Blood of a Thousand Stars

by Rhoda Belleza

  “Secure the medical facility,” said the commanding officer, pushing through the crowded ranks. “Once we have it, we can easily seize the tower.”

  A little thrill zipped through Aly as they all grunted in agreement. Aly prepared himself to drop, double-checking his parachute straps and adjusting his third eye. That wasn’t the real name, though; technically the device was called an I-3, and it predated cube technology by about thirty years. They were going with old-style comm units that had a range of only a hundred or so meters, since everyone had their cubes off. None of them had ever gone into battle without some sort of mechanism to connect instantaneously, and now they were going to do it old school. Aly was itching for action. He wanted to fight. Blow things up. Make people pay.

  The WFC had a firewall on all their crafts, but they’d all been additionally instructed to turn off their cubes before combat. And if they were caught or scanned, well . . . They couldn’t get caught or scanned. It was rumored the UniForce could hack their feeds even when the cubes were turned off, and Aly wondered if that’s what the Kalusians were up to in those labs on the zeppelin.

  Aly nodded at a nearby Fontisian woman, big and magnificent like a statue cut from marble, her delicate pointed ears almost comical in comparison. Aly pitied whomever she’d come up against. Then he nodded to his other side, at the stocky Chram named Hesi who reminded him of Jeth—albino-white flesh and shoulders as wide as the side of a barn.

  “If anyone has taken from you or yours . . .” the commanding officer said.

  “Justice shall be swift,” the soldiers called back in unison. It was the WFC oath, and Aly liked it, the ethos of doing something right, and doing it quick.

  The pilot was counting off to the drop. “We go in ten, nine, eight . . .”

  The hatch opened slowly. The night rushed in to take them; they were pelted with fat raindrops. The wind screamed louder. Vincent should have been by his side. He’d cock his head at a moment like this, flash Aly his holo-star smile.

  “. . . three, two, one . . .”

  The floor fell away below him, and Aly was snatched into the darkness, somersaulting in sparks and stars and rain, with only a muffled silence in his ears and in his brain.

  Back on Wraeta, before their civil war, his dad had saved for months to buy one crappy firework that they lit together on the anniversary of the day the Great War ended, watching it fly higher and higher until it exploded in a shower of light. For a split second, zooming to the earth, Aly wasn’t a soldier—he was that firework from his childhood, but tumbling in reverse. A fiery symbol to celebrate a planet liberated.

  He hadn’t counted. How many seconds had passed? His clothes whipped up around him. His mouth blew back in a grin as wind rushed down his throat. He’d done this before, but he’d had all the right gear and a drill sergeant riding his ass the whole way down.

  This wasn’t a drill.

  Stabilize. He spread himself out in a star. The dark surface of the planet was rushing toward him, and he thought of everyone he’d lost, waiting for him down there in the void. He could plunge into the outer surface of the planet and he’d be lost too. They’d taught him in church that there was a place the dead went to be with Vodhan, an afterlife they’d all end up in like it was a big eternal party with no fear and no pain. Aly wanted to believe that. He didn’t want to think all the people he’d loved were gone. Not just that they were physically gone, but that their hopes and fears and feelings had dissolved like smoke until there was literally nothing left of them in the universe . . .

  The shield on his helmet registered the medcenter and the satellite tower, highlighting it in the distance. All around him the blue LED lights flashed, and he had a close call with another soldier who torpedoed down—screaming at the top of her lungs. A battle cry.

  Aly felt all his organs clench up like a fist.

  The altitude readout on his shield said he was coming in close. Aly realized he was flying past floating blue lights. The other soldiers had already deployed their parachutes. He fumbled for the pull string and couldn’t find it. He thought of Kara, the shitty things he’d said, the kinder things he should’ve said. The image of her limp wrist coming out of a sea of rubble, like she was trying to come up for air but the only thing that had broken the surface was her hand . . .

