Mine to Keep, page 15
“I don’t have clearance to activate the cyborgs, so I don’t have a passcode into that system,” Michaels insisted over the communications link.
“I don’t want them activated for the hundredth time. I want them destroyed!” Neera pounded on the computer station with her fist, purple from frustration.
“I don’t have the ability to do that either.”
“Then who does? Look, you’re begging me to start sending you pieces of your boss—”
“If you could just give me a chance to contact a member of the engineering staff. They’re the ones who understand how the cyborgs work. Or you could wait for them to show up for work in about half an hour—”
Jax snorted and glanced at Lillian, his expression almost sympathetic. “Damn, does he have it out for you? I’d swear he wants Artemis to start carving you up. Or is it a case of little to pick from as far as employees goes? Hey, Alison. You work for the guy. Is he dumb?”
The security guard with the nametag Mays on her chest shrugged. “Michaels never struck me as stupid. Overworked and stressed, sure. He always looks like he’s at the end of his rope. Maybe this is what finally does it for him.”
Or he’s buying time. The thought gave Lillian hope he was stalling until law enforcement showed up. But then what? She would still be used by Neera as a pawn.
“You guys, shut up,” Neera snarled. She returned her attention to Michaels’ voice. “Someone has to do something about these fucking machines now.”
“You’ve always avoided being caught before. They’ll know you were a part of this,” Lillian dared to whisper to Jax.
His easy grin assumed a reverential aspect. “This is the blow that needs to be landed. Wiping out the cyborgs, erasing them from existence, will make us heroes on Earth. It’ll heal the wounds Terrans carry. It’ll give us closure. We need that more than anything, including our freedom. I’ll go to prison with a clear conscience.”
“Didn’t you find closure from executing some of those responsible for the corporations that carried out the wars?”
“A little, yeah. But those bastards were faceless, for the most part. The cyborgs…that’s what we saw every day. What we fought every day. Their destruction will right the wrongs we suffered.”
He spoke with zealot’s fanaticism, even with his voice reduced to a mutter. That Gunnar Jax believed in what he said was obvious. Added to Neera’s trauma and hatred of cyborgs, it was clear Lillian wouldn’t leave the bay alive. She represented everything they were against.
Before that could happen, however, she decided to learn what she could. “Why didn’t you bring explosives yourselves? Why not do to the bay what you did to the executive level?”
He gave her a derisive smirk. “We couldn’t bring a lot of ordinance from Earth. You must have heard how hard the ITCS makes it to sneak the materials through. It’s next to impossible to get half of what we needed on your black market too. That tiny explosion represented all we could get our hands on. It barely took out a quarter of your office’s floor, far less than what it would take to demolish even the smallest storage unit of your cyborgs.”
Lillian hadn’t realized any of that, but she wasn’t in the market of smuggling contraband into the ITCS either. It granted her a small measure of relief that the ITCS was so vigilant.
Neera broke off her conversation with Michaels. “What a useless piece of shit. He says he’ll have an engineer contact us as soon as one arrives. I gave him five minutes.”
“Don’t let him delay beyond that. The police are probably here,” Mays scowled. She kept her weapon pointed at the cyborgs with the most threatening appearances, the TWMs and TWFs. Many of the others did as well.
“Let’s have some fun while we wait.” Gunnar’s excitement was a bizarre counterpoint to their dark moods. “A few of us have weapons that will demolish the tin cans. We can start the party without the destruct codes.”
“No distractions,” Neera ordered. “We aren’t here to destroy a few dozen. They’re all scrap.”
“Yeah, of course, but it’d be a gas to personally trash a few instead of letting a computer have all the glory. Think of the pictures we could circulate to our supporters—”
A hum rang through the air. The Freedom League jolted to startled attention, their gazes skittered everywhere. “What’s going on?” Mays shouted.
“If that ass Michaels is playing a trick, you’ll pay for it,” Neera cried, shoving her gun in Lillian’s face again.
