Chapter 20 Evo
My ultromotor surges in my chest as Aera vanishes into the belly of a Solcrue battle cruiser. It glides off like I’m not a concern, but I line up its trajectory and calculate a possible intersection at another cliff side.
I drop my gear as I run to make myself as light as possible, and sling my rifle over my back so I can have my hands free. I pull up Panther’s contact and the way it felt to run on all fours.
My body shifts, dropping down into his shape, and I bound faster across the loose rocks, catching up to the ship. The cliff nears.
Target: Cruiser. Line up intersection.
My programming replies.
Eighty-two percent of required speed.
I sprint as fast as my motors will let me go. Probability of success drops.
Fuck! They have Aera. Stupid... Thruster!
As I run out on the final rock, I leap into the air and morph into Thruster’s gold form with engines all over my body.
But my fuel is limited, because I’m not actually his kind of unit.
I manage only a burst before the transformation cuts out, and I’m back to my stardust form, careening wildly toward the cruiser.
I kick on my rocket boots and get enough of a flare out of them to snag an aileron. The moment my hands wrap around the metal, confidence returns. My boots shut off, and I walk across the hull to a nearby airlock, rest my hand on the control panel, and open the exterior doors.
When I step inside, I focus on isolating Eon’s skill of invisibility. The rifle slips in my fingers, and I realize I’ve dipped too far. Don’t blend us. Just Eon. I wince as I adjust my grip. How does he feel?
Like no one sees him. Something I used to understand...before Aera.
My hands disappear, then my arms and my suit follow. But I can still see the rifle, because it isn’t reactive like my armor. So I set it down and all the other weapons on my body that aren’t doing what I want them to.
When the airlock opens, the Solcrue soldiers outside stand in confusion. It’s the perfect distraction, and I think I’m going to like being Eon a lot more often.
I move among the soldiers, rip a knife out of one’s belt, and stab him through the neck with his own weapon. I break the neck of the second. As he falls, I guide his gun around to shoot the third behind him. Then I pry it free and shoot the next, who runs in after hearing the commotion.
Tossing the gun aside, I exit into the hallway and use the same tactics. I am an invisible force, smashing soldiers into one another, slaying them with their own blades and guns, fueled by desperation to have Aera in my arms again and rage that anyone would dare hurt her.
I make it down to the level where the gravity beams are and catch Aera’s scent on the breeze. She’s here somewhere. I just can’t see her.
Scanners run and show several hot bodies in the forward rooms. I try to ignore the drips of human blood on the floor, but the fury that pours into me is too much. I break my cover as I step into the containment room where Captain Crezlith, Captain Crazy, wrestles Aera toward the officers’ quarters.
“Aera!” I charge through the room. I can make it. I know I can. But the way she screams when she sees me makes me think I’ve miscalculated something.
“No!” Her face is red, and veins rise in her neck.
A cold, impossibly heavy weight slams into my right side, coats my body, and smashes me into the far wall with crushing force. Milky white polymers filled with energy-draining probes suck the power out of me. My body begins to shut down.
Capsule. Capsule. Capsule.
My body slowly morphs inside the shell of hell I hate most.
How did I get captured in this shit again? Damn it!
Something pushes me, rolls me across the floor, over a lip, and into container. The plasma retracts from me, rolls out of the chamber, and forms into a perfect sphere that a Solcrue loads back into a gun as he slams the door on my cell.
“Welcome back to hell, Ssss...”
“Fuck off, Half-wit.”
“It’s Hetnick, you piece of Shannassi shit.”
I get up and punch the clear pane between us. It doesn’t even fracture. “Half-dick. Yeah. Whatever.”
He taps the control panel on my cell with a smirk and sends a dart punching into my neck. Hetnick tilts his scaly head, rubs a cropped ear, and watches me.
The dart thrusts cold liquid into my body, carrying with it the sickening chill of bad code, of corruption, of the very thing I never wanted to endure again.
I slump down in the cell.
He chuckles, bites off a bit of a gilkyworm cake, leaving crumbs on the floor, then turns for the door. “That’s what I thought. I’ll be back for your first shift in an hour, S...”
I can’t let it consume me, not again.
But the way it invades my body and turns my veins into fire makes me concerned I’m not going to break out of it this time. It feels...upgraded. So I focus my protection around my cores and the precious chips inside my body, and let the poison do its thing.
I just wish I knew how to stop it, what medicine I needed, or anticode.
I pull up the memory of Aniah killing the Solcrue, and every other memory I have of humans fighting for one another, defending themselves from Solcrue, the kind of thing that broke me free last time.
The poison code reaches my central processor and slows my thinking.
But I bring Aera’s face to the front of my memory.
I hold onto her, fighting to help her colony and the salvage mission, even though she’d barely had an hour of sleep. I drift off under the taxing effort of processing the corrupt nanos while thinking of her digging her heels into my ass and begging me to be one with her.
At least when I serve Solcrue this time, I won’t have to be alone. My companion program is complete.