  Aly clawed for his holster strap, still imagining the prayer beads tangled in Kara’s fingers. Elegant, he’d thought once when he noticed her hands, how they looked like they belonged to an empress, like they’d been taken care of, like they flew across piano keys in grand sitting rooms within the palace.

  Let her go, he told himself.

  Aly calmed down, took a deep breath, tried slowly, less frantically this time. He groped behind him and finally felt it—trapped under the holster strap. He pulled the cord with his free hand, and the parachute released. The wind caught and rippled the parachute open. The silk dome bloomed above him, yanking him backward; his harness bucked, cutting into his shoulders. He swayed in the sky like the rest of the soldiers, all of them lit up like pieces of algae floating in the ocean—Vin had taken him to see the Kalusian sea once. It was last year on leave. It felt like a lifetime ago.

  Now, Aly grabbed hold of the steering lines on either side. He focused on the target, and got a sight line on where to land. According to the blueprints, the medcenter contained the only modes of direct access to the satellite tower itself. But Nero had put nearly a thousand droids on patrol in and around the tower—a nearly insurmountable defense, unless all of them could be disabled.

  But the chances, with fewer than forty green recruits and a handful of officers, were slim.

  Aly tugged on the lines of the parachute to steer, coming in hot—way faster than he wanted to. He tucked his knees up high near his chest. He needed to be ready to tuck and roll when he landed.

  Once his boots hit the soil he felt the impact up through his bones. Rain fell from the sky and bounced back up off the surface. It was coming from everywhere; it was dripping behind the backs of his ears and running down his chin. He lost his footing and fell on his butt.

  In the distance, Aly could see the metal tower looming; the very top of it disappeared into the dark clouds above.

  “Alpha leader, I have a visual on the tower,” he said into his third eye. It was a flexible piece of metal that looped around his neck. You had to press a button and talk into the right side, and listen for a response from the other end. Nothing back but static. Great.

  The medical facility rose partway from the base. In his head he heard the pilot saying their objective over and over again: Secure the medical facility. Take the tower.

  He’d landed right where he wanted: in front of the tunnel leading down into the waste corridors.

  There was, however, a droid guarding it. The droid was at least a full head taller than Aly. It stalked toward him, a red light scanning for him in the darkness. Aly pressed down on a handheld signal jammer that came with his WFC kit.

  “Identification scan incomplete.”

  The droid grabbed for Aly’s neck, but he ducked and wove. “I could use some help here,” he called into the third eye, pressing the button frantically. It was useless.

  Pivoting his foot and shifting his weight, shadowboxing, scanning the thing for weaknesses or sensitive wires. It was a model he didn’t recognize, and he regretted that in the UniForce he’d never been taught to attack sophisticated army droids.

  Of course, back in the UniForce, he and the droids were supposed to be on the same side.

  He jammed the heel of his hand straight into the droid’s visual scanners, hoping to disable it, then gave a modified uppercut right to an obvious control panel. A dizzying array of lights flashed across its module, and while it recalibrated, Aly pulled his knee high and brought his boot down hard on its steel knee.

  Rookie mistake in Droid Fighting 101.

  Wha
t would’ve hyperextended a man’s knee just locked the droid’s leg in place. It swept up Aly’s foot in its tight grip and backhanded him. Aly spun and landed on his stomach in the mud. Pain shot through his ribs, and he tasted blood. He scrambled, the ground slick with rain, toward a rock the size of his fist that lay a few feet out of reach. He heard the droid move into place. An executioner ready to bring down the axe. Extending his arm was excruciating. His elbow was on fire. Broken or fractured, for sure. His fingers just brushed the rock, and a sense of déjà vu broke over him—he remembered losing his favorite wrench in the boiler room of the Revolutionary, straining for it, the day it all started. The day Crown Princess Rhiannon was supposedly assassinated. It was only days before Vin had died, killed by a UniForce droid just like this one.

