Chapter 23
Wyl
I hate to do it. It kills me to, but I have no choice …
… To have even a ghost of a chance getting an audience with Epigan III, I have to leave Aura behind.
Doc Leeds will take good care of her. He’ll fix her leg, tune her up, maybe even run a few software updates. I trust him; she’s in good hands. And as isolated as the outpost is, the GA will never find her there. They’ve never once located it in the hundred-plus years since its founding.
My job now is simple: Get to the Galactic Seat, secure a place on the Regent’s schedule, and warn him of the impending android uprising.
Admittedly, I’m losing my connection to the droid hive mind by abandoning Aura, but if I show up at the Seat with an XR-17, they won’t care that she’s second gen—she’ll be executed on the spot.
No, it’s going to take time to explain her existence and convince Epigan III that she shouldn’t be killed just because Archer IX was a sadistic freak.
The walk back to the shipyard is relatively uneventful, though I have to cross the street to avoid the brothel again.
Last thing I need is for one of them to ask too many questions about my new lady friend.
No one seemed to recognize her when we walked past earlier, but I can’t risk one of Madam Qrk’s girls connecting the dots.
Her employees are nice enough, but they’ve got debts just like anyone else.
Some even have prices on their heads, and turning in a rogue XR might earn a pardon or a hefty bounty, or both.
Aura could be a fast ticket to the straight and narrow for some of them.
I may have always gotten primo treatment at Madam Qrk’s, but I can’t sacrifice Aura for them.
Thanks to some bars of yvrite I had squirreled away for an emergency—galactic credits aren’t worth shit on Klymani, but rare metals can buy you just about anything—Doc Leeds promised to keep Aura busy long enough for the ship’s repairs to be done and me to vacate the asteroid belt.
I left the “how” of keeping her occupied up to his discretion, but for the equivalent of thirty million credits, he’d better do the job right.
When I get to the shipyard, I try to lend a helping hand to speed up the repairs, but after a few minutes it becomes glaringly obvious that I’m not fully recovered from my abdominal injury. Lifting a small hull panel proves to be too much, and I reluctantly sit down to, as I told Aura, supervise.
Normally, these repairs would take multiple solar days to complete with or without my help, but I greased the hand of the head mechanic with more yvrite bars. My pockets now have little more than metal dust and shavings in them, but I should be on my way in a matter of hours.
Since I have nothing to really do until the ship’s ready, I fold my jacket into a makeshift pillow and put it behind my head as I rest against the wall for a short nap.
I wake later with a hangover the size of Titan, and I wonder when and what I drank to cause it. When I try to put a hand to my head, I notice that I can’t move. Can’t lift my arms, can’t budge my legs.
A paralytic force field surrounds me, which shouldn’t be possible.
Paralytic force fields are banned on the Klymani outpost; only Galactic Authority vessels are equipped with them, and my blood runs cold as I realize …
… I’ve been captured.
Someone sold me out.
I wrack my brain, trying to figure out who it could’ve been.
The residents of the outpost aren’t exactly the most scrupulous of individuals, but they generally avoid the GA like the Hykrinian Plague.
Most Klyamnis would rather cut out their own tongue than rat anyone out to the Authority, even a mortal enemy.
Who the hell could I have pissed off enough for them to break that sacred code?
The answer comes in the form of a sickening wet thud in front of me.
Fighting against the field to open my eyes, I come face to face with the severed head of Doc Leeds—recently severed, by the looks of it. His thinning grey hair sticks out every which way, and his mouth gapes, locked in a permanent scream, while a single wet tear drips from his eye.
Aura.
If Leeds turned me in, they have to have her.
Before I can think of a way out of this mess to save Aura, a shiny pair of polished boots appears in my vision next to Leeds’s head.
My eyes, still the only things I can move, follow the boots up past the uniformed legs and medal-laden jacket to the sneering face of Admiral Breem.
The bastard looks like a blarg that just ate the last slice of fithzl.
I want to reach out and yank him off his feet. I want to punch that smug smirk until his teeth cave in. All I can do, though, is watch as he kicks the traitorous doctor’s head away and kneels in front of me.
“Well, well, well … If it isn’t Captain Wyl Nosurn. May I call you Wyl?”
Like I can fucking stop him from inside this field.
