by King, Sara
Doberman went silent as a man approached them down the hall. “Unit Ferris,” the man said, “There’s been a breach in this sector. I will take your charge to the spaceport. Go secure the south side of Seven-C.”
“Of course, Unit Gryphon,” Doberman said. “Give me your arm for the transfer.” He began unlocking the cuff holding Anna to him. Anna felt a brief stab of fear. Would Doberman betray her? She had tried to kill him twice already today. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that, she thought, biting her lip. If he handed her over now, she could sing all she wanted to about sentient robots and no one would care, let alone try to find him.
The other robot held out its arm for the transfer, and Doberman grabbed it and twisted it off.
Then, as the Gryphon turned to look at the damage, Doberman put his fist through the side of the robot usually protected by the arm and ripped out the brainbox. As Anna watched in awe, he crushed the brain between nothing but his thumb and pinkie.
Thumb and pinkie? “Cool!” Anna cried, delighted. “I didn’t know you were such a showman, Dobie.”
“Next time,” Doberman said, dropping the wreckage, “You are going to keep your mouth shut, Landborn.” The robot calmly locked the cuff back around his wrist and began to run at precisely the right speed for Anna to keep up.
“Maybe,” Anna agreed. “Where’s the node?”
“My back pocket,” Doberman said.
“Just don’t sit on it,” Anna said.
“Agreed,” the robot said. “Can you run any faster? They’re going to be sealing down this section of the base in eighteen seconds.”
“No,” Anna panted.
Without a word, Doberman picked her up and broke into an inhuman sprint that made her actually feel Gs.
They made it outside the sector in fourteen seconds. Doberman set her down as the doors slammed shut and locked behind them, then resumed walking again as if nothing had even happened.
The robot wasn’t even breathing hard.
He’s good at this, Anna mused, walking placidly beside him. Up ahead, a group of coalers in riot gear rounded a corner and ran toward them. She stared sullenly at the floor as they approached, back to playing the part of an unwilling Nephyr draftee.
Two of the coalers stopped. With a surge of disgust, Anna realized that they were both had the glittering skin of Nephyrs underneath the assault equipment. “Unit Ferris, where are you going with that recruit?”
“Eoirus, sir,” Doberman replied.
“Why are you in Sector Six? The spaceport is in Sector Three.”
“I tricked the stupid thing into taking off the cuffs,” Anna sneered, jerking backwards and twisting her wrist in a mini-tantrum as Doberman remained utterly immobile above her. She kicked Doberman in the leg. Then, when he didn’t budge, she kicked him again, harder. “Stupid robot. Let me go! I want to go home. I don’t want to be a Nephyr.” She stomped her heel on the toe of his boot.
The robot looked down at her. “Anna Landborn, I have been granted full authority by Director Yura Nalle of Yolk Facility 4, North Tear, to remove any body parts impeding your progress to the Academy. Cease kicking me.”
Perfect, Anna thought, delighted. She was even more pleased that she absolutely believed he would rip off her arm in the name of their cover, should she continue to kick him.
Anna kicked him again. Then, glaring up at the robot, Anna desisted her struggles with a disgusted sigh. “Almost got out, too, before the stupid heap tracked me down.”
“You got a Ferris to release your cuffs?” The glittering cyborg stared at her in disbelief behind his black-tinted riot-suppressing mask. “How?”
“I quoted Article Twelve-H of the Unwilling Draftee Act,” Anna snapped indignantly. “…‘a draftee has the right to defecate in private, as long as the draftee makes a recorded oath upon his or her honor not to flee the premises on pain of a ten-year enlistment extension.”
The man laughed and winced. “Sucks for you, kid.” Then the Nephyr motioned to his companion and they hurried after their friends into Sector Seven.
“Article Twelve-H?” Doberman asked, once the coalers were out of earshot. “I was only aware of G. When was H added?”
“Approximately thirty seconds ago,” Anna said.
“Ah,” Doberman said. He started walking again, dragging Anna quite realistically for several yards before she relented and followed along beside him.
“So when are you going to take this thing off?” Anna asked, jiggling the handcuffs.
