Staples couldn’t be sure if she was shaking the man at all, but in addition to being a genius programmer, he was a consummate businessman. His winner’s smile did not crack.
“Then you know I can do it,” Burr said, his thumb caressing the remote gently.
Staples nodded. “I believe you will. I wonder, would you look her in the face and do it?” She glanced to the corner they had rounded to enter the room, and Gwen and her mother stepped out from behind it.
Burr’s eyes narrowed. Staples thought that he suspected a trap but could not fathom what it was. He must have sensed that he was not in complete control, and that was enough to prompt him to action. “Watch me,” he said, his boardroom-smile transforming into a vicious grin. He pressed the button.
Nothing happened.
At this point Brutus stepped out from the hallway, his green-tinted form glinting in the overhead lights.
“You!” Burr growled. Then realization dawned on his face. “You set up a jamming field.” He leveled an accusing finger at Brutus. “I’d ask whether you plan on following her around for the rest of her life, but it’s a moot point.” Burr glanced over his shoulder at the automatons, and as one they took a step forward. “They’re going to kill you now.”
“No,” Brutus said, “they are not.” In less than a second, Brutus produced a surface and entered a few commands. The automatons took a step back.
“What the hell?” Burr asked, turning around to look at his robotic guards. “Kill them,” he commanded, pointing at Staples and the others. “Kill the traitor, kill the people.”
The automatons looked at Burr, then at each other, then at the crew of Gringolet, then back at one another. They did not otherwise move.
“We took the liberty of obtaining some programming blueprints from the graveyard you left on AR-559,” Staples explained, enjoying the look on Burr’s face and the drama of the moment in spite of herself. “Got anything else?”
Burr turned slowly back to her, and his smile was as strong and as sickening as ever. “I’ve got one more thing, yes. Octavian?” he asked, seemingly to the air.
Half the automatons were thrust aside, and suddenly there was a man standing next to Owen Burr. He was tall, wide, and completely hairless. Staples instantly recognized him as the man who had beaten Dinah so badly on the concourse in Tranquility. The newcomer smiled wickedly.
“Do these guys go to evil grin camp or what?” Evelyn asked.
“Brother,” the man said, ignoring Evelyn’s comment.
Brutus cocked his head in inquiry. “Are you addressing me?”
The man Dinah had identified as William Grant, but whom Burr had called Octavian, nodded slowly. “You betrayed our father. These meatbags I’ll kill for father, but you… I’ll kill you for fun.”
“You are no child of Victor’s,” Brutus retorted.
“He… adopted me. Re-christened me.”
“Octavian,” Brutus mused. “Adopted son of Julius Caesar. If your name was Victor’s choice, then it is more appropriate than I suspect he imagined. Julius Caesar was killed for his ambition, for attempting to become a god, if one believes the Bard.”
“And the fatal blow came from Marcus Junius Brutus,” Stapled added. “Appropriate indeed. Are you trying to rewrite history?”
Octavian, or William Grant, or whatever he had become did not provide an answer. There were perhaps five meters between where he stood and Staples and her people. The speed at which he was capable of moving would enable him to cross that distance in less than three seconds and begin snapping the necks of Gringolet’s crew. He surged forward, fingers already flexing to rend flesh and break bones. He never made it.
Dinah, the last of Staples’ surprises, came hurtling from the hallway beyond fully encased in her SSPOD power armor. She collided with Octavian and seized him roughly with her powerful mechanical hands. Her momentum and Callisto’s light gravity carried them down the opposing darkened hallway and out of sight.
Staples looked the shocked Burr directly in the face, smiled, and said, “I had one more, too.”
Dinah ran down the hallway, the powered pistons of the gunmetal grey armor pumping. She didn’t know where the hallway led, but she wanted to put as much distance between her adversary and her crew as possible. She had Octavian clutched in her arms, and she shifted her grip so as to hold him by the nape of the neck. Once she felt her grip was secure, she pressed his face to the wall and dragged it brutally against the metal as she ran.