“You lied to me, Wyl. Quite uncaptainly of you. I’d say it’s more the behavior of a salvager.
A thief. A coward.” He grins and reaches out, lifting me by my hair until we’re more eye-to-eye.
The force field fizzles near his hand, allowing it to pass through unhindered, an indicator that the generator is keyed to his genetic code.
Basically, without his DNA, I can’t budge.
The field reforms millimeters away from the admiral’s skin, keeping me immobile.
Only my eyes can move, meaning I’ll have a front row seat to whatever sick, tortuous things he’s got planned.
No! I can’t give up. Not when Aura might still be alive.
I managed blinking. Rotating my eyes. I can manage something else.
“You told me you were the captain of Jupiter’s Joy. Picked up ‘a young woman with a leg injury,’ you said,” the admiral continues. He chuckles, a humorless sound that sends another chill down my spine. “After finding your ‘woman,’ Captain, I’m starting to doubt anything you said.”
Can’t quite move well enough to punch the bastard yet, but I might get a word or two out.
“Where’s … Aura?”
It’s not easy. It hurts. These force fields are designed to restrain the toughest of prisoners, and I am far removed from that category. At best I’m a nuisance, but seeing the shock in Admiral Breem’s eyes when I speak, defying his damned field, is reward enough to dull the pain.
Rage quickly replaces his shock, and he grips my hair tighter.
“TC-39, bring the prisoner.” His savage grin returns, and I suspect I’m not going to like what comes next. “If this piece of space scum wants to see her, then by all means, we’ll let him.”
But at least he said “prisoner,” not “body.” That’s some small relief, right?
My relief is short-lived.
The TC model, which was standing just out of my view behind the admiral, turns and exits my cell, though it comes back so quickly that I suspect they were keeping Aura nearby for just this purpose.
She does not look well, and it breaks my heart to see her like this.
“Aura …” I croak out as tears stream from my eyes.
A scream builds inside me, coming from deep within my raging soul, and it erupts so loudly and violently that Admiral Breem lets go of me, dropping my head and taking several shocked steps backwards.
Near as I can tell, she’s still alive … barely.
Her eyes blink. Her jaw works to speak. But she can’t, because they disassembled her. They broke Aura’s body into six distinct parts: her head, her torso, and each limb, all still active and mobile, but none connected to the other.
TC-39 rolled her into my cell on a fucking cart.
I can’t imagine the pain she must be in. There’s no way these assholes were kind enough to shut off her neural receptors before they did this.
“You’re all gonna die,” I growl, my body trembling with the fury inside. “All of you.”
Admiral Breem recovers too damn quickly. He snorts and crosses his arms over his decorated chest. It occurs to me that he wasn’t wearing his dress uniform when he boarded Jupiter’s Joy. What’s the occasion?
“I’m sure I’ll die eventually, Wyl, but it won’t be by your hands. What can you do? You’re trapped. As threatening as a butterfly.”
His ignorant comment makes me laugh, a wild, manic sound.
“The Llirin butterflies on Bnaill VIII have a venom so toxic,” I say as I push myself to a kneeling position, “that one touch—not even a bite, mind you, but a touch—will paralyze a Grivaldan.”
Breem’s stupid force field sizzles and sparks when I force my body to rise, and I watch the horror in his eyes grow with each movement.
He hurt Aura. That alone is reason enough for his immediate and agonizing demise.
“I’m so sorry, doll …” One foot under me. “If I’d thought for even a second that he’d find you, that he could get to you …”
Two feet under me. A generator across the room groans, like metal scraping on metal. My force field’s working too hard to try to keep me still, and it’s about to fail. “Fuck. This fucking hurts like hell.”
As I slowly reach my full height, the generator blows. A ball of flame explodes from the overworked device, singeing the admiral’s pretty uniform and igniting the sleeve.
Admiral Breem screams and swats at the fire with his other hand. The cell’s flame suppression system kicks in, spraying water on us all. I brush wet hair out of my eyes and face the enemy officer with the might of a thousand rabid keems building inside me.
Nothing can stop me. Not a force field, not the admiral … nothing.
I look past Breem to the TC unit, meeting its empty gaze and uttering two simple words:
“Save her.”
What happens next might go down in history as the single stupidest thing I’ve done in my short life.
The admiral draws the blaster holstered at his side, aiming it at me as I advance.