Mine to Keep, page 14
“What—what are you doing here?” Lillian halted in shock before the staring group. “How did you get in here?”
Jax laughed, his smile bright within his unkempt beard as he and his followers paused. “Hey, here’s the cyber slut all by her lonesome. Shouldn’t have ditched your bodyguards, Kwolek. My Freedom League has members working in all the ITCS’s security teams. Including CyberServe, Life Tech, and Alpha Security Consultants.” He nodded at a woman in a CyberServe security uniform who looked vaguely familiar to Lillian.
As he boasted, she glanced around for something to defend herself with. Unfortunately, the room’s function as either a meeting lounge or temporary office offered nothing in the way of weaponry. Especially when there were so many.
The group moved around her. “We got the big dog. Cyber Slut herself. See? I’m more than a figurehead.” Jax nudged bushy-haired Artemis Neera, who stood beside him.
Her return smile was tightlipped but indulgent. Her glare for Lillian burned with raw hatred, however. “You did good, Gunnar. Let’s take care of business.”
She caressed the handle of a knife, sheathed at her hip, with one hand. With the other, she hefted a gun, the sort Lillian had seen only in Earth movies. Neera stepped close to her and pointed the barrel inches from her face.
Chapter Fourteen
The Freedom League terrorists marched Lillian through the still-empty halls. The workday wasn’t scheduled to begin for over an hour more, so it wasn’t startling to see little evidence of staff. However, security should have been assembled outside her office door, warned of the Freedom League’s presence by the surveillance cameras posted at regular intervals. Was the entire department compromised, including Michaels? Or had the Freedom League taken them all captive…or worse, killed them? Lillian hoped it was a matter of the monitors being offline, that the security force was unharmed and simply unaware she’d been attacked.
As she was escorted through CyberServe, she considered telling her captors that a single weapon pointed at her was enough. In addition to Neera’s antique firearm, nearly everyone had leveled a weapon of some sort at her. Some had gren-guns, which would literally blow her to pieces if they shot her.
They weren’t ready to kill her yet. They needed her for something, though they hadn’t told her what. She could guess their objective, due to her surroundings and the direction they marched her in.
She swallowed and followed Jax. She did her best to avoid thinking about the ten or so muzzles aimed at her from behind and on either side. She possessed little knowledge about weapons, other than one pulled a trigger and bad things happened on the other end. She’d watched enough dramas to have learned that sometimes firearms went off by accident. Somebody got too nervous or too excited, or the device malfunctioned and fired. People got hurt when that happened.
It was on the tip of her tongue to point that out. That maybe whoever was the best-trained with weaponry should be the only person allowed to guard her. She wouldn’t be much good to them if she were dead.
The Freedom League was no doubt aware there were others who would make good hostages. Others who knew how to operate CyberServe’s various systems. Lillian had a suspicion that the curdling hatred coming from Neera wouldn’t require a whole lot of encouragement to ignite an explosion. Lillian was expendable when it came right down to it, and Neera might be more than happy to prove that point.
She kept her mouth shut and hoped no one, whether accidentally or on purpose, would kill her. Because if she spoke up, a mistake was more likely to happen.
Just as she’d suspected they would, Jax and his goons took her to CyberServe’s largest storage bay.
For a few seconds, Jax’s group gaped at the rows upon rows of cyborgs within the vast space. Humanlike bodies stood at attention, both on the floor and suspended five columns in the air, held in place by magnetic rails. It was the largest bank of CyberServe’s inventory, five hundred thousand units, all awaiting repairs and upgrades. Two-thirds were still operational in some capacity, despite the damage they’d suffered in the war. Even nude, as most of them were, they were an impressive sight.
“Shit,” someone groaned. “It’s my worst nightmares come to life.”
“Fuck this,” another said in a panicked voice, his pulse rifle pointing first at one group of insensible cyborgs, then another. “Let’s get out of here.”