A scream rang out, then another. Neera’s aim jerked aside as she reacted to the horrified cries of her people.
Thousands of cyborgs opened their eyes. Most of the units’ visual sensors, stripped of colored lenses, glowed a hellish orange. Pinpoints of tangerine-colored light filled the chamber, as if a swarm of fireflies had woken all at once.
Lillian took her opportunity and dropped to the floor. She crab-scuttled to hide beneath the computer station.
“Kill them!” someone—she thought it was Jax—shouted.
A bedlam of firing from different weapons exploded in Lillian’s ears. She clapped her palms to them, barely making out the thuds of hundreds of feet as the rows of cyborgs standing on the floor began to march.
The cyborgs were unarmed, but they could withstand a great deal of abuse before succumbing. Only the gren-guns would take them down after several shots, and Lillian had counted no more than half a dozen of those wielded by her captors.
It had taken decades for the Terrans to overcome the cyborgs and throw aside the control of their corporate masters. A couple dozen poorly armed insurgents wouldn’t stop even naked cyborgs from doing whatever someone had ordered them to do. Not when there were so many.
“Shit!” Jax screamed. The lone unarmed member of the group, he ran a few steps in one direction, then another, and another. “Shit! Let me outta here!”
Lillian wasn’t sticking around to watch the cyborgs overcome the Freedom League. She crawled under the computer station’s desk surface overhang to put distance between her and her captors, Neera in particular.
She crept behind her assailants’ legs and neared the corner of the long computer bank. She noted how the front lines of the approaching cyborgs fell as those with the right guns fired on them. Yet the cyborgs continued to come, with the TWMs and TWFs—the Walls—leading the charge. How long could the Freedom League hold out against them?
Lillian reached the corner of the computer bank, and a pair of boots ran to cut her off. Neera knelt on the floor, her features a mask of unholy hatred as she pointed her ancient gun at Lillian.
Chapter Sixteen
Alek pulled the airlock’s door shut behind himself. All over his torso, arms, and legs, he could feel the damage the frozen space had done without his matrix reciting it to him. It didn’t matter.
He heard weapons firing in the bay beyond the airlock, but there was no possibility of forcing his way into the storage bay until the chamber he inhabited finished pressurizing. A full minute, during which anything could happen to Lillian.
Or had already happened. The cyborgs would have activated two minutes before. Had the Freedom League killed her immediately? Or were they continuing to use her to hold off the automatons he’d ordered to keep Lillian from harm, to rescue her if possible?
Alek’s matrix had offered damned little hope of keeping her alive. It identified what was already certain: whether she got what she wanted or not, Neera would kill Lillian. His only recourse had been to provide a distraction and possibly save her. He’d soon find out if he’d managed to do so, or if he’d accelerated her death.
He bared his teeth at the airlock door. Open, damn it.
* * * *
Behind the line of Freedom League radicals, Lillian yelped as Neera dragged her out from under the mainframe by her hair. “Deactivate them! Make them stop, or so help me, I’ll kill you!”
“I. Don’t. Have. Control. Over. Them!” Lillian enunciated every word, though she held little hope Neera would listen in her present state of panic. She’d refused to acknowledge a word Lillian had said when she had control over the situation. The chances of her accepting the truth of the situation during full-scale battle were nil.
“Artemis! Artemis! You have to get me out of here!” Jax ran wildly back and forth, hunching to hide at the back of the firing line.
“Not without killing this bitch and taking out as many of them as possible,” Neera snarled.
Lillian had run out of time. It was in the crazed shine of Neera’s dark eyes, wide enough to show the whites around her irises. She was ready to murder her.
Lillian yanked to the side, ignoring the brutal tug of Neera’s grip on the silver locks. At the same instant, she shoved against her attacker’s wrist and the hand holding the gun.
It went off. Her ear, next to it but just out of the line of fire, lost all its hearing. Ignoring how close she’d come to having a bullet in her brain, she lowered her head and butted it hard into Neera’s chest.
