WARDEN 2

CHRONICLES OF A CYBORG 2

Isaac Hooke

Contents

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Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

About the Author

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For a limited time, Isaac Hooke is giving away Salvage, the prequel novella, here:

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1

Rhea strode across the pristine, asphalt-surfaced streets of Aradne. Behind her followed an angry mob of Rust Towners intent on gathering illegally, among other acts of civil disobedience.

She was on her way to confront the mayor, who was currently in session with his counselors, if the leaks to the streaming sites were to be believed. Earlier, she had joined the Rust Towners rioting at the main gates; hackers had overridden the gate controls, opening them, and forcing the security robots to form a chain of bodies in front of the opening. In the ensuing violence, the rioters had broken through and stormed the city. Rhea had quickly taken charge of the situation, using her fame and her followers to gather the rioters before too much damage could be inflicted against the properties closest to the entrance. Aradne defense robots had arrested a few of the more disorderly among them, but for the most part the mechanical monstrosities remained on the sidelines and left them alone. Rhea wished she could take full credit for that, but she knew the defense force’s public image had a part to play: many citizens of Aradne would be watching live streams of the event, some transmitted from the rioters themselves, others from residents observing from the balconies of nearby towers.

Rhea herself was live-streaming from her own point of view at that very moment. She had been famous for a short while: her actions in Rust Town against the bioweapons had netted her several million social media followers. However, she had been banned from broadcasting on most of the major platforms shortly thereafter, including VidTube, but that didn’t stop her from using alternatives such as SubverseTube. She didn’t have as many followers as before on these smaller platforms, but those she did have were a dedicated group: real fans who routinely disseminated her broadcasts to the larger platforms, risking bans themselves.

Rhea kept expecting the Net to go down in the current neighborhood, blocking live streams entirely, but everything remained online. Still, Rhea had no doubt that any recordings of the event would be scrubbed from the major streaming sites by evening, and perhaps even SubverseTube, which made the defense robots that mirrored the path of her and those with her all the more menacing. She did her best to ignore them: the two-legged mechs equipped with electrolasers, missiles, and plasma turrets; the smaller infantry robots with the grenade launchers attached to their shoulders and the twin rifle muzzles protruding from their forearms; and lastly the octocopter drones hovering overhead, their wicked laser turrets tracking different members of the crowd, ready to fire on command.

“Well, at least they’re giving us an escort fit for royalty,” Will grumbled above the chanting crowd from her right side.

Rhea offered her friend a grim glance. He still wore his hair in long dreadlocks. He’d grown out his beard however and had begun to braid the tips of the chin area so as to form mini dreadlocks of their own. The thin visor of his AR goggles sat just above his eyes, below his brows. He wore a black and gray uniform with a utility belt, and other than his fists, had no weapons. None of the others with her were armed, either—all pistols, rifles and bladed implements had been confiscated at the entrance by the defense robots. Those who had not willingly surrendered their arms were among the arrested.

Before she could answer Will, Horatio, who was standing on the other side of her, spoke up: “I wouldn’t precisely call this an escort fit for royalty. Fit for criminals, perhaps. If we were royalty, those guns would be tracking the buildings and streets beyond; instead, they’re pointed directly at us.”

“I was being sarcastic,” Will clarified.

“Oh,” Horatio said. The robot’s face was a black oval with a gray visor for eyes and a grill for a mouth. Two antennae on top completed the look. Below, its body was all servomotors and polycarbonate tubes—a motley of gray and yellow.

Her own body was similar in design, but more metallic than gray or yellow. Of course, it was currently concealed by the clothing she wore—those dull gray fatigues with the hooded cloak layered on top. Her exposed face was the only part of her that was sheathed in artificial skin. She used to keep her features hidden within her raised hood to hide the fact she was a cyborg, but now she wore her synthetic skin openly in the slums, and here. Not even the unsavory residents would dare attack the Warden of Rust Town. That was what the slum denizens called her. They considered her a hero for the bravery she had shown against the invading bioweapons, a bravery that had not been forgotten despite all the videos of her actions being scrubbed from the Net. The residents of Rust Town were the ones who had been responsible for pooling their money and resources to upgrade her body after she had been sliced and diced into near oblivion by the bioweapons.

Normally, she wore a retractable bladed weapon called the X2-59 on her right wrist, a weapon that, when deployed, sparked with electricity generated by electrolasers built into the hilt. But she’d left that behind when she departed to join the rioters—she didn’t want to risk losing it to Aradne’s defense forces. And seeing as she wasn’t quite ready to fight those forces…

Rhea returned her attention to the street ahead, and the buildings that lined either side. Their surfaces glimmering beneath the mid-afternoon sun, the serene, crystalline towers of Aradne proved an odd counterpoint to the shouting residents of the slums behind her. The structures had windows that were cut from sapphires, a substance that lent itself extremely well to some of the more fantastically engineered skyscrapers, some of which took the form of exotic geometric shapes, occasionally piled one atop the other. For example, her eyes lingered on two pyramids stacked tip to tip as she marveled at its construction.

Not far overhead, delivery drones passed to and fro as if oblivious to the events taking place below. Gizmo followed along at the same height, along with a few other drones from Rust Town. Beyond them, flyers ferried citizens between buildings who seemed to be going about their business unperturbed.

“You’d almost think the citizens don’t care,” Will said, his gaze upon those flyers.

“It’s all fun and games until someone loses a life,” Renaldo quipped from behind her.

Renaldo sported a crooked nose and blunt brow, with short-cropped hair combed over his forehead like a drape. His flesh was bronzed almost to the point of being dark-skinned. Renaldo was part of a group of people who called themselves Wardenites—her most loyal fans. He had watched her exploits online and flown in from another city to join her. He did so shortly after she had been banned from the major platforms for violating “content policies.” Her actual violation was never stated, other than the powers that be wanted to shut her up. It hardly seemed a coincidence that the ban hammer fell after she blamed the rulers of Aradne for sending the bioweapons to destroy Rust Town. Most online commentators dismissed her as a conspiracy theorist at that point, but to her loyal Wardenites—who had come with her to the alternate sites—the ban only proved she was right. It was after the ban that Renaldo and other Wardenites flew out to join her cause.

Renaldo had arrived first and considered himself chief among her most loyal followers. He had assigned himself to her personal guard, and often swore he would take a bullet for her. She wondered if he was truly here because he wanted to help Rust Town, or if he had come simply to “bask in her presence,” as Will liked to say. His behavior was often borderline hero worship. The other three Wardenites who had flown in to join her were little different: Brinks, Miles, and Chuck, who marched beside Renaldo at that very moment.

There were also about ten other self-proclaimed Wardenites from Rust Town who were just as dedicated. Though they hadn’t flown in from other cities, they camped outside her house and joined her whenever she had to run an errand, no matter if that errand was helping to rebuild a neighborhood that had fallen to bioweapons or joining a riot. She didn’t always appreciate having them around, but it was especially reassuring at the moment because they helped her keep the rest of the demonstrators in check.

“They’re all in love with you, you know,” Will had told her at one point. “It’s more than hero worship. They’re groupies. They want to get with you.”

“No they don’t,” she insisted.

“Really?” Will asked. “Did you ever think to ask yourself why so many of them are men?”

“Well they’re going to be disappointed, then,” Rhea said. “Considering I don’t have the parts to ‘get with them,’ as you call it.”

Will shrugged. “There are other orifices…”

Rhea glared at him. “Thanks for that.”

“Hey, you’ll only ever get the truth from me, dude,” Will told her. “I’m just saying, watch yourself around them.”

The memory faded, and she found her eyes drifting to the intimidating barricade of steel formed by the mechs and robots lining the roadway. At the moment, she had more to worry about than fans who might want to sleep with her.

The crowd had taken up some nonsensical chant by then. Rhea heard the words mayor and water, but the rest was gibberish, at least to her.

“What are they saying?” she asked Will above the din.

“Mayor Grandas, give us back our water,” Will replied.

Soon, the skyscrapers receded, and ahead awaited a campus of sorts, housing several sprawling, low to medium rise buildings with lots of green space between them. In the center, a large, dome-shaped structure rose above the rest. That was the Parliament Building: Aradne served as the country’s capital, and this campus contained the buildings used by the elected officials to manage the nation. The president also had a residence somewhere within, known as the Bright House, though most people believed he ruled remotely. There was also a city hall on the campus, used for the local administration of Aradne: a pyramid-shaped structure next to the Parliament Building. That was Rhea’s destination.

She had read several different opinions online questioning the wisdom of putting all those administrative buildings into one place. From a security standpoint, it was easier to defend. But the detractors argued all it would take was one nuke to get through, or one cyberattack, and the nation would be taken down. Those for the arrangement pointed out that most of the elected officials didn’t even live in Aradne and worked remotely. If the parliament fell, the business of ruling the nation would be rerouted through fail safes in other cities.

The entire city block containing the campus was cordoned off by an impressive array of mechs and robots. The machines stood abreast, forming an impenetrable fence all along the perimeter. Their weapons were lowered, at least for the moment.

The demonstrators began to fall silent in turn as they noticed these dealers of death arrayed before them.

Rhea led her companions to that perimeter of steel and polycarbonate, and halted two meters from the closest mech, which towered over her.

Overhead, none of the drones accompanying the crowd were able to penetrate the virtual geofence surrounding the site: instead, they hovered along the perimeter, almost precisely in line with the machines below, about fifty meters in the air. None of the commercial delivery drones passed near that geofence either: only those intimidating octocopters controlled the airspace within.

“Return to the slums, or we will open fire,” one of the large mechs announced.

Rhea stood her ground. It was so quiet that a pin could have dropped in the next street and she would have heard. It helped that she had enhanced hearing, of course, but still.

“We want to see the mayor,” she calmly told the towering mech.

In the parks behind the line of machines, defense turrets emerged from hidden recesses in the ground. These rose well above the heads of the machines and swiveled to target the demonstrators.

“Return to the slums,” the large mech repeated.

Rhea raised her chin stubbornly and said: “Not until we see the mayor.”

The large mech remained motionless, its featureless face unreadable. Rhea kept expecting its weapons to swivel toward her. But they did not. Still, an unnerving number of the tracking turrets behind the machine ranks had lined her up.

“They’re not going to fire,” Will said under his breath. “It would be a public relations nightmare. Turn us all into martyrs. They might start arresting us, though.”

The crowd resumed its chant.

“Mayor Grandas, give us back our water!”

Rhea waited a full minute, letting the demonstrators shout their words. She had come mostly for the spectacle. She knew the mayor would never agree to see them. But hopefully this would help put public pressure on city hall.

Rhea turned around to face the demonstrators and raised her hands. “It will serve us no purpose to be locked in jail. Let’s go. We’ll come back again tomorrow, and the next day, and the day thereafter, until they turn on our water. This is not a defeat, but a victory! For every video of ours they scrub from the streaming sites, we’ll upload ten more! For every account they delete, we’ll create a hundred!”

The crowd cheered.

Someone took up her pseudonym, and the demonstrators repeated it.

“Warden! Warden! Warden!”

She waved at them and led them from the line of deadly machines.

“Where did you learn to be so good at stirring up the emotions of crowds?” Will asked as they made their way back toward the city’s walls, where the slums of Rust Town awaited beyond.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “Must be my past life.”

She just wished she could remember it.

