by TJ Ryan
“Hey,” Tyrese complained. “Some girls like to be teased. You one of those kind, Tara?”
“Right now I’m just a girl looking for answers,” she said. “My AI…he went insane, Tyrese. I know how that sounds but it’s true. He tried to…kill me,” she decided to say, again avoiding that whole uncomfortable moment when Aiden had put his hands on her.
“We took care of him,” Tyrese said. “I promise. He won’t be back. Even if he survived getting blasted out of orbit, that ship won’t survive landing on Earth.”
“So how’d you do it? How’d you manage to shoot through the ionized shielding?”
“I didn’t have to.” He smiled again with that same amazing, lopsided grin from before. “These clouds down here strip off the ionization. Toxic to humans, bad for electronics. I don’t know if you saw how my screens kept flickering when we were down there but a few more minutes and we might have had a murder of a time climbing back out again.”
Her eyes went wide. “You’re kidding. So the planet is going to try to kill us no matter what we do?”
“Well, that’s one way of looking at it.”
“I’m in orbit around a dead planet in a rinky-dink galaxy on the far side of the universe that every alien race in creation wants to get their hands on, I just got jettisoned out of an escape cylinder, and oh yeah, I don’t even have a ship of my own!” She paused a moment for a breath. “How else am I supposed to look at this?”
“Tara, seriously, calm down.” He rolled with an electronic whirring over to the hallway out of the control room, controlling himself with a lever joystick controller on the right arm of the chair. We’ll go down to the rec room and contact Overwatch. They’ll know what to do.”
“I can’t believe this,” she said, feet planted on the deck, her hands pushing through the strands of her gel-filled hair as she tried to hold onto her sanity. “My AI tries to kill me. Alien species are trying to kill me. My own damned homeworld is trying to kill me, and you think I should calm down?”
He shrugged, pausing at the doorway. “Well, yeah. There’s mysteries all around us. The Earth might never be livable again, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have things to learn from it. Things to gain from it.”
She offered him a weak smile, because damn it all to hell if listening to his voice wasn’t making her feel better in spite of herself. “You’re an incurable optimist, aren’t you?”
He patted one of his useless legs. “Kind of have to be. I mean, here I am a cripple, defending the Earth with the rest of the Engineers. Hard not to look at things with a glass-half-full kind of attitude, you know?”
“So, um.” Delicate question, she thought, but she figured after you’re almost killed with someone you get to ask whatever you want. “How’d you lose your legs?”
“That, I’m afraid, is a very long, and very sad story.”
“I’m not exactly going anywhere,” she pointed out. “Seems I just lost my Pod.”
“Yes, you did,” he agreed.
She could tell he was considering whether to tell her such a private detail of his life. “Come on. It’s not like I can walk out on you if you start boring me to death. I’ve got nothing but time.”
He chuckled softly. “All right, Engineer Tara Royce. Let me buy you a drink from my private reserves and I’ll tell you everything you need to know about Tyrese Gypsum.”
That was the best offer she’d had all day. If Tyrese had thrown in a long sonic shower and a full body massage she might have married him on the spot.
“Excuse me,” Claire’s clear voice interrupted them. “Overwatch is transmitting. They request your immediate attention, Engineer Tyrese.”
“Well.” He sounded…disappointed. “Those guys have the worst timing in the whole galaxy, don’t they?”
“Yeah,” she sighed. She might have enjoyed a drink with this man, and getting to know him better, and whatever else they decided to pass the time with. She really liked him. It was so odd for her, to feel this kind of connection to a man this quickly. It was more than just a reflex emotion because he’d saved her. She’d saved herself, actually, jetting out of the Pod like she did. This was something more.
In his eyes, Tara saw the same thoughts crossing Tyrese’s mind. This was going somewhere. They could both feel it. But, nobody kept Overwatch waiting.