“Maybe in a year or two,” Doberman said.
Anna winced. “You can’t be serious.”
“You laced my hamburger with EMP grenades.”
“Oh.” Anna licked her lips. “Maybe I’ll stop that.”
“It’s in both of our interest that you do.”
Anna scoffed. “You didn’t put a bomb in my brain.”
Doberman gave her a flat look. “I assure you I did. Two of them.”
“Whatever. You’ve appealed to my logical side. I’ll stop trying to kill you now, robot.”
Doberman looked down at her. “You thought I was going to hand you over to the Gryphon, didn’t you?”
Anna froze, and Doberman kept walking, dragging her for real, this time.
“Because,” Doberman said, once Anna finally, grudgingly, began walking beside him again, “Your biorhythms spiked quite violently there for a moment.”
“I was trying to keep it realistic,” Anna muttered. “Wasn’t sure you could destroy him.”
“I could have simply told him to leave,” Doberman said. “I wanted to test a theory.” He glanced down at her. “And your capillaries are expanding. You’re lying. You thought I was going to give you to the Gryphon.”
“You had no reason not to,” Anna muttered. “If you weren’t so stupid, you would’ve realized you could’ve gotten rid of me back there.”
The robot glanced down at her again. “Have you ever had a dog, Anna?”
“If you’re going to compare yourself to a dog, spare me,” Anna said. “You’re not a dog.”
“Humor me.”
“Yes, I know what a damn dog is like,” Anna said. “Willing, obedient, happy to please. Loyal. Trustworthy. Wouldn’t eat your corpse even if it was starving. You’re not a dog.”
“What kind of dog was it?” Doberman asked.
“It was a Doberman. And it wasn’t my dog, it was my mom’s dog. They got trapped in the silver mine together. Still had water and air. Starved to death.”
“The dog didn’t like you, did it?”
“No, it was a stupid piece of shit that only liked my m—” Anna choked, realizing the direction of his conversation. “You tricky sonofabitch!” she cried. “You were updating your profile, weren’t you?!”
“This makes much more sense now. Thank you, Anna.” The smugness in the robot’s voice oozed across the tiles around them.
Anna narrowed her eyes. “I hate dogs.”
“But you sleep better around them.”
“I never had a dog, you shit,” Anna snapped. “And my mom’s dog hated my guts. Tried to bite me every chance it got.” She was angry now. She knew the robot was only adding more facets to his profile, but she didn’t care. “Mom wouldn’t get me a dog because she caught me cutting open her cat in the backyard. That’s what I think about pets. Great laboratory experiments.”
Doberman stopped and looked down at her. “I’m not going to bite you, Anna.”
Anna snorted and looked away. “You’re just a stupid robot.”
“I’m your stupid robot,” Doberman said. “And I’m not going to bite you.”
He seemed to be waiting for something, confirmation that she agreed he wasn’t going to bite her. Anna knew it would be an excellent time to tell him to prove it, and to use his redirected processing pathways to slip a bomb into his brain. But, instead, she heard herself say, “Okay, Dobie.” Like a little girl. Like a goddamn, crying little girl.
Anna swiped her eyes with her slee
ve and said, “Walk. Before I figure out how I’m going to use your newfound sentimental side to my advantage.”
“Ditto, Landborn.”
Chapter 25
A Hero’s Welcome
Tatiana was greeted as a hero. Her entire Pod came out for the celebration. Even though she had always been relatively reclusive, coming out of her barracks room only for formations or mandatory group P.E., everyone screamed and chanted her name as she took the podium behind the two Bouncer captains who had rescued her.
Tatiana viewed the crowd through eyes blurred with tears. Her injuries had been given immediate care by the finest Coalition doctors—a team of five assigned to the Director himself. They’d replaced the shoddy colonial cast and splint with titanium pins. They had painstakingly stabilized her injured node. They had boosted her immune system with another load of operator nanobots…
And they’d also given her a brand new lifeline.
Now, standing at a podium in front of over a thousand people, Tatiana was expected to tell them how happy she was that they had rescued her.
Staring out at their expectant faces, all Tatiana could think was that Milar was dead.