  His fingers closed around the rock. He spun on his back and launched the rock with less than a second to calculate trajectory. The rock cut straight through the air and nailed the droid’s comm unit between its shoulder blades. It staggered on its feet, and Aly knew he’d hit his target: the gyroscope. The robodroid’s anatomy had been part of the WFC’s crash course training.

  Its lights were going crazy. It stumbled in a half circle, like it was party-drunk. He thought of a tree he’d seen cut down in the Ernew forest as a boy—and that breathless, weightless second just before it fell hard.

  Aly hooked the crook of his foot around the droid’s ankle and yanked. It fell backward with a boom boom. Aly climbed to his feet, wincing. He stomped down on the droid’s head, just once, because he couldn’t help but think of Pavel. Not all droids were war machines. Someone had made them this way.

  Aly flipped it over, grunting and straining the whole time as the droid flailed like a helpless insect. He gritted his teeth and ignored his elbow. Clicking on his flashlight, he wasn’t sure what he was looking for until he found it: the outlet on the back of its neck, right where someone’s spinal cord would be. It was freaky how fully the makers had committed to humanlike features. Aly ripped out its whole comm unit without any kind of plan—only because he was exhausted, and pissed off, and in this exact moment he hated this thing more than anything else in the universe. The comm unit was wet from the rain and glistened in his hand. It was sleek steel, cold metal, and it looked so different from his own cube with its tech embedded in roots, how it pulsed with life. He wondered what kind of secrets this cold, shiny comm unit had seen, what kind of data it held . . .

  And how he could use it.

  When Aly was programming Pavel, he’d inserted a sample of his own DNA into the server so that Pavel could better read and compare Aly’s vitals. It was a standard technique, especially for droids used as basic companions. But could the process happen in reverse? He remembered Pavel saying that theoretically, cube-to-cube transfers could be “enhanced.” That neural pathways could give and take info without “even being prepped”—whatever that meant. But what about droid-to-human transfers? He needed a doctor, preferably a cube surgeon . . .

  Good thing he was storming a hospital.

  He cradled his elbow and ran for the waste tunnel. Once inside the facility he busted his way through three double doors to the main entranceway, where a dozen WFC soldiers were waiting to pile in. Aly didn’t slow down for the others; he took off running.

  Two other soldiers corkscrewed through the labyrinthine corridors behind him—Hesi, who’d been standing next to him on the way here, and an Uustralite who wore a digital tag that said Darris. Together, they burst through another set of doors into a waiting room. Dozens of stunned Uustralite patients looked up, completely unaware that a takeover was going down. Aly would let the others handle these folks. Following a slick of blood on the floor, he shoved his way into an operating room and surprised a doctor with a scalpel, carefully disposing of a used blade in a sterilization basin.

  “What is this?” the doctor demanded, taking a nervous step back. Darris’s translation net relayed her words back in Wraetan, but Aly didn’t recognize the original language. He pointed his stunner at her with his bad arm; it felt like crushed glass grinding against itself at the joint as he extended it. She raised all six of her hands in surrender.

  “I—I’ve done nothing,” she stuttered. “What—what do you want?”

  “I’m your next patient,” Aly said.

  With his free hand, he threw the robodroid’s comm unit on the metal table where the doctor had laid her scalpels. They were knocked off the table, and Hesi had to dodge them. “Do you know how to enable this remotely?” Aly asked. He switched the stunner over to his good hand, and a new kind of pain—a stinging, pricking sensation—exploded in his elbow now that his arm was hanging loose. But he wasn’t going to let anyone know how much everything hurt. He breathed through the pain.

  The doctor’s hands fanned out in front of her, shaking as she accepted it. “How did you get it out?”

  “I ask the questions,” Aly said. The answer was obvious anyway—he’d ripped it out—and he figured the doctor was stalling. He still had the stunner pointed at her. “Can you enable this remotely or not?” UniForce would for sure be on their asses by now, especially if the WFC’s suspicions were right and they were tracking them even with their cubes off.

