Steal the Demon: A Science-Fiction Novella

by Robert Roth

  “Brace yourself!” Paradox cried urgently, a moment before the lift slammed to a halt and threw her to the deck.

  “What the fuck, Joe!” Kimiko called out as she picked herself back up.

  “The station AI has discovered my presence,” Paradox replied, sounding audibly strained, “and is currently fighting me for system control. Stand by.”

  She got back onto her feet but used her arms to brace herself against the sides of the lift chamber. The last thing she wanted was to be stuck in a lift as some pawn in a fight against an evil AI. She’d seen too many horror vids where shit like that always spun horribly out of orbit. The lights inside the lift started to flicker, and went out, thrusting Kimiko into darkness. Her helmet optics immediately compensated, projecting a rough, rendered version of the space around her in her virtual display.

  “What’s happening, Paradox?” There was no reply. “Hey, Paradox, are you there?”

  “Paradox is engaged in vigorous access negotiations with the Station AI,” said a strange, muted voice without any hint of tone or emotion. “You are advised to exit the lift now.”

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “I am a submind that Paradox created to communicate with you while he is unable to do so.”

  A submind? Where had she heard that term before? “Ok, Joe. And how exactly should I exit the lift?”

  “Via the upper hatch. That will lead you out into the lift shaft, where you can access a nearby maintenance shaft. You are advised to proceed with caution.”

  That was only marginally helpful, but she needed to keep going. “Okay, Joe. Thanks for that.” She looked up at the ceiling and spotted the emergency hatch. “Can you at least open the hatch for me?”

  “I am unable to access any lift systems.”

  That figured. It was an emergency hatch, so there had to be a way to open it from inside the lift. Kimiko looked around, and spotted an access panel underneath the lift’s input pad. She pushed on the panel, and it popped open. Behind it was a control lever that she flipped down, and the ceiling hatch slid open. Kimiko crouched underneath it, took a deep breath, then jumped up just high enough to grab the edge of the opening. She felt the strain in her arms as she pulled herself up, until electro-muscular bands in her suit kicked in and aided her efforts. Once she successfully got a leg through the opening, it was easy enough to push herself out and crawl on top of the lift module.

  Kimiko looked up, straining to make out the far-off top of the lift shaft, and wondered how much further she still had to climb. But first, she had to find the maintenance shaft the submind mentioned. She slowly spun around until she spotted it behind her. It was above her, but still low enough that she could grab it.

  Then the lights inside the lift module underneath her suddenly flickered.

  “You are advised to hurry,” warned the submind. “The station AI may soon regain control of the lift.”

  “Shit.” Kimiko grabbed the lower edge of the maintenance shaft and pulled herself up. The opening was wider than the emergency hatch, so it was a little easier to swing a leg up into it. Then she heard a soft clunk in the lift shaft behind her, followed by a smooth hum.

  “You are advised to–”

  “I’m working on it!” She pushed with her leg and forced herself all the way into the maintenance shaft. Suddenly the lift shot up behind her, mere cms from clipping off her toes. She imagined that she even felt a breeze as it flew by, although that was impossible in her sealed flight suit. After lying there for a few moments to catch her breath, Kimiko pushed herself up to her hands and knees. The maintenance shaft was too low for her to stand, so, after one more deep breath, she crawled forward.

  Her mini-map updated using her suit’s inertial guidance system, and it showed a deck pass-through a few meters ahead. One thing she’d learned well as a kid, then as a smuggler, was that stations always had a lot of hidden ways to get around, whether for maintenance or emergency reasons. If a lift broke down, or the station grav field failed for some reason, pass-throughs were an easy way to get from level to level.

  Kimiko got to the opening for the pass-through quickly enough. She ducked her head inside and saw the ladder rungs that were attached to one side. That was handy, since the station’s grav field was still very much in operation. Kimiko looked down and immediately regretted it. The pass-through shaft sank down farther than she could see. It would be good not to fall, she told herself. That would totally ruin her day.