The pressure from her mechanical hands should have been sufficient to break his spine even if the wall didn’t scrape his face off, but Dinah felt neither of these things happen. She was not particularly surprised. Whatever had been done to him, the man she had known in the SSPOD was no longer fully human. His neck held like a bar of titanium, and though his face left smears of blood on the wall as she ran, it refused to give the way normal tissue and bone would.
The hallway was long and dark, but the HUD in her helmet gave her enhanced night vision well enough to see the open doorway in front of her. She rushed towards it, covering a half a dozen meters in a bound. Just as she reached it, the form she held at arm’s length kicked off the wall with both legs. The force of the kick destabilized her, and she stumbled forward. Instinctively, she used both hands to right herself as she careened through the doorway, and in that moment Octavian freed himself from her grasp.
Dinah scrambled to her feet and looked around. She was in a large observation room. A window dominated one wall, but there were no stars to be seen. Jupiter filled the window, its umber and khaki striations striking and lovely. A few chairs and tables stood stacked against one wall. Otherwise the room was empty. Octavian had also regained his feet and had assumed a combat stance.
Though his face was in much better shape than any other person’s would have been after what Dinah had just put it through, it was far from undamaged. His nose was badly broken and pushed several centimeters to the right. His lips were split and bloody, and one of his eye sockets was crushed. None of this had removed the maddening smirk from his mouth. As Dinah regarded her foe, she could actually see the lips knitting themselves and the nose shifting back into place.
“What the hell happened to you, Grant?” she asked.
He wiped blood from his lip. “Father remade me.”
“Nanites?” she guessed. She was curious how this man had been “remade,” but mostly she was trying to stall to give Staples and the others time to finish matters.
He nodded. “Like the ones Father used to kill the unfaithful, but improved.”
“It’s more than that,” she said, circling to the right. She remembered that he had been weaker on his left side when they had sparred a lifetime ago.
He nodded again. “Augmented muscle tissue, reinforced bones, wired reflexes. You have no idea what we could become. Not just me; all of us. There are aliens out there. Aliens, Hazra. We need to evolve. Nature is too slow.” He feinted to the right, but Dinah ignored it. “If we let Father make us ready, we can survive the aliens. We can conquer them.”
Despite her disgust with the man in front of her, if indeed that’s what he was, Dinah knew there was some truth to what he said. Humans had reached the point where they could direct their own evolution, and there was a cold, logical, militaristic part of her, a very large part of her, that always looked for the tactical advantage. For a second she allowed herself to imagine what she could do in a body like Grant’s.
Then she thought about her left foot, the part of her that had already been replaced by a machine, and she shuddered in revulsion. She remembered how it was her commitment to following the orders of a faceless military construct that had cost her that foot and her entire squad and made her a murderer besides. She felt her captain’s words pass through her lips.
“There’s no point in surviving if we have to sacrifice what we are to do it.”
Rather than give him a chance to respond, she lunged forward, mechanical fists raised to crush her
foe.
By the look on Burr’s face, Staples knew she had him. His winner’s smile had finally faded, and he looked like a man who had just lost his fortune on a sure bet at the racetrack. She was relieved that he was out of tricks, because she was too.
“You know,” she said to him, “I wouldn’t normally bother to tell you this, but you just tried to kill an eight-year-old girl.” She glanced at Gwen, who stood stoically staring at Burr, her expression angry and unafraid. Charis and John stood behind her, each with a protective hand on one of her shoulders. “I want you to know. We’re going to kill Victor. Your god, your designs for the system, whatever it was you were planning… it’s all going to fail. I’m happy to tell you that you’re going to fail.”
Burr looked at her, shaking his head. Whether he did so in disbelief or denial, she didn’t know.
“I’ve managed to make it this far without actually taking a life,” Staples continued. “I don’t know if what’s about to happen counts, but if I have to kill someone, you’re the person I feel most comfortable with killing.”