Neera exhaled in a gust of explosive air and fell flat on her ass. Gripping Lillian’s hair, she pulled her down as well. Lillian crashed on top of her. The gun was jarred loose and slid across the floor off a couple feet, out of reach.
They fought each other, swinging and kicking. Pain registered from the blows, but Lillian’s survival instinct had been triggered, and she gave Neera everything she had. They paused pounding on each other to scramble for the gun when they had the opportunity to lunge. Neera screeched at the still-panicking Jax. “Help me with her!”
He paused long enough to shout, “Fuck you! You got us into this!”
Lillian jerked loose and brushed her fingertips on the gun only to have Neera slam her skull to the floor. She saw stars and lost her tenuous hold. Neera sprang for the weapon as Jax, taking advantage of a gap that appeared between the encroaching cyborgs, made a beeline for the door that led to an airlock.
“Bastard! Coward! Traitor!” Neera brought the gun up and fired several shots…into Jax’s back. He stumbled forward a few steps, then fell. He lay unmoving.
Lillian saw it from her position, flattened to the floor. The crazed energy that had fed her combat with Neera had fled. Only sheer will forced her past the ringing in her head so she could bring herself to her hands and knees. The knowledge that Neera would turn and kill her too brought her up on shaking legs.
Perhaps that would have been the case, had the airlock door Jax had been running for not chosen that instant to open. Alek, wearing a space helmet, stepped out. He sighted Lillian beyond Neera and ran straight for them.
Neera screamed as the PSM shot toward her, a ululating cry of a child trapped in a nightmare. “Not you! Not you! Kill it! Kill it!”
She fired a barrage at Alek. The bullets couldn’t have gone through his metal chassis, but Mays, alerted by her leader’s hysterical screams, turned the more powerful gren-gun on the approaching cyborg and fired too.
Alek went down in a hail of explosive shots, his shirt and flesh shredding. The metal beneath was pocked with holes.
“Alek!” Lillian shoved past the still-screaming Neera, whose gun clicked impotently as she continued to shoot from an empty chamber. Lillian tackled Mays to the ground. The next few seconds were a senseless, chaotic blur. She was aware she was punching Mays, who lay under her. A distant voice in her mind howled for her to look out for the other woman’s weapon, but her body was far from lucid control. Its only goal was to keep her foe from destroying Alek.
“Mr. Kwolek! Mr. Kwolek!”
Hands tore her from the bloodied Mays. A man whom Lillian didn’t recognize right away replaced the view.
“Mr. Kwolek, we’re here. We have them contained.”
A woman joined him. “Mr. Kwolek. Lillian? Are you okay?”
“Officer…Kahn? Mr. Michaels?” Her brain began to reassert itself and overcome desperate instinct.
“Hey, there you are. Are you injured? Yeah, scalp’s bleeding, and you’re going to have a hell of a shiner. How many fingers do you see?” Kahn held up three.
Lillian was far from interested in counting fingers. She shot from security, cops, and cyborgs gone motionless to the only person who mattered. “Alek!”
He lay prone, the white fluid that fed and nourished his skin soaking his torn shirt and tie. He stared sightlessly at the ceiling.
Power re-routing. Partial functionality will be restored in five seconds. Four. Three. Two. One.
A face hovered over him. Human. Female. Wetness ran down her cheeks. More wetness, red in color, from her scalp.
“Partial functionality restored.”
“Alek, thank the heavens. Are you okay? How do you feel?”
Feeding pertinent information to vocal emitters.
“This unit is attempting to regain its functions after a sudden, unplanned shutdown. Systems are rerouting paths to undamaged circuits. Some systems may be permanently lost.”
“Your memory, Alek. Do you remember me?”
Human is referring to this unit as Alek instead of its serial designation. Respond to her questions.
