The one thing. The one goldam thing I couldn’t stand. Kids in danger.
My military training kicked in. You can take the soldier out of the service but you can’t take the service out of the soldier. I swore at myself for caring even as I threw open my ship’s door.
The kids ran in my direction. It was dark, but the scared looks on their faces were evident in the moonlight. But as they got closer, I saw they weren’t kids at all, but androids. The indent on their temples, a dataport for software updates, was the giveaway.
When the Tri-Star System started handing out citizenship to androids I was upset at first. But in the service, I spent weeks with a squad once that included a couple of bots. One of them even saved my life. That’s when I learned that, although they weren’t human, they felt pain like humans. And more importantly, they thought they were humans. Perception is reality, or that’s how I looked at it.
And looking at them now, at that look of shared terror, I knew the line between human and bot was so blurry it wasn’t worth looking for.
“Are you okay?” I asked a little girl, who shied away at first. “What happened in there?”
“Bad man is shooting,” she answered, not wanting to stop. “Bad man with a gun just shot Daddy.”
I remembered where I was. I knew what the little girl meant and I knew Daddy wasn’t really her daddy. It’s what pimps were called here. These kids had been trained to be slaves to the high rollers of the pleasure planet. Anything went here, as long as you had the money. My company’s unofficial motto came to mind: We don’t care what you do, as long as you pay when the night is through. I saw it could apply here, too, to a fate this little girl was running from. I might need to change that motto.
Countless, horrible scenarios filled my head. Whether these children were android or human, the images made me sick. My stomach lurched. , I had to remind myself.
“Just run,” I said to the girl.
Booming, blaster fire echoed over Roy Harbor. Several fires from the earlier explosions threatened to raze the whole biz center. Maybe that was for the best, I thought as the last of the children passed by. Would it be so horrible if these men found themselves in the middle of a dumpster fire of their own making? In a single night, some of the most notorious names in organized crime in the whole Tri-Star System would be bacon. Crisp and smoky. And after what I’d just realized they were doing with these kids, selling them by the hour, that seemed like a perfect fate for them.
Only, again, my military training kicked in. I knew that even a building in the darkest corner of the universe could be filled with the good as well as the wicked. Innocent civilians, and maybe other victims like the bot kids who wanted nothing more than to live no matter what they were born into.
Everyone who frequented Blissformine knew the bots were slaves, that they were bred for just such a purpose. They weren’t the lucky ones getting citizenship passes. I’d even partaken of the adult variety myself, if I’m being honest. This was different. These were children. It seemed like a fine line, now that I thought about it; slaves were slaves. But that was a soul-search for another day.
I stayed low and approached the building I’d seen Pete enter. What was the shady little rat’s role in all this? Maybe he was even one of the good guys…
I didn’t even have to finish my thought to know it was a load of piss. Pete wasn’t a good guy. Good guys don’t carry bricks of credits around. I decided his motivation didn’t really matter. Too many lives might be in danger. Once again, I hated myself for caring. I’d been sure I’d put any self-delusion of being a hero behind me, that I’d left it behind with my uniform when I parted ways with the guard.
The gunfire grew louder as I edged through the open door. There were screams—some fearful, some angry. I ignored them and moved deeper into the warehouse.
I followed flashes of dancing light to a room on fire, hoping there was nothing explosive nearby. A ladder on my right led to a catwalk. My best bet was to get high and assess the situation.
As I climbed, sweat poured off my forehead, stinging my eyes. At the top, I peered over the ledge of the last rung. A man wearing all black composite armor and holding a pulse-rifle paced back and forth. I guessed it was an android; it was too hot in that room for any human.
I couldn’t risk alerting anyone to my presence, so shooting him was out of the question. So, I waited until the mandroid got closer on his patrol route. As soon as his back was turned, I charged him and shoved him hard at the railing. But he spun around with those patented android reflexes and hit me in the face with the butt of his gun. I went down hard.
“Another one. Building B. Catwalk.” He brought the muzzle of his gun down and trained it on my head. “What are you doing here and who are you working for?”
I raised my hands. My eyes darted from side to side, searching for an escape route. The guard then took a step forward, providing one for me.
I snapped my leg forward, connecting with the bot’s knee. It made a satisfying pop as it bent inward. He screamed and pulled the trigger, the shot going wild. The best androids were designed to simulate pain, all to help keep up the illusion. I was just lucky this one wasn’t a black-market model with his pain indicators removed.
Still feeling the heat of the blast, I rolled to my right, under the bottom rung of the railing. As I fell, I grabbed the metal and yanked myself up and back through the bars, feet first. I was out of shape, but I managed to find the bot’s hip just the same.
The weapon flew from his grip as he fell, clanging on the floor far below.
I drove my elbow into his throat and pinned him against the railing. Androids were stronger than their human makers, but I’d fought against and beside enough of them in the force to know their weaknesses.
“What is this place?” I demanded.
Before he could respond, more blaster fire arced from below. His backup had arrived. I slammed his head it into the railing twice and let him drop to the catwalk floor.