2

When Rhea neared the western exit of Aradne, which opened onto Rust Town, she slowed uncertainly. The gate sentries had formed a veritable chain of robots in front of the sealed doors, and for a moment she thought they had been ordered to execute the demonstrators.

She was about to call a halt when the robots stepped aside, clearing a path to the city wall. She quickened her pace as the pair of large metal doors behind the machines began to slide wide.

“That was quick,” Will said. “Given the damage we did to those doors, I thought they’d be out of commission for at least the next day or so.”

“Smelting Drones,” Horatio explained. “The ultimate 3D printers.”

A line of protestors were waiting on the other side of the gate. Some of them rushed inside as the doors parted further, but when they saw Rhea they stopped in their tracks.

“It’s the warden!” someone exclaimed.

“What news?” one of them asked.

“Nothing, as usual,” she replied. “The water remains cut off. The mayor refuses to see us.”

“Then we will storm city hall!” a young man said. He made as if to race into the city, but Rhea caught him by the arm.

“Don’t,” she told him. She turned her gaze toward the other newcomers. “They’ll only arrest you. All of you. We can’t penetrate the parliament area. Turn back. We’ll try again another day. Turn back. Trust me.”

Those who had rushed inside hesitated, but then one by one they began to turn around. Some of them glared at the watching robots, others gave the machines fearful glances, but they all turned back.

Soon Rhea was leading the throng away from Aradne’s walls. The metal doors sealed with a loud clang behind them. There was a certain finality to the clang that bothered Rhea, but she ignored the feeling. Even if the Aradne security forces had reinforced those walls, Rhea and the others would find a way inside. She had told the citizens of Rust Town they would return every day until the water was turned back on, and she intended to do just that, even if it meant climbing the very walls that encircled the city.

But while protesting certainly had a place, especially when it came to easing the collective angst that was felt among the population, it was obvious their cries were falling on deaf ears. Eventually the Aradne city council might give in to them—when waves of slum residents began to die from dehydration, turning public opinion against the mayor. The slum residents were rationing what little water had been left after the bioweapons were defeated—there were only two storage tanks still intact, and their contents would last for maybe a few more days. Rhea hoped to get the supply restored well before the tanks were exhausted, and at the moment that meant circumventing diplomatic routes: to that end, she had members of her inner circle and their network working on a plan to tap into the city’s water supply without anyone in Aradne knowing about it.

The city’s official explanation for disconnecting the water was that the bioweapon attack had “destroyed critical infrastructure” and they had to sever the supply to prevent needless wastage from the broken pipes. However, the people of Rust Town had run their 3D-printing drones overtime and repaired every last one of those pipes on the first day.

The truth was the oceans were overtaxed after supplying water to trillions of people for the past few centuries. The seas were running dry, and Aradne wanted to conserve as much of the valuable liquid as possible for its own citizens. Of course, none of this had actually been revealed to the city’s population, or to any city for that matter; anyone who mentioned the diminishing ocean levels was banned from social media for life, their words scrubbed from the blogs and streaming sites of the Net not long after they were published, courtesy of advanced monitoring AIs.

So even rerouting some of the water into Rust Town was only a stopgap measure at best and would only help the settlement for so long. Eventually, all the cities of Earth would run out of water and they’d need to find an alternate source. But Rhea had to focus on the smaller, more achievable goals at the moment.

Around her many of the lean-tos and cargo containers had been repaired since the bioweapon attack, though there were still countless heaps of debris between them, marking the sites of former homes. 3D-printing drones sifted through the ruins, occasionally recovering dead bodies, but otherwise the small flying machines processed the debris into sheets of metal for the humans, cyborgs and robots to use in the construction of new lean-tos or to repair the more intact ones. In theory, the drones could have printed the cargo containers and so forth entirely from scratch, but complicated designs required a lot more time to form; a much faster throughput could be achieved by printing simple sheets and sharing the workload with more prehensile entities.

Dead Hydras were still scattered throughout the city. Groups of people and machines towed the corpses to different piles where they awaited burning. Early on, someone discovered the creatures were edible—which wasn’t surprising, given they were crafted from the DNA of many animals—and large chunks of meat had been cut away to feed the masses. Some of the more enterprising individuals had drained the blood and converted it to water for resale as well. But otherwise the carcasses were too big to put on ice, considering how few storage facilities remained intact within the settlement, and the remaining meat was quickly going bad. Hence the need for burning.

The makeshift pyres rarely reached a heat high enough to turn the bones to ash, and some people used them to create foundations for new lean-tos and other buildings, while the remainder were discarded in the Outlands. A few of the more twisted inhabitants had cut off the heads of several bioweapons and impaled them on flagpole-style pikes outside the rebuilt Texas barriers as a warning to any other creatures that might come this way. Rhea doubted it would have any effect if more Hydras arrived—in fact, it would probably only enrage them—but the gruesome displays certainly seemed to boost settlement morale.

Rhea passed a Hydra corpse that was lying next to the path. At that very moment a man was chopping off one of its multiple heads. He carried a rather large laser cutter, and his corded forearms were currently steeped in blood. He was a Robo, judging from the extra pair of robotic limbs he sported.

“You know, I’m still pissed that I missed the battle of the century,” Brinks said. “I had to watch what went down here on the streaming networks, and I couldn’t do a thing. I felt so useless. I would’ve hopped onto the first flight to Rust Town, but I knew I’d never arrive in time.” Brinks was from Stables, a settlement in the Midwest. The Wardenite was rather short and squat, with a wattle of skin dangling beneath his chin; Rhea doubted he would have held up very well when the bioweapons had come. But while his fighting capabilities might not be up to par, he was loyal to a fault.

“Don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll get your chance to fight again.” Will nodded at Rhea. “Hang around her long enough, you’ll see.”

“She has a propensity to attract trouble,” Horatio agreed.

“I do not,” Rhea said.

“I’m telling you, if I had been here, what that dude is doing to the dead Hydra, I’d be doing to a live one,” Brinks bragged.

“What, mating with it?” Chuck quipped. The barrel-chested man had no neck—or rather, it was consumed by his enormous trapezius muscles, making it almost look like his chiseled face was directly attached to the torso. His low body fat gave his face a gaunt appearance, while it made the rest of his body appear substantially ripped. Rhea had caught a glimpse of Chuck shirtless one time, and she very much liked what she saw. He used some kind of performance enhancing drugs to maintain that physique with no physical effort on his part. At least she assumed so, because she never saw him exercising. The heavy AR lenses he wore magnified his eyes, reminding Rhea of Bardain, her former mentor who had died trying to protect her during the bioweapon attack.

Brinks rolled his eyes. “No. Killing it, bro.”

“Don’t call me bro, Stick Arms,” Chuck said. That was basically what Chuck called everyone else, as very few had biceps to match him. Excerpt Rhea of course. He called her Warden.

“You talk a good talk,” Miles told Brinks. “But I wonder how you’d act if the bioweapons truly attacked again. Would you run or would you hide?” Miles was an albino, and his extremely pale skin burned badly when exposed to sunlight. As such, he was always seen wearing a wide-brimmed hat. That pallid skin, combined with the thin nose, big eyes and round face made him look very much like a mouse to Rhea. But perhaps his most glaring feature was the dark sphere protruding above the hat he wore: Miles was an Orber, one of those people who carried an orb camera permanently attached to the head, giving him three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision.

“I’d neither run nor hide,” Brinks intoned, raising his chin ever so slightly. “I’d fight, of course.”

Miles laughed, and cracks formed along the smile lines of the albino’s face. “So you say. If by ‘fight’ you mean launching a few energy attacks from the air while you sit safe and cozy in a flyer beyond their reach, then maybe I can see it.”

“What I’m wondering is how that Robo is able to cut off the head at all.” Chuck nodded at the man sitting astride the Hydra’s neck with the laser cutter. “He’s using an energy weapon. I thought these Hydras were supposed to absorb energy.”

“Certain forms, yes,” Horatio told him. “But when they die, their dermis cells lose the ability to absorb attacks. At least according to the biologists we have looking at them. This matches up with the empirical evidence we have, as witnessed by our friend here cutting off the head with the laser cutter.”

“I heard a few Hydras were captured alive…” Brinks said. He sneezed then, causing the lobes of flesh hanging beneath his chin to jiggle.

Horatio nodded that polycarbonate head. “We had a few, but what was left of them didn’t last very long.”

“Live dissections?” Brinks asked. “Or they were just in bad shape when you found them?”

“A little of both,” Horatio explained.

“You’re awfully quiet, Warden,” Renaldo scratched his forehead, parting the hair that draped it. “Still upset about what happened in the city?”

“She’s a woman of few words,” Will said.

“You ask me, she’s simply trying to maintain an air of mystery,” Chuck said. “Not that I blame her. Familiarity breeds contempt, as they say.”

Rhea smiled cryptically, saying nothing.

Miles adjusted his hat. “I don’t think she wants to let any of you get very close,” the albino said. “She allows you in her company, yes, but that’s the extent of her trust.”

“You talk like you’re in her confidence or something,” Chuck said. “Saying ‘you’ instead of ‘we.’ But we all know you’re not any closer to her than the rest of us. Not like the salvager and the robot: the two who’ve actually fought with her in battle.”

“Yes, you’re right, I’m not,” Miles admitted.

“Maybe when we actually prove ourselves in combat, she’ll talk to us like them,” Renaldo said. “I can’t wait until that day.”

“You and Brinks both, huh?” Chuck said. “Oh, this is going to be good.”

Brinks shrugged. “You might be surprised at what a man like myself can do when backed into a corner. I’m telling you, when the bowel discharges hit the plasma fan, I’ll be right there fighting with the best of you.”

“Bowel discharges?” Chuck shook his head. “Come on, Stick Arms… if you’re going to swear, use a real word.”

Brinks ignored him and glanced at Will and Horatio. “She communicates with you two in her head all the time, doesn’t she?” He turned toward Rhea. “Don’t worry, Warden, we don’t mind. Your privacy is important to us.”

“Sure it is,” Will said. “That’s why you scour the Net every day, looking for even the smallest mention of the Warden so you can announce what you’ve found to her and get brownie points. Stalking much?”

Brinks looked down and stammered. “I’m— I’m only trying to keep the Warden informed! If I don’t save the data, who else will? As soon as anything is published online mentioning the word ‘Warden,’ the AI censors kick in! If I don’t act quickly, the knowledge could be lost forever!”

“It’s okay,” Rhea said. “You’re doing well, Brinks.” Even if the files he showed her were mostly hit pieces: while it was true that pro-Warden articles and videos were deleted almost instantly, government propaganda remained online indefinitely.

She gave Brinks a reassuring smile, and he grinned like some dog freshly petted by its master.

A dog. She’d watched videos of them online. Apparently, they were a common pet in the big cities like Aradne, though they were strictly quarantined indoors. She’d never seen one. The residents of Rust Town certainly didn’t have any pets, and in the Outlands, there was no life at all, neither plant nor animal.

Well, excepting bioweapons, which fed on each other. Many of them had chlorophyll pigments from cyanobacteria spliced into the cells of their dermis, which allowed the smaller creatures to survive on photosynthesis for a very long time between meals. A variation of these pigments was responsible for the energy absorption capabilities of the Hydras, the local biologists had determined.

Rhea continued touring the rebuilt streets and byways of Rust Town until she reached Daria’s Quarter, one of the hardest hit neighborhoods.

