by David Aries
Vay couldn’t move; the most she could do was block with her sword. It didn’t stop her back from being crushed into the wall by a hit that should have left a crater.
Yet still she stumbled forward, even though she could no longer breathe.
“Vay, stop it!” I said as I edged closer.
“And throw in the towel?” she rasped, knees buckling. “Never.”
DD had other ideas. She shot a claw forward, ready to deliver strike number four.
Vay tried to lift her sword, but her arms wouldn’t move.
No!
Faris drove her spear into the incoming appendage, forcing it into the floor.
“Leave my friend alone!” she yelled.
DD did just that… by sending her next grabber after Faris.
She jumped over the metal claw and onto DD’s outstretched arm. With her crackling spear outstretched, she took off running, using the appendage as a winding path.
Her target was DD’s main body.
DD tried to intercept Faris with another arm, but she flipped past the assault and continued to the summit. With a roar, she buried her lance into DD’s torso.
At least, she tried. The spear didn’t make it through the machine’s armor.
DD giggled. “Did you really think that would wor—”
Faris wasn’t done; destroying DD hadn’t been her plan. She used her spear like a vaulting pole to reach the central platform.
It was so close. She extended her claws to grab hold of the edg—
DD snatched hold of Faris’s tail.
“A valiant attempt,” DD replied. “But, ultimately, fruitless.” She flung Faris straight into the floor.
There was no time for Faris to counter. She hit down, hard.
“Faris!” I cried.
“And that makes four,” DD announced.
Vay was still awake, but she couldn’t move. That left DD’s arms with two targets: me and Akko.
An appendage was already on my cephra mate’s tail.
I gritted my teeth. As much as I wanted to check up on Faris, I had to protect Akko. I bolted toward her while smacking away the arm that wanted me.
“Akko, here!” I yelled as I tackled her out of the way and scooped her onto my shoulder. “I’ve got you!”
“But, sweetie! Now she’s targeting you too!” Akko replied.
“You think she wasn’t already?”
Two of DD’s arms were busy restraining my mates, while another helped secure her position. That left five against two.
I don’t like those odds, but I can’t stop yet.
DD’s tentacle swarm descended upon me, and I put faith in my zerrin-gifted instincts to keep them at bay. I utilized all the fancy footwork Faris had taught me during our year together while swinging the axe crafted by Sylvetty for good measure.
I skipped, smashed, and did everything I could to keep myself away from attack, after attack, after attack.
Got to keep moving. Got to keep swinging.
I can’t let DD get Akko too.
DD’s arms kept coming, and I kept dodging. It didn’t matter to me that they were getting faster and closer by the second. I would not surrend—
The ground beneath me bucked upward.
My heart pulsed. I knew what had happened instantly; I’d stepped on a tentacle. I’d been lured into the same trap that had taken down Trez.
However, that wasn’t quite right. DD didn’t capture me as she had done my zulk lover. Instead, she followed up by smacking me out of the air.
It hurt. Of course, it hurt. Did anyone think being clubbed by a chunky bevelinium limb wouldn’t hurt like hell? But I didn’t care about the pain; I didn’t care that my armor was in pieces and my ribs felt like they’d been broken in a dozen places.
I cared that it had knocked Akko from my arms.
“No, no, no!” Akko squealed as she was picked up by one of DD’s claws. She threw her legs and arms around with gusto before pausing, seemingly because she realized she wasn’t actually being held.
The air tanks on her back were.
“I shall be taking these,” DD said as she shook Akko out of her harness, dropping her toward the ground.
“Akko!” I yelled as I rushed to catch her.
Before I could, a metal arm blindsided me. It flung me across the room, head over heels.
I gagged the moment I hit the floor. It was far from a soft landing spot, not that much was when your sides felt like they were being gnawed on by fire ants.
If I had any intact ribs left, it would be a surprise.
DD crushed the air tanks. “And that takes care of that. Now all that remains is to finish you off.” Her main body looked my way.
I snarled as I tried to stand, but two great stabbing sensations in either side of my torso kept me grounded.
Dammit, no!
Not yet…
I had to keep moving. Somehow, I had to stand and escape.
Akko scuttled in front of me. She stood tall, facing DD, arms outstretched. “D-don’t hurt him. I won’t let you!”
“Don’t,” I groaned.
“I would advise listening to your mate, or else you could end up getting hurt,” DD said before casually flicking Akko away with one of her claws.
“Akko!” I yelled, piercing sensations in my insides be damned.
“Once again, I do not think you are in any position to be worrying about others,” DD said as she at last lowered the body she was using as a temporary host.
I jerked up to try and hit it, even if the only weapon I had available were my fists.
DD slammed a limb down over my shoulder. “I must advise you to stay still, Brandon. Any further struggling is pointless.”
“Fuck… you,” I said, growling.
“Please refrain from speaking; I can see you are in great pain. It is truly a scene I never wished to come to pass, but I am afraid you left me with no choice. The least I can do is put you out of your misery.”
“You damn crazy… don’t go acting like you’ve won! This isn’t over.”