“I’ll take the call in here, Claire.” Tyrese rolled his chair back over to the main control panel and accepted the incoming message. “You’ve reached Engineer Tyrese Gypsum. What can I do for you?”
The image of the man on the screens was transparent, but even so Tara could see he was tall and thin and not amused in any way. “Tyrese, what the hell just happened? We lost 2-7-7 off our screens and—”
His face turned toward Tara, and his beady eyes narrowed. “You are Engineer Royce, correct? You arrived yesterday?”
“Yes,” she said. Then she noticed the rank insignia on the shoulders of the man in the image and added a hasty, “Sir.”
Sector Sergeant Emil Wargo. She knew all about him from the data files but she never thought that she’d speak to him in person. She figured she would keep her head down for the three years of her tour and do her job and never have to speak to the Overwatch brass. Apparently, all it took for her to catch their attention was to almost die.
“Your Pod was 2-7-7,” Wargo said to her. “The information we have is that Engineer Tyrese just shot down your Pod. We also monitored an undocumented transmission to your Pod from the Academy. So tell me, Engineer. What the bagging hell is going on over there?”
“Well,” she said, with a sidelong smile for Tyrese. “That’s kind of a long story.”
CHAPTER SIX
There were no guest quarters in a Defense Pod. They were meant for one person and an AI, and no one else. Tara made due sleeping in the chair in the dining area, with her feet up on the table.
Or at least, she sat in the chair with her eyes closed, and pretended she was going to fall asleep sometime in the next two minutes.
The story she had told Sector Sergeant Wargo had been completely true, of course, but just unbelievable enough that the insufferable man had made her repeat it twice and then answer a series of idiotic questions before he was satisfied that what she was telling them and what their own instruments had confirmed must be true. For the first time since the creation of the toaster, an AI program had developed a serious glitch that turned it on its human partner. It should have been impossible.
Tara was learning that she was very good at stumbling into the impossible.
She’d had a harder time explaining the transmission from the Academy. Overwatch couldn’t intercept the secure transmission from Tier Sergeant Borden, but they still knew it had come to her. Was the mission still secret, she wondered? Without her Pod to collect the probe when it returned from the Earth’s surface—if it returned—then everyone would end up seeing it anyway. There was no way that Overwatch wouldn’t notice a self-propelled device rocketing up from those clouds if she wasn’t there to snatch it up.
She popped her eyes open and stared at the ceiling. Nothing had turned out like she expected it to. This was supposed to be her time to prove herself. She wanted to be here, defending the Earth, showing she was a valuable member of the Defense Engineers. It would have guaranteed she could go on to bigger things. A career at the Academy. A posting in any of the colonies. Maybe, after a few three-year terms here on Earth, she could have even gotten a promotion to Overwatch.
Now where was she? Not even a Pod to call her own. She was stuck here until replacement Engineers came to take the place of the losses from the battle with the Oog. Tomorrow, when the moon’s orbit brought it closer, Tyrese would transfer her over to the Overwatch facility and she would at least have a bed to sleep in. She would have something to call her own.
Swinging her feet off the table and down on the floor she forced herself up out of the chair, straightening out the cricks in her spine as she started pacing. It wasn’t long before she slammed a fist
against the wall. Twice.
The lights came on in the room. When she turned around, Tyrese was there in his wheelchair. He was in a pair of white sleeping clothes and for a moment she pictured him changing clothes and wondering how…there must be some serious twisting and bending going on when he changed clothes. Huh. A woman’s touch might make it so much easier for him.
“Your face is red,” Tyrese told her. “You must be thinking really hard.”
The double entendre in that made her cheeks hotter. “I was, um, thinking about my future here.”
He laughed. He actually laughed at her. “I don’t think you have one. Your career is going to be awfully hard to resurrect here, Tara. An Engineer without a Pod to pilot is as useful as a solar cell with no sun.”
“I’ll get a new Pod,” she told him. “As soon as I get back to the Academy. I’ll get a new one…and you’re shaking your head. Why are you shaking your head?”