She passed beside a lean-to that was being rebuilt from the ground up.

“Where do you need me?” she asked one of the workers.

The man gave her a toothy grin. “The Warden herself visits us! It’s an honor. Here.” He beckoned toward the 3D-printing drones that were smelting metal nearby. She went to the drones, waited until they created a sheet of metal, then returned to the lean-to and began attaching it using the available tools.

“Well, that’s my cue,” Will told her. “Think I’ll take a break from rebuilding today. I’ve got a human body after all. It can only take so much punishment. Not like you cyborgs.”

Rhea shrugged and didn’t look away from her work. “Have a good rest of the day.”

Horatio remained, mostly to watch her back, she suspected. Which was good. She wasn’t an Orber after all and could use the extra eyes.

Gizmo also stayed behind, circling patiently overhead like only a machine could, and Rhea gratefully tapped into the drone’s camera feed, placing the video in the upper right of her vision so that she had a bird’s eye view of the general area visible on her HUD at all times.

Renaldo and the fourteen Wardenites also stayed, and they spent the rest of that day helping out wherever they were needed in that neighborhood.

That night, she returned to the series of stacked cargo containers the residents had gifted to the Warden to serve as her home, and she promptly fell asleep. She was utterly exhausted and didn’t have to worry about her usually overactive mind keeping her awake.

It was too bad that she was roused from sleep shortly after midnight by an alarm.

3

Rhea continued to inhale and exhale with the same regularity and intensity as she would have while asleep, in order to fool any intruders into believing she was still under. It was a trick she thought of instantly, no doubt thanks to the person she once had been. It was relatively easy to achieve, considering only a few days ago, out of curiosity she had switched her body to sleep mode while keeping her mind conscious. She had observed her breathing rate among the other subtle physiological changes.

The next order of business was locating the source of the alarm: Rhea had placed motion sensors throughout the room. Her upgraded body had similar sensors, but she had chosen not to rely upon them due to her elevated position on the bed, which prevented her from detecting someone sneaking into the room by crawling across the floor, for example.

It was one of the sensors she had placed near the door whose silent alarm was now sounding. The alert would be sent to Will and Horatio—who were only a floor below her—in addition to the other Wardenites sleeping in the same building.

The actual door alarm hadn’t tripped, she noted, which meant the entrance to her room hadn’t been breached in any way. Without moving her body, or changing her breathing, she shifted her eyes toward the entrance; she couldn’t see anything in the darkness.

She switched to thermal vision.

There we go.

A heat signature appeared, one that was typical of a human. Male, judging from the build. He approached at a crouch, likely believing she still slept.

Other motion alarms continued to trip in succession as the intruder grew near.

She quickly navigated through the menuing system on her HUD until she found the controls for the lights. She intended to blind the intruder—her cyborg eyes would adjust instantly to the sudden brightness, whereas those of the human would take several moments to adapt. Well, assuming he hadn’t replaced his eyes.

She activated the lights, full power.

The cargo container flooded with illumination.

She caught only the briefest glimpses of the man before he rushed her. She didn’t even see his face.

“For Veil!” he shouted.

The laser cutter came directly at her. She caught the wrists that held it. They were made of steel. He was a Robo, and the supplementary limbs he possessed were strong, extremely so. She could barely keep the weapon at bay, even with her upgraded limbs. In fact, she was losing the fight.

She stared at the laser cutter as it inched ever closer to her head. That long, buzzing string floated between the two generating ends, a red beam threatening to cut right through her artificial skull.

She forced herself to look away. While the robotic additions to his arms were strong and powerful, the rest of his body was soft and weak.

Grinning maliciously, she slammed a knee upward, into his groin region.

She was met by something hard and a resounding clang filled the room.

Metal.

Okay. So he was more cybernetic than she’d first thought. Was he a full body cyborg like herself then, but a more realistic one? No. His heat map would have been vastly different. He was only part cyborg.

She released her hold on his arms and ducked out of the way before the laser cutter could saw her brain case in half. She swiveled behind him as the laser burned through her pillow and the mattress below, and before he could recover, she slammed an elbow into the back of his head.

This time she was met by a sickly thud and felt her elbow sink into something wet and squishy. It was like cracking through a glass jar filled with pickled cabbage.

The laser cutter fell from his hands and continued buzzing away harmlessly on the floor. She rolled off him, and he didn’t get up.

She glanced at his face. The man’s eyes had rolled up into his skull.

She hadn’t actually meant to kill him.

Still don’t know this upgraded body’s strength yet.

As she stared at his face, she realized she recognized him.

A Wardenite.

His name was Anderson. One of the locals from Rust Town.

Will’s words came to her. Watch yourself around them.

She had been too trusting. Letting too many into her inner circle without properly vetting them.

She wondered if he had known he was tripping the alarms. After all, as a Wardenite, he should have been aware of their existence. Then again, maybe he had wanted her to wake up, so she would know who it was that killed her.

She glanced at the far wall and saw the hole the man had cut into the wall next to the door with his laser cutter. That explained why the main door alarm hadn’t tripped. He’d caught the loose section before it fell away and slid it aside.

As she watched, Will and Horatio rushed through that gaping hole, followed by Renaldo.

“Anderson!” Renaldo exclaimed when he saw the fallen man.

Rhea nodded. “Betrayed by one of my closest fans.”

Will knelt and deactivated the buzzing laser cutter.

The other Wardenites started to crowd in behind Renaldo.

“Keep them back!” Rhea ordered Renaldo. “Until we can search everyone for weapons.”

Renaldo raised both his arms and shoved them backward. “Get out, get out!”

The Wardenites obeyed, and Renaldo kept guard at the opening.

Horatio knelt and held a polycarbonate hand over Anderson’s bashed head. The robot moved the hand back and forth. “We’re going to have to search for more than just weapons, I’m afraid. I’m detecting some sort of chip attached to his cerebral cortex.” The robot glanced up. “The cortex is a favored spot for mind hijackers, considering it forms the heart of the brain’s decision processing center. Not to mention consciousness.”

“You’re saying someone installed a mind-jacking chip in his head?” Rhea asked. “So they could assassinate me?”

“That’s one possibility,” Horatio said. “Though admittedly, the cerebral cortex is a popular spot for many enhancements. The only way to be one hundred percent certain of its purpose is to perform an autopsy.”

“Do it,” Rhea said. She glanced at Will. “Also, I want all of my other closest followers scanned. Make sure the Wardenites are clean.”

“I’m on it,” Renaldo said.

“No,” Rhea said. “Will, I want you to handle it.”

Renaldo gave her a hurt look. She couldn’t hold his gaze and instead glanced at Will, who nodded.

“I want everyone to wait for me on level three,” Will instructed Renaldo.

The latter man scowled at him, but then Renaldo sighed and retreated through the hole cut into the wall.

“You heard the man,” came Renaldo’s voice from the next cargo container. “To the rungs. Level three it is!”

Rhea listened to the receding clang of boots upon the metal floor; she could tell when the group reached the ladder, because the clangs changed in pitch, dropping further in volume as they descended.

“Renaldo didn’t look too happy,” Horatio commented when the din had faded almost entirely.

“He’ll get over it,” Will said.

“Yes,” she agreed. “He has to realize that I can’t trust anyone, not anymore.” She glanced at Will and Horatio. “Maybe not even you two.”

“We’ll submit to scans, of course,” Horatio said.

“I know you will,” Rhea said. “But that doesn’t mean you won’t be infiltrated at some point in the future.”

“Then we’ll have daily scans,” Horatio said.

Rhea nodded. It would have to do.

She tried to access the Net. Even with the breach in the wall she wasn’t able to get a signal. She had insisted on installing a grounded metal screen around the cargo container she used as a bedroom, which formed a Faraday cage around it. The cage meant no unauthorized transmissions could get into or out of her room. It also meant when she wanted to browse the Net she had to do so in a different area. Why she had insisted on such a security precaution, she didn’t know. She supposed it was something she had done in her past life, something that had carried over into this one.

Rhea strode toward the adjacent cargo container. “Have you ever heard of Veil?”

Will shook his head.

“I have not,” Horatio said.

As she neared the hole in the wall her connection to the Net reactivated. She promptly ran a search on “Veil,” but found only the definition, and a few random usernames on various VR forums and streaming sites. She tried the search again, adding in the phrase “Rust Town or Aradne,” but this time got nothing at all. Which made her think that someone in power had been scrubbing things…

“The assassin said something, I take it?” Will asked from behind.

Rhea nodded. “He shouted ‘for Veil’ when he attacked. While you’re scanning my followers, ask them if they know anything about a man named Veil. Tell them to reach out to their networks.”

Will nodded.

“I’ll also upload a video to SubverseTube,” she said. “And ask my subscribers if they know anything.”

“That’s a good idea.” He paused. “You know, we should change locations. Too many people know I stay here.”

“We could,” Rhea said. “But what’s to say he won’t hunt us down again? The Scorpion might have been sent by Veil, for example. We were in the Outlands, but he still found us!”

“Good point,” Will said.

“Don’t worry, I don’t plan to stay here for very long anyway,” she said. “As soon as we find a way to restore the water, I’ll be on the move again.”

“Different city?” he asked.

“I haven’t decided yet. But either way, Veil will still be a threat.” She studied him. “Maybe now would be a good time to come clean on what you know about my past. You once sanded away a mark from my forehead. Why? What did the mark mean?”

Will shook his head. “The knowledge won’t help you. It will only make things worse. Confuse you. Trust me on this.”

She sighed. “All right. I trust you.” She glanced at the hole in the wall. “When you go, send one of the 3D printing drones up here. I want my wall, and its Faraday cage, restored.”

* * *

Rhea sat in the corner of the adjacent room, watching the humming drone work. It sprayed a melted concoction of metals into the gap in the wall as it moved from side to side. Every time it completed a horizontal pass, it moved upward almost imperceptibly, less than a millimeter. In that manner it slowly filled the hole in the wall.

Meanwhile, cleaning robots carried out the blood-stained mattress. Horatio had departed with the body earlier, carrying it in a body bag so as to not spread blood all over. Rhea had felt only anger when she saw that bag. She experienced no sadness or remorse of any kind. She wondered if that made her a bad person.

I should feel guilty about killing him, shouldn’t I?

But she reminded herself that it had been an accident. And self-defense. But the worst part was, a part of her had enjoyed it.

No, not the killing. Never the killing. Only the fighting.

She remembered smiling when she kneed him in the groin.

Yeah, I like fighting.

When the gap was completely sealed, the drone deployed a telescoping arm to retrieve the existing section that had been cut away. The sheet metal flopped back and forth, emitting a deep twang, at least until the drone could press it against the wall. Then the machine began welding the edges to the surface.

When the drone completed the task, it promptly flew into the open door and vanished. She accessed the inner security camera, which was located well within her line of sight—ensuring that the shielding from the Faraday cage wouldn’t interfere with her signal. From the cam’s viewpoint, she watched the drone move to the discolored section of wall that remained where the gap once was; when the flying machine arrived, it began spraying streams of metal onto the surface, and slowly crept upward after each pass.

While it worked, she thought idly of the camera and the motion sensors in this current cargo container, adjacent to her bedroom. The monitoring devices had been temporarily disabled by Anderson during his earlier attack, since he had the passcodes like most members of her inner circle. Giving out those codes had been a mistake, she realized. Best to keep them in her possession alone, like the codes to the sensors of her bedroom. As soon as Horatio had taken away Anderson’s body, she’d changed all the codes in the vicinity, with the intention of keeping them to herself.