“They’re powered down,” Jax soothed despite eyeing his surroundings with obvious fear. “They’re about to be made so they’ll never operate again. Be cool.”
“Secure the area,” Neera ordered the woman wearing the CyberServe security uniform and holding a gren-gun. Those two had been the only members of the group who’d kept their weapons targeted on Lillian.
The officer turned to the door they’d come through and punched commands into its manual control panel. “Got it. No one can access the bay from here. I’ll barricade the other three doors.” She took off.
“All right, cyber slut.” Neera waved her gun in Lillian’s face. “Over to the computer bank. Now.”
She did as she was told. She walked to the massive workstation, where the monitors were all dark. What did they expect her to do with half a million cyborgs?
“Switch it on.” Neera’s heavy brows descended low over her eyes, as if she’d expected Lillian to already be working on whatever plan the Freedom League had concocted. “But don’t power up those garbage cans. If any cyborg so much as twitches, I’ll blow your brains out.”
Lillian cocked her head as her finger hovered over a computer’s on switch. “There’s no power to the station.”
The next instant, she stared at the floor, which had appeared only a foot from her nose. Her ears rang a strident tone. She blinked to find herself stretched on the ground, propped on her elbows. How had she ended up there?
Pain blasted through her head an instant later. She cried out and grabbed just behind her ear. A lump was already swelling.
“Stand up, bitch. Wake this fucking thing up.” Standing over her, Neera snarled and brandished her gun.
Jax grinned over her shoulder. “That’s telling her, babe. Hey, here’s the power.” He jabbed the switch and frowned when nothing happened. “She’s right. It’s got no juice.”
“I want it on now!” Neera shrieked.
Lillian looked down the long, black barrel of the gun. She licked her lips, but her tongue was as dry as a desert. “It was probably shut down at the main source while the place was locked down. Let me check.”
She hauled herself up, shaking her head to clear it from the blow Neera had dealt. She must have hit me with the gun’s grip.
The muzzle dug into her cheek. “Stop delaying! Move it, cunt!”
“I’m going.”
As Lillian dragged herself around the workstation to where the power module was, she reflected on the situation. Neera was unhinged. It seemed that the rumors about the Freedom League had been true: crazy as she was, she was in charge, not Gunnar Jax. He was merely the poster boy of the organization. The “figurehead,” as he’d put it.
The computer station’s main power grid had been taken offline. Lillian switched it on. Though the computers themselves remained inert, a hum announced the energy source had been restored.
“Get a computer running. Hurry up.” Neera sounded breathless with excitement, her eyes alight with hectic eagerness.
Lillian went to the first available station and turned it on. The welcome screen invited her to enter her passcode. With Neera tapping her skull impatiently with the gun’s barrel, she did so.
“Okay, it’s up and running.”
“Good. Set the cyborgs for self-destruct.”
Lillian turned to stare at her. She did her best to ignore the deadly bore of the gun’s muzzle in her face. “What? Like, wipe their matrixes? Because they don’t have the same matrixes they did on Earth. They’ve been outfitted with—”
“Blow them up, bitch!” Neera sprayed her with spittle as she screeched. “Make them self-destruct. Explode the whole bunch.”
Lillian gaped open-mouthed. “They don’t have explosives attached to them. That would be insane.”
She cringed against the computer station as Neera raised the gun with the obvious intent to bash her skull with it again.
The extremist’s expression flickered with a note of sanity as Jax grabbed her arm to stop her. “Hold up. Let me try,” he coaxed Neera. He offered Lillian a charming smile. “You need to cooperate, or I can’t guarantee you’ll come out of this alive. Look, we’ve seen the how it works in the movies. The rogue ship or robot always has a self-destruct failsafe that blows it up.”
Lillian would have laughed at his naivety if her life hadn’t been hanging by a thread. Did Jax and Neera actually believe real life was accurately represented in films? Had their home planet fallen so far behind that Terrans believed movies were on the level of documentaries?