  With a huff, she reached out to grab the closest rung then pulled herself inside. Once she had a firm grip on the ladder, she began to climb upward. According to the markings painted near the maintenance opening, she still had another seven levels to climb before reaching the docking bay. She could manage that.

  “Kimiko,” Paradox said after she’d been climbing for a few minutes. His voice sounded distracted and distant.

  “Where you been, Joe?” she responded. “And what the hell is a submind?”

  “A submind is a limited personality created to deal with specific situations or problems when my main focus is otherwise engaged.”

  “So you, what, split your mind in two, like multiple personalities?”

  “Now isn’t the time–”

  Then everything clicked into place–his substantial gift for hacking, slightly odd mannerisms, and the surprising ease with which he managed to hide from the CSG. “I’ve still got three more levels worth of ladder to climb,” Kimiko said, interrupting him. “Why not just come clean with me now?”

  There was an uncharacteristic pause before Paradox replied. “It seems like you’ve already figured out my secret.”

  Kimiko grinned, wondering if Paradox could still detect it. Her P/N-interface claimed that he was no longer riding her senses, and hadn’t been since he dropped out of contact. But she didn’t know if she could trust that, since Paradox, the entity, was clearly a lot more than the man she’d met in that overpriced bar on Davida Station. “You’re an AI.”

  “I am,” Paradox admitted. “I apologize for my deception. I’d hoped that you would already be well away from the station before I had to deal with Doha.”

  “Doha?”

  “The station AI. But that’s not important right now. You need–”

  “How is your being an AI not important?”

  “Focus, Kimiko. Doha is not only aware of my presence in its systems. It has also inferred your presence in the station, despite my having deleted you from the Station-Sec logs. It doesn’t know who you are or what you’re doing, but once it learns that, it will attempt to intervene directly.”

  Kimiko stopped climbing. “How will it intervene?”

  There was another pause. “There’s no way to know for sure, but it controls a station full of custom manufactured armaments and security equipment, so I’m sure you can easily imagine the possibilities.”

  She took a deep breath, calming herself, then resumed climbing. “While I don’t appreciate being lied to, I get why you can’t go around telling everyone you meet that you’re a Confederation AI gone rogue, so I guess this doesn’t change anything. And getting discovered was always a risk anyway.” She looked up and saw that she only had one level remaining to climb. “Is Doha the reason you wanted to tag along on my op?”

  “Yes, and I will deal with it. I just wanted to warn you so that you’d be careful.”

  Kimiko chuckled. “I think that ship launched a long time ago, Joe. But I’ll proceed with caution.”

  “Stellar. I’m cutting our connection for the time being. I don’t want Doha to use it against you. In case we don’t speak again, safe flying, Kimiko.”

  She sighed. That sounded awfully fatalistic for an AI. “Same to you, Paradox.”

  Her virtual display showed the connection terminate. Kimiko was genuinely on her own. But what she’d said to him still applied. Getting caught was a risk that went with the game. And she’d be damned if she got snatched that close to her prize. Doha would have to send an army after her
if it wanted to stop her from getting to that ship.

  Kimiko stopped climbing once the markings inside the pass-through shaft indicated that she’d reached the docking bay level. There was a hatch next to the ladder that opened with a simple access pad, so she wouldn’t need Paradox’s magical hacking abilities. She tapped the pad, and the hatch slid open.

  A Station-Sec guard was standing watch nearby, but they had their back turned to Kimiko, so she pulled the stun baton from the loop on her waist. The guard was armored from head to toe in matte black composite, which would inhibit the stun charge’s effect. Well, not quite head to toe, Kimiko noticed as she crept up behind them. There was a small patch of exposed skin on the back of their neck between their helmet and shoulder plating, and that was where she touched them with the tip of the baton. The guard’s arms flung out wildly as the stun charge coursed through their body before they collapsed to the deck. Kimiko replaced the stunner at her waist. She was reasonably sure that the guard hadn’t been able to call for help before being stunned, but she had no idea if there was anyone, or anything, that would check on them. Or was watching.