The drone reached the top of the former gap and then flew out of the room. As it passed her, it beeped twice in acknowledgement, or perhaps thanks, and then departed. She could no longer discern any difference in coloration on the wall. The gap might as well have never existed. At least on camera.

More robots arrived, carrying the replacement mattress and sheets. No doubt the substitutes had been taken from Anderson’s cargo container, since he wouldn’t be needing them now.

The final cleaning robot departed her room, making way for the newcomers. When the robots finished placing the mattress and setting the sheets, they departed.

With a sigh, Rhea arose and entered her bedroom. There was no sign of the bloody mess that had tainted the room. She still didn’t feel like sleeping there, however.

Well, she wasn’t going to sleep out here, that much was certain. She felt safer within the Faraday cage. She wasn’t quite sure why. She glanced at her HUD and confirmed that she had no Net signal already.

She didn’t bother to activate the usual virtual decorations she liked to festoon her room with; she wasn’t in the mood for them.

Instead she lay down. On the floor. She didn’t quite feel ready to sleep in the bed, even if everything was clean. Not when the previous owner had only just died.

Rhea realized she’d forgotten to shut the door behind her. Like most entrances in Rust Town, it was manually operated. While the parts necessary for remote interfacing were dirt cheap, manually operated doors provided an extra level of security: without a remote interface, a door couldn’t be hacked.

She got up again, and before she could close it, she heard clangs, rising in volume, coming from outside the room. A glance at her overhead map showed the blue dots of Will and Horatio approaching.

She peered around the bend and saw Will and Horatio pulling themselves into the adjacent cargo container via the opening in the floor.

She retreated into her bedroom and sat down on the floor, propping her back against the wall.

When Will entered, he gazed down at her and frowned. “Don’t like your new bed?”

“I’m not ready to sleep in a dead man’s bed, not just yet,” she said.

Will nodded and shut the door.

Rhea appreciated the added privacy. No one would be eavesdropping on them now.

“So,” Will said. “The other Wardenites are clean. For now. No chips. Horatio and I are also good.”

Rhea nodded. “Not surprising. But would you mind if I scanned you myself?”

Will gave her an incredulous look, but then shrugged. “Horatio?”

The robot came forward, and removed one of his fingers, which functioned as a portable scanner. She took the device and ran it over Will’s head, then Horatio’s AI core.

“Clean,” she said, giving it back to Horatio. “Hope you’re not insulted.”

“No,” Will said. “Someone from your inner circle just tried to assassinate you. You have every right to be overly cautious and suspicious of everyone, even your friends.”

“I knew you’d understand,” she said. She glanced at Horatio. “You finished examining the body, I assume?”

“Yes,” Horatio said. “It was indeed a mind hijacking chip.”

Rhea tapped her chin. “I wonder why he was only armed with a laser cutter? You’d think he’d have something more powerful. Don’t get me wrong, a laser cutter can do plenty damage when misused. But still.”

“Given all the security cameras you have throughout the place, sneaking a weapon inside would be rather difficult,” Will said.

“Actually, about that…” Horatio interjected. “During the autopsy, I also found this in the lower intestines.”

He produced a small spherical object.

Rhea extended a hand toward it, but then stopped herself. She wasn’t all that big on touching something that had been in a dead man’s intestines.

“What is it?” she asked.

“A fragmentation grenade,” Horatio replied.

Rhea hissed and stepped back a pace. “Why are you bringing it in here?”

“No need to panic, I’ve disarmed it,” Horatio said.

“I don’t care, get it out of here!” Rhea said.

Horatio shrugged, then started for the door.

Before the robot reached it, she asked: “Why didn’t Anderson detonate it when he had the chance?”

“I believe he had no control over the device,” Horatio said. “Whoever sent him wanted to dictate the timing behind both your deaths.”

“The Faraday cage,” she said. “It saved me.”

“Yes,” Horatio agreed. “The walls of the cargo container would have interfered with any remote arming signals.”

“But the Faraday cage… wouldn’t it have prevented the attack order from reaching the chip in his brain?” Rhea pressed.

“Not if the order was received outside your room,” Horatio said. “Once given, Anderson would have followed the order even after losing communication, until the success or failure of the mission.”

“Okay,” Rhea said. “Let me know if anything else surfaces.”

“Will do,” Horatio said before opening the door and leaving.

She glanced at Will.

“So, what now?” Will asked.

“Now I sleep,” she said. “And hope someone can dredge up something on this Veil in the morning.”

4

Rhea had set her mind-machine interface to wake her with the dawn, and at the designated hour her eyes opened. She was surprised at how well she’d slept, given the events of the night before. She thought she should feel shaken in some way. But then she reminded herself that she’d faced an army of deadly bioweapons.

Takes a lot more than some botched assassination attempt to faze me.

Though her room had no windows and was completely dark, she knew it was sunrise courtesy of the clock overlaid in the lower right of her HUD, which remained visible at all times, regardless of the light output. It currently read five in the morning.

She rubbed her eyes and rose groggily. She half-expected to feel stiff, but as she stood up gracefully and without effort, she remembered she was no longer completely human. For a small instant she had forgotten she was a cyborg. It happened from time to time, usually upon waking.

She glanced at the untouched bed then went to the door. She opened it only to discover Horatio seated on the floor just outside.

“Have you been here all night?” she asked the robot.

“Will thought it would be a good idea,” Horatio said.

“Will had nothing to do with it,” Rhea said. “The idea was all yours, wasn’t it?”

“The idea was mine,” Horatio admitted. “But I did tell Will. He agreed I should guard your door last night. And perhaps every night going forward, if you will allow it.”

“Oh, that won’t be necessary,” she said. “I wouldn’t want you to be bothered, my friend.”

“It’s no bother,” Horatio told her. “I was logged into Machine World for an all night gaming session.” That was a massive multiplayer VR game for AIs.

She grinned. “So, you’re saying I ruined your gaming session?” Like her, his body was equipped with motion sensors that could rouse him from virtual reality at a moment’s notice.

“Actually, this isn’t the first time I’ve been rudely pulled from the game,” Horatio said. “Renaldo came up a few times. You might want to check your messages.”

She frowned. She’d told Renaldo not to come knocking at her door after dark, but the man was a night owl and sometimes couldn’t help himself. Good thing Horatio had been there to turn him away so she could have an uninterrupted rest.

Now that the door was open, she was able to log into the Net. A moment after she connected, the notification icon flashed in the lower right of her HUD.

She had a message waiting from Renaldo. Actually, five messages. Apparently, he wanted to see her, very badly. There were also several other messages from SubverseTube subscribers who had watched the latest video she’d posted, but she planned to review those later.

She sent Renaldo a call in holographic mode and shared the feed with Horatio. She muted the robot so that Renaldo wouldn’t know Horatio was observing.

Renaldo’s upper body appeared before her in hologram form. He swept the short-cropped hair away from his eyes as if he’d just awakened. “Warden. I have news.”

Rhea waited patiently, saying nothing.

Renaldo cleared his throat. “Jairlin reached out to his network.” That was another Wardenite from Rust Town. “He received a response early this morning from a man who claims to know Veil. This man wouldn’t agree to a virtual meeting—says the Net has too many prying eyes and ears. He does have a point about that, so I decided to let him visit you in person. Hopefully you’re okay with that.”

“Tell him I’ll be available this afternoon,” she said.

“He’s here now,” he said.

“He’s here now?” Rhea repeated incredulously.

“Uh huh,” Renaldo told her. “He came an hour ago. We wouldn’t let him leave.”

She frowned. “The forceful confinement of someone who wants to help me…”

“It’s for his own good,” Renaldo countered. “We told him to wait, but after fifteen minutes he tried to go, giving us some lame excuse about feeding his robotic cats. So of course, we stopped him.”

“What if he really had to feed his robot cats?” she asked sarcastically.

“First of all, they’re robots, so they don’t eat,” he replied. “Second of all, no one owns robot cats in Rust Town—they’re too easily stolen and reprogrammed. It’s obvious he was having a change of heart.”

“If he’s had a change of heart, what makes you think he’ll talk now?” she asked. “And I don’t want you threatening him, by the way. That’s not how the followers of the Warden roll.”

“We haven’t threatened him…” Renaldo said.

“Telling him you won’t release him unless he talks is a threat, I’d say,” she insisted.

“No, no, we didn’t do anything of the sort!” Renaldo said, stiffening. Then his eyes darted back and forth as he continued sheepishly: “We simply said he couldn’t leave until he spoke to the Warden.”

She pressed her lips together. “I see.”

“Please, Warden, just talk to him,” Renaldo told her. “If he reveals nothing, you can send him on his way, and we’ll blame Jairlin for wasting all our time. I have a feeling when he meets you face to face, he’ll spill what he knows.”

Rhea sighed. “All right, fine, bring him up.”

“Thank you.” Renaldo’s hologram blinked out.

She glanced at Horatio. “See what I have to deal with?”

“Interacting with humans is often unpleasant,” Horatio agreed.

She stepped fully into the adjacent room and left the door to her bed chamber open in case she needed to beat a hasty retreat. Horatio stood up and leaned against the wall beside her.

Rhea gazed impatiently at the opening on the far side of the cargo container, where rungs attached to the wall led to the next container stacked below.

A few moments later she heard muted clanging coming from those rungs, then three individuals pulled themselves into the chamber in turn.

The first was Renaldo, his bronze skin seeming darker than ever, no doubt from all the days spent in the sun helping to rebuild Rust Town. The artificial skin that covered her face and neck didn’t tan like a normal human’s; she always had the same perfect complexion no matter how much sun she took.

The next man was someone she’d never seen before. He wore black coveralls over a grimy shirt, with a drab, mangy cloak hanging over his shoulders and boots that had seen better days. His unshaven face had a similar disheveled appearance, with both the hair of his beard and his head reaching to the upper chest; and if it wasn’t for the dirt caking his cheeks, he’d be as pale as Miles. And then there was the stench, which she detected even from here. Unwashed feet, underarms, genitals. She managed to avoid wrinkling her nose in disgust. Just barely. Via her mind-machine interface, she deactivated her sense of smell. Much better.

Other than the AR goggles the man wore, he had no obvious augmentations. Because of his pale face and lack of attention to personal grooming, she had the impression he was someone who had given up on the exterior world and spent most of his days in VR, rarely leaving his home. She wondered if his home had survived the bioweapon attack, or if his life had been upended like most of the residents. Then again, maybe he never had a home. There were more than a few VR addicts who lived their lives in the dark alleyways between cargo containers. The bioweapon attack wouldn’t have changed that: it simply meant they called different alleyways home.

Jairlin appeared, bringing up the rear. The Wardenite was dressed in a bright blue blazer and matching pants, with white shoes and shirt. His face was impeccably shaven, sporting just the right amount of designer stubble. His hair was cropped short on the sides and brushed up and back on the top to form a quiff. He was such a stark contrast to the other man that Rhea could hardly believe they knew each other.

She focused on the newcomer once more. He seemed nervous, and immediately dropped his gaze when her eyes met his.

“Warden,” the man said without looking up. “It’s an honor to meet you.” He sounded genuinely in awe.

“You scanned him for hidden weapons?” Rhea asked, keeping her distance. Well, as much distance as could be had in a cramped cargo container.