She supposed they might. Earth had once been the hub of human ingenuity, until the corporations had funneled all technological breakthroughs into fighting territorial wars for resources. The engineers and scientists, at least those who could escape, did so to the ITCS’s string of space stations. After the rebels had stopped the corporations and wrested control from them, there’d been few technicians left. With their world in shambles, a massive lack of infrastructure, and depleted resources, Terrans had been left scrounging just to keep the lights on.
Could members of the Freedom League have been reduced to thinking the height of engineering and technology was represented in Earth’s old movies and television shows?
“Listen,” Lillian said as Neera wavered. “The cyborgs you’re looking at have been wiped of all programming. A number of these don’t have any operational function whatsoever. Those that do aren’t capable of anything more than following basic orders. Walk. Talk. Stand still. Make me a drink. Clean the toilet. That sort of thing. The barest of tasks. What they were on Earth is gone. Erased.”
“You lie. I’ve seen them work on their own. Laughing and acting without orders.” Neera’s fury was waking again.
“What you’ve witnessed are a few purchased cyborgs programmed with sophisticated interpersonal programs, chosen and tweaked by their owners.” Lillian thought it best to avoid telling them the cyborgs were expanding into sentience and self-identity through those programs and the learning matrix.
Hell, she was fine with outright lying to the fanatics. “Really, they’re only sophisticated toys in their current state. They’re made to simulate our emotions for their owners’ comfort.”
“What if their owners are monsters? Do you vet your customers for that?” Neera grabbed Lillian by the hair. She dragged her to a row of worse-for-wear PSMs, the same model as Alek. “Do you know what these sophisticated toys did to me while I was in prison? I can’t have children because of what happened!”
As she screamed at Lillian, she jerked her back and forth by the hair, tearing some of it out. Lillian gritted her teeth against the pain.
“There are safeguards in place to keep them from harming others that way. Even as bodyguards, they’re programmed to defend only as much as it takes to keep their owners safe. It’s hardwired into their circuits,” she sobbed when Neera stopped yanking her around.
“Bitch, you have an answer for everything. You damned sure better come up with an answer on how to destroy them here and now, because otherwise, you’re dead.” Neera shoved the gun between her eyes.
Alarms began braying in the bay.
Chapter Fifteen
“Alek here.”
“Man, am I glad you picked up.” Michaels sounded out of breath. “When I didn’t see you with the president, I was afraid…listen, Alek, the Freedom League’s got Mr. Kwolek. I’ve called the police, but I’m scared they won’t arrive in time to deal with this.”
Alek bolted upright from the chair he’d been sagging in, at the computer mainframe in the cyborg cocoon bay. How had he missed hearing the alarms in the distance? How could he have been so absorbed in his sadness? “What do you mean, they have Lillian? Where is she?”
“Main storage bay. There’s over a dozen of those lunatics in there with her, including Gunnar Jax and his girlfriend Neera. We only just saw them because the security cameras went down all over the site, and we had no one—”
“Feed me the monitors here,” Alek interrupted. “Show me what’s going on.”
His circuits fired in a frenzy as the picture came up on the screens before him. Lillian cringed as Artemis Neera screamed obscenities while pulling her around by the hair. The extremist shoved her into a chair and waved an old revolver. Jax and others stood around. Some scowled at Lillian, and some watched the unpowered cyborgs that surrounded them.
It took all Alek had to keep from running straight to the storage bay and beating his way through the door with his fists. A strange, guttural noise rose, and after a second, he realized it came from him. A restrained scream seeped between his teeth.
Lillian waited for the verbal and physical assault to stop before saying, “The best I can do is access the mainframe and show you there’s nothing I can do to destroy the cyborgs from here.”
“We need to break in there and help her,” Alek told Michaels. “First, let me take care of something.”
“They have the bay locked up tight. One of my people, Mays…damn it, I checked her history with a fine-tooth comb. I did that with all of them! But she’s in there too.”
“Concentrate, Mr. Michaels. Order your squads to those doors and stand by. I have an idea.”
