Liberation's Vow (Robotics Faction #3)

by Wendy Lynn Clark

  The Hyeon fleet had to grow, ready and armed to defend them, or a great number of people would die.

  Maybe Resa could convince him.

  She looked human—dazzlingly, infuriatingly, temptingly human—and she had no reason to reveal her employer’s plans to anyone. But he had seen something in her, something changing. When she touched the flower. When she touched the dresses. When she allowed her soft, vulnerable skin to be touched by him.

  His cock pulsed.

  She didn’t want anyone to die anymore than he did. Perhaps working together, they could convince his father.

  He straightened and turned to see Resa.

  She ran across the room and fisted his robe.

  He started to greet her.

  She yanked him off his feet and leapt, throwing them both out the window and plummeting toward the knee-high waters fifty feet below.

  Minutes earlier, Resa allowed Aris to walk away from her, putting herself both out of earshot as well as angled so as not to read his words on his shapely lips.

  The Robotics Faction probably already had the entire room under surveillance. Everything they spoke, she was certain her robot would report to the Faction as soon as it found an open terminal. Once the Faction placed its satellite repeater, the communication would be instant.

  But she wouldn’t be the one to betray Aris. Not so long as she had the choice to save him.

  She hoped that Aris’s father would have good news about their planetary defenses. News that even her robot couldn’t sabotage.

  She couldn’t help her curiosity, though.

  The first few moments were clearly not confidential, and so she allowed herself to drift closer and listen. Their parent-child argument sounded funny and engaging, like a foreign language.

  “Let me tell you about my future,” Aris was saying quietly.

  “No, let me tell you,” Aris’s father said, loud enough that he could be heard even by normal ears at the edge of the room, and not someone with Resa’s level of subsonic hearing. “Starting with yesterday’s shenanigans at what is supposed to be a respectful, proper event.”

  Aris stiffened as his father descended into detail about the things that he should and shouldn’t have done, but Resa detected notes of admiration buried in the criticism. His genetic father complimented his ability to turn a dangerous situation into a popular win, disturbing as it might be to his extraplanetary relatives. His ramrod back suggested he didn’t realize it.

  Too bad she wasn’t in there to run her fingers over his back. He listened when she shifted, and although he was so emotional that her distant presence was a blur, she knew he would respond if she touched him.

  Wait. Touched him?

  She skimmed over the others in the room, searching for danger without, while her brain parsed through the danger within. There was no reason for touching the overly sexualized governor, no matter how good he looked in his ab-defining robes and neck-bulging thick collar.

  Especially in comparison to the other sleek, somewhat noodley presences in the high-class lounge.

  Aris possessed his father’s coloration and manner. From broad build to silver mane of hair to grand deliberation, Aris stood beside him as a smaller, stronger, more passionate sample. They both approached a problem with the same arrogant confidence, open to listen, but difficult to fully change a man or his mind.

  His father asked excellent questions about the Robotics Faction’s intentions. They were questions Resa herself had no answers for.

  She, like every member of the Robotics Faction, knew only enough of an assignment to complete it. The why, the wherefore, and the consequences for failure were moot.

  Human-interfacing robots were the fingers of the Faction. Her direct supervisor—the comptroller—was the furthest nerve ending. There were still a hell of a lot of layers until the heart, or more importantly, the Robotics Faction brain.

  So the men’s discussion opened as many unanswered questions with her as it did with them. And her robot, if it knew, would not tell her the truth.

  Humans are useful, it said. War is costly. Killing a hundred humans when only one must die is wasteful.

  Its cold, numeric assessment of her future—killing one human or a hundred—iced her belly. She would not obey. Somehow, she would find a way to protect the man who was more precious to her than her memories—

  “There is no woman,” Aris snapped to his father, in answer to whether he had anyone important in his life. “I have no one.”

  True, her robot said. You mean nothing special to him.

  His honesty slapped at her halfhearted fantasies, driving in the truth like a nail’s spike in her chest.

  She was a harmless flirtation to him. No, less than that. A means to find out which cousin wanted him dead. What she thought was flirting, he considered normal conversation. She didn’t even register to him.

  Ugly thoughts pounded into her brain.

  That’s right, her robot said. Do as the Faction orders. Stop wasting emotions. He’s only human.

  She was trying to ignore it when heat from the fireplace beside her increased and a strange clicking sounded in her ears. Carbon burned the inside of her nose.

  She jerked up sharply.

  There, in the fireplace, a small blue box. It had clicked open. All of the safety mechanisms containing the fire winked out, and the flames raged like a pocket of gas. White flashed.

  The trigger of a bomb.

  She turned and ran at Aris.

  There, at the window. He looked up in surprise. A low roar of gas ignited behind her. She grabbed Aris and dove backward out the window, catching the railing with her feet to swing them back towards the curved dome wall.

  The explosion roared, geysering flames out of the room and chasing them as they fell.

  She landed them on the balcony below.

  Black smoke billowed from the dignitary room above. Rubble clattered on their balcony. Aris started to reach for her.

  I have no woman.

