She allowed him to pull her closer. “Well, I am the only person here.”
He squeezed her fingers. “If anyone needs to be reprogrammed, it’s you. You should value exactly how wonderful you are.”
Her heart thunked again. “A really wonderful person wouldn’t have zapped you all those times with the electro-welder.”
“I survived.”
“Barely.”
Amusement crossed his face, fleeting.
“Don’t laugh,” she said. “You might be drunk on me now, but that just means you’re going to have one hell of a hangover.”
He stroked her knuckles, soft and hypnotic. “I’ll reprogram you, and you can reprogram me. Okay?”
So, he wanted to give her exquisite pleasure, so he could figure out how to control his emotion. In exchange, he promised to make her into an arrogant, selfish person, who didn’t care about her mistakes.
He tugged her dangerously close to him again. “I can help you decide.”
“No way.” She scrambled back so fast she slipped and banged her forearm on the bed rail. Pain radiated up her arm. She hissed.
He stopped instantly. “What?”
She rubbed the abused joint. “Souvenir of our escape.”
He peeled her flight suit open at the wrist, revealing a mass of bruises.
The places she’d hit in the elevator. The places she’d hit falling into the crate, him on top of her, and falling out of it again. Probably some from the decompression too.
His expression turned indecipherable.
She covered herself. “Sexy, right?”
He gently pushed her hands aside, exposed her arms up to the shoulder blades, and revealed her legs to the knees. Her whole body darkened in bruises.
Well, she’d been wanting to get out of the flight suit for weeks.
She shrugged free, stepping on the cool metal floor in her bare feet. Her old cotton chemise and her faded lavender panties weren’t exactly what she would’ve chosen as lingerie, but he stared at her bruises anyway, so her outfit might as well have been shapeless bags.
“These are a day old,” he said, looking directly at her big butt.
She made a lattice with her hands to obscure it. “Those are mostly from the crate. Maybe a couple are from the Hub transit lounge or that freight elevator.”
The bench made a squeaking sound. He released it suddenly. Oh, he’d been gripping the edge. And it seemed he had been gripping it hard. The iron bar held the unlikely impression of ten fingers.
He seemed upset.
She tried to shrug. “You told me to stay closer to the floor.”
He stroked her wrist—gently—and captured her eye. A solemn promise filled his serious face. “You will not suffer any more injuries. Not with me protecting you.”
His words echoed like a vow.
Her breath caught in her chest.
But he was the one with the hole in his head. She tapped his hard skull. “Don’t sacrifice yourself for me again.”
“I don’t intend to.”
“Swear it.”
He focused on her with his most intense promise. “Only if you agree not to let anyone manipulate you.”
“I don’t—”
“You wear your vulnerabilities on your face.” He stroked her cheek. “Don’t let others take advantage of your kindness. Not even me.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Mercury lost herself in the fiercely protective gaze of the android. She wanted to curl up in those arms and give herself over to his embracing shelter.
But now wasn’t the time. He wanted to use her to discover his own limitations, and she didn’t want to be used.
Well, honestly, she wanted to be the kind of woman who had a thousand lovers, and a sexy robot could be just part of her big adventure.
But he spoke such lovely, kind, dangerous words that she would probably develop feelings for him. It was possibly already too late.
It was better to have loved and lost…
She shushed her practical self with a little promise. If they made it through landing at the next hub, she would reconsider.
“Like I said before, stop provoking me.” She rose. “Let’s prepare for storming Hope Station.”
“I’ll think more clearly if we work out my concentration problem first.”
“Yves.”
He sighed and looked around. “This window has to go. And I need some leg braces.”
They worked for hours. Yves tested sight lines to make sure Mercury could hide behind the curved glass hull, invisible from any angle.
“They can see through the glass,” she said.
“Not if more light strikes the outside.” He framed the solution with his hands. “When the loader boards to put this glass back in its proper place, we’ll hitch a ride off. And if we’ve been discovered, it will make a perfect honeypot.”
“Which is what?”
“A honeypot”—he hobbled on her cobbled-together elbow braces—“is where you force your enemy to reach blindly in to get a sweet. But the sweet is surrounded by reverse spikes. The more you try to scoop out the honey, the worse you injure yourself.”
Goodness, it sounded like his offer. Have sex, taste the indelible sweetness, and then pierce herself on the spikes of his indifference when he walked away.
She shook off the image. “So I’m the bait again.”
“I prefer to think of you as the honey.”
Heat warmed her. She swallowed the flash of pleasure from his words. “I hope it goes better than your last scheme.”
“Me too. Don’t move this time until I tell you.”
The frigate navigated its final docking maneuvers, and she huddled behind the curved shield of hull glass. The glass angled away from her, toward the frigate door. She’d prefer it curved protectively around her instead.
“Now,” Yves called over his shoulder. “Shield the lamp.”
She covered her portable holo projector, plunging them into darkness.
“Keep it dark. Your life depends on it.”