“They’re already there, trying to force their way in. What are you up to?”
“Following their playbook and getting help on the inside. Stand by. Come on, Lillian, let go and put some distance between you and the computer.”
As if hearing him, she drew back and waved at the monitor, exhibiting terrified frustration as she glared at Neera. “See? These are all the commands available through the mainframe.”
Neera shoved her aside. Jax joined his compatriot, shoving too. Lillian was nearly knocked out of her chair. She pushed away to let them look. Good. She had no contact with the keyboard whatsoever.
Alek disabled Lillian’s passcode. Though he couldn’t view her monitor through Neera and Jax, he knew it had begun flashing Access Denied when the pair shouted. They turned to confront Lillian.
Alek froze. “Leave her alone, assholes. You know she did nothing. Don’t you fucking touch her.”
Neera’s gun came up, and he readied to reinstate Lillian’s access before she was killed.
“What the fuck is this shit?” Neera shrieked.
Lillian held her hands up. “Security must have noticed I signed on. The alarms tell you they’ve been alerted you’re in here with me. They’ve deleted me from the system.”
It was Jax, of all people, who tried to talk Neera down. “Okay, so we’re still cool. We have an important hostage. We use her to either hack into the system or to convince someone else to obliterate these monsters. No problem.”
Neera looked as if she’d take the shot anyway, and Alek’s fingers flew over his keyboard. He had access to the mainframe, and he inputted commands as fast as he could type.
His screen flashed enable? He hesitated and watched the drama within the bay, his finger poised over the command.
The set of Neera’s shoulders loosened. Her brows, nearly meeting over the bridge of her nose, drew apart. “Yeah. Yeah, let’s get someone on the horn, tell them our demands.” She told Lillian, “You sit there. Don’t move. Don’t say anything.”
Alek allowed his own tension to lessen the slightest bit. He tapped the keyboard, and 15:00 appeared on the monitors. It began to count down.
“Did you hear all that?” he asked Michaels.
“Every word. I expect it might be me they call.”
“Stall them and be ready for things to go down in fifteen minutes. I’m on my way.”
* * * *
Alek sped to the security level, conversed briefly with Michaels, then raced to the level below where Lillian was being held. Seconds later, he stepped out of an airlock.
He’d decided against the precious minutes necessary to pull on a full spacesuit. Gloves, shoes, and a collar to which he could seal his helmet were all the protection he’d afforded his lab-grown collagen dermis. He was relying heavily on his circuitry and systems to regulate his temperature in the hopes most of his skin wouldn’t be too badly damaged during his climb up the outside of CyberServe’s hull.
He used a single tether rope that he attached to the maintenance rungs as he went. The suction shoes and gloves kept him clinging to the station like a fly on a wall.
He climbed. By the time he reached the storage level of the company, almost a minute had elapsed. His sensors sent warnings that fluid vaporization had begun in his unprotected skin. He was also slowly freezing. Ironically, with the sun beaming its rays and without an atmosphere to protect him, he’d possibly end up with a nasty sunburn where his skin was exposed.
His circuitry worked frantically to offset damage, but Alek wasn’t concerned. Even if his entire dermal covering was torn off, which there was no danger of, his matrix and processors were safely enclosed within his metal chassis.
He let the matrix complain without heeding it. His only thought was to reach Lillian.
He left the vertical climb to approach the main storage bay laterally. Meanwhile, the timer continued to count. He eyed the distance between him and the airlock attached to the bay. He’d underestimated how long it would take him to make the journey, but there was nothing he could do about that.
He continued to crawl to Lillian. He learned as he went that a cyborg could pray when it came to the saving of the woman he loved.
* * * *
Lillian kept the same attention on Neera she’d have given a short-circuiting industrial robotic meat cleaver. Though the Freedom League appeared to have the advantage, what with a high-value hostage in their clutches, the situation hadn’t gone according to plan. The latest snafu was in convincing Mr. Michaels to do what they wished.
