“Who?”
“Narcissa. You’ll like her. She saved our asses more than once.”
“Get down!”
As we rounded the corner, he blasted at a pair of legionnaires who were jogging towards us. Their heavy combat armor bought them a few seconds of extra life, but the Sean bot’s target tracking system coupled with the element of surprise quickly overwhelmed them.
“Here you go, JJ.” The Sean bot tossed me one of the legionnaires’ assault rifles. “Happy late birthday.”
I smiled to myself. Whatever part of that bot was my dad still remembered my birthday.
“You also might want to grab one of those armored suits. But hurry.”
He covered me as I donned the crimson armor. But before I could put on the helmet, the Sean bot snatched it from my hands.
“Hang on a second,” he said.
“What are you doing?”
He extended one robotic finger and slowly drew it along one side of the helmet, scratching off a twenty-centimeter-long section of the paint job.
“What’s that for?” I asked.
“So I know which red hat not to shoot,” he said.
Over the next ten minutes, we wound our way through the maze of empty corridors, luckily without encountering any more Mayir soldiers.
The lift was a different story.
There was a cluster of four legionnaires exiting the lift when we arrived.
“What the hell do you have there, Figg?” one of the soldiers asked me. He obviously had mistaken me for one of the soldiers the Sean bot had taken out near the medical bay.
I tapped my helmet and tilted my head to try to signal that there was something wrong with my comm. It was an old trick, but it worked.
Out of nowhere, the Sean bot started blasting. I joined in, and within ten seconds all the legionnaires were down. I availed myself of a couple of K-45s and a spare battery pack from the fallen soldiers.
“Five you said?” The Sean bot punched at the lift controller touchscreen.
I followed him into the lift and nodded.
As we rode up, he asked about where the women were being held, how many guards, etc. I told him what I remembered, but it was clear that we would have to improvise. As usual.
My dad wasn’t really one for improvisation. Or spontaneity. Or anything that wasn’t planned down to the minute. It used to drive my mom crazy. And me, for that matter.
But he got things done. That was for sure. Hopefully he still had that ability—even in his robot form.
Who was I kidding? Now he was even more formidable.
“Down!” the Sean bot shouted as the lift doors opened. He sprayed blaster fire into the hallway, mowing down a pair of Mayir technicians and a repair bot.
After the smoke cleared I dusted myself off. “Damn. How many is that now? A dozen?”
“Sixteen so far. Not all dead, of course. But none of them will be bothering us.” He stalked down the hallway.
I ran to keep up with him. “Nice. Only five hundred more to go.”
“Actually, the Baeder has a crew of approximately eleven hundred. At least, according to the logs.”
Yeah, those odds might be a little overwhelming, even for an Aanthangan clone bot.
I recognized the way from here, so was able to guide us to the cell block where the women were held. It wasn’t guarded, but it was locked. The security fob at my waist took care of that.
“Holy shit!” Ana-Zhi exclaimed when the cell door opened. The other two looked up in alarm at the sight of a class-5 combat bot. I didn’t blame them.
“What kind of welcome is that, Z?” the Sean bot said.
I took off my helmet. “Guess who I found?”
The Sean bot gave me the robot equivalent of a dirty look. “Who found whom?” he asked sternly.
Chiraine sprang to her feet and dashed over to get a good look at the Sean bot. “Mr. Beck, I can’t believe you’re here.”
“As I told Jannigan, there will be time for debriefing later. Right now we need to get out of here.”
“Out of where?” Narcissa stammered. She was probably the most freaked out of all of them.
“I’ve located the Vostok,” the Sean bot said. “It’s docked on the level 9 rear hangar.” He nodded at Narcissa. “I am Sean Beck, by the way. At least most of Sean Beck.”
“Narcissa Holt. Pleased to meet you. I think.”
I helped Ana-Zhi to her feet. “Can you walk?”
“I think so.”
I handed her one of the K-45s and handed Narcissa the assault rifle. “You’ll make better use of this than I will.”
