Or that a rod from beneath the floor boards had pierced the side of her body.
The high-pitched buzz of a saw blade cutting through the mangled cockpit hatch did catch her attention though; its sparks burning her face in little dots began to wake her to the present. It shook her a little, heightened her senses just enough for her to start looking around. She heard the dull, muted shouting now outside her ship — not possible if she were still in space. She couldn't hear what they were saying, or couldn't concentrate enough to comprehend, but she stretched vaguely away from the saw.
The saw kept cutting, the whine of its metal blade slicing through the metal hull. She suddenly felt an impending doom close in around her, she started hallucinating space pirates carving into her ship so that they could carve into her. Her heart sank and her stomach tied into knots, and she struggled against the metal rod that pinned her body into the chair without her realizing it. Her inability to move brought on further panic.
She lost consciousness moments before rescue crews sawed through the remainder of the cockpit hatch, pulling it away.
"I think she's alive," said a man wearing a coverall and a yellow safety vest that flashed a dull yellow light on a slow strobe. He looked down at the black metal rod sticking out of her side. "Oh shit, that's going to be a toughie. Come on, Xue, give me a hand."
***
A man in a uniform came running down the stairs that led down the side of the warehouse from an upper office. "What have you done, you numbskulls? What have you done?!" The man shouted in a high-pitched, nasally voice. He seemed tentatively bold, as if gathering strength from some outside, unseen force. They all watched him as he stomped down the stairs.
When the man got to the bottom of the stairs, he got a better look at who it was, exactly, who had been fighting with his robots. Wimprey’s face went pale.
"You!" he exclaimed at Celia and Rex.
"Hi!" Celia said, waving. "Look," she said, tugging at Rex's shirt sleeve, "it's our friend from before."
Rex only grunted lightly.
"We're not friends!" Wimprey shouted. There was still a considerable distance between him and the group, and it didn't appear that he dared to go any further.
"Oh," Celia said, pretending to be hurt. "Well then," she said, her face going dark. "Then I guess we need to treat you like these robots then."
Wimprey's false bravado left him a moment. He turned bright red, and stood staring at them for a moment. His eyes darted around, as if searching for something in the empty warehouse.
"So who this fellow be then?" Dirk asked, standing next to Kenpur behind Rex and Celia.
"Who is that anyway?" Joey asked.
"A very officious little weakling, and nothing we need to worry about," Celia said, grinning at Joey. Joey smiled back at her. He couldn't help but do so.
Wimprey wasn't far enough away that he didn't hear the smear against him. His face turned more red, his eyes narrowed, but then they widened with delight. He became his bold self again.
"Well, about time I caught you two! And the rest of you losers too! Now I'll serve you up to the CEO! I'll have my way up the corporate ladder paved for me. To the top floors, they'll send me. And you!" Wimprey pointed at Celia, who made a “who me?” gesture. "I'll take special pleasure in torturing you every day."
"Sounds kinky," Celia said, laughing as Company C soldiers flooded into the warehouse from its multiple doors.
"They keep giving him soldiers somehow," Rex muttered, shaking his head.
"Don't they ever learn? Celia asked, shaking her head.
“Don’t get so cocky,” Kenpur growled. “Those robots took a lot out of you. Out of all of us. You need to stay focused.”
“Well don’t tell them that!” Celia hissed.
"Now soldiers!" Wimprey was practically jumping up and down. "Get them!"
***
Isellia woke up in a hospital bed, small wires attached to her wrists, exposed by rolled up sleeves. She blinked her eyes awake and as she rubbed them she nearly pulled off the small microchip attached to her temple. She looked around the room: White walls, a small holo in the corner with a talking head and some XRs racing behind them. A holo monitor next to her displayed her vital signs, and could be switched to show a real time hologram of her vital organs for reference. A line of static ran through the holo monitors whenever she touched the microchip.
The room was quiet, save for the occasional beep of the monitor. The talking head on the holo was a dull background noise to her as she tried to understand how she'd gone from the cockpit of a spaceship to this.