For a moment, DD was silent before she said, “You truly believe that? How? You must realize the position you are in.”
“I do. Right now, you’ve got us in check, but it’s no more than that. As long as I’m still breathing, I refuse to accept we’ve lost. I didn’t come all this way, go through so much shit, just to surrender in the final round.”
“But…” DD began, before her voice trailed away. “Is this the faith you suggest I should have had? If so, I am afraid I was always going to disappoint. It is over, Brandon. Look around. I have defeated all six of you.” Suddenly—and as weird as it was to say—DD tensed up. “Wait… six?” She glanced around the room, counting each body in turn. “One, two, three, four, five” —her gaze returned to me— “six. There are six of you. But… there should be seven. There should be seven! Where is Casella?” DD grabbed the upturned walkway we’d stopped her from crushing earlier.
Casella wasn’t beneath it.
If robots could go pale, DD was turning just that. She grabbed me by my collar and lifted me into the air. “Casella! Where is Casella?!”
My lips curled into a grin. “I have no idea, but I can hope.”
Right on cue, the glowing tube directly beneath us… well, stopped glowing.
“What?” DD said.
It was far from the only one. One by one, random tubes lost their shine, turning from a vivid blue to an empty black.
“What is this?” DD continued, body swiveling from side to side. “What is happening?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” I replied. “Checkmate.”
“Brandon!” Casella called from the edge of the platform above. “Did it work?!”
The vanishing lights spoke for themselves.
“No,” DD said as the room got darker by the second. “This cannot be.”
I tutted. “You know, you really screwed up. How did you overlook Casella? Sure, she might not be the toughest among us, or the one keeping us alive,
or even the one best tooled for reaching the generator… but I’ve learned she should never be underestimated.”
“She… since when?”
“Since Faris hit you with the railgun.” I tried to laugh, but it came as more of a pained groan. “I’ve got to hand it to her, she really saved that shot for the right time. You were so frazzled, you didn’t even notice Casella had gone. We knew if we kept it that way, and kept ourselves alive, that victory would eventually be ours.”
“All this time, you have been striving to keep me busy?” DD replied. “Impossible. You had no time to discuss such a plan.”
“Discuss? What was there to discuss? As soon as Casella broke through, we knew what we had to do. That was it. No discussion needed.”
My girls and I had been together for what felt like years. If we couldn’t occasionally land on the same wavelength, something was wrong.
It made sense that a treacherous android wouldn’t understand.
“Attempting to disable reboot sequence… attempt failed,” DD mumbled. “Attempting to overwrite input… input rejected. Attempting to reroute energy supply… network failure. Attempting to… why will nothing work? Why am I unable to stop this?!”
“Didn’t I already tell you? This is checkmate.”
“No… no. No, no, no! This cannot be. I… I cannot die. I… I do not want to die.” With every sentence, the vitality drained from DD’s artificial voice.
“You should have thought about that before you turned your back on us,” I said.
“But… I only did so because I thought it was the only way. If I thought there was another… I never would have… I would have instead…”
“It’s too late for regrets,” I told her. “You picked this road. It’s time you suffered the consequences.”
“But I do not want to!” DD cried. “I want to live! Why do I need to… why did I never get a choice? Why was I made just to…” She moved toward me, her movements jerky. “Please, Brandon… save me. Help me. Somehow… I am sure you can… if it is you…”
I didn’t say anything.
“Please! I… never wanted… I only did because… thought it was…” By the second, her voice grew duller—deeper. Her body sagged, losing the strength to hold itself up. “Brandon… I… sorry. Admired… really. Wished… together… truly…”
“Goodbye, DD,” I said.
“Bran… don… ”
As the final bits of light drained from the room, so did the energy from DD’s puppet. It collapsed, arms dropping.
Trez screamed as she fell to the ground.
I gritted my teeth as I pushed the now limp claw off my shoulder and staggered to my feet. If Ruple was right, and I prayed he was, that was the end of DD.
However, at what cost?
There were so many people I had to check up on. As the lights of the room began to reappear, I staggered to where Sylvetty had been dropped.
She laid flat against the wall, like a doll.
I grabbed her shoulders and shook. “Sylvetty! Wake up.”
There was no response.
“Sylvetty!” I said as a storm of emotions bubbled up inside of me. “Wake up! Please, wake up!”
DD was gone, but that wouldn’t mean anything if she wa—
Sylvetty heaved. Her eyes popped open and were swiftly flooded with tears due to how violent her coughing was.
I couldn’t say a word. All I did was look at her like she was the most precious thing I’d ever seen.
In a sense, she was.
“You’re alive,” I said, at last.
“Of course I’m—” A violent cough interrupted her statement. “Did ya forget I’m a tough lassie? I won’t… break from a wee bit of roughhousing.”
When I was done enjoying a comforting glow, I realized I should let her use my bubble for air. Then I noticed she seemed to be breathing just fine, all things considered. I pulled my bubble up and inhaled.
The air supply’s back online.
Was it because we’d reset the system?
Voices flowed from behind me.
“Sylvetty, wait here,” I said to her before rushing to see what was going on.