“We should have chosen a different holo.” She squeezed the projector to her chest. The cover shifted, and a crack of Romeo and Juliet flashed out.
He frowned back at her, his oculars glinting dangerously. “What did I just say?”
She rubbed her damp palms on her bare legs. “Do you know how this holo ends? They die. They die horribly and tragically.”
“And then they get resurrected and move to Neo Fiji. Concentrate.”
She hugged the projector. The Cat Prince danced on the glass. She fixed the cover. “I’m a little nervous.”
“Don’t move, Mercury. I mean it.”
Air from Hope Station Arrival Lounge 422-N hissed around the frigate’s first seal, then the second seal, then the third seal. Each breach made the whole ship groan while the pressures equalized.
Her ears popped.
Unlike a station, this dumb frigate did not have safety measures to prevent a catastrophic depressurization. If they missed the dock, if they got attacked, or if the hull failed, they would be sucked straight out into cold space.
So she had to get off here. Preferably unnoticed. Also, alive.
Then sneak onto something else. Preferably bound to a place that could activate her ID chip. Also, wouldn’t report her to the Faction while she still carried her old ID.
Oh, and Yves was paralyzed below the waist, with two holes in his head. Not exactly the sneakiest for blending in.
The frigate door creaked. A thin bead of light cracked around the four corners.
Yves stiffened.
Uh-oh.
The door pushed in a foot, flooding their area with the scent of engine oil, lubricant, dry ozone, and, comfortingly, humanity.
“Shit,” Yves muttered.
Dread curled through her. She sucked in a breath and whispered, “What is it?”
“Don’t move.” He clenched the braces. “Don’t breathe. Don’t speak.”
The heavy frigate do
or shrieked upward on hinges badly in need of maintenance, swinging parallel to the ceiling. Light flared into the ship, illuminating the hull glass and tinting it like a polarizing sun.
Despite his orders, she gasped and shrank into a little ball.
Clearly exposed on the other side of the glass ranged a gun-bristling wall of army droids.
~*~*~*~
The frigate door ascended with a final gong that echoed through the metal.
Attack droids, aerial drones, rapid-fire terminals, and zero-gravity command platforms focused laser sights on Yves. Space-ready troops wore rebreathers and radioactive reflection gear, and four hull-breakers guaranteed they would not get away from this firefight.
So much for the element of surprise.
A screen floating in front of the troops showed a woman with high cheekbones and olive skin. Tiny black ropes of hair swept up against her skull, and a bony, square frame poked through a black skin-tank. She was lounging on some sort of bench. A command bench? He couldn’t quite make out the insignia on the corner.
Her brown eyes were threaded with human irises, but the very deadness of her expression identified her for Yves even before she began to speak: She was an android.
“I am Zenya|Sen,” the woman on the screen said.
Shit. The z-class.
“How are you still breathing?” she asked.
“I am using the processors on Mercury’s brain chip,” he said.
Mercury shifted nervously behind him. Her heartbeat sounded like a staccato drum.
He swore it would keep beating. So he needed to emergency-decouple the frigate before the ambush rained fire. And to do that, he needed to wrest control of the frigate.
The z-class spoke. “Where is the target?”
“Here,” he said.
“Is she still alive?”
“Yes.”
“Show her to us,” Zenya said.
“I will.”
No one moved in the docking bay.
“I am still using her to accomplish my primary goal,” he said, tracing the cable lines beneath the troops. Sprinting past all of them to the control booth was a job for an x-class soldier, not a y-class analyst.
“The rogue is long gone,” the zero said.
“As I am currently at her last known solar system, I am best positioned to find her again.”
“Surrender yourself and target n82x.”
The floating screen resembled a control panel. But the zero class operated it.
He just had to get her to make a mistake.
“The rogue is accessing Faction networks and data,” he said, edging backward. “By disconnecting me from the network, the rogue also lost her ability to track my movements. I confirmed this when I approached and nearly shot her in the 14-Q Departures Terminal corridor.”
Zenya listened without blinking. “Show us the target n82x now.”
He took another step back. “Your troops surely have an on-sight execution order.”
“Nevertheless.”
“The rogue will corrupt the next android she encounters.”
“The rogue is only severing robots from the Faction controls. Other robots already severed possess your same advantage.”
Such as the zero class. Shit. Her logic won.
“Your adherence to your assignment is the only reason you have not already been melted into scrap.” Her monotone sharpened. “Stand down.”
Very few robots heard those words; they usually accompanied a piercing disconnect directly from the Central Mainframe. But he felt only a vague sense of dissonance.
“Androids have no defenses against her corruption.”
“You are relieved of your assignments,” the zero enunciated. “Decommissioned, effective immediately.”
Again, he anticipated the painful shock of deactivation. He had experienced it many times when his usefulness expired and his existence became a drain on the Robotics Faction’s processing powers.
But once again, it didn’t come.
“I don’t understand,” he said again. “If the priorities have not changed, I have a 38 percent higher chance of capturing the rogue. Where is the flaw?”