Renaldo nodded. “If he’s stuffed a bomb up his arse, he’s hidden it well.”

Rhea hoped they had checked him with external scanners, and not via a method that was more… violating.

“What’s your name?” she asked the man.

“DragonHunter, Miss Warden, Ma’am,” the man said.

She frowned. “Sounds like some gamer’s alias. Or a hacker’s.”

“That’s because it is,” Renaldo said. “Not even Jairlin knows his real name.”

She glanced at Jairlin. “How do you know him?”

“He wasn’t always like this,” Jairlin said, running a hand through his perfectly coiffed hair. “Before he started working for the Towners, he had a life.”

“Towners?” Rhea pressed.

“It’s a guild in an online game known as Barter Life,” Jairlin said. “They’re essentially a hacking group. Often hired out by different cyber gangs across the world. Anyway, I first met him when I needed some hacking done, years ago. He was still calling himself DragonHunter back then. But he dressed a lot better. He lived in Aradne, believe it or not.”

“How far the great have fallen,” Renaldo muttered.

“I chose this!” DragonHunter told the Wardenite heatedly. “I don’t need worldly possessions. Everything I have is up here.” He tapped the goggles attached to his face.

“Well, I don’t need to hear your life story,” Rhea said. “Do you know anything about Veil, or not?”

The man swallowed anxiously. Finally, he met her eyes, for a brief moment. “I heard you have a Faraday cage. Can we use it?”

Rhea glanced at Horatio, who shrugged imperceptibly. “Fine.” She beckoned toward her bedchamber. “Lead him inside.”

She stepped back while Renaldo and Jairlin directed the man into her bedroom.

“Nice crib,” DragonHunter commented when he saw the spartan interior. “I remember when I used to have a real bed. Can’t say I miss it. There’s just something invigorating about sleeping outside on the hard ground that can’t be replicated indoors.”

Rhea entered with Horatio and shut the door. The network signal on her HUD instantly cut out.

“Now then, Veil…” Rhea said.

DragonHunter gazed suspiciously at the small dots of the motion sensors that dotted the walls. When his eyes spotted the dome of the security camera, he glanced at her. “Can we shut that down?”

Rhea shrugged, then logged into its remote interface. “The camera is off.”

“And can you all stop recording with your local devices?” he pressed.

Rhea stared at him incredulously, then glanced at her companions. “Deactivate AR recording.”

She pulled up the necessary menus on her HUD and turned off video logging.

Then she turned toward DragonHunter. “It’s done. So then. Veil?”

DragonHunter’s eyes were defocusing. Obviously he was checking if he could read any of their signals. Rhea deactivated her remote interface entirely, not wanting to risk any hack attempts. If Horatio or any of the others needed to talk to her privately, they could pull her aside to the adjacent room.

“Veil is one of Aradne's crime lords,” DragonHunter said. “He’s known by many names. Damascus. Resolutus. Scourge of the North.”

That latter name seemed vaguely familiar, though she wasn’t sure why. “Scourge of the North?”

The man shrugged. “He’s been very successful. So much so that in recent years he’s expanded his reach beyond Aradne to the Outlands north of the city, where he employs bandits to rob any unlucky salvagers and other travelers who happen to pass their way. They call themselves Veil’s Black Hands. They’ve been known to shoot down passing flyers as well: they’re opportunists to the extreme.”

“Nice guys,” she commented.

“This is why we usually take the westernmost exit,” Horatio commented to Rhea.

“You’ve been relying on the crowdsourced hotspot data for bandit activity?” DragonHunter asked. “If so, you’ve been lucky not to encounter them. The Black Hands routinely mess with that data. Anyway, Aradne’s security forces have tried to root them out on multiple occasions, but the Black Hands always seem to be one step ahead. It’s almost like they have someone on the inside to warn them whenever a raid is coming.”

“Veil himself?” she asked.

“Or someone who works for him,” DragonHunter answered. “But even with that advance warning, how they manage to escape without being caught on camera by the spy satellites, no one knows.”

The communications satellites that had once provided wireless Net access throughout the world had been fried in a cascade attack launched by a rogue nation many years ago. Since worldwide Net coverage was no longer needed, considering that no one lived in the Outlands anymore, the government couldn’t justify the replacement costs. But that didn’t stop them from replacing spy satellites—not that many were lost. While the spy satellites had also been targeted in the attack, most were equipped with defenses to protect themselves.

She glanced at Renaldo for a moment before returning her attention to the hacker. “So. I was told you knew Veil directly.”

“Oh, I do,” DragonHunter said. “I’ve never actually met him of course. But I’ve handled a ton of cyberwarfare jobs for him. He often gets me to run DoS attacks against his competitors.”

Rhea didn’t need a connection to the Net to know DoS stood for Denial of Service.

“I don’t suppose you can tell me his exact address?” she said. “I’d like to pay him a visit.”

DragonHunter started laughing. “Sorry. Excuse my laughter: I guess you don’t know how my business works. You have to understand, I make a point of not learning too much about my clients. I never hack them, and never, ever try to get any of their personal information, including their actual physical connection point. Because you see, if I learn too much about a client, I become a liability to them. People who become a liability to men such as Veil tend to disappear.”

Rhea tapped her lips. “The next time Veil hires you to perform a Denial of Service attack, I want you to run a trace on his IP.”

DragonHunter stared at her incredulously. “Didn’t you hear what I just said?”

“I heard,” she said. “Trust me, I don’t ask this of you lightly. I promise you; Veil will be dealt with before he can make you disappear.”

The hacker met her eyes for a moment, but then dropped his gaze immediately.

“Your Warden is asking you to do this for her as a personal favor…” Rhea pressed.

“It won’t work,” DragonHunter said. “His connection is obfuscated. He bounces it across the world, past hundreds of encrypted nodes to hide his tracks. All the big crime lords do it. They have enough money to hire in-house cybersecurity staffs that dwarf those of major corporations, even governments. With the credits Veil rakes in, they’ll be the best in the business.”

Rhea smiled patiently. “But surely a renowned hacker such as yourself has a means to get around such obfuscation… a way to outsmart even the best cybersecurity operation in the business.”

He looked up once more, and she saw a strange, eager flicker within those eyes. She had suspected he wouldn’t be able to resist the chance to show off his hacking prowess: he wouldn’t be the first man who wanted to impress the Warden.

“There are ways,” he admitted. “It won’t be easy, but yes, there’s a chance I can track his connection when next he makes contact.” When DragonHunter realized he was still looking at her, he quickly dropped his eyes.

Rhea nodded. “Good. I want you to find out everything you can about him. Where he’s connecting from, what kind of AR system he’s using, his public profile… everything. Bonus points if you can plant a trojan in his goggles.”

DragonHunter shook his head and smiled. “I might be good, but I’m not that good. The most you can hope for, given my expectations regarding his staff and equipment, is his physical connection point. And I might not get even that. You have to understand, if I fail, he’s going to know.” He licked his lips apprehensively. “I’m going to have to be paid. Handsomely.”

“What do you want?” she asked.

“Ten thousand creds,” DragonHunter said without hesitation.

Rhea smiled patiently. “You know that I’m trying to restore Rust Town’s water?”

“I heard this, yes,” he admitted. “But I’m not a charity.”

“Sadly, I don’t have ten thousand creds,” Rhea said. “But if you succeeded, you would have the Warden’s eternal gratitude.”

The hacker didn’t answer. Rhea had the feeling she was losing him.

“You once lived in Aradne,” she said. “Am I correct in assuming you can’t go back?”

He nodded reluctantly.

“Then it’s in your best interest to help me,” she said. “You’re going to need water if you plan to stay here. Even if you spend your days in VR, the subdermal packs you use to hydrate your body will only hold out for so long. If you don’t help me, the water you carry in them is probably the last you’ll ever own.”

Still no answer.

“Veil tried to have me assassinated this morning,” Rhea said out of desperation.

His eyes widened. “What?”

“Yes,” she said. “On this very bed the attempt was made.”

DragonHunter’s eyes shifted to the bed. “This changes everything.”

Rhea nodded. “I hoped you’d say that.”

“You didn’t get any useful information out of the assassin, I assume…” the hacker said.

“Sadly, the attacker succumbed before I could interrogate him,” she told DragonHunter. “He did shout ‘for Veil’ before he went down. This Veil will try again at some point, no doubt. If he succeeds, all the plans I’ve set forth to restore Rust Town’s water supply will fail. That means you’ll have to leave the settlement behind and brave the Outlands. Or hope Aradne takes you back.”

“I’m never going back,” DragonHunter said. “I can’t.”

“Then I guess you’re helping me,” she said, smiling sweetly.

5

When DragonHunter and the others left, Rhea reviewed the remaining messages she’d received since last night. These were filtered and forwarded to her by the Wardenites, who handled most of the mail sent to the email address she had associated with her underground social media accounts.

She received a call from Will shortly after finishing the final message.

His hologram appeared at the foot of her bed.

“So, what are your thoughts on that guy?” Will said. “Think he’s the real deal?”

“I don’t know about his hacking prowess,” she said, “but I’ve received some messages from my SubverseTube subscribers that essentially corroborate everything he told us.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Will said. “I almost forgot you were going to post to your channel. So, you asked your followers to send you anything they had on Veil, and…”

“Well, he’s definitely some kind of big-time crime lord based in Aradne,” she replied. “Has a chokehold on the black market augmentation trade. It doesn’t surprise me he’s trying to branch out into other businesses such as banditry.”

“What is surprising, though, is why he’d have any interest in you,” Will said. “Maybe he doesn’t like your face.”

“Really, and what about all the fans you say are in love with this face?” she mocked.

Will shrugged. “It’s not for everyone.”

She scowled at him.

“Hey, you’ll only ever get the truth from me,” he said.

“And is my face for you?” she asked.

His hologram regarded her uncertainly. “While I’m not really big on faces with exaggerated, obviously cyborg features, yours works on you.”

“I guess that’s a compliment,” she said.

“It is,” he agreed.

“Anyway, getting back on to the topic of Veil, and his interest in me…” Rhea said. “It could be that I’m simply bad for business.”

“How so?” Will asked.

“Well, he’s been starting to ship bottled water to the settlement through various black market channels,” Rhea explained. “And he’s charging the residents of Rust Town huge mark-ups. If I succeed in getting our water restored, then he loses that business.”

“But that doesn’t explain why Veil sent The Scorpion after you,” Will said. “That happened before Rust Town was attacked, and the water shut off.”

“We still don’t know if Veil was the one who sent The Scorpion,” Rhea said. “But if so, you’re right, it doesn’t explain it.”

“Oh well, with luck this Veil will make contact with our friend soon,” Will said.

“Yep, and I guess we’ll see if he’s as good a hacker as he claims to be,” Rhea said. “Assuming he lives up to his end of the bargain.”

“He does seem like a spineless fellow, doesn’t he?” Will said. “Maybe he’ll grow a pair and get this done. Then again, probably not. Oh, by the way, Miles says his team has Operation Fidelity ready.”

That was the codename for their plan to restore Rust Town’s water supply.

“Good news,” Rhea said. “Tell him I’ll be down to see him in about fifteen minutes.”

With that she disconnected and spent several moments trying to calm the sudden trepidation she felt.

Why are you so worried? You don’t even know the full extent of the plan yet!