The door swung open, a nurse in a white coverall entered the room, heading toward the vitals machine. He paused at seeing her stare at him. "Oh, you're awake."
Isellia looked at him. He was tall, with dark hair that curled around toward his left eye. He had a chiseled jaw and a fairly muscular physique. She stared at him, unable to say anything, her mind still in shock from the explosion.
"You hungry?" he asked, using his finger to pull down a few settings, punching some things into the pad attached to it. He swiped his finger over the vital signs, bringing up a holo of her spleen.
"Yes?" he said, smiling at her. She looked up at him, her eyes still wide with surprise. "All right, you've had a pretty rough day. How about I just bring you something?"
She nodded, still unable to speak.
***
"Where is she!?" Porter frantically pushed his wheelchair toward the front desk at the closest hospital to the race course, turning it at the last minute so he was both closest to the counter in the waiting room of the hospital, and so that his chair was pointed toward the hallway, ready to sprint off to find Isellia. "Where have they taken her?"
"Sir, you need to calm down," a large woman with horned-rim glasses said. She wore her dark, auburn hair pulled back in a tight bun, a bored look on her face. "Mark your name down and someone will come out to assist you."
"I don't have time for this. Tell me where she is so I can go see her!"
"Sir, please have a seat!"
"I already have a seat! What I need is to see my crew member!"
"So, you're not immediate family?"
"I'm the only family she's got! Now let me see her."
"Sir, you can't —"
"Oh forget it!" Porter cocked the wheels back on the metal chair. "I'll find her myself."
"Sir, you can't just —" But Porter was already out of earshot.
***
Sparks flew as the mass of bodies scrambled through the warehouse. Each of the dozens of soldiers who flooded the aisles of the warehouse carried a stun stick that sparkled with electricity. They were similar to the robot's, except all black. The soldiers’ orders seemed to the crew to have been to capture as many of the crew as possible. Stun sticks would render them incapacitated and twitching if any of the crew members got anything more than a glancing blow, but they'd be alive.
Rex and Celia preferred the open area in front of the stacks for its maneuverabliltiy, swinging in tandem as they dodged stun sticks, and redirected them right into other soldiers’ faces. It only took a few moments before half a dozen of the soldiers were lying on the floor, twitching and incapacitated.
Jeanna and Dirk stuck to the stacks, climbing and leaping from row to row in order to evade the soldiers, as they shoved boxes on the soldiers as they ran below. One soldier lay unconscious under an enormous steel drum that fell from a stack as Jeanna and Dirk climbed and ran across the stacks, one of their more successful attacks.
One soldier ran straight at Joey, whose eyes went wide. Joey wanted to move, he knew he needed to, but he simply couldn't. His feet felt frozen to the ground.
Then Joey watched as the soldier’s balance changed, tipping forward, and then sprawling end over end, flying over Joey's head and landing with a crunch on his black helmet, sliding across the floor and out of commission.
Joey turned to look at the soldier, then turned back to see Kenpur standing in front o
f him. Kenpur grabbed his hand.
"Let's get you somewhere safe, young man," he said. In a flash, they were on the far end of the warehouse, far away from the fighting. Kenpur left Joey sitting on top of a metal box at the top of the stacks, where he could see the entire scene: Rex and Celia moving like blurs, but the robot moving even faster, leaving a wake of stunned Company C soldiers.
"I should be helping," Joey said in a weak voice. He remembered freezing up and felt ashamed.
"You can help us by staying safe for now. Your time to help will come."
Then Kenpur was off, and Joey was left to watch the remainder of the battle.
***
"Hey man, what do you have going on?" MaBrown walked into the engine room, surprised by the shear noise that filled the room. Metal clanking against metal, the low bass humming of the turbines rumbling his bones with their sound.
"H-h-hey, you're n-not supposed to be in here," Stephen said, barely audible over the roar of the engines.
"Come on, man, I just want to talk. Can we step outside a bit, where I can actually hear you?"
Stephen looked at the engine control panel a moment to double check things were running smoothly, then followed MaBrown.