  “Yes, I can enable remotely,” the doctor said. “Just please, don’t hurt me.”

  Aly registered the fear in the doctor’s eyes, and for a split second he felt bad about it. He’d always wanted to be the good guy, the hero, to rep Wraeta right. Look where that had gotten him.

  “And you upload the information into my cube?”

  “In theory, yes. But we’re still in the early stages of research. Military droid data is encrypted differently. If I upload it to your cube it may be detrimental to the human neural system—”

  “Dumb it down, Doc,” Aly said. He looked between her and Darris, who had to translate everything on the fly. “I’m not a medic.”

  “They code NX data differently. It may have dangerous effects on the organic matter connected to your cube. A portion of your actual brain could be corrupted . . . irreparably damaged . . .”

  Aly thought of the people he and Kara had found in that creepy lab on the zeppelin, the vacant stares, the woman who kept drawing triangles, urgently, as if they meant anything . . .

  Still, they were running out of time, and they couldn’t coordinate without cubes, without any kind of way to communicate across channels. They had to take over the tower. It meant he had to risk it. He figured maybe he was the only one with nothing to lose.

  “Figure it out,” Aly said, pulling up a rolling stool. “The droid will have info on how to hijack the tower.”

  The doctor frowned. “It’s extremely dangerous—”

  “Do it,” Aly said—with every second wasted, their mission had a greater chance of failing. They needed the satellite—it was the key to Nero’s spreading influence.

  “What are you doing, man?” Hesi whispered. Darris’s eyes were wide.

  It didn’t really matter what any of them thought, or whether he lived. Secure the medical facility and take the tower, by any means necessary.

  The doctor worked furiously, sterilizing and reaching for her operating tools, then she stilled one of her hands enough to insert the fine needle of the device. She withdrew some sort of substance from the robotic spinal column and held it up to the light. “I don’t have any painkillers that will let you remain conscious,” she warned. “And introducing something foreign to your system is going to be quite painful.”

  No way, no how was he going to risk passing out. And the last time he’d been shot with a chemical compound, Aly had been the one doing the injecting—the taurine that had lowered his body temp and nearly killed him, all to escape the heat sensors most military bots came equipped with. “I can handle it,” he said.

  Then, at the last minute, he wondered about his own memories—if they’d be corrupted, lost. He’d always be
en such a hard-ass, never recalling anything in the Wray, never wanting to think of his dad. But he’d always imagined that one day when he was ready he could find those memories again, relive them when he was smarter, wiser, a hell of a lot less angry.

  And then he wondered if he’d forget moments with his ma, Alina, Vin. Kara, he thought.

  “Wait—” he said, just as he felt the pinprick of a needle. And then . . .

  A surge, instantaneous and massive—information everywhere, like water, flooding into his brain and choking his own synapses, smothering them. Everything was going under. The droid’s mind took his over—but it wasn’t a mind. It was a collection of directives, prioritized. Mechanical, black and white, clear-cut instructions to be executed no matter what.

  Every thought, every impulse Aly had was being drowned out beneath the data, blueprints and names and programs sweeping him up in a current.

  His brain was swelling; it would burst like a balloon. It felt like the bloating of a new bruise but a million times more intense, a billion. It would break his brain, then his skull, then crack his skin until he was just light, burning like the sun.

  He couldn’t hold it all.

  Breathe. His own voice came to him beneath an all-out assault of sounds and memory and thought. Breathe. Let it pass.

  He soared across the threshold of pain; in an instant, the information felt invigorating. When the data stopped flowing it stopped instantly, and he stumbled off the stool, dizzy with the newfound buzz of data and power. He inhaled deeply and closed his eyes. Nothing hurt anymore. His pain had been replaced by an overwhelming sense of focus. Take the tower. He knew exactly what he was doing and how he was going to do it. He could feel the network channels of a thousand other droids brushing up against his mind, like tendrils of growth sweeping his feet in a deep pond.