And yet she knew enough to understand that restoring the water supply definitely wasn’t going to be easy.

* * *

Rhea sat in the conference room. One of the larger cargo containers in the stack composing the compound, it contained a mid-sized table surrounded by several chairs. Miles resided at the head of that table. Horatio was on her left, Will her right. Renaldo and most of the remaining Wardenites took up the remaining seats.

“So, tell me how we’re going to restore water to Rust Town,” Rhea said.

Miles cleared his throat. “All right, well, first I want to tell you all the different avenues we explored, so that we don’t get comments from you guys like: why didn’t you do this? Why didn’t you do that? Originally, we wanted to 3D print a bunch of pipes, and use drills to lay them in secret underground, linking up with the main pipeline that feeds Aradne from the ocean. However, the costs proved prohibitive: there wasn’t enough material to build such a pipeline, even if we smelted everyone’s home in Rust Town. Nor were there enough donations on social media to purchase new materials and the drills we’d need, considering the big payment processors banned your account.”

Rhea was still smarting over that. She’d accumulated over a hundred thousand credits in donations from across the world, but before she could withdraw anything, CredPal banned her account for “violating its terms of service” and she never saw a dime of it. In its place, Aradne city council started an “Official Rust Town Rebuilding” online fund. So far it was up to thirty thousand creds, but again Rhea doubted the slums would ever receive any of it.

“And even if we could afford the project,” Miles continued, “if Aradne ever discovered the pipeline, it wouldn’t take much for them to destroy it, even underground. Besides, we’re mostly looking for a short-term solution, something we can put into play while negotiations with Aradne continue. We’re operating under the assumption that eventually they’ll turn on our water supply.”

“A good assumption,” Rhea commented. “Though I’m hoping to avoid the mass deaths in the streets it would probably take.”

“We all are,” Miles agreed. “Though already there have been some deaths live streamed, with people falling dead from lack of water while walking the street. So far, it hasn’t brought much of a response from Aradne city council, despite the outrage from its citizens online.”

“Yes,” Will said. “Online outrage is very easy to ignore. Maybe if its own citizens started rioting, Aradne might start paying attention.”

“We might have to look into staging a riot with the help of our contacts in the city,” Rhea said. “Assuming the security forces don’t simply arrest everyone. Somehow I doubt more demonstrations would help.” She glanced at Miles. “Anyway, go on.”

“Since the project only needed to be short term, we thought about using disposable rubber hoses that could link to the main pipeline, and supply the city for a few weeks,” Miles said. “Something we could lay discreetly, out in the open, in the Outlands. But even that was expensive. Plus, a surface operation left us exposed to attack not just from the city, but from roaming bioweapons and bandits.”

“The satellites in orbit would pick you up on the first day,” Horatio said. “There would be no ‘discreet’ in such a plan.”

“Yes, I know,” Miles said. “Another reason we ruled it out. So, this left us with only one real option. A water run.”

Rhea raised an eyebrow. “A water run?”

“Yes,” Miles said. “We’ve reached out to about a hundred residents who are still homeless and asked them if we could use the materials from their ruined houses to create three supply tanks. They’ve all agreed, and we’re 3D-printing those tanks as we speak, which we plan to connect to three pickup trucks recovered from the debris. Trucks that we’re converting into semis.”

“Wait a second, let’s see if I’m understanding this correctly,” Will said. “You’re building three supply tankers to drive into the Outlands, which you intend to fill with water from the main pipelines, and when that’s done, you plan to return to Rust Town with them.”

“That’s right,” Miles said.

“We’re going to be out in the open the whole time,” Rhea said.

“Yes,” Miles said. “But the city’s security forces won’t attack, not until we load up our tankers. We’re going to disguise them as a car carrier convoy, complete with false heat signatures to fool the satellites. But on the way back, once the city realizes what we’ve done, you’re right, they’ll try to stop us from bringing back the water.”

“We’re going to need an armed escort,” Rhea said.

“We have a few more pickups, and several drones,” Miles said.

“Not sure it’ll be enough,” Will said.

Miles was smiling.

“Those tanks are decoys,” Rhea said.

“Very good,” Miles told her. And he proceeded to reveal the actual operation.

Rhea smiled. “Ah. That’s good. Very good.”

“With proper rationing and recycling, one run could last a week,” Miles added.

“But they won’t fall for the same trick twice…” Will said.

“No, but that’s a week more than we have now,” Rhea said. “I say we do it.”

* * *

A day later found Rhea seated on the passenger side of a rig while Will sat in the driver’s seat. Horatio perched between them. They drove across the barren rock of the Outlands at a good clip; the super-gimbaled shock absorbers prevented her from being tossed about by every small bump in the terrain.

The three of them wore camo fatigues that had some stealth properties, the foremost being thermal masking, which would hide their infrared signatures in the dark. The second property was the black and gray “rock digital” pattern stamped onto the surface, which would blend them in with their surroundings during broad daylight.

Outside, two other tankers followed along a fair distance to the left and right—semis hauling long, cylindrical metal tanks on beds. The top portions had been stained with special paint to fool the visual and thermal bands of the satellites in orbit into believing the semis carried passenger vehicles meant for resale. A car carrier convoy, as Miles said.

Between the semis were smaller, autonomous pickup trucks sporting rocket launchers or laser turrets bolted to the beds—technicals, in military speak. That knowledge bubbled into her consciousness from her past life, as such thoughts sometimes did, the moments associated with them long forgotten.

She thought of the two memories she had recalled so far. The first had her standing in a vaulted chamber with archways in the walls branching off into different corridors. She guessed the chamber was located in the parliament area of Aradne, since that was where the memory had come, triggered by the sight of a similar chamber.

In the recollection, she answered to a clean-shaven, square-jawed individual with a bald head and a stern expression. An aristocrat, she thought. A man who called her Dagger.

Do not fail me in this task, my Dagger.

The second memory involved fighting on some distant moon or planet. Well, fighting was perhaps too generous a word, as the combat was completely one-sided—a slaughter really, with her wielding the butcher’s ax. Certainly, her opponents tried to kill her, but she weaved between them with incredible ease, employing a strange energy weapon to perforate the fabric of their spacesuits and expose them to the deadly environment of the planet, if not killing them outright with the initial strike.

She wasn’t quite sure what to make of either memory, but she had been some kind of warrior or assassin in her past life, that much seemed certain. That made her feel strange, because she didn’t think of herself as a warrior or assassin. Killing seemed so foreign to her when she thought about it outside battle, but as soon as the energy rifles started going off, a strange lust came over her, a yearning to be part of the action. She forgot about her own safety and simply lived in the moment, existing only to kill bioweapons. Or in the case of The Scorpion, cyborgs.

I killed Anderson, too, she reminded herself.

She smiled sadly at that, wishing she had started scanning her followers for mind-jacking chips sooner. Oh well. There was nothing she could do about it now. She wouldn’t beat herself up over it. She couldn’t.

The men were scanned twice a day now, so hopefully a mishap like that wouldn’t happen again. Still, when she found this Veil, she’d have to make certain he paid in full for what he’d done.

Rhea scanned the rocky terrain of the Outlands that surrounded the convoy. She watched for bioweapons, or signs of Aradne security forces. According to the crowdsourced hotspot data, bioweapon activity was relatively high in the area, with several pods of Tasins recently sighted. If the scouts spotted any, she planned to change course immediately, hopefully before the bioweapons noticed them. If the convoy was spotted, there was a good chance the vehicles would outrun the creatures: Tasins could only keep up their top speed for a very short time, while these semis could operate at one hundred and twenty klicks an hour for a good amount of time, even when hauling the trailers. Eventually the vehicles would have to slow down to let the solar cells recharge, of course, but by then the Tasins would be long gone behind them.

She glanced at the ground, which rolled past in a blur. The terrain was another factor that would limit the convoy’s top speed, but so far, the plains remained relatively flat, if rocky. If it became too bumpy, however, that could definitely impact how fast the semis moved.

She gazed overhead, where a squad of drones followed along. Most of them were armed in some form or another. Well, except for Gizmo, who assumed a pure scouting role. The drones would warn the convoy of approaching bioweapons well before anyone on the ground could sight the creatures. That, and the approach of any security forces.

“You know, it’s really tempting to take over the wheel,” Will said, his hands on the aforementioned steering wheel. All self-driving vehicles had overrides to allow human, cyborg, or robot drivers to take over, as part of the built-in safety mechanisms. “I hate letting a machine control what I could just as easily steer myself.”

“I didn’t know you drove,” Rhea said.

He glanced at her and smiled. “I’ve salvaged entire vehicles before, don’t you worry. And when there’s an urgent need to transport said vehicles out of the Outlands, you learn to drive pretty quick.”

She smiled. “I’ll bet.”

“You wish you could drive, don’t you?” He winked at her.

“Nope.” She didn’t really care if he did the driving, or the machine. Either suited her. After all, in the military, the commanding officer rarely took direct control of a vehicle. Why do I know that?

It didn’t matter.

She stared at the barren landscape for a moment. The immediate area was a blur, thanks to the speed of their passage, but the more distant portions she could see readily enough. So many small rocks and stones out there, littering the terrain. An infinite number of them, forming a landscape when taken in their entirety. Just like the multitude of humans, cyborgs and robots spread across the solar system, who formed civilization when considered as a whole. Civilization. Sometimes she felt more at ease in the Outlands, surrounded by bioweapons, than in the small bastions of glass and steel—or cargo containers and lean-tos—the humans called civilization. By driving out here, she felt almost like she was going home.

She looked at Will once more. “Thank you.”

“For what?” he asked.

“For everything,” she replied. “For saving me from the trash heap. Introducing me to the Outlands, and the salvaging life. But most importantly, for doing this.” Her gaze took in Horatio. “The two of you risked your lives to return to Rust Town when the bioweapons attacked. After, you stayed on, helping to rebuild the settlement with me. You gave up salvaging for me. And you’re still here, joining me on a mission to restore the city’s water supply.”

“And we could leave at any time,” he grumbled.

“I know,” she said. “Which is why I thank you. Especially considering this is a mission we might not return from.”

Will smiled faintly.

“All of which begs the question, why do you stay?” she pressed. “Not that I don’t appreciate it, but… well, you don’t owe me anything. In fact, if anyone is the debtor here, it’s me.”

“We couldn’t abandon you now,” Will said. “Not when you needed us most. Brothers… sisters… they’ve got each other’s backs. If we needed you, you’d be right there for us. Just like you were in the Outlands, when we were battling bioweapons, and it seemed like there was no hope. When it seemed like we’d never get out of those dark caves, never see the light of day again. But we did it. Because we stuck together. Because we were there for each other. And I’ll be damned if I leave you now. Besides, I’m sure I speak for Horatio when I say this, but someone had to protect you from all those lusty Wardenites!”

Horatio turned his polycarbonate head toward her, and those antennae twitched. “He does not speak for me. I wanted the Wardenites to take you and be done with it so we wouldn’t have to worry about you anymore. Just kidding.”

Rhea grinned at the robot, but before Will could comment on the robot’s bad jokes, she gave the human salvager a serious look and said: “Are you certain you’re not staying because of something more?”

“No,” Will said hastily, looking away. “Well, I guess, to be frank, you’re like the little sister I never had. I feel… a bit protective about you. Maybe overprotective at times.”

Horatio studied her. “You asked the original question almost as if you were hoping he would admit to wanting something more.”