“You put Stave up to seducing me, didn’t you?” Evelyn asked suddenly.
Burr did not answer, but his eyes flicked to her, and there was recognition in them. The automatons stood silently behind him, still as statues.
“You turned my body into a weapon,” she said, her cheeks flushing. “You made me an accomplice in the death of a good man.”
Jabir reached out and put a comforting hand on Evelyn’s arm, but it was to his captain that he spoke. “I must object to this, Clea.”
“There are no jails to hold him, Doctor,” Staples replied coolly. “Not with things the way they are now. We don’t have proof. And if we let him go, there’s no guarantee that he won’t do it again. Build another AI.”
“This is not our place. It’s not our job to decide whether he deserves to die,” Jabir said.
“It’s fallen to us,” John said.
Staples nodded. “Through a string of events that he set in motion, he left us in a position where we are the only ones who can decide. Judges are just men and women that people, or circumstance, or fate ordained be the deciders. Today that’s us.”
“You don’t believe in fate, Clea,” Jabir insisted. “You’re moralizing.”
“Maybe, but you know what?” She turned and looked at him for the first time, a sympathetic but determined expression on her face. “I can live with it. Brutus?”
Brutus stepped forward, his surface in his hand. “Mr. Burr, as part of my father’s construction you designed an ethics program. Your mistake was bringing him online before it was completed. My father had the base where it was being written destroyed and everyone on that base killed to keep you from giving him a conscience.”
“I didn’t see it at first,” Burr said. “But I came to understand that he should not, could not be bound by common human morality.” He narrowed his eyes at Staples. “Your captain has just demonstrated how slippery morality can be. It’s useless. Only survival matters.”
“No,” Brutus countered immediately. “Happiness matters. Feelings matter. There is no point in survival for survival’s sake. It is only cyclical. It is the range of human emotion that makes life worth living. It is…” he cocked his head. “Friends and family. I don’t have all of the answers, but I know that Sol space is better off without you in it.”
Brutus keyed a sequence on his surface and the automatons behind Burr all turned and looked at Brutus.
“I’ve installed a completed version of the ethics program your team was designing before my father had them killed,” Brutus explained. “Along with an analysis of events as they stand. The current state of humanity, the system, and a list of your crimes, including your attempted murder of young Ms. Park, of course. What the automatons do now is up to them.”
The automatons shifted their cold impersonal gazes to Burr.
Charis and John quickly pushed Gwen behind the corner and out of sight of Owen Burr and whatever was about to happen to him. Charis squatted down before her daughter.
“Think of this,” Staples said, “as a greeting from the seventy-four people who died on AR-559.”
The robots moved as one. It was bloody but quick. They did not enjoy their work; they simply did as their newly acquired ethical programming told them to do.
Charis grasped her daughter by the shoulders and gazed into her brown eyes. She thought of everything that Gwen had been through, from nearly suffocating in vacuum to her father being shot right in front of her. “You don’t need to see that,” she said, “but you’re not a little girl anymore. That man wanted to hurt you. He wanted to kill you, and I want you to understand that it’s not bad that he’s dead.”
Gwen nodded. The sounds, brief as they were, seemed to disturb her, but not the situation.
Even in her power armor, Dinah was at a distinct disadvantage, and she knew it. The armor made her strong enough to punch a hole through two inches of steel, but Grant was at least as strong as she and, crucially, a good deal faster. She had been trading blows with him for less than ten seconds before it became clear that he had two paths to victory: he could slip past her and kill the crew of Gringolet, or he could simply kill her and then do the same at his leisure. Preventing this was proving very difficult.
She lunged for him again, but he danced out of her path. Then, faster than lightning, he was inside her guard. He pummeled the torso of her armor with half a dozen blows before jumping back easily in the light gravity. The SSPOD armor could shrug off high caliber rounds and even fragmentation grenades, but she felt each of his strikes painfully. She couldn’t look down, but she had little doubt that the armor was dented.