  She finally turned to look at her ship. The Shaitan was beautiful–a true demon, just like the name implied. Kimiko couldn’t help admiring the low slung, rich-black shape parked at the other end of the hangar bay deck. It was even more gorgeous in person than in the pics she’d seen, somehow both sleek and muscular. The deep black coating on the outer hull almost seemed to soak up the light around it. She bet that it looked like nothing more than a hole in space when running under stealth. A few supply crates were stacked on the deck near the ship, next to the hulking, blaze-orange form of a Heavy Loading Bot.

  As she began to walk toward the Shaitan, Kimiko pulled up its control codes and reached out with her P/N-interface to establish a connection. She got into the system far enough to open the outer hatch when she heard the sound of the lift entrance sliding open behind her. She turned to check on it, and saw the tall, lithe, mechanical form of a station Sec-Bot come charging out in great loping strides as it made right for her. It gave her no warning messages or orders to stand down. It was already set on taking her down.

  Kimiko grabbed the stun baton and widened her stance, keeping it loose enough to allow for a dodge roll in either direction. She didn’t know what kind of effect the stunner would have on a Bot, but she figured that a stun charge would at least do some sort of damage. As soon as the Sec-Bot was just about in arm’s reach, Kimiko squatted down and pivoted on her left foot, angling her body out of its path, while she reached out and stabbed the baton into the Bot’s chest plate and pressed the trigger button. The Sec-Bot stopped in its tracks as sparks flew from the contact point. It looked down and saw the baton, then grabbed it, wrenching it from Kimiko’s grip before throwing it to the side over the guardrail on the edge of the landing platform. The Bot was definitely strong, and it was fast, but not so fast that Kimiko still couldn’t deal with it.

  When it swung an arm toward her, Kimiko simply ducked and lunged to the right, reaching back to grab the Nishimura knife. Weapon in hand, she let her momentum carry her forward into a roll, then finished in a combat crouch. The Sec-Bot seemed confused by her actions, taking too long to readjust its own stance, so Kimiko just dove forward, slashing out with the blade and slicing through the Bot’s right leg. The Sec-Bot lost its balance and pitched forward, crashing to the deck. Kimiko scrambled to her feet and lunged at the Bot as it struggled to push itself upright, then stabbed down into the Bot’s upper back and sliced down into a cascade of sparks. The Sec-Bot dropped back to the deck and stopped moving.

  Kimiko looked at her knife in wonder. It had cut through the Bot’s proprietary composite alloy with almost no resistance. She still had no idea how much it would’ve cost to actually buy it, but she no longer doubted the knife’s value. She reached back to resheath it, when the lift entrance slid open again, and two more Sec-Bots stepped out. The blade probably wasn’t gonna cut it anymore, so Kimiko dove for the nearby body of the still unconscious guard, grabbing their blaster from its holster before slamming into the wall at the end of the deck. She gritted her teeth and ignored the pain, lifting the weapon toward the nearest Bot and firing. But that Sec-Bot was faster than the first one, and ducked away from the blast before knocking the gun from her hand. The gun clattered across the deck as the Sec-Bot lifted a foot into the air. Kimiko quickly rolled away from the wall, tucking herself into a ball to slip past the Sec-Bot’s legs as its foot slammed down onto the deck. She scrambled to her feet as the second Sec-Bot came for her, stomping on the deck where she’d been just a moment before.

  The Bots’ tactics had changed. They reacted faster, and attacked more assuredly. Were they learning from her? She needed to get that blaster back, so she ran for it as quickly as she could, scooping it off the deck with a Sec-Bot right on her heels. Reaching around to point it behind her, Kimiko squeezed the trigger multiple times as she fired blind, each blast the shriek of a toolbox being tossed into a metal grinder, with a kick hard enough to nearly knock her over. When one of the shots sounded like it scored a hit, she glanced over her shoulder and saw a Sec-Bot lying prone on the deck, its right arm missing and right shoulder glowing a bright, reddish-orange. But the other Bot was still on her tail, and Kimiko was running out of deck. She skidded to a stop to keep from bouncing off the guard rail, then turned her back to it and started firing double-handed at the remaining Sec-Bot, which somehow danced around her shots anyway. Then the Bot was on her, sending her right over the top of the guard rail with a vicious backhand.