“You are not adding in the risks of a y-class under the influence of the rogue’s program.”
“What are those odds and how are they calculated?”
“Are you stalling?”
Shit.
He tipped his head. “Stalling for what?”
Her eyes narrowed. “The odds you have become corrupted are incalculable.”
“If they are incalculable, then, by definition, they cannot be entered into the equation, and therefore your tautology becomes irrelevant.”
“Show me the target. Now. Or I will have you both melted.”
Her threat echoed in the lounge.
The wall of guns focused on him.
He weighed his odds of survival against his next move.
More importantly, he weighed Mercury’s odds of survival.
He needed her to survive. Survive healthy, whole, and unhurt. Her old bruises filled him with a self-loathing he had never experienced before. He hadn’t cared about her physical well-being in the freight elevator. But now he couldn’t stop himself from caring, and he couldn’t explain the compulsion to save her away because he needed her chip. He needed her. He needed her kisses and her teases and her smiles. Sacrificing her was an error. The white-hot burning below his rib cage promised such an error would not occur again.
No matter what he had sworn.
No matter the cost.
Sixty-two thousand miles of blood vessels pulsed under her soft skin, and not a single one of them would break on his watch.
He turned his back on the z-class.
Her voice rose. “Where are you going?”
He tightened against the impending assault and tossed his answer over his shoulder. “I’m showing you the target.”
The screen floated after him.
Yes.
He heard the whoosh of its hover controls. He walked behind the curved, polarized glass of the sunspot detector and stood behind its opaque, conditionally reflective coating.
The screen floated over top of the curve. “Where is n82x?”
He pointed down.
The hovers squeaked in protest, and then the screen slowly tilted down until it floated horizontal with the floor, exposing the console’s wiring. As he had predicted, the view lens was not concave, nor holographic. Its lens focused on a shuddering, squinched-up Mercury staring up at it with horrified blue eyes.
On the other side of the curved glass, a hundred units thundered across the terminal and up the ramp.
“Very good,” the z-class said. “Now, stand—”
Yves plucked the wireless power receptor from the screen. The hover died. The tablet started to fall. Mercury jerked to shield her head.
He caught the tablet neatly in the air. “The lamp.”
She shuddered. “Huh?”
He let his sticks splay, falling behind the shelter beside her. “Remove the shades.”
“Oh. Oh!” She pulled off the outer shade.
Light blazed behind the curved glass. The polarizing mirror disappeared, and Mercury showed through to the Arrivals Lounge side.
She peered at the inevitable march of death. “They’re coming!”
He rewired the screen, booted it, and navigated through the primitive security to access the station’s schematics. “Don’t get too close to the glass.”
“Why not?”
Shots blazed at her face.
She shrieked and jerked back, dropping the lamp.
The shots hit the curved glass at exactly the same angle and frequency as a solar flare.
Tinted glass polarized to reflective in the strike location. The lasers ricocheted back on the army, who interpreted their own reflected shots as returned fire.
The marching droids scattered to defensible positions in the empty lounge while their command platforms fired burst after burst
directly into the glass. The air heated and the mirror changed colors from searing red to molten blue.
“Lift that shade again,” he instructed, wiring into the Lounge comptroller, “and stand.”
She gulped. Her arms shook. “Stand?”
“They’re programmed to shoot where they see you, so disperse their shots a bit. A melt-through would be catastrophic.”
She controlled deep breaths to psych herself up to the challenge.
He tapped her thigh with his toe. Her eyes locked on his. He filled his expression with absolute faith. “You can do this.”
Her chin wrinkled, but she nodded and, with one last great gasp, shot to her feet. The incinerating laser fire followed her face, as predicted, with a few stray human shots fired at her neck and torso. She bobbed and wove in front of the firing squad. Each shot smashed into the glass, making a horrifying cracking noise, and she flinched away from it.
And then, she began singing the local anthem of Gold Dust. Her eyes closed. Terrified beyond her ability to reason, acting only on instinct and his last request, she went to her execution with a song.
For once, he couldn’t fault her waste of energy.
He returned his attention to the communications screen. Close the door, decouple the frigate, and chart a course away from the hull-boring, space-faring units. He navigated through the unfamiliar codes until he found a promising location and pinged its controls.
Running lights flared between his knees.
Mercury didn’t notice, eyes still closed and starting on the second chorus.
A laser blast smoked at his feet.
He looked up.
One of the heavy artillery units flew into the frigate and angled for the backside of the glass. Its bulk prevented it from making perfect sights, but slagging the ceiling above into curved mush allowed them to ricochet down to his hiding spot. Pop, pop, pop. The shots flared between his feet, his ankles, and his thighs, and singed the edge of the tablet.
Shit.
He executed the forced decoupling program.
Out in the lounge, the warning lights flared. Any second, the hole formerly occupied by the ship would vent to space.
Time to close the door.
Shots burned between his knees and his ankles, heading toward Mercury. But she turned at the noise and saw the smoking spots next to him.
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