He rolled his chair in closer with that little stick controller. “I know the bastards at the Academy. Believe me, they won’t send you back here again. Your days of being a Defense Engineer are over.”
It was a good thing she was near the chair at the table, because she had to sit down.
“Hey,” he said, gently. “I didn’t mean to be so blunt. It’s just a job, Tara. People come, people go. Nobody does this for life.”
“I was going to,” she mumbled. “This was all I’ve wanted out of life. Forever.”
“Seriously? How old are you, even? You can’t be that old.”
She glared at him. “I’m twenty-six, thank you. I’m plenty old enough.”
“Hold on,” Tyrese said. “I’m not trying to run you down. What you did, escaping your Pod? That took more guts than I’ve seen from most people.”
“Says the guy piloting a Defense Pod from a wheelchair.”
She’d meant it as a compliment. Instead, his face went very still and he stared up at her with dark thoughts moving behind his eyes. “It hasn’t been easy,” he said finally. “I do my job as well as anyone else does. Better than some. Seems to me you had the chance to become one of the best of us, too. But, Tara, reality is reality. I was done after this tour. I can’t keep doing this without my legs. You’re done, too. You lost your Pod on your first day.”
“I didn’t lose it,” she argued. “You blew it up. And it wasn’t my first day. It was my second day.”
“Tara, try hearing me. Okay? You’re done. This is it for you.”
She wanted to kill him. She wanted to scream at him that she was going to make this work…somehow…but she didn’t know how.
“Come on,” Tyrese said to her. “I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”
“Sure,” she griped. “Might as well get something into my system before I get transferred over to the moon. After all, I’m done, right?”
“Tara…”
“Screw you, Tyrese. I thought you were a friend. I thought you…”
She bit off the end of that sentence. Cared. She thought he cared. That maybe she’d found somebody that would be more than just a voice on the other end of the Comms channel. Now she sat there with her hands fisted into her lap, shaking, and trying not to see her future go up in flames.
He tapped his fingers on his chair, his face still unreadable. “When I lost my legs, I thought my time in the Engineers was over. I thought, sure, I can still do the programming and they’ll keep me around on Overwatch to make sure the Pods are running properly and all in the correct orbit and hey, they might even let me service the waste disposal unit, you know? But here I am, still piloting this Pod of mine, still defending the homeland from alien species who want to claim our little rock for their own.”
“Oh, bagging hell, Tyrese,” she swore vehemently. “What’s your point? You think I’m going to be given a spot on Overwatch and that’s going to make me happy or something?”
He rolled over to her, and then took one of her hands in his. Then he brought it up to his lips.
Then he kissed her skin.
“My point,” he said, as she sat there too stunned to speak, “is that you can do anything you want. If the Engineers don’t want to give you another Pod, make them see why they have to. Convince them you’re still valuable. I did.”
He slapped his legs again. It was obvious he didn’t feel it.
Her hand was still in his. She didn’t try to take it back. She liked the way it felt too much. “You never did tell me how you lost the use of your legs.”
“Heh. Guess we’ve got time for that story now, don’t we? Over a year ago, I—”
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” Claire’s voice spoke, surprising them both. “There is a large object coming up through the clouds directly below us.”
Tyrese’s hand closed tighter on hers. Their eyes met, and they were both thinking the same thing.
Aiden.
Tyrese let go of her and spun his chair around. “I need to get to the—”
“—command room,” she finished for him, following close behind. He was very quick in that chair of his.
At the main console of the command room Tyrese put his chair in place for the floor clamps to lock it down again. His hands worked the controls, arming the flash lasers, ionizing the hull, preparing to send a message off to Overwatch, even though they were out of position to assist again.
Claire’s voice was way too…sultry for the moment, in Tara’s opinion. Not that she was jealous. Still, she couldn’t help seeing the AIs as a lot more human now than she had before. Aiden had forever changed her opinion of them, and not for the better.
