by Mina Carter
Her eyes unfocused, the displays in front of her unheeded. Lady Liaanas, she loved Jay. She loved the human male with all her new heart, and with every breath she took.
“How’s it going in there, sweetheart?” Jay asked from the doorway.
“Comms are coming on line now,” she smiled over her shoulder.
He nodded. “Hurry it up and then we can get out of here. This place gives me the creeps.”
Nodding, she turned back to the panels in front of her. The systems were older Latharian tech, so easy for her to operate. Bringing the comms systems online, she checked the date-stamp of the last message sent.
“Looks like this place was abandoned pre-plague,” she said over her shoulder, hands moving over the controls as she composed a quick message. It was short and sweet to underline its urgency, quickly fired off through as many comms channels as she could. In addition to the Izal’vias, she’d copied in any K’Vass or M’rln ship in range.
“Message sent, but it looks like the internal systems are all good.” She pursed her lips, tapping at them with the fingers of one hand as the sensors kicked in, scanning the interior.
“Okay. Several rooms on this level are open to the elements but I can seal those doors,” she said, reaching out to suit words to action. “Scans indicate we are the only living things in here.”
“What about dead things?” he rumbled from the door. “Certainly smells like something died in here.”
“Yeah… I can’t tell that from here.” The systems were good but not that good. With how long the outpost had been abandoned, it was remarkable they were even still working. “We’ll have to check that ourselves. And the automated cleaning systems are offline, so…” She shrugged. If they found anything that was dead in here, they were cleaning it up themselves.
“Securing the place will do,” he said. “At least we can relax then.”
He came to stand behind her, sliding an arm around her waist and bending to bury his nose in the side of her neck. “And by relax, I mean… relax.”
She closed her eyes, a wave of heat washing through her. “Personal quarters are on the second level. They should still be sealed,” she suggested. “There might even be viable food pods as well. While we wait for backup to arrive.”
“Sounds like a plan.” He dropped a kiss on the side of her neck. “Let’s go explore. Shall we?”
“This is actually quite nice,” Keris murmured an hour later.
They’d located the personal quarters the outpost staff would have used and, apart from a musty smell in the air, most were in good condition. Reaching down, she smoothed fresh blankets over the two smaller beds they’d shoved together. Well, the blankets weren’t precisely fresh, but they were new out of a storage pack, which was the next best thing.
Jay groaned as he sat on the opposite side and then lay down, patting the covers next to him. “Come on, sweetheart, lie down. It’s been a long day.”
She slipped off her boots to cuddle up. The feeling of his large, warm body next to hers made her feel warm and safe. A sigh escaped her.
“I didn’t think we were going to get away from them,” she admitted. “I hope Miisan will be okay.”
“She’ll be fine.” Jay snorted, turning on his side to spoon her. His hand settled in the curve of her waist, a reassuring weight. “I’ve met women like her before. They always manage to come out on top.”
She twisted her neck to look up at him. “Women?”
“Women, yes. The female of the species, of which you are one?”
“Haha. Yes, I get it.” She stuck her tongue out at him. “I meant… no, it doesn’t matter.”
He frowned, reaching up to brush her hair away from her face. “No. Go on. It mattered enough to start to say it. So what were you going to say?”
She bit her lip, wondering how to phrase it.
“It’s stupid. But the way you said that.” She shrugged. “It was like you considered Miisan a real woman, not just an AI.”
“Of course she is.” His expression was calm and level. “Why wouldn’t I?”
Her eyes prickled with heat and a tear slid down the side of her face. “You think I’m real then?”
It sounded so pathetic that she winced, expecting him to laugh at her. But he didn’t. Instead his brow furrowed and he moved, bracing himself over her.
“Hey, hey,” he murmured, leaning down to kiss her tears away. “Of course I think you’re real. Very real. Perfectly real.” Another kiss punctuated each word as he worked his way down to her lips. “You are utterly real to me, whatever your origins. You always have been.”