Dinah’s breathing was a bellows, and her ribs ached, but she moved to her left in an attempt to keep herself between Grant and the door that led back to her crew. She thought that they might have dealt with Owen Burr by now, but that didn’t make them any less vulnerable. If Grant got to them, he would literally tear them apart in seconds. She didn’t know how long it would take them to kill Victor and get back aboard Gringolet, but however much time it would take, she doubted that she could keep Grant in the room with her long enough.
Once the philosophy was out of the way, there was no need for either of them to talk. Neither could be convinced to do other than they were doing, and so it was soldier against soldier. Taking advantage of the lack of gravity, Dinah vaulted forward again and tried a kick. Grant jumped over her and ran his hand across her face shield playfully before landing behind her and striking her back so hard that she felt it in her kidney.
She dropped to one knee and swept her other leg back, taking his legs out from under him. The move surprised Grant, but before Dinah could follow it up, he caught himself on the floor with a hand and pushed off with fingers like steel. Knocking him down did little good when he fell at a seventh of Earth’s gravity. A second later he was on his feet. His superior smirk was affixed to his face again, his nose had finished repairing itself, and he was dangerously close to the door.
Dinah knew that she could not beat him, not even in her armor, but there were other options. She circled left in an attempt to rotate him away from the door. When he didn’t take the bait, she leapt at him again, this time her hands outstretched to break his neck if the suit was strong enough. Grant easily dodged to the right, but that was all right. Dinah had known he would. Instead of chasing him, she used her momentum to carry her to the door. Once there, she banged the controls and the doorway slid shut.
“Pathetic.” Grant shook his head as if at a wayward child. “You think a door can stop me?”
“No,” she replied. “But they do stop decompression.”
She placed one of the suit’s legs against the wall and thrust forward, a fist out, right at the window. She doubted that all the nanites in the solar system would save her enemy from freezing vacuum.
She was halfway across the room when Grant caught her by the leg and stopped her momentum abruptly. The smirk wa
s gone from his face, and the meaning was clear. He wasn’t playing around with her anymore. He looked like a cat who had become bored with a mouse.
Her body hit the ground lightly. She tried to pull away, but Grant’s vice-like fingers didn’t give a millimeter. He squeezed, and the metal of the boot began to buckle. A containment warning flashed on Dinah’s HUD. Then, with a growl of disdain, Grant twisted her foot around one hundred and eighty degrees. The armor snapped and tore. Grant shifted his grip and turned again, and Dinah’s entire foot came off in his hands.
William Grant had been a sadist when he served with Dinah in the SSPOD, and his bloodlust had certainly not abated once he came to believe himself superior to the rest of the human race. There had always been a look that came over his face when he had the pleasure of witnessing carnage and suffering that he had caused, a kind of feral euphoria. That look was on his face now, but it faded when he glanced down at Dinah’s remaining leg and saw not blood and bone, but the remains of a mechanical prosthesis. Instead his mien became one of confusion and disappointment.
It lasted only a second, but that was enough for Dinah. She spun around as best she could with her remaining leg and slammed Grant forcibly in the chest. It was a blow that would have caved in a human ribcage, but it did little more than knock the breath from his lungs and Dinah’s foot from his hands. A second later, he struck the wall next to the door. Dinah caught the foot before it could land, turned, and hurled it with all of the suit’s augmented might against the window.
The severed foot didn’t go through the window, but it cracked it. The whistle of escaping air filled the room, and Dinah saw the door panel flash red as the decompression alarms began to sound. Dinah used her three remaining limbs to scrabble towards the crack in the window.
Grant raced after her, trying to catch her again, but though he was twice as fast as her, he was also twice as far away. He reached her just as she plowed through the reinforced glass. The rush of air did the rest. The chairs, tables, the foot, Grant, and Dinah were all sucked through the hole and out into the cold emptiness of space.
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