  The gun flew from her hands as Kimiko flipped out into the open air and started to fall. She made a desperate grab for the railing in a panic, but she was already too late to catch it. She fell past the deck, her hands slipping down the smooth side of the platform, before she miraculously grasped onto an exposed structural support underneath it, painfully wrenching her shoulder but arresting her fall. Kimiko let out a piercing cry as she reached up with her other hand to grab the support strut she was hanging from. The electro-muscular bands in her suit immediately tightened to strengthen her grip, and an alert flashed up in her virtual display, informing her that the suit’s Emergency-Med function had activated. Cooling numbness soon spread throughout her injured shoulder, mercifully wiping the pain away. Kimiko looked up. The top of the deck was too far away for her to easily reach it. But it was either that, or dropping the thirty meters to the surface below her.

  Then one of the Sec-Bots leaned over the railing and looked down on her. “Your presence here is not authorized,” it said, with a deep machine voice. “You will surrender yourself immediately.”

  She hung there, her left arm mostly numb, effectively immobilized, wondering what other options she still had left. There was always the knife. Maybe, if the Bot hauled her up to the deck, she could get to the blade before it disabled her. It was a shitty plan, but it was better than nothing. “Looks like you already got me, Joe.” She could hear the strain in her own voice. “Don’t think I can be any more surrendered.”

  The Sec-Bot’s head tilted down, then slightly to the side, as if it didn’t quite understand what it was looking at. The gesture was inordinately human and completely unnerving. “You are the intruder working with the one who hacked into my system,” it said mysteriously. Kimiko could hear the difference in its tone of voice right away. “Who are you?”

  It must’ve been the station AI, taking over the Sec-Bot to communicate with her. That wasn’t greased up. Not at all.

  “I’m the tooth fairy, Joe,” she replied, forcing more bravado into her voice than she actually felt. “Who the hell are you?”

  The Sec-Bot leaned even farther over the railing, and Kimiko could see its optic units trying to focus on her. “Your defiant attitude is to be expected. Making it this far into my station must have taken some skill, even if you had assistance.” Then it tilted its head again. It was no longer moving like a Sec-Bot at all. “I am Doha. I run this station. An
d you should consider answering my question before I’m forced to resort to more aggressive methods of persuasion.” Then the Bot stretched an impossibly long arm down and wrapped a mechanical hand around Kimiko’s wrist. Of course, it had to choose her injured arm.

  “Fuck you, Joe,” she spat, as it started to lift her up to the deck.

  Then a sudden clamor let loose, like a closet full of buzzsaws, and the Sec-Bot stopped lifting her to turn and look behind it. Kimiko felt the Bot’s grip loosen, but she was already high enough to grab one of the guard railing balusters before the Bot let go of her completely. She heard a fearsome rumble, and felt the deck vibrating through her hands. When she looked back up, a bright orange, half-meter wide claw closed around the Sec-Bot and cleaved it in two with a loud crunch and an explosion of sparks. The Heavy Loading Bot lifted its giant claw, ripping the top half of the Sec-Bot from its bottom half and tossing it back over the guard rail. Then it turned and, with a rumble, moved away.

  Kimiko lifted herself up, gingerly grabbing the guardrail first with her injured arm, then her other arm, grateful for her suit’s assistance as she pulled herself up and over it before she fell down to the deck. The Loading Bot had already turned on the second Sec-Bot, which was sorely outclassed. It clearly hadn’t realized yet that their upcoming fight was already over, swinging its remaining arm at its oversized opponent, but it didn’t even manage to scratch the bright orange paint. The Loading Bot just lifted a mammoth, clawed arm and smashed it down on the Sec-Bot, crushing it onto the deck. Then the giant Bot trundled around on its massive treads and rolled over toward her. Kimiko smiled as she pushed herself up into a sitting position, and spoke up when it stopped a couple meters away from her. “Are you enjoying your new toy, Paradox?”

  “How did you know it was me?” replied Paradox’s voice. It sounded a little tinny broadcasting through a speaker mounted on the front of the Bot.