She hadn’t meant for it to end that way. She hadn’t wanted it to end that way.
The cheers slowly died away as the crowd waited for her to speak.
“I’m so grateful—” Tatiana’s voice broke and she moved away from the podium to steady herself. You have to do this. If you don’t, you’re going to look like a sympathizer.
The crowd expected trauma. They expected tears, rage, ranting, condemnation for the colonists. They expected gratitude and open arms.
One of the Bouncer captains receiving medals with her took the podium beside her. As she gathered herself, he softly said, “Give her a minute, folks. She had a rough week.”
Tatiana nodded her gratitude at the man, then took several deep breaths.
You have to do this. You are a Coalition operator. Milar kidnapped you. He deserved to die.
But she choked on a sob, even as she thought it. Just say it, she thought. You’ve already sung his evils to investigators. It’s not like you’re going to sully his memory any more than you already have. Besides, it’s what he wanted you to do.
She forced her trembling lips into a smile and grasped the metal edges of the podium once more. Waves of silent faces watched her, many wearing the standard protective, waterproof tube caps covering the lumps of nodes. It was the nodes that caught Tatiana’s attention and gave her a new direction for her speech.
“I guess I learned a valuable lesson from all this,” she said, remembering her last hours with Milar. “The lesson was this: Regardless of whatever you think you’re up against, you can always be surprised. The whole ballgame can change in an instant, and if you’re not prepared to meet those new circumstances head on, you can find yourself in a whole world of hurt really, really fast.” She thought of Milar, and how much it had hurt to see all that blood, how badly she had wanted to see him live when he had stopped breathing in her lap. Then she thought of how badly she had screwed up and how it was her fault he was resting in a coffin somewhere in an unmarked prisoner graveyard.
She had been cleared by the investigation. Fully and completely cleared. Psych had no idea what she had done. Everything had been fully leveled on the dead colonist’s shoulders. All Tatiana had to do was pull through this speech, accept her three new medals, and go back to her room to cry.
You can do this, she thought. Just finish your speech and everything is back to the way it was.
“I want to thank Captain Hawthorne and Captain Williams, here,” she said, nodding at the two Bouncer captains on the platform with her. “Before they showed up, I was in despair. I was alone and scared and facing a situation I wasn’t trained to handle. It’s given me a lot more respect for Nephyrs and the ground troops. You guys have the hardest job there is.”
A cheer went up from those sections of the crowd.
Tatiana took a deep breath and bit her lip as her vision began to blur again. “Before this, I was always safe in the belly of a soldier. Never really had to deal with anything head-on. I was sheltered, cocooned, never had to look in the eyes of the people I was fighting. Never had to experience their hatred—” she choked and looked away again. “Thank you,” she said, meeting the Bouncer captains’ eyes. “I’m so proud to be part of this team.”
The crowd cheered. Tatiana left the podium, accepted her commendations, watched as the Bouncer captains accepted theirs. She was waiting to exit the stage in a daze, thinking the ceremony complete, when the Master of Ceremonies returned to the podium and said, “Now, my brave men and women, let’s hear a final round of applause for—”
A tall, broad-shouldered Nephyr wearing the badge of a Colonel strode onto the stage and whispered into his ear, cutting him off.
The Master of Ceremonies slapped a palm over the microphone and glanced over his shoulder at Tatiana, then shook his head.
The Nephyr laughed loudly. “Well, we’re doing it anyway.” He turned on heel and departed.
What was that about? Tatiana wondered, watching him glitter in the floodlights as he strode away.
She didn’t have to wait long to find out. The Master of Ceremonies cursed, then, clearing his throat, he lifted his hand from the mic and said, “Before I dismiss you, folks, the Nephyrs have a special treat for you today. The very same man who captured our Captain Eyre, here, is here with us tonight. Bring him out, if you will.”
Tatiana’s face went slack when two tall Nephyrs, a man and a woman, dragged a struggling, dragon-covered captive out into the light of the stage. Over his chest, obscuring the head of the red dragon, he had a big green strip of nanotape.
Milar met her eyes as they dragged him out and immediately went stiff.