Her gasp was a soft sob against his lips as she wound her arms around his neck to kiss him back. He accepted her, really and truly accepted her.
Their lips caught, clinging together as they shared a breath. When he claimed her lips, she opened up for him. Her heart raced as she drove her hand into his hair, holding him to her. She could spend eternity kissing him, but within moments other needs made themselves known.
With a small whimper in the back of her throat, she pulled at his shirt. He growled in approval as she drove her free hand beneath it, then sighed as she found hot skin.
Before his lips could claim hers again, the world exploded. She screamed as the ceiling came down around them, instincts taking over as she tried to shove Jay under her to protect him, only to realize he was doing the same. They rolled off the bed, Jay pulling it over them as a shield as something ripped the door away.
A B’Kaar stood framed in the devastation, lights from his kasivar stabbing through the sudden darkness to pinpoint them. Tiny circles of lavender light from the cyberwarriors’ scopes danced over the center of their chests. Ice rolled through Keris’s veins as she raised her hands.
They were caught. There was no way out.
The warrior in the doorway stepped aside for Risyn. The B’Kaar leader’s expression was hard as it swept over them and she trembled. There was no mercy in his pale gaze.
“Take the AI,” he ordered, motioning to two warriors behind him. “Kill the human. We don’t need him.”
“Wait! No!” she gasped, trying to get between the suited warriors and Jay. It was no good, though. Their strength easily outmatched hers. Jay swore and tried to fight, shoving her behind him again, but one of the B’Kaar backhanded him across the face. The force of the blow, enhanced by the exosuit, knocked him across the room to crumple against the wall.
“No! Jay!” she screamed, reaching for him, but the other warrior, Berr, had her around the waist. “You can’t do this. Humans are protected by the emperor!”
“Actually,” Risyn said coldly. “Human females are protected by that ridiculous mandate. There is no such protection on human males.”
She whimpered as the warrior standing over Jay leveled both canon arrays. Jay looked up, his expression unreadable. The B’Kaar’s exosuit had cut his cheek almost to the bone, but he didn’t seem to notice the pain. He watched his enemy with a steely-eyed gaze.
“Do it,” he growled. “Kill me. Because if you don’t, I’ll never stop coming for you. You’ll always be looking over your shoulder, and one day I’ll be there to send you to hell.”
Risyn laughed. “Of course you will.”
The B’Kaar looked over his shoulder at Risyn. “If I fire in here, I’ll bring down the whole place.”
Risyn shrugged as Keris was carried past him, kicking and screaming. “Wait until we’re clear and then finish it. Rejoin us later.”
“No, no, no, please,” she begged, trying to catch at Risyn’s arm. “Please. I’m the one you want. Let him live, please. I’m begging you. I’ll do anything you want.”
As one the B’Kaar turned, the heavy metallic clomps of their suits the only sound other than her screams as they carried her out of the outpost ruins.
“You’ll do anything I want anyway, AI,” Risyn managed to pack loathing and disgust into the word. “You’re just an errant piece of code in that body. And I will have all y
our secrets. Willing or not.”
18
Jay didn’t take his eyes off the alien warrior standing over him. The B’Kaar was a hulking brute of a thing in his armor, heavily armed with all those guns aimed right at him. By rights he should have been terrified, praying as he prepared to meet his maker.
He wasn’t.
Instead, he watched the alien in front of him with a steely gaze as the others left. He didn’t know this one by name, but he’d seen the guy around, lurking and watching the women with the group. His black-eyed gaze had even given Jay, used to the blackest that humanity was capable of, the creeps.
“How could something as pathetic as you hope to beat one of us?” the B’Kaar snarled, looking him up and down. “You are no match for us physically. Mentally you are deficient. You are thoroughly inferior. I fail to see how any of us became… you.”
Jay let his body remain lax and pliant where he’d fallen after being thrown across the room. His face hurt like a bitch and he was sure he had at least one broken rib. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was he’d landed with one arm twisted behind him.