  She sidestepped his questing embrace. He wrapped his arms around the cold, twisted balcony rail, wet eyes closed, shuddering and coughing.

  Another explosion rattled through the dome.

  No, no, no.

  She grabbed him and started for the hall.

  The doorway marblestone cracked, crackled, and shattered. The ceiling collapsed and the room above smashed into theirs, pancaked the floor, and dropped again. The balcony tilted forward, then fell back.

  Resa hooked her arm under his and hugged his trusting body to her chest. He held her and she jumped him to the neighboring balcony. Shaky, it challenged their weight. She leapt one more over, and another.

  Overhead, deep cracks fissured the whole golden dome.

  They escaped to the hall, and Resa led him with the screaming crowds evacuating the dome while construction bots climbed in with structural replacements to shore up the remaining building and unearth any survivors.

  Aris cried out the last of the dust, his cheeks blackened with streaks. “Who was it?”

  “A bomb in the fireplace.”

  “A bomb?” He sniffed, scrubbing his face, his voice wavering. “What do you mean?”

  “Someone disabled the fireplace controls and turned it into a deadly weapon.”

  “The Faction?” He coughed. “Wait. My father is still in there.”

  She forced him onward, with the rest of the crowd. “It’s too late.”

  “But he…” Aris gritted his teeth, coughing. “He’s there….”

  “No one survived the blast and the roof’s collapse. If he has an augmentation that allows him to withstand crushing damage, he’ll be fine.”

  He seemed to be coming to his senses, and his addled senses demanded he return. “I have to see my father.”

  “Keep moving.”

  They reached the lowest hall and walked while others ran. Emergency sirens worked on this floor; red and blue lights advised of structural damage and loss of pressurization. A huge concern
in the palazzo. Darvin’s dome supported the atmosphere shield.

  He rubbed his red eyes. “Someone planted a bomb.”

  “In the fireplace.”

  He stopped. “The Faction?”

  “So far as I know, they still want you alive.” She stopped and turned to him.

  A strange expression twisted his face.

  The other survivors streamed past them. “Aris?”

  “In the fireplace,” he repeated, turned, and headed back into the collapsing part of the dome.

  “Aris.”

  She caught up with him at the door of the palazzo. The dome creaked, empty and strange, and rubble clattered down on the broken steps. Water snaked through the walls, hissing and soaking them.

  “Where are you going?”

  “The delivery entrance.” He ducked into the hall.

  The dome shook. Aching screamed to a twang. The snap of mooring cables releasing from their hitchings. The floor bounced and leaned. Loose tables skipped across the floor and glass shattered.

  She saved him from a collapsing hallway mirror. He broke into a run. She tossed the mirror. “Aris!”

  “We have to get the recall box. To make sure they get put back,” he shouted over the collapsing rubble. “In case the bomber died.”

  “What gets put back?”

  “The nanobots. The ones that disabled the fireplace controls.”

  She scratched at them idly as they ran through the building.

  He reached the service lounge entrance, sideways and partially blocked, and she boosted him through. He was nuts, really and truly, with no self-preservation.

  But he was also right.

  In the service kitchen, kicked under a reprocessor block that Resa flexed her mechanical muscles and threw out of the way, a small box glowed blue as the fire. He opened it and the glow changed to red. It emitted a signal recalling the deadly bomb-producing nanobots. But how strong was the signal?

  He grabbed her hand. “We need to get this back to the room.”

  “That whole side of the building has collapsed.”

  “And this side is next.” He glowed his conviction into her. “We need to trap them again, now, before they take out the column and the whole street falls away.”

  A shadow at the window caught her peripheral.

  She whipped to face the attacker. Someone in a full bodysuit, chameleon-class. A rappel line attached them to a distant fulcrum. Light bent around the figure, but enough anomalies registered.

  “Your assassin.”

  Aris jerked up. A dish dropped off the sill, bumped by the assassin. Aris ran blindly at it.

  The dome shook as it began to fall over.

  The assassin let go of the window and swung away. Aris’s hands whiffed the air above the sill.

  Resa calculated the angles and energy. “Aris, this dome won’t hold much longer.”

  Aris stared wildly into the open abyss. “You could catch him.”

  “But not with you. And you couldn’t place the box to recapture the nanobots.”

  The floor tilted backward. His feet started to slide.

  “Aris, the nanobots.”

  He gripped the box. “Fuck. Fuck!” He turned and started back into the building, picking his way across the tilting floor and the debris.

  She yanked him off balance and ran.

  Debris passed in front of them like snow, breaking off and confetti-ing down. She ducked them under, over, pushing off walls and bouncing off the ceiling. It felt like falling through zero-G except that gravity was very much active. She also had to calculate his mass and how his inertia interacted with it.

  He wanted to put a recall box near the nanobots.

  She wanted to get him out alive.

  They raced down the hall. A column broke off and fell in front of them, crashing through the wall and tunneling to the outside. Another fell, and another. The ceiling cracked.

  She reached the palazzo, swept the box from his hand, and drove it into the debris where the room collapsed.

  Then she pulled him, stumbling and clambering, through the tunnel to the surface of the dome.

