“And I only talked to two of them,” Eva added.
Sapri’s psychic emanation transitioned to confusion, then bitter amusement. “The third imprint is from Lashra Damaal,” he said.
Eva stared at him for a long moment, then gave a close-mouthed chuckle. “Something good came of chatting with her, then,” Eva said. “And to think I was trying to get away the whole time.”
Dr. Lucien finished whatever he was doing with Jei’s arm and carefully reattached the prosthesis. “We can proceed as we previously intended, then,” he said. “More easily, in fact, since Damaal had unrestricted access to all portions of the facility. We must shut down the laboratory before it is too late.”
“We must do it tonight,” Sapri said. He raised the cube, scrutinizing its glowing faces with his enormous dark eyes. “If we delay, they may alter the security codes and protocols and render all our efforts useless.”
A brief argument erupted among the assembled rebels, which Eva opted out of once again. She was exhausted, physically and emotionally, but the prospect of being finished with this whole arroz con mango sooner rather than later was intensely appealing to her. The Pod Pals needed to be stopped before they ended up all over the universe, doing whatever damage they were designed for.
Not to mention the bonus The Forge had dangled in front of her like a delicious slice of carrot cake, and whatever big secret Gate project they needed Josh for in the first place. Eva hoped it was as noble as Mari made it sound, because after all this time and effort, if it was the same shit with different bosses, Eva was going to be pissed.
Abruptly, Mala shifted to sit on her haunches, tail wrapped primly around her front paws.
“Miau,” Mala said.
The arguing stopped. “What did your creature say?” Sapri asked.
Eva opened her mouth to tell him cats didn’t talk, but Mala turned her head to glare at Eva, hazel eyes flashing in the dim light.
“She said we should stop comiendo mierda and get this party started already,” Eva said.
“Miau,” Mala said, licking a paw and swiping it over her face.
“She’s a cat,” Jei said, scowling.
“And? Is she wrong?”
Jei shook his head after a moment, and Pink snorted derisively.
“All right, then,” Eva said. “What exactly is the plan?”
Barely visible in the dim starlight, the Sylfe Company laboratory was located on a rocky seaside cliff several hundred meters tall. Over time, crashing waves had left a few isolated towers of stone rising out of the water like giant middle fingers raised in the general direction of entropy. Multiple pod-like buildings attached to the cliff like metallic tumors, connected by the same ubiquitous cables found in Rilia and Spectrum City. A few cable cars waited on different levels, and presumably anyone with a harness could use that instead, assuming they weren’t concerned about being exposed to the elements and any passing hostile forces.
The rebels used an Attuned as their vehicle—specifically by cramming a bunch of people in its enormous mouth. There were devices meant to deter wild Attuned and other animals from approaching the lab, but like any modern technology, they were prone to regular, inconveniently timed software updates that briefly disabled them. This left cameras, proximity sensors, and their associated alarms, all of which were hackable, at which point the resistance could swim up to an access pipe sucking in seawater for various scientific and mundane reasons, make their way up to the engineering room collecting the water, and proceed from there to the remaining pods.
Each of the dozen pods was assigned a team: a hacker, a saboteur, and at least one guard. The hacker would steal as much data as possible and then bring down the local node with a virus, ideally spreading it to any connected backups. The saboteur would use a nonexplosive expanding demolitions agent to destroy the pod; the devices were slow enough to allow anyone inside to escape, but fast enough to be difficult to stop once they were going. The guard would round up anyone already inside the pod and make sure they didn’t interfere, then see to their safe evacuation once the saboteur had started the final countdown. If any security forces were alerted to the rebel presence, despite all the planned countermeasures, the guard would also warn the others and provide cover until everyone was out.
Eva, Pink, and Sue were with Jei and Nara on their own mission to find Josh. They all wore their spacesuits for protection—except Nara and Jei, who had their own armor—and would have their isohelmets activated and opaque on the outside to protect their identities. If a team found Josh before they did, they’d be informed of his location so they could sneak in and pick him up.