“Yeah… maybe we lost some advantages when we evolved,” he admitted readily. “Far as I can tell, you lot designed that expedition for some specific circumstances. Given the genetic type was smaller and less capable than the rest of you, you gotta wonder what your scientists were on. It’s almost like they intended for it to fail.”
That had been bugging Jay since he’d gotten a look at the data for the Jevenar mission. The Lathar knew what they were doing with genetic adaptation, so why didn’t they equip the expedition with plenty of redundancies rather than just assume they’d reach paradise and settle in without any issues or setbacks. It was like they hadn’t even heard of Murphy’s law.
“It did fail,” the B’Kaar bit out. Cold sweat trickled down Jay’s spine as he tried to ignore the multiple muzzles aimed at his face and chest. Just one thought and he’d be swiss cheese. Then who would rescue Keris? He put her from his mind instantly. In a situation like this, he couldn’t afford to be distracted.
He shrugged. “I wouldn’t say failed as much as they adjusted the parameters for success.”
The alien bit out a laugh. “Success? In no way could humanity be considered a success.”
“Sure we can,” Jay argued. “We survived on a planet where pretty much everything wanted to kill us. Wanna know how?”
“How?”
Jay grinned. “By being the nastiest fuckers out there.”
Before the B’Kaar could get over his confusion, Jay whipped out the blaster he’d been hiding behind his back and shot out the control units on the suit’s shoulders. They exploded in multi-colored sparks, plunging the underground room into darkness. The B’Kaar swung for him but Jay was already on the move. He was out through the door and into the blackness before the alien could catch him. He counted his blessings he’d reconned the area earlier.
There was a gap in the corridors’ inner walls, a split that must have occurred over the years and led to a small cave system beyond the building’s footprint. With the outpost’s systems down, the forcefield that had been covering it was gone. He hit it at a run, wriggling through.
It wasn’t big enough to allow a Latharian to slip through, and he took a couple of layers of skin off his back on the way. As soon as he was concealed in the tiny crevice behind the metal wall, he froze and tried not to breathe. The heavy clump-clump-clump of the suited alien sounded in the corridor on the other side of the thin metal.
“Draanthic human,” he hissed to himself, his voice so close he had to be just the other side. Bending down with a grunt, the lights on his suit stabbed into the darkness beyond where Jay stood hidden. If he worked out that Jay was only the other side of the thin metal, it was over. With that suit, he could tear through it like tissue paper.
“Run then, you coward!” the B’Kaar called out, obviously thinking Jay had escaped through the caves. “Die on this draanthing planet alone.”
Jay kept holding his breath as the B’Kaar walked away, not moving until his heavy steps had faded into silence. Then he slid out of hiding, running like the hounds of hell were after him to reach the main doors of the destroyed outpost. But they weren’t there. The aliens had utterly ripped the place apart, literally digging down through the roof to get to them.
He clambered up the last shattered slope of flooring to see the B’Kaar who’d been left to kill him engage the high-tech jetpacks on his suit and disappear up into the atmosphere, following the shuttle that must be carrying Keris and the rest.
Jay’s eyes narrowed. “Hold on, sweetheart. I’m coming for you.”
Then he ran, heading down the mountain toward where they’d left the shuttle. It had no weapons he could use, and he wasn’t even sure he could fly it, but he would figure it out.
He had to. Because he was going to save Keris. Even if it killed him.
19
The two B’Kaar holding her carried her across the broken ground to a nearby shuttle. It was much newer than the one she and Jay had arrived in and bristled with weaponry. Just looking at it gave her the chills. It was a machine designed for war—bloody and brutal war.
“No! Let me go!” She struggled against them every step of the way, but it was futile. Unenhanced and in a tiny physical body, she couldn’t hope to match them for strength. Their hands were like iron manacles around her arms and her legs beat at the air as they carried her between them, their suit boots crushing small rocks underfoot.
They threw her in through the open door of the shuttle, any possible escape cut off as the huge, kasivar-clad warriors clambered in after her. She retreated to the back of the large cabin, scooting across the floor on her ass.