  Their escape route tilted again, rolling until they were climbing. He lost his arm holds and footings. She boosted him over the crest of the hole and up to the top. It continued to roll. She grabbed a mooring line, hooked her arm around his middle, and used its torque to fling them both to the steady ground.

  The loose mooring line rolled off the dome surface and landed them both at the broken edge of the bridge. The dome building broke into pieces and fell through the street, damning any survivors left inside. The crowds milled behind, looking through the misty, gaping hole all the miles down to the surface.

  His legs shook.

  She held him up.

  Until they approached the grateful crowds looking for leadership. His father, many elite guests, and even his cousin Darvin had died. He absorbed that knowledge in shock.

  “Governor.” His cousin’s secretary led him to the broadcast station. Everyone stared at him while the Twilight dome burned in the background. They looked to him to explain what had happened, to reassure them someone was investigating, to promise he was in charge.

  Reassurances he gave, standing straight and solemn, even though his hands and knees trembled where only she could see them. This was her Aris. Soldiering on when the world forced him to be unshakable.

  Chapter Eleven

  Maybe it wasn’t worth it anymore.

  Aris rested the back of his head against the hover car cushion. The future week blurred beneath his closed lids. State funerals took days and had only just begun. Aris had to appeal to his uncle, ruling during his father’s absence, to summon the Antiata main fleet.

  It was all his fault.

  He had let the bastard get away. Right there, within his grip. He could have captured the assassin, found out who was behind the murders, stopped any more attempts.

  But it would have cost other lives.

  And he still had more to accomplish.

  “We should have gone after the bastard,” he said, for the tenth time. “We lost our only clue.”

  “Not our only clue.” Resa, comfortingly cold and absolute in her judgment, eased his conscience with truth. “We know he had access to the nanobots used in the fire display during lunch at the promotions.”

  “So that limits us to a few hundred possibilities.”

  “And access to this party. At least, enough so that a delivery wasn’t suspicious.”

  He dismissed that. “I can’t believe Darvin allowed this to happen. It’s one thing to want me dead. It’s another thing to allow actual family members to be killed under his roof. Are you sure it wasn’t the Faction?”

  “It’s possible,” she twisted to him, “but only if the target wasn’t you. Maybe it was someone in that room.”

  “We won’t know, will we?” He bit the question. Their funerals over, everyone was resurrected minus a day or two of memories. “We allowed the only suspect to get away.”

  The car dropped silent.

  He felt petty, like one of the teenage tantrums he used to throw for his mother. She would listen carefully and brightly to whatever problem he had, and then they would parse out the emotional response from the course he needed to take.

  What they said was hurtful, his mother would agree as she enfolded him in her soothing arms. Stay like this with me until your hurt is salved. Then, how can we deal with the situation?

  When his mother wasn’t enough, he got the hug “salve” from his half sisters, who were just as free with hugs as they were with wide-eyed wonder at the high family school life he described—so different from their own. They had saved him so many times from doing the first stupid thing Darvin or the others would have wanted.

  And then, when the Faction had come, he had abandoned them. He missed Cressida being smuggled out, because of an elite academy entrance test; he left Mercury in a coma at a hospital to begin the new year. Sorry for the dissolution
of his family, but also callously uncaring, because he had a greater destiny.

  Ha.

  “You shouldn’t take any more risks like that,” his companion said.

  “My funeral would be a hundred times more grand when they realized they couldn’t resurrect me.” He sighed. “I’ll try to avoid dying. I don’t want to bankrupt the planetoid.”

  “If that’s your only reason for staying alive, I’ll kill you myself.”

  He found her silence, a slim profile in the soft car, soothing. Almost as soothing as his family, from that long-ago time. Just being silent with her wasn’t irritating like the other women he had to entertain. He didn’t have to perform for Resa. He had no reason to impress her.

  And as a robot, she didn’t get angry at an imagined slight or use his position for greed. Their relationship was honest and straightforward: She intended to kill him as soon as she got what she needed out of him. His strategy was to use her skills until their positions changed.

  Although, it had been some time since he thought she would actually kill him.

  He tilted his head, letting his doubts sink into the careless, bitter confidence that baited a lesser woman. “Worried about me?”

  Her brows twitched. If she were more expressive, he would call it a frown. She turned away.

  He made no effort to hide his ironic smile.

  “Yes,” she said.

  His smile caught.

  But the bitterness, long trained into him, reasserted itself. He crossed an ankle over his knee. “If I died, it would make your job much more difficult.”

  “Yes,” she said automatically. “But not impossible. Don’t push it.”

  His lips moved on their own into a sneer. “Are you saying you don’t need me to accomplish your ‘assignment’?”

  “That is correct.”

  “Have I lost my usefulness then?”

  “No.”

  “No? Then what use am I?”

  Her lips opened then closed again. She looked out the window.

  The urge to bait her again rose up, childish and unstoppable, itching under his skin. He wanted to see her upset. He wanted to forget himself, the plans that had hurt his father, the original choices that had cost his loved ones their lives and himself, his soul.