Approximately twenty minutes after the android known as Xan|Arch had disappeared from positive control of Central Command, his successor, Xelia|Brae, coasted into his old orbital pattern and accessed the network directly.
A column of smoke emerged from the crater of the former diplomatic residence, seeker-drones radiating out from it, sentries marching in spoked columns.
She switched systems, accessing the moon’s central error-malfunction reports. Of course, everything within a quarter mile of the destroyed residence errored out, as did any systems wired through it. Moving farther out, a traffic signal had been error-malfunctioning since yesterday. Every few seconds, a new error ghosted up and then disappeared, all due to lags and hiccups in the system. Grit slowing down the inefficient human tubes.
A new error appeared: Central Transit Hub, men’s decontam room, wrong gender.
It disappeared moments later.
She flagged that location with the highest priority for investigation and centered her craft on the hub, overriding all other orders. Approximately eight seconds later, the security forces of the planet would ring this hub. She would land and lead the retrieval-assault.
~*~*~*~
Xan peered around the decontam wall and nearly ran into a miner in full hazmat suit and rebreather.
His goggles were deeply tinted with the harsh radioactive light of the raw ore, and he stomped past Xan and a wide-eyed Cressida without even a glance. His shoulders slumped from the heavy work and the long resurfacing restrictions during the bombing, when the integrity of the mine shafts could have been compromised.
The hair on the back of Xan’s neck rose.
A microsecond later, he processed why: reflected in the miner’s rebreather tanks were the converging forces of a security platoon. Not sentries, but immigration forces. Humans.
His pistol was dead. His knees were blown. Cressida huddled against him, soft and vulnerable and trusting and completely puncturable by every type of weapon the force carried.
He pushed her back into the decontam room.
“Wha—?” she started to say.
The miner stumbled through the silicate, pushed the release on his suit, and stepped out. Bacterial-yeast stench clothed his naked butt. He hung the suit on the outside stall hook, tripped on the foot-tall frame, and tugged the door closed behind him. The stall sealed, containing his nakedness in privacy.
Above, the ventilation hatch was out of Xan’s reach, opened the wrong direction, and he had heard it lock. It would take several seconds to breach. Seconds they didn’t have.
There was no other way out of the decontam room.
No other way except through the security forces. Which he heard, even now, converging on the entrance.
“What is it?” Cressida asked. Her eyes were so deeply blue.
He cleared his mind. “Get in my suit.”
“What?”
He jerked her to the far end of the bathroom and yanked open the group stall. “Put your hands on my collar and pull.”
She hesitated.
Shit. He let go of her forehead. The room’s color tinted to red. He ripped apart his flight suit, exposing himself from collar to navel, and lifted her against his bare skin.
She gasped and stiffened.
The material edges sought to separate them. He stretched the fabric over her, forcing it to enlarge and form-fit the two of them. Her hands pressed against his chest, and her head rested unwillingly against his shoulder.
His.
No time for that. He pulled the stall door all the way open so it rested against the main room’s wall, gripped the outer stall hook, and lifted them both a foot above the ground. Even Cressida could hear the noise of the entering soldiers now. Xan held her perfectly still. They were hidden from every angle.
Until someone closed the stall door.
The hook strained beneath their combined weight. What was its tensile strength rating? How much torque were the bolts securing it to the door rated to hold? What about the structural integrity of the door and the strength of its hinges?
“Open it,” a woman’s voice said.
A crash broke the miner’s stall door. The man inside yelled. Xan wanted like anything to see, although he was able to follow the noise as the miner was dragged out into the main room.
“Where is the criminal known as Cressida Sarit Antiata?” the woman asked.
Cressida stopped breathing.
“Whar is is? Whar tis is,” the man screamed. Something seemed to be wrong with his tongue; more than that was his indignation. This man thought he had rights. “Whar—”
The hot buzz of a shatter-pistol slightly increased the temperature of the room. There was a biological sound of something sliding to the ground.
A radio crackled loudly over the decontam fans. “Sensors indicate a shatter-pistol discharge. Did you get them, Miss Brae?”
“No,” she said. “Please run a sensory diagnostics on every square inch of this room.”
Cressida started breathing again. Her thready gasps were masked by the ventilation system—just.
A young officer’s voice asked from inside a security helmet, “You don’t think they’re still in here?”
The woman moved toward Xan’s open stall door. “I have received no data to the contrary.”
“Where would they be? Hiding in the air?”
“The room is still red.”
“You’re in here.”
She sucked in a breath. “I notice a slightly higher temperature than would be expected given the space and the average operant efficiency of the fans.”
“So someone’s hot-blooded?”
“Perhaps.”
“You did just discharge a firearm.”
“Yes. I did. Are you informing me of this fact because you are concerned that I did not incorporate it into my calculations?”
The young officer dropped silent.
In Xan’s taut grip, the door hook started to bend. He silently adjusted his grip. Cressida looked up at the strained piece of metal with widening eyes.