“I am displaying the image of the object now,” Claire said.
On the screens in front of Tyrese, the sleek outline of an object streaking through the layers of the atmosphere was displayed in holographic relief, in colors of red and yellow, information displaying around it as thin blue lines pointed to various aspects…thrusters, control fins, nose cone, hollow interior compartment containing unknown payload.
“That’s not a Pod,” Tyrese said, pointing out the obvious. “What in the hell is that?”
Tara knew. She couldn’t believe it. Reaching past him she worked a few controls just to be sure.
“What are you doing?” he asked her.
“Look. Right there. Your Pod is over the same spot that mine would have been if you hadn’t shot it out of space. Right here. Amazing.”
“Tara, what are you talking about? Whenever we lose a Pod the others change orbit to compensate. So, yeah, I’m covering your sector, too. Our patrol arcs were bound to overlap. What is that thing coming at us?”
“It’s a secret,” she said, with a smile for him. “Prepare to bring it on board.”
Aiden couldn’t join her down in the cargo hold. That wheelchair of his couldn’t navigate the central access corridor. Ever since his accident, the droid crawlers had done everything he needed done at the lower levels.
Now, next to her escape cylinder, the droid crawlers had positioned the probe they had collected out of the atmosphere. None of the other Pods, not even Overwatch, had seen them do it. She’d launched this thing expecting to collect it in secret. Now, she was sharing that secret with Tyrese, and worrying about what Tier Sergeant Borden was going to think about all of this.
She snorted. What was he going to do, take away her Pod? Little late for that.
“Tara?” Tyrese said to her over the Comms. “I’m watching you through the droid crawlers. Go ahead. I want to see what the probe found on the planet as much as you do.”
The way Borden made this sound when he gave her the assignment, the probe was just supposed to go down to the surface and collect data and then return with it. Now, the Pod’s sensors and the droid crawlers sensors and even Claire’s scans all confirmed that there was something inside the Pod. It had actually collected something from the Earth and brought it back.
“You know this could be toxic, right?” she asked him, not for the first time.
“Definitely not. Not
hing on any of our scans indicates any toxicity, radiation, or infection. Whatever’s in there, it’s safe to look at. So let’s look.”
Tara nodded, knowing he was right, but still terrified to look inside. The probe had black scoring all along its length. Marks from the dust clouds around the planet, she was sure. Because of that she had on heavy Engineer gloves, the ones with microtools worked into the fingertips. This was Engineer work, after all. Servicing and repairing probes and equipment. They were more than just killers.
Swallowing back her hesitation, Tara put her hands to the curved hull of the probe, feeling over the seams of the hatch over the interior compartment. When she did, a panel next to the hatch lit up.
The droid crawlers all tensed on their articulated legs.
“Calm down, guys,” she muttered, but it was said more for herself than them.
She tried every code sequence the Engineers were taught in the Academy, and a few that she had picked up along the way as simple hacks that worked on most electronics. Nothing. The probe remained sealed.
“Fine,” she said. “We’ll do this the hard way.”
Using her right ring finger tool she had the circuitry bypassed in a matter of seconds. The index finger tool popped the hatch lock. The compartment was as long as her torso, and half as wide, and when it finally opened it lit up internally to reveal what the probe had secured from the Earth.
Tara stumbled backward, raising her hands up defensively. Impossible, was her only thought.
The droid crawlers moved in defensively. When she was able to regain her senses she shooed them all back, waving her hands at them, threatening a few with her left finger arc welder until they finally retreated.
Bloody, sucking, bagging hell.
“Tara?” Tyrese asked her over the Comm. “What is it? What is that thing?”
She realized the glimpses he was getting through the droid crawlers would have been chaotic as they swarmed and scurried in all directions. With her gloves, she bent down and picked a crawler up from both sides, and then moved it around to stare inside. Its legs curled up on itself and its little tools waved menacingly, but it didn’t try to escape her grip.