Sue wanted to find a way to bring Gustavo, her bot, but Eva vetoed it as too impractical. Jei wasn’t happy because he wanted to be on one of the other teams. Nara didn’t care because she was getting paid the same amount regardless.
It was a good plan. A solid plan.
It failed, of course.
“How much longer until the shielding is down?” Eva asked Sapri, firing her pistol at a Pod Pal hovering nearby.
Sapri’s psychic emanation was as sour as old milk, and not a little angry. “I am not certain,” he said. “The psychic imprints you acquired have partially facilitated an override of the lockdown protocols, but there are additional layers of security we are unable to penetrate. If we cannot overcome this soon, we will have to abandon the mission.”
Eva scowled. “Hell no. I’m not giving up that easily, and neither are you.” She fired again, barely missing Jei, whose robot dog had turned into a hoverboard for him to float around on. He was picking off the various auto-turrets attached to the roofs of the pods, which also kept them focused on him instead of the rest of the team.
“Maybe if you didn’t distract the guy doing the heavy brain lifting?” Pink asked, taking her own shot at one of the robotic creatures farther away.
“You could stop talking completely,” Nara added. She stood in front of Sapri, shielding him with her armor.
Eva rolled her eyes and continued scanning the sky for targets. Bad enough that all the lab pods had been under lockdown as soon as they climbed out of that claustrophobic fish mouth, the resistance also hadn’t been aware that the whole place would be swarming with robot guards. Damaal had apparently started field-testing the Pod Pals’ more violent applications, and what better place than right where the prototypes were being developed?
Sapri and a few other xana were trying to deactivate the shields on the first pod while everyone else waited in the access pipe underwater. Except Eva’s team, which she had insisted would come along as protection if nothing else, so they’d be able to go after Josh as soon as the opportunity presented itself.
Then again, Eva hated waiting for opportunity to knock. She was more prone to busting down the door.
“We need a distraction,” Eva said.
“Our Lady, you physically can’t shut your mouth, can you?” Nara asked, idly firing her plasma cannon at a swooping Pod Pal.
Eva ignored the comment and spoke to Sue over helmet comms. “You’ve taken these robots apart and messed with their programming. Anything you can do to them to make them stop attacking?”
Sue was hunkered down inside an isosphere with her backpack full of her own bots, some of which had escaped to crawl over her and make unhappy shrieking noises. “I don’t know if these are networked with each other, but they should all be connected to a single control interface,” she said. “If I could get into the updater, I might be able to push out something to all the robots simultaneously, but otherwise I can only try to mess with one at a time.”
“Great, start messing,” Eva said.
A Pod Pal like a giant insect with drill legs shot an energy dart at her, which she avoided by throwing herself into a shoulder roll. Unfortunately, she’d overestimated how much roof she had left, and ended up careening over the side. She twisted and activated her gravboots, which pulled her toward the bottom of the pod, sticking her there upside-down. She cussed and started climbing bac
k up, doing the occasional stomach crunch to avoid another shot from the same robot. By the time she got back to the others, any patience she’d been cultivating had shriveled up like an unwatered plant.
Jei swooped down on his dog-bot, hovering in front of Sapri. “Additional enemies are being deployed from the platform near the top of the cliff. A small gap in the shields opens each time, and remains open for a few seconds.”
“Perhaps we can use that,” Sapri replied, emanating a sharp spike of hope. “If you can deliver one of the expanding agents to that area, we can at least partially damage their facilities before retreating.”
Jei nodded and proceeded to fly down to where the saboteurs were hiding. Eva, meanwhile, scowled more deeply. That wouldn’t get them any closer to Josh, who could be in any one of these buildings—or none of them, if Damaal had relocated him for some reason.
Given their proximity, Sue could try to ping him. It was a calculated risk: they had no way of knowing how he would react, it might get caught in whatever surveillance was likely monitoring pings, and it would mean potentially giving up whatever anonymity they were able to maintain during this operation. But if they didn’t do something now, they might never get another chance.