"So listen," MaBrown said, once they'd walked far enough down the hallway that the engines were only a muffled background din. "I think I got a lead on a story. A good tip on something I came across on the Buzz."
"Oh, that's g-g-good," Stephen said.
"Want to go check it out with me? You could use a break, right?"
"Oh, I... I can't, I have to stay with the ship and keep it running," Stephen said, fidgeting.
"What are you talking about? We're not even flying!"
"The engines still have to run!" Stephen said perfectly, in the way that he did when he forgot about his stutter. "We have to keep the environmentals going, and all the electronics. Nothing would work if we just turned it off. We could use back-up generators for a while, but those are limited and they cost fuel."
"OK, OK, I understand," MaBrown said, nodding, his hands out in an “I give up” posture. "I get it. But come on, are they going to fall apart for an hour? I could use a second person to help me check this out."
"Well, how about me?" Fran said from behind MaBrown.
MaBrown looked at her a moment. "Well, I suppose. This involves Company C though — you sure you want to start nosing around in your employer's business?"
"As a matter of fact, I do. It just so happens I was looking into something before I left: an accounting discrepancy that I couldn't explain and when I asked the boss he really couldn't explain it either and I thought well, that's weird, so I started looking into it more and I was asked to go on vacation so I took some data with me and I started examining it and then I wound up on this ship and here I am, so let's go."
MaBrown opened his mouth to say something, but then just smiled. “Sounds like we’re on the same track. OK, Fran, let's go."
***
Porter charged into the white hospital room, pushing open two large swinging metal doors with the foot rests of his wheelchair. They opened to a pair of doctors standing over Isellia, unconscious on top of the white-sheeted hospital bed. The two doctors held instruments over her, and they looked up in surprise at the disruption. Porter stopped, his internal fire extinguished, at seeing Isellia lying on the bed. A large metal rod lay on a tray next to the doctors, a man and woman, and Isellia's white hospital gown was red with blood on her side. Porter could see under between the doctor's hands the bone of her ribs through the gaping hole.
"We're about to patch her up," one of the doctors said. "Park yourself over on the side, and keep out of our way."
Porter nodded through his shock, gingerly turning his wheelchair around and wheeling it back to the edge of the room, a curtain dividing it from the next room.
"Laser scalpel," The older male doctor said, holding his hand out to the side. The female doctor placed the handle in his hand.
"Shouldn't we ask him to leave?" The female doctor whispered. Porter stared at the two. His whole demeanor had changed into that of a quiet observer. He folded his hands in his lap.
"He's already in here," the male doctor said. "It won't make much difference anyway. Look at him. He's practically in shock. We won't hear a peep out of him."
"The nurse station just sent a message. He's not family."
The male doctor shook his head. "Just look at his face. He's family, in one way or another."
***
Celia dug her heel into the soldier's chest, twisting it just a little. She could have applied a great amount of pressure, puncturing the man's shirt with the pointed end of her heel. Instead, she pinned the man to the concrete with it, just enough pressure to hold him, and stuck the end of his own stun stick into his stomach. The soldier's helmet masked the look of fear on the man's face as she pulled the trigger on the stun stick, sending him into convulsions and then unconsciousness. She pulled her foot off at the same time so that she wouldn’t be shocked at the same time.
"That it?" Rex said, standing with his arms crossed, a worthy pile of defeated Company C soldiers nearby.
"I think I got the last one," Celia said, chuckling. "Why do they keep thinking they can win?"
Dirk jumped down from the stacks, landing on two different platforms before rolling onto the concrete as he landed. Jeanna did the same, following an identical path. "They keep trying but we keep winning. Some mighty fine skills you two be having there."
"We try," Celia said in a sing-song voice.
"Where's the kid?" Rex asked.
"Sorry guys," Joey said.. He walked out from behind the stacks with an ROU to his head, held by Wimprey, who somehow was grinning and angry at the same time.
"Now you all listen here!" Wimprey yelled, with all the pomposity and bravado he could muster. "You're all going to surrender yourselves, or the kid gets it!"