More guards climbed the ladder up to my level while others scurried below, angling for a shot. I sprinted down the catwalk and tried to shoulder the metal door at the end. It wouldn’t open. It didn’t even budge.
“Come on, come on, come on,” I said, like the weight of my voice would help. Heavy boots pounded on the catwalk behind me. I leveled my blaster and a bolt of hot plasma ate through the metal where the lock met the wall. With some quick motivation from my boot, the door collapsed and I crawled through.
I slammed the hatch closed, knowing it wouldn’t protect me for long. Below, a mechanics bay housed vehicles of varying kinds. Ahead of me, the catwalk ended at a flat, metal wall. A chain hung down to ground level, so I holstered my blaster and hoped it was strong enough to hold my weight. Behind me, the echoes of my pursuers told me they’d reached the hatch.
I hurled myself over the ledge. The chain spooled out, and I figured my knees would be in worse shape than that guard’s when I hit the floor. About five feet before impact, the chain caught, popping my shoulder but not doing any real damage. My luck was holding.
I dropped to the ground and heard the guards yelling above, finally having burst through the hatch. Plasma fire arced by, boiling the concrete floor around me. I took off, angling beneath the catwalks to obscure their aim and firing randomly behind me, hoping to force them into cover. A scream told me at least one of my shots had found its mark.
I charged for the first unlocked doorway I could find. As the door flung open, it connected with a guard and sent him sprawling.
“That’s enough!” a voice shouted.
I inched forward with my blaster aimed at the guard the door had connected with, but he stayed where he was. He’d seemed to take the voice’s order seriously.
I took a second to assess my surroundings. The warehouse seemed to be an unending series of vast spaces. The one I was in was about the length of two football fields. In the middle of the huge room knelt about two dozen android children. They looked more terrifi
ed than the ones who’d escaped. Fire burned all around them, and one man stood before them all.
“Pete?”
“I told you to stay in the cab!” he shouted. His was the voice I’d heard just moments before. He brought up his pistol and shot three times in my direction.
Boy, was he a bad shot. He missed, and at close range.
Then I heard bodies slump to the floor behind me. I turned and found three guards on the floor, his old-style handgun making new holes in their heads. Maybe not such a bad shot.
“Last chance, Cabbie,” Pete said. “Walk away.”
“What’s happening here, Pete?” I lowered my blaster to my hip, but kept my trigger finger ready.
“My name is Carth!”
“If you had been even a tiny bit more talkative in the cab I’d have known that.” I took a few steps toward him.
“Stop there. I’m warning you. I’ll shoot you dead.”
I put my empty hand up. “Okay, yeah. I’ll stop. What about all these people, Pete? What're you doing with them?”
“They aren’t people. They’re vengeance.”
“Vengeance? Against who, the Quilians? You didn’t think you were going to just waltz in and, what, steal these bots? You thought you’d get away with it?”
“I don’t plan to get away at all.”
With that, Pete removed some sort of manual triggering device from his pocket.
“Put the weapon down, Mat. The whole biz center is rigged to blow.”
I heard whimpering coming from one of the little bot girls. Pete cast a hard look at her, and she hushed.
“You don’t want to do this, Pe...Carth,” I said
“Oh, now you use my real name? Things starting to get real? Put the blaster down, Cabbie. I won’t warn you again.”
“Okay.” I bent my knees and slowly placed the weapon at my feet, keeping my hands raised as I stood.
“Kick it toward me.”
I did as he asked. “What are you hoping to accomplish, Carth?”
“What do you think this is, some horrible action movie? I spill my guts and the hero saves the day? This story has no hero. In this story, everybody dies!”
“Don’t!” I shouted, but he was already aiming.
Before I could move, Carth fired his gun. The bullet found the head of one of the android slaves. Just a kid—android, maybe but still a kid who thought he was human.
He fired again. As his second victim fell onto her face, Carth turned back to me. The rest of the bot children screamed, begging for their lives.
“Why?” I asked.
“I’m evening the score,” he answered. “Fredrik Quilian ruined my business, and now I’m going to ruin his.”
“Carth, this isn’t a crate full of drugs—these are people.”
“People? They’re robots. Stupid, soulless robots! But they’ll cost Quilian money to replace.”
He turned to fire the weapon again. It clicked, empty.
Carth swore and began working to free the magazine to reload. I bolted forward, dove to my blaster and came up aiming right between his eyes.
“It’s over, Carth. Give it up.”
He ceased his struggles with the empty pistol and dropped it. I hoped he’d finally decided to give up, but his expression said otherwise. “I don’t hear the fat lady, do you?”
He lifted the triggering device, making a show of it. Seeing it made me hesitate. Delivering him to Quilian might be the only way I got out of this alive. Then I heard a beep.
Too late.
I fired, and a bright hole of plasma blossomed in the middle of his chest. Explosions promptly sounded in the distance, a string of them spaced a couple of seconds apart.
“We gotta go!” I shouted at the kids still cringing on their knees. I knew more guards would be on their way. “All of you, up!”