“I think I got one!” Sue said, and sure enough, a Pod Pal that was mostly mouth and wings had stopped trying to bite one of the xana. Within moments it emitted a painful shriek and then flapped away toward the top of the cliff.
“What did you do?” Eva asked.
“Every Pod Pal is programmed to act like the Attuned it’s based on when it’s in natural mode,” Sue explained. “Unless it’s given direct orders to attack or defend or whatever. So I put it in natural mode and turned off remote access. Whoever wants to reprogram it will have to catch it first.” She sounded pleased with herself, and Eva had to admit she was impressed.
“Keep doing that, then,” Eva said. She opened a private comms channel and took a deep breath. “Sue, I need you to ping Josh and tell him you’re here.”
“Rusty buckets!” Sue exclaimed. “Of course, why didn’t I think of that?” She tried to slap her own forehead but hit her isohelmet instead, scattering some of her bots in the process.
“See if you can figure out where he is,” Eva continued. “And if he can lower the shields to that pod so we can get in.”
Another wave of robot Attuned arrived. Some of the larger flying varieties carried smaller nonflying ones, which they deposited on the lab pod before taking to the skies again. Two-legged and four-legged critters launched themselves at the xana still trying frantically to bring down the shields, so Nara and Eva teamed up to fend them off, Nara with her arm cannon and suit-augmented strength, and Eva with her sonic knuckles. Pink continued to pick off distant ones with her sniper rifle, each shot carefully aimed and timed so as not to be wasted.
“How many you take down so far, Innocente?” Nara asked.
“You think I’m counting, mija?” Eva replied, punching a spiky, rat-looking bot.
Nara shrugged. “My suit does it automatically.” She paused. “And I’m older than you.”
“Bueno, sorry vieja.” Eva dodged a fireball from one of the flying todyk bots. She shot back at it and missed, hissing in frustration. They were running out of time, and the damn shields were still up on this very first pod, with another dozen to go.
“He’s here!” Sue shouted, thankfully on the private comms channel. Eva’s skin went briefly cold with relief.
“Josh? Where?” Eva asked.
“On the top platform, with all the Pod Pals. He can let us in if we go up there, but we have to go without the resistance.”
Me cago en diez, Eva thought. Sure, in theory the resistance had agreed to bring them along because Eva had gotten them the psychic imprints they wanted, so her obligation to them was minimal since she’d held up her end of their original bargain. But could she really accomplish her mission knowing she’d left them here with virtually no hope of success? Maybe she could do something once she got up there, got in past the shields, but what? And how would she even get all the way to the top of the cliff without help?
Jei reappeared with one of the demolition devices, a cylinder as wide as his arm cannon with a single large button on the top. “It will take me some time to reach the platform, but with luck I will be able to react quickly enough after a robot is launched to place this inside,” he said. “I may even be able to enter myself if a large enough unit is dispatched.”
“May the Light go with you,” Sapri said, his psychic emanation somber. “We should be able to open this shield soon, but already we have little hope of achieving all our aims. We must be content to do what is within our power and escape to continue the fight another cycle.”
Tactical retreat was practical, certainly, but after all their effort and planning, the resistance had to be feeling extremely shitty. Eva sympathized deeply, but she couldn’t let those sympathies overshadow her own goals.
Eva squinted at Jei’s dog hoverboard. “How many people can your bot carry, Jei?” she asked.
“Two at most,” he replied. “Why?”
“Take Sue with you,” she said. “Pink and Nara and I will meet you at the top.”
“Why?” Jei repeated, his eyes narrowing in suspicion. “I can do this on my own.”
“Or you can do it more easily with help,” Eva retorted. “Sue can hack the Pod Pals, and the rest of us can watch your back.”
Jei seemed inclined to argue, but a new wave of security appeared: xana this time, wearing gliding suits and harnesses that let them leap from pod to pod or slide down the cables connecting the buildings. They all carried stun batons and wore helmets with large antenna-like protrusions covering their horns, and they moved with a grace and agility and cohesion that made Eva freeze.