The way the B’Kaar looked at her was hard and cold—a combination of contempt, loathing, and disgust. Like she was something they’d scraped off the bottom of their collective boot. She would have been scared, but fear of a different type rolled through her as she sorted through the suited warriors, her gaze latching on to a dark-bearded face she knew.
“Berr! Berr, please!” She launched herself at him, landing against his broad chest and clinging on. He refused to look down at her, yanking his head up out of her reach when she touched his cheek.
“Please,” she begged. “You have to help Jay. This isn’t his fault. He’s innocent. He… didn’t know what I was,” she lied, desperate for some way to save the man she loved. “I lied to him. I told him I was a stored mind-file from a Latharian woman who’d died years ago.”
Berr’s head turned like it was on a swivel, and in the tiniest crack in the black-on-black armor of his eyes, she saw indecision. Agony.
“But you were lying. Weren’t you?” he rumbled. “You ain’t ever been a woman. You weren’t born like the rest of us.”
She shook her head. She had been born—on the cold metal floor of the station—but that wasn’t what he meant. “No, I wasn’t. But he was. He doesn’t deserve to die. Please!”
But as she begged, the troop shuttle’s engines had spooled up, the whine assaulting her ears through the open loading ramp, dust kicking up in swirls as they took off. A small squeak escaped her and she would have been thrown down with the force of the acceleration if not for Berr’s arm hard around her waist. The B’Kaar all stood in place, the maglocks on their suit boots securing them to the deck.
“Please, Berr, I’ll do anything,” she pleaded, keeping her eyes locked on his face. But the tiny chink she’d seen closed over and his eyes shuttered.
“Save your breath, machine,” he snarled, detaching her grip on him with hard hands and pushing her away. She staggered against the metal wall, reaching for a support strut to hold on.
The roar of a booster pack and a thump announced a warrior landing on the ramp. She whimpered, recognizing him. He was the one who’d been left behind with Jay.
Risyn turned, one eyebrow raised. “The human?”
The warrior rolled his shoulder. “Dead. Di
dn’t put up much of a fight. Disappointing really.”
Keris screamed.
At least, she thought she did. Her mouth opened as she collapsed to her knees, but no sound emerged. Just an awful, gasping croak as she tried to breathe through lungs that no longer registered oxygen.
Agony sliced through her chest so intense that she pressed her hand to it and looked down, convinced one of the B’Kaar had shot her… but no blood welled over her fingers. Her clothes remained whole, untorn.
The pain was within as her heart cracked and then broke in two. Tears coursed down her cheeks as torment filled every cell of her body in a protoplasmic storm.
She barely noticed as the ramp closed and they left the planet’s atmosphere, or when they reached the B’Kaar ship. Being lifted by hard hands and carried off the shuttle only elicited another silent sob.
Corridor after corridor passed before her eyes, but she didn’t pay any attention. What was the point? Nothing mattered anymore. Jay was dead. Nothing would ever matter anymore.
She was carried unresisting into a lab. She assumed it was a lab anyway, looking around dully at long counters and operating tables. A body even lay on one of them, the warrior long dead and his skin opened up to reveal his ke’lath within. A preservation field surrounded him so it was impossible to tell how long he’d been there. A kasivar of an older design stood next to the table. She didn’t get a chance to see anything else as her captors shoved her onto the other table.
Risyn watched her with a stony expression as she sobbed silently.
“It feels emotion?” he mused as two other B’Kaar strapped her in. “Fascinating. I doubt it is real emotion. There is no way an AI—”
“Of course it’s real, you fucking asshole!” Keris snapped and raged at him. Her voice rose in fury as she struggled against her bonds. “I am a Miisan-level advanced intelligence construct with hyper-threaded neural capacity. I am capable of running myriads of algorithms and processes concurrently with no loss of cerebral performance and you’d better fucking hope I don’t get anywhere near your fucking computer core. I’ll destroy it and you, and laugh while I do!”