They all looked at each other, a silence falling between them. Then they all bursted out laughing.
Wimprey glared at them, his face turning red as they doubled over in guffaws.
"What is funny? Do you think I am kidding!?"
Kenpur stepped forward. He was the only one not laughing. His eyes narrowed on Wimprey.
"None of us is going anywhere with you,” Kenpur said. “And you touch that kid, and I'll feed you your fingers."
Wimprey winced a moment, then quickly regained his composure in order not to show weakness. He looked around at all of them, who'd stopped laughing and now had taken on a threatening posture.
"Don't come any closer!" Wimprey's hand was shaking as it held the ROU, its metal contours becoming heavy in his hand.
The others started toward Wimprey, but Kenpur put his hands out.
"Walk away with or without the boy, the choice is yours. Without him, I'll forget all about this and leave you be. With him — well, you become our new punching bag. We will get him back either way. So there's really only one good choice."
Wimprey narrowed his eyes. He looked at them as if wondering whether he could trust their word, or if he'd just become a punching bag anyway.
"I've got Company C behind me," Wimprey said, mustering his best bravado. "You won't touch me." He started backing away.
"We'll see," Kenpur said. Wimprey slowly backed away into the warehouse, his ROU pointed at Joey's head the whole time.
"Stay strong Joey!" Celia called. "We'll come for you. You'll be fine!"
Wimprey fired a shot toward the group, which they all dodged. When they looked again, both of them were gone.
Nix looked at Kenpur, waiting for the nod, which Kenpur happily gave to him.
"You know what to do." Nix was off, using his skills as the crew's best tracker.
"Poor little guy," Celia said after he left. "He's probably scared. I didn't realize how attached I'd gotten to him, until now."
"He'll be fine," Kenpur said. "That boy is more resourceful than I think even he realizes. We’ll find him soon enoug
h.”
"And right to the bloodbath I've got in store for that little creep Wimprey.” She looked at Rex, who nodded. Rex gave only the slightest of nods, but it was enough to tell her Rex felt exactly the same. It masked the tremendous amount of guilt he felt.
***
MaBrown and Fran stood outside the Office of Transfers. The small building hid nearly out of sight, tucked in amongst the black skyscrapers that nearly blotted out the sky. The two-story building was almost homely by comparison, a small stack with smoke from heating oil wafting into the sky through the jungle of skyscrapers.
MaBrown and Fran noted a small “open” sign in the window next to the door. "This is where I was told to go," MaBrown said.
"That makes sense," Fran said. "If we were going to get a tip on something, this is the place, most likely, because the Office of Transfers is a small investigative office run by the former galactic government, and though that government is a shell of its former self the OoT seems to have become this sort of entity onto itself, so they have one in just about every major city in the galaxy, as far as I know, and you know, it’s funny because the one where I worked was closed most of the time, isn't that funny, that it would just be closed like that?"
MaBrown nodded. He tended to listen more than most people, ready to pick up on the slightest hint of something newsworthy. He let people ramble, knowing eventually they would reveal something. So he, perhaps more than anyone, was best suited to listen to Fran's often long-winded speeches.
"I think so too," Fran said, satisfied.
"Well, I suppose we should go in, huh?"
"Yes, let's."
MaBrown cracked open the front door, to see a small man balancing on a ladder reaching toward a book on a high shelf of a round room filled with shelves of books. The room looked to be from another era, with wooden benches under the shelves for reading and dark brown wooden floors and wall trim.
The sound of the door startled the man on the ladder, and he began wobbling on the ladder, which they could now see was balancing on a stack of books.
"Whoa!" he said, his balance tipping one way, then the other. MaBrown and Fran both rushed to his side, trying to right the ladder, without much success. Finally, the ladder toppled over, crashing into a heap amongst the previously stacked up books. The man fell toward MaBrown, who unwillingly cushioned the man's fall. Fran rushed over to help them both up.
Robot Awareness: The Inner Circle Page 14