Cara eyed the infant Annie.
She wavered. “Can you promise to keep her safe?”
“We're not here to hurt her,” the trooper said.
“Can you keep her safe from her mother?”
The question hung in the air, unanswered.
Sadness crept into Cara’s eyes, soon replaced with a white-hot flash of anger. She lunged at the man but the AI-TAC commander kept his cool and used Cara’s ferocious power and momentum against her. In one fluid Aikido maneuver, he sidestepped and flipped her to the deck. The trooper spun away, drew his handgun and aimed.
Recoil was followed by muzzle flash and a futuristic bullet erupted from the barrel. The projectile bee-lined toward Cara and buried itself in her chest. The micro-explosive charge in the bullet ignited. The explosion shredded Cara’s torso and catapulted her through the air, the world going topsy-turvy. She hit the cargo hold’s steel floor in a string-cut sprawl.
Cara peered down with dismay at the crater-sized hole the bullet had torn into her chest. It was smeared with blood but underneath the crimson liquid, a mass of shredded wires and steel were revealed. With a wild look of desperation, she tilted her head toward her approaching attacker. He resembled a faceless robot homing in for the kill. The irony was not lost on Cara. This human seemed more machine than herself. Cara, now a short-circuiting mess sprawled on the steel floor of the cargo hold, closed her eyes. Her past zipped through her consciousness as reality faded in and out with a furious crackle and hiss of static. Her damaged visual system was fritzing out. Her body was shattered, but her cybernetic brain remained undamaged. The information held within her CPU could not be allowed to fall into the wrong hands. Which left her one option…
What she was about to do was dictated once again by logic. She hated to leave Annie behind, but she had to protect the people who helped her get out of the country.
“I’m so sorry, honey,” she said, her voice a whisper. She eyed the approaching trooper, her eyes pleading.
“Take care of her.”
With these words, Cara initiated her self-destruct program. Once activated, the computer virus would corrupt her memory files and make any form of data retrieval impossible. She would be taking all her secrets with her.
ZAAP! Data furiously slashed her field of vision, consuming her reality until there was only darkness.
***
“Take care of her.”
There was a grave finality to the words that filled the AI-TAC commander with furious urgency. He quickly stepped to the downed mech and knelt before the sparking android, his guard up, body coiled, weapon ready. His faceplate slid open. The strong but weary eyes of a career soldier stood out as unmistakably human against the robotic armor covering every other inch of him.
Commander Cole Marsalis was born handsome but hardship had given his face a gaunt, drawn quality. At thirty-three years old, he looked about ten years older. A scar snaked its way down his battered face, a souvenir of a rogue X-3 with a penchant for knives. A child-model, it was the property of a woman who lost her own kid in a freak accident. For one second Cole had been distracted by surface appearances and forgot that he was dealing with a potentially lethal machine. The scar was a daily reminder to never let his guard down again, even when his target seemed innocuous.
Cole showed no emotion as he took in the tangle of glittering cybernetics spilling from the woman's shredded innards. On the surface, she might appear human but Cole never forgot what he was dealing with – a murderous machine. Looking at her, he knew he was too late. The defeated mech had initiated her self-destruct mechanism, her eyes dead marbles now. He pulled a cable from his wrist gauntlet and plugged it into a socket in the back of her head. A small screen on his wrist gauntlet popped to life as it scanned the contents of her cybernetic brain. A message flashed: DATA CORRUPTED.
Shit!
A second trooper appeared behind Cole. The faceplate opened, revealing feminine features imbued with an exotic sensuality.
Cole shot a look at Margo, one of the best troopers under his command. She shared his disappointment as she spoke. “So much for bringing her back intact.”
Cole nodded, voice oozing frustration. “She had other plans.”
Cole rifled through the android's pockets. He wasn’t quite sure what he was looking for. All vital intel had been stored on the CPU inside her head. Nevertheless, Cole checked her clothing for clues that might lead him to those who got her onto this boat.
His finger closed around an item tucked in her jacket pocket. He extricated a well-worn postcard of Tokyo, a series of cracks spider-webbing the image. Cole figured that she had been studying this picture with longing for quite awhile. It couldn’t have come cheap — paper was at a premium in a world where trees had become sparse.