Then we set off. The Sean bot took point, with Narcissa right behind him. Then Chiraine—helping Ana-Zhi. I covered the rear, to make sure no one came up behind us.
Voices crackled in my helmet comm. The tone was definitely worried.
“I’m picking up chatter,” I told the team. “We’ve got some panicked Mayir on our hands.”
“Good,” the Sean bot said. “We want panicked.”
It sounded like a larger team was coming down from the upper decks. We would have to avoid the main bank of lifts.
The Sean bot paused at an intersection, then led us into an access hatch which led to a maintenance tunnel. Then it was smooth sailing until we reached a narrow shaft with a ladder that led to the lower decks.
“Not sure I can make it with my arm the way it is,” Ana-Zhi said.
“Not a problem,” the Sean bot said. He scooped her up as if she was a doll and clambered down the ladder. After an hour or so of evading maintenance drones, we made it up to level 9 and found an access tunnel that opened to a hangar.
The Baeder’s rear hangar was a warehouse-sized space cluttered with thick snaking power and data conduits, mech substations, and generators. The landing pad was mostly filled with the stingrays and a few dropships and shuttles, but at the far end stood the Vostok, up on its landing gear. A bunch of workers were unloading its contents—the crates of artifacts—onto a narrow cargo carrier train.
I wondered why they had waited so long to unload the crates. Surely they knew what was in them. Maybe it was Mayir bureaucracy.
We snuck behind some freight containers the size of my kitchen back in New Torino, and I mentally charted a route out to the ship.
“How long will it to take you to fire her up, Z?” the Sean bot asked.
Ana-Zhi jerked her thumb at Narcissa. “Ask her.”
“Oh?”
“I was the engineer on the Valerius II,” Narcissa said. “It was a Barnes J-200.”
“An old Tarpon, huh?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Close enough. You’re hired.” He turned to all of us. “I’d like to get our stuff back.”
“How?” Chiraine asked.
“They haven’t made too much progress unloading,” the Sean bot said. “We take them out, and then you guys cover me for ten minutes.”
> “We’ll need to take them out quietly,” Ana-Zhi said.
“And fast,” Narcissa said.
“Yeah, I think I know how we can pull that off,” I said.
To the half-dozen workers unloading the Vostok the sight of a legionnaire leading a hulking bot towards them was a big surprise, but I quickly reassured them.
“Thought you folks could use a hand.” I jerked my thumb at the Sean bot. “It’s been reconditioned to a mech loader. Check it out.”
Out of curiosity, they followed me and the Sean bot up the loading ramp and into the hold.
“Transport those!” I commanded the bot. “Outside!”
The Sean bot made a big show of lumbering towards the closest crate.
“What is that thing?” one of the workers asked me.
“Old Jacrea security bot,” I said. “Don’t worry, it’s been completely disarmed.”
Disarmed was the code word the Sean bot and I had agreed upon. The second I uttered it, I dove for cover, and the Sean bot started blasting non-lethal tremble rounds into the workers.
The plan worked perfectly. All six Mayir were unconscious within ten seconds. And best of all, we did it without any alarms going off.
“Signal the others!” the Sean bot said. “And then we need to get these crates loaded back in.”
I did so and Chiraine and Narcissa helped Ana-Zhi to the ship.
“That was pretty slick,” Narcissa said.
“We got lucky,” I replied. “Change clothes with the workers and help get these crates back in.”
Even with the strength of the Sean bot and using a bunch of hover-sleds and repulsor dollies, it took us a good fifteen minutes to load everything back. I had a quiver in my stomach the whole time, expecting to see a squad of legionnaires come blasting their way into the hangar. But we managed to stow all the crates back in the hold, and so far there was no sign of hostile forces.
“What now?” Chiraine asked.
The Sean bot tossed me an Aura. “Give me twenty minutes and then blast your way out of here.”
“What are you talking about? We’re not going to leave you again.”
“You won’t be leaving me. I’ll be back.”
Narcissa shook her head. “No one’s blasting out of here. There’s a mooring arm on this thing.”