Rhea considered that for a moment. “Maybe I do hope for such things, sometimes. But other times, most times, I can’t imagine such a thing: being with someone. At least not at this point in my life.”

“Yeah, that’s kind of hard anyway, without the extensions,” Will said.

“Don’t forget, you promised to give her fifty creds if she didn’t install genital extensions six months after her debt was paid,” Horatio said.

“Yup, and we have another five months to go,” Will said.

“I bet she’s going to hold off until the fifth month,” Horatio said. “Just to get fifty credits out of you. And then as soon as you pay, the next day she’ll make an appointment to have the extensions installed.”

“Probably,” Will agreed.

“I doubt it,” Rhea said. “I like the freedom of not being beholden to anyone, let alone some genital extension. If I install such a thing, I’m worried I won’t be able to control the urges. I remember all the women you had coming up to your room when we first visited Rust Town…”

“Hey, when you travel in the Outlands for months on end, with nothing but a robot companion, a little sexual release is deserved,” Will said.

“How do you know he hasn’t been inviting women to visit him again since we’ve returned?” Horatio asked. “Multiple times. Sometimes in the same night.”

“Hey!” Will said, slapping the robot on the side of the head. “Don’t tell her that!”

“Don’t hit me like that again,” Horatio warned. “Unless you want me to hit back. You wouldn’t like it.”

“I don’t care if he’s been seeing other women, or renting fembots,” Rhea said. “But that’s my point… you’re a slave to your desires. I don’t want to be like that.”

Will stared at the horizon outside. His expression seemed almost yearning. “You’re probably on to something…” He was quiet a moment. “I sometimes wonder what it would be like to transfer my mind into a full body cyborg. That’s my endgame, you know. It’s always been my endgame. It’s everyone’s, whether we like it or not: when we get old enough that death from natural causes becomes a serious issue, it’s the only way to ensure we keep on living. I’m hoping to have enough creds saved up to afford the procedure by then.

“Problem is, I don’t know if I can stay ahead of inflation. Sure, parts go down in price over the years, but no matter how much I’ve made, the cost has always been out of reach. So I guess we’ll see. Still, I’m not sure what’s more troubling to me: the possibility that I can’t afford it, or the off chance that I can. Thinking about losing my body… just ripping my brain out and throwing the rest away, it’s a disturbing thought. You grow attached to your body. Get used to all its scars, and its quirks. Consider it yours, when in truth it’s only a rental.

“When the time finally comes, I’m not sure I’ll be able to give mine up. Then again, by that point, my body will probably be so old and worn out that maybe I’ll be happy to see it go, who knows? I’ll still be afraid, of course—there’s always the chance of complications. On the rare occasion the procedure fails to take, and you simply die. And what happens if I don’t like my new body?” He sighed. “If it’s the only way I can keep on living, I guess I’ll have no choice but to go through with it, if I have the creds. What an endgame, though, huh? Knowing that you’re going to give up the one thing that makes you most human. I sometimes wonder how you handle it.”

“Being a cyborg?” She shrugged. “I never had an option. I woke up like this, if you remember. I don’t have a past to miss.”

Will nodded. “It’s probably for the best that you can’t remember what you were.”

“Probably,” she agreed.

He thrummed his fingers on the dashboard for several moments.

“Maybe I’ll do that…” he announced.

She studied him uncertainly. “Do what?”

“Maybe I’ll have them wipe my mind after the transference,” Will said. “Now that would be interesting.”

“If you want to spend the rest of your life wondering who you were, then go for it,” she commented.

“Is it that bad for you?” he asked.

“No,” she answered. “Though I admit I’m curious, if a little afraid.”

“You’re not sure you’ll like who you were…” Will said.

She nodded. “But it shouldn’t matter. You said it yourself, we’re more than our pasts.”

“Yes, we are,” he agreed. “And yes, it shouldn’t matter.”

“But sometimes it does,” she said. “And that’s what scares me.”

Will had nothing to say to that.

They continued across the Outlands, making their way northeast toward their target. She glanced at her overhead map. The destination was marked as a flashing waypoint, visible when she zoomed out.

On the map, she could clearly see the line that represented the pipeline, colored green as it wended its way across the landscape toward the ocean. The waypoint was quite a distance along that route, about three hundred kilometers from Aradne.

The convoy could have approached the pipeline directly, aiming for a target closer to the city. While doing so might mean much less time was needed to reach the waypoint, that close to the city the Aradne security forces would scramble their air force and reach the convoy in minutes. The attack would come before Rhea and her team even started loading any water.

So instead the convoy approached the pipe at a relatively broad angle, first of all to make their destination less obvious—another settlement was roughly along this course, and the Aradne security forces and AIs monitoring the satellite feeds would likely assume that was their destination. Secondly, this waypoint gave them at least some time to drill into the pipe and gather the water they needed before the attack squadrons could reach them. Even then it would be a close race: at three hundred kilometers, the airborne forces could arrive in half an hour. It was too bad the slum residents couldn’t afford to build airships big enough to handle the weight of these water tanks… ah well, she had to work with what she had.

Before leaving, Rhea and the others had shut off their remote interfaces, vanishing their IDs from the Net. Once they had entered the Outlands and were well away from any network nodes, they’d reactivated those interfaces so they could communicate with one another. It seemed a wise move, in case the Aradne government was keeping tabs on them.

They’d also kept the purpose of the semis and their intended destination known to only a handful of people. This limiting of information seemed to have worked, because if any spies had reported their intent, the convoy would have been attacked already.

After three hours of travel the main pipeline appeared on the horizon to the left. The drones picked it up first, and Will relayed Gizmo’s video feed to Rhea so she could watch the tiny, glinting section pass by. On their current course, this was the closest point of approach to their destination.

The convoy had encountered no resistance thus far, but that would change shortly.

“All right, it’s time,” Rhea said, transmitting over the band shared by the entire convoy. “Make a direct course for the pipeline.”

6

Rhea stood guard on top of the tanker as the robot assistants attached the rubber hoses to the pipeline. Surge release valves were located along the pipeline at one-kilometer intervals. They operated automatically, using gas pressure to vent excess water and vapor as the need arose. Next to these were manual bypasses, accessible over a local wireless network. These latter valves could be hacked, albeit with difficulty.

Miles and his team had already gotten their hands on the specs to the bypass modules, and they’d sent drones ahead to begin the hacking process. These drones had made good progress brute-forcing the wireless interface, so that by the time the rest of the convoy arrived, it took only a few more minutes for the robotic assistants to finish the job.

When the bypass was in their control, the robots draped canopies between the tankers and the pipeline to hide their activities. Those canopies were painted with a reflective coating to block infrared as well as visual, but it would still be fairly obvious what was going on to anyone watching the orbital feeds.

With the canopy in place, the robots affixed a forking connector to the bypass valve, then in turn attached the hoses from each of the tanks to this new connector.

“We’re ready!” Miles announced from the top of the tanker next to hers. He had on rock-digital camo outfit similar to the one Rhea wore.

“Open it up!” Rhea shouted.

A moment later the hoses expanded, shifting as water from the pipeline rushed into them.

“Loading in progress!” Miles said. “Hoses and connectors are holding!”

Rhea followed the pipeline to the westernmost horizon and let her gaze linger there. When Aradne’s security forces arrived, that was where they would first appear.

Will watched the sky beside her. “Nothing I hate worse than the calm before battle.”

“You get used to it,” Rhea said. She glanced at him, confused. “Not sure where that came from.”

“Blame your past life,” he said.

She nodded. “Good call.”

The next few minutes passed very tensely. Finally, when all the tankers were topped up, Miles gave the order to seal the bypass.

“Careful not to close it too fast!” Miles shouted at the robots. “You’ll cause hydraulic shock!” Instigating a water hammer in a pipe of that size would probably be bad. Their goal was to steal some water from Aradne, not to cause major damage to the supply.

The robots disconnected the hoses. Rhea and the others waited a few moments in trepidation, scanning the pipeline on both sides for signs of hammering, but all seemed calm.

“Looks like we’re good!” Miles said.

“All right, time to go our separate ways,” Rhea told him. “Good luck!”

“No, good luck to you. You’re the diversion!” Miles climbed down from the tanker and darted toward one of the smaller vehicles that would be heading directly west. The canopy overhead would shield him from the spying eyes of the satellites.

Rhea could only smile wanly at his words. It was true that the three tankers were the diversion. Miles and his team were the real mission; it was important they returned at all costs.

Rhea watched them leave, then she leaped onto the rooftop of the semi and swung into the passenger seat, joining the already waiting Will and Horatio. The other two semis that composed the diversion were babysat by Renaldo and Chuck respectively. The pickup trucks with them, along with the laser turrets in their beds, were operated by AIs. Rhea had wanted Renaldo and Chuck to join the others, and Will and Horatio, too, for that matter, but they all refused to leave her. In theory she didn’t need to be here either, but she thought it would be too obvious this was a diversion if no one accompanied the semis. And she wasn’t about to order anyone else to do a job she could do herself. Not when that job was as risky as this one.

And so here she was.

The semis departed almost due south, ripping away the canopies formerly draped between the tanks and the pipeline. They were headed toward the ruins of a city located fifty kilometers away—roughly half an hour of driving. The relatively close proximity of those ruins was another reason they had chosen this particular spot to perform the operation: they hoped to take shelter there before or during the fight, because if they stayed out in the open, they had no chance at all.

Rhea kept her gaze on the western horizon. So far, the sky remained clear.

“Aradne security is late,” Will said.

“Maybe they won’t come at all,” Horatio commented.

“Don’t jinx us,” Will told the robot.

“They’ll come,” Rhea said. “It’s only a matter of time.”

“Tell me again why we’re doing this?” Will said. “We could have let the AIs operate these machines.”

“I’m insulted,” Horatio said.

“We’re selling the diversion,” Rhea said simply.

She glanced at the drones overhead. Most of them had joined the diversion: having them accompany the main convoy would’ve served only to betray their position. Besides, all that airborne weaponry would be needed in the coming fight.

Gizmo was up there, flying on the eastern edge of the drone swarm. In theory, that was the safest position at the moment, considering that side was the farthest from the incoming enemy.

She returned her gaze to the ground, which passed in a blur beside them. The terrain was rockier than she would have liked, but so far, she still hadn’t felt any jolts, courtesy of the super-gimbaled shocks.

“Giz is detecting the ruins of several skyscrapers ahead,” Will said. “Looks like we’re going to make it before the Aradne forces arrive after all.”

Rhea looked south and zoomed in. Yes, she could definitely see the tops of skyscrapers. At this distance they looked like small sticks poking up from the ground.

“Spoke too soon,” Will said. “Got several police drones incoming from nine o’clock.”

“All right, it’s time to show our Warden what we’re made of,” Chuck said over the comm. “You wanted to prove yourself in combat, Stick Arms? Well, now’s your chance.”

“You’re the one who’s going to be doing the proving,” Renaldo transmitted. “I’ll be busy fighting.”

“Good comeback,” Chuck commented. “Too bad it makes no sense.”

Rhea switched to Gizmo’s feed and spotted the combat drones approaching from the west. She recognized several different models, based on the specs Brinks and the other Wardenites had familiarized her with—specifications that weren’t available to the general public on the Net. Most were police drones drawn from different precincts, along with a few military models no doubt borrowed from the parliamentary garrisons. These latter were the size of gunships with the firepower to match.