Oh my God, was all Tatiana could think.
“Captain?” the Master of Ceremonies said to her as he gestured at Milar. “The Nephyrs believe you have something you’d like to say to the colonist scumbag before they take him for further questioning.”
The world narrowed to just the two of them. Tatiana couldn’t hear anything but the beating of her own heart, see anything but Milar’s face. It was uncertain, void of rage. Scared.
I’m so sorry, Tatiana thought. It was all she could think.
“Captain?” the Master of Ceremonies asked, giving the two glittering warriors a nervous look.
When Tatiana didn’t answer, the female Nephyr said, “Let’s put it this way, honey—how do you want us to kill him, Captain?”
“Right now?” Tatiana whispered, unable to tear her eyes from Milar’s face.
The female Nephyr laughed. “Oh no. We’re going to take him back to our compound and question him first.”
“And we’re going to be very thorough, too, aren’t we Miles?” The male Nephyr holding Milar grabbed him by the hair and jerked his head up until his Adam’s apple was showing. “Aren’t we? We’re going to very thorough.” He released Milar, laughing, and punched him hard in the ribs.
Tatiana winced as Milar doubled over in their grip, gasping. He was physically bigger than either Nephyr, but the cyborgs were heavier, and they held him as easily as if he were a child.
You didn’t shoot him, Tatiana’s mind ranted at her. You didn’t shoot him, and now they’re going to make him suffer.
“So, Captain, do you have a preference?” the male Nephyr asked. It sounded like the Colonel was gloating, asking more for Milar’s benefit than Tatiana’s.
“No,” Tatiana whispered.
“Oh come on now,” the female Nephyr said, smiling at Milar. “A big boy like this…” She patted Milar’s shoulder. “He had time to do all sorts of nasty things to a little cutie like you. He had you for a whole week, Captain. Surely you’ve got a few things you want to see before we kill him. A few positions, maybe?”
Milar hung his head, staring at the ground.
“No,” Tatiana whispered again.
“Be as invent
ive as you want,” the male Nephyr said. “I’m sure you couldn’t think of something we already have planned.”
“Just kill him.”
Milar’s head came up and he looked at her, confusion in his face.
“Oh, we will, Captain,” the woman holding Milar said. “But we have a bone to pick with him before we do. He’s a bit of a sore spot in our history, you see. Only Nephyr recruit who ever escaped. Once we figure out how he did it, we’ve gotta make an example out of him, lest the other incoming kiddies get any ideas.” The woman reached out and lightly cupped Milar’s face with the hand that wasn’t holding his arm. Smiling at him, the woman said, “Don’t we, there, Love?”
Milar’s golden-brown eyes never left Tatiana.
The Nephyr followed his gaze, saw what it was directed at, and her glittering filigreed fingers tightened. She cuffed Milar hard enough to throw him bodily backwards. “Keep your eyes to yourself, Love,” the Nephyr said, smiling at Tatiana. “The Captain doesn’t appreciate it.”
Tatiana felt a sickness pooling in her stomach. “I need to go to my room,” she whispered.
The Master of Ceremonies looked at her, then at Milar, then covered the microphone again with his hand. “Get him out of here,” he snapped to the two Nephyrs. Then, to Tatiana, he said, “I’m so sorry they put you through that. Are you going to need Psych?”
“No,” Tatiana managed, watching the Nephyrs jerk Milar into motion, then kick him when he stumbled. “I just need some time alone.”
“So whose stupid idea was that?” one of the Bouncer captains muttered, once the Nephyrs had dragged their victim off the stage. The Master of Ceremonies shook his head, hand still on the microphone. “Damn Nephyrs,” he said. To Tatiana, he said, “Go on. We’ll finish without you.”
Tatiana nodded numbly and left the stage. By the time she reached the barracks area, she was running.
They were going to kill Milar.
She slid into her room and leaned against the door. Her heart was slamming like a broken leg piston. They were going to kill Milar, and they were going to make it hurt.
No.
Tatiana couldn’t let that happen. She knew, without a doubt, that Milar didn’t deserve what the Nephyrs were planning for him. She had to help him.