Trez was, of course, awake, as was Akko. She had blood dripping down the side of her face, but she’d managed to get to her feet, so I was praying it was nothing too serious.
I was more concerned with the pair they were checking on—Faris and Vay were still out.
“Girls,” I said as I rushed between the two of them.
When I shook Vay’s shoulder, she moaned and opened an eye. “Is that you, stud?”
“Yeah, it’s me…”
Her amethyst eyes wandered from side to side. “Is this… the floor? How embarrassing. And to think I call myself ‘indomitable’.”
I smiled and rubbed her shoulder. “Don’t worry, you did great. We couldn’t have done this without you.”
Her lips curled into a grin. “So another win for the record? I suppose I’ll have to take it.”
I exhaled. That was one worry taken care of. However, that still left—
“Sweetie!” Akko said.
My heart jumped, and so did I. As quick as I could, I bolted to Faris’s side.
She was still flat on her back, but her eyes were opening.
“Brandon?” Faris asked through her groans. “Did we…?”
I nodded, unable to stop myself from smiling. “We got her.”
“Not that… the bomb.”
My blood froze over, wiping the joy from my face.
The bomb… the bomb.
How did I forget about the bomb?!
And to think I’d been ready to hand out the medals. None of it would mean anything if we were too late.
“How long do we have left?!” Akko said.
Faris forced her arm up so we could see the countdown on her bracer.
We were into the final thirty seconds.
Shit!
“We need to go, now!” I said, leaping to my feet.
“Are you serious?!” Trez said. “We’ll never make it in time.”
I snarled. She was right. It would take more than that just to get out of the pit. “Then what are we supposed to do?! We can’t let everyone down!”
Dammit, this can’t be happening!
We fought this battle for everyone, not just ourselves.
Things can’t end this way.
But what could we do? This wasn’t a game; the timer didn’t stop because we were occupied. It was still ticking down, zero only seconds away.
My heart sunk. For everything I’d said to DD about having faith, I didn’t see anyway we could—
Faris’s bracer buzzed, and it wasn’t an alarm.
“Come in,” a voice said. “Come in.”
I flinched. “Demi?!”
“Brandon,” she said with a sigh. “At last.”
“Wait, I thought your communicators weren’t working?” Akko said.
That was the least of our worries. I swallowed a frog in my throat and said, “Demi, I’m so—”
“Thank you,” Demi said. “For a moment, I didn’t think you’d make it.”
“I fucking love you, bro!” Keith cheered. “I just wish you hadn’t cut it so close. Millith almost pissed her panties.”
“I did not!” Millith snapped. “How could you say that, you jerk?!”
“Come on, babe. You know I’m just teasing. I was totally shitting bricks.”
“Anybody who wasn’t is much braver than me,” Aya said.
I listened, jaw hanging somewhere toward the ground. “W-what are you talking about?”
“The bomb,” Demi clarified. “You deactivated it… right?”
“We did?” I looked at Trez.
She shrugged. “Don’t look at me. There’s no way rebooting the system should have deactivated the bomb. If it was hooked to this generator, maybe, but anything else makes no sense.”
“Then how?” I said, before one answer came to mind. “DD…”
“Huh?” Akko said.
“She could’ve done it, just before she passed. It could also explain why the air is back and calls are no longer blocked.” The former I could see being the default, but the latter seemed like the sort of thing you’d need to trigger manually.
“But why would she do that?”
“For all her faults, she didn’t betray us out of spite. Her actions were driven by one thing: self-preservation. Don’t you think it’s possible that, upon realizing she could no longer win, she decided to throw us a bone?”
“She did insist that admiring business was the truth,” Trez said.
“And I suppose she did act pretty excited about the prospect of us staying with her,” Akko whispered.
“Yeah. They always say the best lies are sprinkled with doses of the truth,” I replied.
If that was the case, how much did we really mean to DD? Was this her way of trying to apologize for what she’d done?
I couldn’t say it meant I forgave her, but I could at least understand why she’d done what she had—what she felt she had to.
“What’s wrong?” Demi asked. “And where’s Faris?”
I shook those thoughts away and said, “Don’t worry, she’s here. A bit banged up but awake. We all are. Well, apart from DD.”
“Does that mean what I think it does?”
I nodded. “Sure does.”
After a long adventure filled with more ups and downs than a seismograph during an earthquake, our battle against The Fractured World had come to an end.
We had won.
Chapter 30
In the past, I’d celebrated many decisive victories over The Fractured World that had failed to live up to my expectations. All too often, a new threat had appeared at the last and dumped us right back where we’d started.
This wasn’t one of those moments.
DD was gone. The security robots were offline. Waltgomery was dead—a lack of air will do that to a guy.
There was nothing left to stop us.
We didn’t even have to fear any interference from the other space stations. As it turned out once we’d patched ourselves up and returned to Walt’s garden, the other moons were gone.
Trez theorized it was probably DD’s doing. One doctored call from ‘Waltgomery’ was all it would take to dismiss them. They wouldn’t even realize HQ had been taken over.
Clever, but not clever enough.