“In addition”—the woman shifted right, toward the crease of the hinges—“there is a slightly reduced echo of the sound vibrations in this room, exactly as though it were being absorbed by two additional bodies. I notice a mix of atmospheric exchange equivalent to two additional people breathing. In absence of external confirmation, my conclusion is that our two criminals are still in this room.”
“All the stalls are open.” The young officer must have looked down; the angle of his voice changed. “Why’d you ice the guy?”
“His excess verbalization interfered with my investigative abilities.”
The officer’s voice dropped low. “Better luck in your next life, buddy.”
The hook in Xan’s hand continued to taper like pulling a soft cheese. He pinched the bolt. His fingers slid on loose powder coating the air. The ventilation system abruptly shut off. In the sudden silence, they both stopped breathing. In Xan’s hand, the hook metal made a very light squeaking sound.
The security officer started to speak. “Hey, if they’re not—”
“Shh.” The woman’s voice spoke directly on the other side of the stall door.
“Huh?”
“Hush for a moment.” She had moved instantly and silently in a room built for echoes—something no human could possibly do. Fuck. Another x-class? If so, she was his exact equivalent, only less broken and with a fully loaded pistol. And now she was leaning close, possibly sensing Cressida’s body heat through the stall door, or possibly even hearing his internal cooling dampeners underneath his skin fighting their combined heat. Her voice gnawed in his brain. “I hear something.”
Cressida’s brows drew together. Her mouth opened.
A radio crackle. “We have completed the analysis. There is an additional heat signature of the room emanating from the wall beside the group stall.”
Shit. Shit. Shit.
Footsteps trooped toward the woman. Xan abandoned a h
undred possible plans; all ended with him immobilized and Cressida dead. One had to emerge dynamically. The footsteps stopped. He tensed. As the stall door closed, he would leap sideways—
The footsteps trooped inside the stall.
“I do notice a slight temperature difference here,” the woman’s voice said from within the stall. The ventilation turned on again, making it impossible to tell by echo whether every troop was inside, but the muffle indicated a large number. He hated to be so goddamned blind. The woman helped him by continuing to talk. “My schematics are out of date. Can you tell me whether it’s possible to access this side wall from the ventilation system overhead?”
The hook in Xan’s hand bent lower. His feet dropped below the sight line of the door. No one shouted in the main room. Either no one was there or such a person was not an android. Either way, his best opportunity for their survival was to move.
“Negative,” the radio crackled. “They cannot access.”
“They could cut their way into a closed system.”
“But they couldn’t survive the pure thermal glycol. That’s a radiant heat pipe.”
Now.
His feet eased to the ground. He squeezed out from behind the stall door. An officer stood on the lip. The stall was filled with the rest of the force surrounding another x-class. Her head was turning and her shatter-pistol rising as Xan moved; of course she heard him.
He slammed the stall closed, knocking the officer in, and hit the external privacy lock to execute a blinding light cycle. Shouting chaos erupted, bashing and clanking against the door.
Striding forward with Cressida still cradled protectively against his body, her legs dangling in strange angles where they emerged from his torso, he stepped over the body of the dead miner and picked up his hazmat suit. Her gasp coincided with him passing the man’s melted face.
“Don’t look,” he murmured.
She couldn’t stop staring.
Behind them, the smoke of the shatter-pistol melted through the reinforced wall and curled toward the ceiling. An alarm began to wail.
Xan stepped into the thick rubber-alloy suit. The other man had been larger and taller than average, and so luckily it fit their joint bulk, although Cressida’s head gave him something of a lopsided shoulder. He fit the hood over top and sealed it as he walked down the corridor. Lucky for him, the suit didn’t begin shrinking to immobilize him (a common theft deterrent) or announce any alarm. He stepped out of the decontam room. The transit hub was bathed in yellow. Security forces shoved him out of the way as they ran past him.
To his right stretched the main exits to the city. In front of him stacked local rails, tourist shuttles to the nearest islands, grotty transporters to hub cities on the south and east continents, and the velvet-cordoned precision scales of the off-world escalators. Those, he most wanted to walk toward, but the stagnant lines stretched four deep with bored travelers in expensive fashions. Rich families stranded by the hostilities, still hoping to get off world before the Nar enacted martial law. He limped past them, into the corridor to the de-escalators.
Weaving in and out of the miners, Xan remained hyperaware of the uniform sea passing anonymously in both directions.
Cressida’s breath heated his collar. Her gasps elevated.
“Stay with me,” he said.
“I can’t breathe.” Her words came as a whimper.
The atmosphere indicator on the lower right suggested she might be correct. The tank was empty; they were essentially breathing whatever had gotten into the open suit in the decontam room. Which, according to his calculations, would allow approximately ten minutes before the oxygen was eclipsed by carbon dioxide and one or both of them passed out.
He calculated her likely response to knowing the truth. “It’s in your head. Don’t panic over nothing.”
She sucked in a breath and held it.
He was an asshole. But hopefully an asshole who would get them both out of here alive. “Good girl.”
They descended the ramp into the caves section of the hub. Below ground, the lights looked increasingly normal, color shifting from yellow to blue when they passed the superbrights. Even in the midst of a hostile takeover, miners reported for work. Without commerce, there was no income, and without income, there was no life.