“Negative. Memory circuits appear to have experienced catastrophic feedback from explosive injury to main network. Please stand by for further data.”
More wetness, pouring heavier from her eyes. Her voice grated, choked. The PSM…he knew that was his designation, though the human female kept calling him Alek…felt a tugging at his chest.
“Give me a light, someone. I have to see how bad he was hit.”
A beam flashed bright against his visual sensors, then trained onto his torso. The female grimaced.
“Damn it. There’s damage to your main power supply. It must have sent a surge into your matrix. Most of the CPU is apparently functional since you’re talking, but…fuck. If any engineers have shown up, bring them!”
The PSM felt something. A strange urge to learn the reason for the odd play of facial tics she displayed. But no, only performing the tasks required of it mattered. “The current matrix is heavily damaged. The most economically and labor-feasible solution would be for a new matrix to replace the impaired piece. Shall this unit power down for the repair?”
She made odd noises that weren’t speech. Harsh, hiccupping sounds to go along with the flow of wetness. Tears.
“I don’t want you to have a new matrix. We may not be able to transfer your memories and feelings to another one. We have to fix this module. Have to.” She slapped her hands over her face, the bizarre sounds growing louder. “I can’t lose you. I have to get you back. Alek, come back to me.”
Lillian bawled, her sobs growing in violence. She didn’t care that she was surrounded by law enforcement and CyberServe’s security. She never had cared what others thought of her preference for cyborgs when it came to her personal life. Now that she had actual feelings for a nonhuman, she gave zero fucks what they thought of that either. Especially when it came to the opinions of the Freedom League, cuffed in the middle of the room. Most particularly she gave absolutely no fucks about Artemis Neera, who’d killed her boyfriend, who kept shouting cyber slut until Detective Steelman threatened to have her sedated.
None of that mattered when Alek didn’t know Lillian. Compared to that, everything else was a blip on her radar.
It was to be expected. Gren bullets were explosive, and though Alek’s matrix hadn’t been impacted dead-on, it had suffered harm. The question was, how much was too much?
She inspected the damage, recalled the importance of the various circuits that had been impacted. Data storage appeared mostly intact, but its housing was crumpled on one edge and a quarter of the neural pathways feeding to it were inoperative. Too many to know without a schematic how badly the device had been compromised.
Maybe the matrix could recover his memories. Perhaps even his feelings for her, little as he wanted them. If it failed to, repairing it might restore everything. Maybe.
She was forced to count a lot on a possibility that might turn out to be unfeasible. So Lillian cried unashamed tears and begged Alek to return.
He’d loved her. She’d been too stupid to appreciate that and what it had cost him. Too determined to never be hurt again to accept his precious gift. She’d squandered it all. There’d been a few days she could have lived the perfect relationship with the man who’d offered her everything. She’d missed out on it because she couldn’t stand to tell him those three little words that would have meant the universe to him.
He’d suffered the version of a cyborg death in coming to rescue her. He’d done so despite believing she didn’t care for him. Despite her treating him worse than those who’d lied to her. Infinitely worse. Without his memories, she’d never be able to make it up to Alek.
“Lillian?”
Her hands flung to either side, though she hardly dared to believe Alek had spoken her name.
He gazed up at her, the bland lack of feeling giving way to confusion and a hint of desperation as he sought to regain what he’d known.
“Lillian?”
He remembered her name. He remembered being around her. In an office. In a home.
“Alek?” She looked terrified. Why was she scared?
“Stand by. Records of interactions are coming online.”
More stored data arrived. A memory of her standing over him, leaning down to look over his shoulder at a computer screen. Another in which she typed on her own keyboard, writing lines of programs. Cyborg programs. Programs for her to test on him.
A vision of her naked before him, approaching with her head bowed. Of her kneeling before him…
…of her urgently sucking his cock into her mouth. Her warm, wet mouth…
…lying beneath him. He pinned her, taking her with force, but her expression said it was what she wanted, what she needed…