They slowly got to their feet, their eyes vacant and overwhelmed. I slapped one of them in the back of his head, and that worked him out of his stupor. Grabbing him by the arm, I pushed him toward the door, and the rest followed lazily. But at least they were moving. I scooped up the last straggler from the floor and carried her in my arms.
If my sense of place was right, there had to be a door to get outside close by. I didn’t dare take them back the way I’d come. It’d be crawling with guards. I was pretty sure I could get them clear of the blast.
I herded the children into the next bay of the warehouse and there it was: the door I’d been searching for.
“Stop!” someone behind me hollered.
The children froze in place, as if they’d been trained like dogs.
“We don’t have time for this!” I shouted, but the children didn’t move. Even the girl in my arms had gone stiff.
A command word. Their software had kicked in. They were frozen by their own programming.
A mandroid stood on the balcony above us. I recognized him as the one I’d knocked out earlier. He held a blaster and it was aimed squarely at me and the girl in my arms.
A deep rumble shook the walls. The balcony yawned as the explosion took hold, and the mandroid tried to keep himself from falling over the edge. But the balcony collapsed under him and he crashed to the floor headfirst.
“Move!” I shouted at the kids. I fully expecting them to stay rooted to the spot, but they moved. Whatever had held them must have short-circuited when the guard ceased functioning.
I hurried them through the door to the open air beyond and noticed my cab sitting unharmed by the nearest curb. The children I saw earlier must have escaped through that door. I cursed myself for missing that door in the first place. Really must have been out of practice taking the long way through the complex like I had.
We were almost all outside when a final explosion brought down most of the warehouse. The children stood and watched. I glanced down at the little girl still clinging to my arms. Her lips were curled into a faint smile, and I couldn’t help but do the same.
What’s more human than wanting to be free? I asked both myself, and all those bastards who treated bots like dirt.
Roy Harbor was shrouded in a thick cloud of smoke, flames licking through the darkness. Pete hadn’t been lying. The whole biz center was reduced to smoldering rubble.
As cinders rose into the night air, I had a moment to assess the kids. Most were nearly naked and shivering. I put the little girl on the ground and asked the boy I’d slapped into action earlier to watch over her. Then I walked to my ship and radioed for a rescue team and medical personnel.
They took forever to get there, as Tri-Star security always does in Blissformine. A worker approached me with a blanket but I politely refused. I had to get out or face being tied up in hours of paperwork and questioning. This wasn’t my fight anymore.
As I pulled my cab skyward, I wondered at the fate of those kids. The ones who’d gotten out earlier, too. I wondered if anyone would even care.
* * *
A few days later, I sat in a familiar room, staring at pictures of the battle for Anoxi 9 and beyond. I saw faces I recognized.
“It’s good to have you back, soldier.”
“So, you’ll have me?” I asked the colonel standing before me.
He took a few steps around his desk, then pointed to one of the pictures. “Do you remember this day?”
“Yeah,” I said, lowering my head. “We lost Garret that day.” He was the combat medic in our squadron, an android designed to run headlong into battle faster than any human could and without being crippled by fear. The guy had the personality of a wall, but he’d saved my skin too many times to count. More than any human ever had.
“We lost a lot more than him, and we would have lost even more of them if not for you.”
I nodded, looking away from my own memory of the hell that had been Anoxi 9.
“You deserved better than you received, Mat,“ the colonel said. “You were young. You did what needed to be done and I’m proud of you for it.”
“Thank you sir.”
“We want you back in the fold, soldier. I will petition to restore full rank and position…if you answer one question.”
“Sir?”
“I remember the day you left. You were shaken up. People even said you were broken. You told me face to face you didn’t believe in what we did. That people deserved to make their own decisions, live free of the law.”
I blinked but kept his gaze. “I was wrong, sir. We need the law. But Anoxi 9 had nightmares no one would believe.”
“I understand.”
“Sir, that wasn’t a question, though.”
The general eyed me a moment, as if trying to read my thoughts. “What made you change your mind?”
“Honestly?” I glanced at a stain on the wall. “I got tired of working night shifts.”
About Steve Beaulieu
Steve Beaulieu is the author of Brother Dust: The Resurgence. He was born in 1984 in East Hartford, Connecticut. Having spent most of his life in Palm Beach County, Florida, he and his wife moved to Texas in 2012. He works as a pastor, author, and graphic artist and loves comic books, fantasy and science fiction novels.
He married the love of his life in 2005 and he fathered his first child in 2014, Oliver Paul Beaulieu. His namesake, two of Steve’s favorite fictional characters, Oliver Twist and The Green Arrow, Oliver Queen. His second child, Juneau Grace was born in 2017.
You can read more of Steve Beaulieu’s work by picking up any of the Superheroes and Vile Villains Anthologies. In addition to contributing stories to each volume, he is the curator of the series.
A Friend to Man
by Lucas Bale
When beggars die, there are no comets seen;
The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.
SOME BELIEVE THAT THE MOMENTS BEFORE DEATH offer a mirror in which the true self is witnessed. Yet when that moment comes, despite the vivid colour which accompanies it, the machine experiences no such revelation.
Bridge Across the Stars: A Sci-Fi Bridge Original Anthology Page 28