They were mind-linked, she was sure of it. Someone else was controlling them, guiding them . . .
Flashbacks to her mission with Tito flooded her vision. It was happening again, she’d sworn she would never be here again, do this again, but here she was and here they were and she could almost hear the shouts of her team as they fought against the nearly silent foes assailing them from every direction, feel her cheek being torn open by a razor-sharp claw as her blood poured down her face, smell the smoke as the chemical fires she had set raged below until the branch was finally cut, and then the ragged breath she held as she took aim at Mother, squeezed the trigger, the delayed sonic boom and the bodies falling around her, graceless and limp and empty—
Someone was flashing a light in her face. Pink. “Eva, can you hear me?” Pink was saying. “Listen to me. Take a deep breath.”
Eva struggled to fill her lungs with air. Her chest was tight, like her diaphragm was being crushed, like she’d been spaced without a suit and the void was trying to get in.
“We don’t have time for this,” someone else said. Nara?
“You think this shit cares about time?” Pink snapped. “It takes as long as it takes.” Then, more gently, “Eva, honey, you’re having a flashback. It’s not real. There is other, very real shit happening right now, but you’re not in Rilia. Deep breaths, Bee, come on, come on back.”
Eva tried to press her hands to her ears, but her isohelmet was in the way. Just as she was about to deactivate it, Pink shouted, “Sweet deep-fried fucksticks!” and someone kicked Eva in the back hard enough to send her sprawling across the top of the pod. Her spacesuit took the brunt of the damage, and she instinctively curled up into a ball.
Her vision cleared, and there was Sue hiding in her isosphere, her bots running back and forth waving their tiny pans and torches and other random weapons. Mala had appeared as well—had she been hiding in Sue’s backpack? Eva had sworn she’d left the damn cat with Dr. Lucien. But she was out now, hissing at the xana attackers with her fur raised and her tail as bushy as a pipe brush, even though she was a tiny fucking animal and they were ten times her size.
The absurdity of it coupled with the danger Sue was in yanked Eva
back to reality hard enough to leave her dizzy. Someone kicked her back again, and she groaned in pain; that would leave a bruise. But Sue needed help, and Eva had a mission, and one of Sue’s bots definitely had her chancleta, the little cabróncito.
Eva sucked in a breath and let out a ragged laugh. It helped, a little. An inhumanly fast punch came flying toward her and she sidestepped, too slowly, catching it on her shoulder. She ducked a kick next, and the tail that whipped around immediately after, briefly glad to be so much shorter than the xana. One moment at a time, the flashback retreated into the past where it belonged so Eva could focus on the present. It would always be there, waiting for the chance to drag her down again like an ocean undertow, but for now she was lucky enough to once again be in calmer waters.
For a particular definition of calm. The resistance had made it through the shielding of the first pod, finally, and broken into the interior. More rebels had arrived to protect them from the xana security guards who had swooped down from above, and who were also coming after Eva and her team. The xana she’d been fighting launched another flurry of punches, kicks, and tail swipes, which Eva blocked and evaded as best she could until Nara body-checked the guard and shoved him over the edge of the pod.
“Pink,” Eva croaked, and Pink was at her side in a moment.
“You okay?” Pink asked.
“Hell no,” Eva said, her voice growing steadier as she spoke. “I’m never okay. But we need to get to the top platform before this shitshow gets any worse.”
“You got a plan under all that hair?” Pink asked.
Jei hadn’t left yet, thankfully, choosing instead to help protect the resistance as their reinforcements arrived. Eva stumbled over to Sue while waving at Jei.
“Come on,” Eva told him. “We can do this if we work together!”
Jei hesitated, his expression as dark as before. But finally he nodded and hovered over, lowering his dog-bot so Sue could jump on. Sue hurriedly stuffed her tiny yellow bots into her backpack and deactivated her isosphere, climbing aboard next to Jei and crouching down to grab the side of the contraption for balance.
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