Xan peeled off into the first tunnel and viewed the brilliantly lit de-escalator shuttling load after load of miners like so much luggage dropped straight down a hole. Xan didn’t want to go down there—it would be immediately obvious that he was in the wrong place—but going as deep as possible and turning around gave him the best odds for losing the station security cameras.
But even that ruse required a quick fix to the air situation.
He angled toward a horizontal stack of resupply oxygen. His hand closed over a tank.
An anti-theft alarm blared.
Shit. He jerked back his hand. Everyone was staring at him; the ones in front turned around and looked. Ah, double shit. The alarm had sprayed a big yellow splotch on his front. He was no longer an anonymous weirdly shaped man in a suit with similarly shaped men. He was a walking target.
And the station crew was coming for him.
~*~*~*~
Cressida fought to control her anxiety and struggled to breathe inside the thick, compressing miner suit. Everything felt damp, even though Xan’s skin was strangely cool. The desire to cry beat against her with increasing urgency. She had seen her first dead person today. A bloody, meat-colored mess in a stew of teeth fragments. Thinking about it again made her chest convulse. That was what the robots were trying to do to her. That was what they would do if they found her.
Her fingers traced the shape of Xan’s pectoral, his steady thud-thud-thud soothing her. He was one of them too. Yet his scent made her light-headed, and he was carrying her away from danger like a child in the pouch of his flight suit. Her mind drifted as though in a dream back to the last time she had felt so safe. A summer trip off world to the famous cloud oceans. One of the few trips afforded by her busy parents and her too-mature-for-family-outings older brother and her sweet little sister.
An alarm went off. Something puffed against her shoulder, on the chest of Xan’s suit.
“Shit,” he said.
She strained to see through the protective mask. The lower angle showed the tops of others suits. Miners crowded in.
“What is it?” she asked.
He stepped back and was jostled unevenly forward.
Ah, she recognized that alarm from news vids. “Did you steal something?”
“Not intentionally.” He angled another direction, but the other miners forced him back, against a wall. “Shit.”
The internal com crackled above her left ear. “Citizen, what is your malfunction code?”
He rocked forward. The other miner suits disappeared from her scope of vision. The com remained open, crackling, for his response.
A mine security helmet, clearly marked with a yellow hazard symbol, appeared at the edge of her vision. “Citizen, respond.”
Although she could not see, the usual news clip would show a stunner baton arcing toward an insane miner. If this security helmet were on a human, she had no chance, but if it were a sentry, there were a wide swathe of acceptable answers that would not result in a stunning.
A light shone from the top of the hazard gear. Although it was difficult to see under these conditions, through the thick glass, it was bright and probably red. Warning.
Xan tensed.
Her heart spiked. No. He would attack or run. Remote security would cut them down from above. They would not survive.
She cleared her throat. “Ex-81, 3, 17.”
The com crackled to silence.
“What the hell was that?” Xan muttered.
“An improperly formatted error code. Are you familiar with the Outer-Centurian upper-world dialect?”
“What?”
The light remained bright. Their com crackled. “Citizen, come with me.”
Xan edged sideways.
She hissed at him. “Go.”
“Citizen, repeat.”
She took a deep breath. “Ares seulia. Misaan tiyean dostrobrich ‘Upper Cave’ tia-analat.”
The silence was longer this time, although the com remained open. Finally, the sentry replied. “Citizen-anat, res oritilit.”
“Dabrastich.”
The light atop the sentry changed to a darker shade. The com dropped out.
“Follow him,” she whispered.
Xan started to move. From the lack of immediate gunfire, she assumed it was in the direction of the sentry. His heart remained steady beneath her fingers, which was calming, even though her forehead dripped sweat and she labored for her next breath. His voice sounded just a little rough. “Did you just say that you’re a tourist to the ‘Upper Cave’?”
“Diplomatic visitor,” she corrected. “And that we require a guide.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Not if it works.” Her chest felt as if she were breathing through three layers of woolen blanket. She closed her eyes to conserve her concentration. “We do have such visitors to the mines. And you can’t shoot all of them in the wrong area or you’d have a public relations nightmare.”
Xan stiffened and turned to watch something run past them in the opposite direction. “Holy shit.”
“What?”
“This just might work.” He turned to the front. “So where is he taking us?”
“An interrogation lobby.”
Xan coughed. “And that’s good?”
“It’s not being shredded in a tunnel or stunned on suspicion of terrorism, so I think it’s a step forward, don’t you?”
He didn’t respond.
Another thought occurred to her, distantly, as though it had to travel through molasses to reach her brain. “You understand Outer-Centurian.”
“Only its language tree. It’s not exactly common out here.”
“I thought androids had infinite intelligence.”
“Off network, we have to preload what we expect will be useful, and an elite Old Empire dialect was not one of mine. I have to run what you’re saying through the same parser as the sentry we’re following, and damned if he doesn’t have a more complete vocabulary.”
Liberation's Kiss: A Science Fiction Romance (Robotics Faction Book 1) Page 5