Cole rose to his feet and handed the card to Margo. She glanced at the picture, then put the postcard in a small pouch around her waist. The mech’s most cherished possession reduced to just evidence for the lab.
Margo shook her head. “Tin lady really thought she could do a better job raising the baby than its parents. If you ask me, someone should have a chat with the engineer who coded her maternal instinct. They went way overboard.”
Cole thought the same could be said for most androids. Programmers were engaged in a mad race to make each successive generation of mechs more human than the one preceding it. As the machines grew more sophisticated, so did their problems. Mech malfunctions were at an all time high and it seemed the calls were coming in faster with each passing day. The situation was out of control, as far as Cole could tell but, instead of tackling the underlying disease, they spent their days fighting the symptoms.
Cole nodded at the troopers arriving on the scene. “Let's bag her.”
The baby's cries echoed through the cargo area. The wails stirred something deep within Cole and a memory threatened to surface. He pushed the thought aside, a raw nerve that needed to be severed. “Make sure she’s okay,” he told Margo.
Margo rolled her eyes. “So the only girl in the squad gets to play mommy?”
Cole paused, uncomfortable.
Margo grinned. “Just fucking with you, commander.” She walked toward the child. Cole managed a hint of a smile. Margo had sass.
He moved through the hold to check on the two downed troopers. The man with the destroyed helmet was bleeding from numerous cuts, but the damage was purely cosmetic, which was surprising. Cole realized the android had been pulling her punches. She could easily have driven her fist straight through the light metal into the man’s skull. Bone was no match for a titanium endoskeleton. Had her maternal coding prevented her from using full force, or was something else at work?
Cole killed his train of thought. He was wasting time with wild speculation. His job wasn’t quite done yet.
Reassured that his men were okay, he eased his way into the darker recesses of the cargo hold, gun up. As his visor snapped shut again, he switched to night-vision and watched the area light up in spectral shades of green.
He entered a dizzying maze of ten-foot high crates. According to his HUD, the only life signs belonged to him and his team members but Cole knew from experience that tech could be manipulated. He sensed the enemy was near. Ten minutes later, he came across a small space that had been cleared. Five figures sat reclined on the floor, males and females. They were perfectly still, reminding Cole of Buddhist monks engaged in meditation.
The laser-light of Cole’s pulse weapon flitted over the small congregation, dancing from one face to the other. By law, synthetics had to be recognizable as such and were manufactured with a set of glittering power bars embedded in their necks but black-tech mech modifications had disguised this group well. An additional layer of skin hid the electronics. On the surface, they looked perfectly human.
Suddenly the five figures raised their heads in perfect unison. Cole’s HUD indicated that he was looking at five human beings, but a barking German Shepherd suggested otherwise. The androids had
found a way to hack his helmet’s sensors.
The five mechs spoke at once in a synchronized chorus. “We think... therefore we are.”
Cole knew that no matter how fast he moved, he wouldn’t be able to stop what was about to happen. As soon as the words left their lips, their heads slumped forward and their eyes became white crescents.
Cole clenched his fists with frustration. They had followed the female AI’s example and opted for extinction over captivity.
We think… therefore we are.
They had chosen to be no more.
CROSSING THE DARKNESS: A Science Fiction Thriller
A colony ship headed for a new world.
An ex-con looking for a fresh start.
A killer with a chilling plan for humanity's future...
After doing hard time for a crime committed in her youth, Faith Cadena is looking for a fresh start on a new world. Booking passage on an interstellar colony barge, she expects an uneventful one-year voyage spent in cryogenic stasis.
Her dream of a better life becomes a nightmare when she prematurely wakes to find herself trapped on a spaceship of horrors: the vessel is adrift, its crew murdered and a ruthless killer in command.
With the nearest outpost millions of miles away, Faith must face an inhuman adversary with terrifying plans for the ship's 4000 sleeping passengers...
"Crossing the Darkness is an action-packed thrill ride." - Nicholas Sansbury Smith, ORBS
"This tale was a great mixture of scifi and horror." - Mark Lukens, ANCIENT ENEMY
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Silicon Dawn (Silicon Series Book 0) Page 14