Many of the drones were equipped with missiles, but Rhea doubted the machines would be utilizing those against the semis, not when the tractor-trailers carried tanks full of all too precious water. No, more precise weapons like lasers would be in play for this battle, which meant if she left the cabin, she’d always have to be on the move.

“Deploying laser shield,” Will announced.

Because lasers had such a long range, the enemy would be fast approaching effective firing range—if they hadn’t already.

Metallic sheets began unfolding across the windshield of the semi, and the windows on either side. They were reinforced with ballistic plates meant to repel plasma blasts and painted with a laser reflecting coating. That latter wouldn’t completely prevent the weapons from penetrating, but it would ensure that any laser strikes hit with only a quarter of their intensity. The hood and doors were similarly reinforced and coated.

The semi began swerving randomly, knowing that the AIs manning the attack drones would attempt to fire at the same spot repeatedly in order to defeat the protective metal. Random directional changes made such precise targeting all the more difficult.

There were more ballistic plates installed above the engine block itself: if the attackers intended to target the battery in the hopes of a quick shutdown, they’d be in for a surprise once they penetrated the hood. There were other defensive features incorporated into the semis, as well as a host of cheap, active sensing capabilities that one wouldn’t expect to find on a mere tanker, including LIDAR, thermal, and echolocation—the Wardenites had done what they could to make these vehicles military grade while still staying within their budget.

“You’re not going to take the wheel?” Rhea asked Will as the view became blocked by the deploying metal.

“The AI has it under control,” Will said. The steering wheel in front of him turned left and right of its own accord. “Nothing I hate more than driving blind.”

Rhea switched to Gizmo’s viewpoint as the metal sheets completely enveloped the windows and the cabin went dark. The drone had pulled well back to observe the battle, and she had a bird’s eye view of the entire convoy.

The pickup trucks accompanying them were randomly swerving as well. Their turrets moved back and forth, targeting the incoming attackers. Laser fire was being exchanged by both sides, no doubt, but she couldn’t see it—such was the nature of laser light, whose concentrated photons traveled in a straight line; none of that light would have a chance to reach her eyes until reflecting and diffracting from the target. But even then, she wouldn’t see the dots marking the impacts, because these particular lasers fired in pulses that lasted for less than a nanosecond—not enough time to register with her all too human brain. She could probably tweak the LIDAR overlay that fed her mind-machine interface to provide some realtime tracking on the hits if she really wanted to. Not that she really had time for such experimentation at the moment.

The airborne drones with the convoy were also swerving, and no doubt those that were equipped with lasers were firing them as well.

Some of the pickups carried plasma turrets, and as the enemy came into range, she saw the energy bolts launched by these particular trucks readily enough. The drones that were equipped with energy weapons fired them as well.

Plasma streams were returned in kind from the attackers: two pickups and a drone were struck. They crashed after partially melting.

Missiles came from the enemy, too, hitting pickup trucks and smashing airborne drones out of the sky. But none of those missiles targeted the tankers, as expected. The convoy had no missiles to fire in return.

Rhea heard a loud thud come from the hood of the semi. Two more thuds came a moment later as large objects struck the cabin.

Rhea minimized Gizmo’s feed to the upper right of her vision; internal lamps had activated to compensate for the lack of external light entering the cabin, so she could see well enough. Movement attracted her eyes to Gizmo’s camera once again: the drone had swung its camera toward the semi, no doubt thanks to Will, and Rhea realized humanoid robots had attached to the cabin.

“One of the military drones was a transport,” Will said. “Looks like it’s deployed combat robots. V9000 models. We’ve got three on the cabin, five on the tank itself. Renaldo and Chuck have another eight each.”

“Bring them on!” Chuck sent.

Rhea had disabled her public profile and programmed her comm node to ignore communications handshake requests from third party clients. The others had done the same, which would prevent their IDs from being transmitted without their knowledge to any nearby enemy robots or drones, thus affording them a modicum of anonymity, something they would need when it came time to return to Rust Town. It also, in theory, prevented any hacking attempts.

The metal shell on the windshield began to peel back on the driver’s side, causing bright light to stream in.

Will unholstered the thick pistol from his hip and shoved it onto the exposed glass there. He fired, melting a hole through the windshield.

On Gizmo’s feed, the robot outside let go—or rather, its arm had been shot off. As the semi swerved yet again, that robot lost its balance and fell off.

More light from outside began to penetrate from the upper right of Rhea’s window as the metal shielding there also began to curl back. She saw the clawed hand of a robot gripping the edges.

“Can we get some help from the drones and pickups?” she asked over the comm as she retrieved her pistol.

“They’re slightly occupied at the moment,” Renaldo said.

Rhea aimed at those fingers and fired, creating a hole in the glass, but shooting off the fingers at the same time.

The robot’s hand withdrew, but a moment later a muzzle shoved into the hole she’d created. It was pointed directly at her…

7

Rhea grabbed the handle beside her and shoved open the door, bending the muzzle and pivoting the arm of the robot that held it. The weapon fired, but because the barrel was twisted, the robot succeeded only in burning another hole into the windshield.

That muzzle was part of a rifle barrel built into the robot’s forearm, but it had another on the opposite arm, which it promptly lowered into the open door.

Rhea grabbed the weapon and pulled with both hands, ripping the robot off the roof. She tilted her head to the side as she did so, moving herself out of the muzzle’s line of fire; the robot unleashed the weapon as it plunged toward the rocky terrain, and the energy bolt struck the inside of the roof, drilling a partial hole. The robot vanished from view almost instantly when it hit the rolling ground.

One more combat robot remained on the roof of the semi, along with another five on the tank portion itself. A quick glance at Gizmo’s feed told her that Chuck and Renaldo were in trouble. The robots were firing into both of their cabins, and neither man seemed to be firing back.

“Help Chuck and Renaldo!” she ordered Will.

She aimed her pistol at the cabin of the adjacent semi through the hole in her window. It was a tricky shot, considering her semi was swerving, as was the tractor trailer of her target; but her training paid off, and she struck one of the robots assailing Chuck. Her shot hit the power cell and the robot fell away, disabled. Two other robots on Chuck’s tanker returned fire, and she was forced to duck behind the metal shield on her window.

Will lowered his window slightly so that he could help out Renaldo in a similar manner, but then a muzzle shoved inside.

Horatio was ready. The robot’s arms shot upward, deploying the barrels attached to the forearms. They fired instantly, the energy bolts drilling into that muzzle and melting it away.

Will started. “Sheesh!” He leaned outward slightly to fire up at the robot.

“Careful, Will,” Rhea said.

She aimed past him, through the open window, at Renaldo’s semi. Another tricky shot. This time when she fired, she missed. Another shot. Another miss.

Will abruptly pulled back inside. “Think I made him mad!”

The robot on the rooftop swung down into view, and reached for Will, the muzzles underneath its forearms smoking.

Both Rhea and Horatio opened fire, shooting the robot at almost point-blank range. The machine slumped, collapsing on the partially open window.

Will shoved the robot off the door and it dropped out of view.

“That leaves another five,” Will said as he aimed at Renaldo’s semi.

Rhea glanced at Gizmo’s feed; the robots clinging to her own tanker were slowly making their way toward the cabin, but they were still a ways off yet.

“Five?” she said. “I see only four.”

Will shrugged. “You’re right. Maybe one fell off. Or a technical finally decided to pull its weight.”

“Could use some help here!” Chuck sent.

She aimed past the gap in her window, toward Chuck’s cabin. The robots were assaulting it from all sides, ripping away the protective metal layers while firing blindly into the breaches they made.

She targeted one of the robots, and as two semis swerved to and fro, she wondered vaguely if there was a way to tap into the “random” path the AIs of the tractor units intended to take. It would certainly make targeting easier. They were all on the same side after all, so she should be able to get access…

Well, there wasn’t really time to figure that out now.

She fired thrice, adjusting her aim slightly with each shot, until she scored a hit with the fourth. She missed the power cell, but did score a glancing blow against the head; however it wasn’t enough to stop the robot, and the machine simply turned back on her and fired several bolts in return, forcing her to duck behind the intact portion of the metal shield that protected her window.

Polycarbonate fingers shoved into the gap and grabbed the edges of the shield, bending it right back to expose half the passenger window.

With both hands, Rhea swung her pistol toward the uncovered triangular section of glass, but then a fist smashed through the pane, catching her by surprise.

She fired, melting through a rifle barrel that hung beneath the forearm of her robotic attacker, but the arm itself otherwise remained intact; those polycarbonate fingers wrapped around her left wrist and pulled her toward the window. The pistol caught on the lip of the opening and was ripped from her grasp. She was dragged out, but her midsection caught on the jagged edges of glass, and she halted halfway.

Horatio grabbed onto her leg. “I got you!”

The enemy combat robot crouched on the roof of the cabin above her. Its free hand lowered, bringing the deadly barrel that hung from underneath its forearm to bear. In only a moment that barrel would be aimed squarely upon her head.

Her left hand remained firmly gripped by those unyielding fingers; but her right arm was free. As was the X2-59 she kept strapped to that wrist.

Rhea swung the blade while it was still deploying; the sharp steel leaped forth, enveloped in the bright blue sparks of plasma generated by built-in electrolasers, and she cut off the weapon arm of her opponent at the elbow. She beheaded the robot at almost the same time.

These particular robot models could operate without heads—their AI cores were stored in their torsos, along with the power cells. However, the head contained everything it needed to communicate with the other machines in its squad, along with its vision and hearing sensors. In essence, she had blinded it.

The fingers that held her wrist tightened, as if intending to apply enough crushing force to sever her hand.

Rhea smiled grimly and brought the X2-59 down for another pass. She cut off the hand and the robot released her, staggering backward. She finished the job by plunging the blade into its torso, striking the AI core. Feeling exposed, she promptly slid back inside and retracted the blade. Horatio released her ankle along the way.

She scooped up the pistol from where it had dropped to the floor. She waited a few moments, taking cover behind the bent triangular remnants of the shielding, then peered past. Only two robots remained on Chuck’s cabin—seems he had been busy.

With Horatio’s help she picked off those two. She occasionally glanced at Gizmo’s feed in the upper right of her vision, not wanting to be caught off guard again. The four robots that yet clung to her tanker hadn’t made much progress—apparently they had decided that firing at the pickups and drones was a better idea at the moment. They were certainly taking a lot of targets down, considering that most of the vehicles escorting the tankers were ignoring the robots, occupied as they were by the airborne fighters.

The robots clinging to the tank section of Chuck’s semi were behaving the same way, and they made easy targets; when she began to fire at them, they quickly scrambled to the far side of the tank and took cover.

“If any of you drones or pickups can spare a moment, we have some robots clinging to the righthand side of Chuck’s semi that could use some handling,” she sent. “In fact, all of the robots could use a good whacking. They’re picking you guys off!”

With Chuck’s semi safe for the time being, she turned her attention to the other side to help Will. He still had the driver window open a crack, and traded shots with the last remaining robot attached to Renaldo’s cabin. Will shut the window after he took each shot, shielding the interior.

When he opened it once more, it was to discover the robot lying flat on Renaldo’s roof.

“Got it!” Renaldo said. “First in the mouth grill, and then the power cell! What do you think of me now, Warden? Now do you believe me when I tell you I got your back?”

“I always did,” Rhea transmitted.

She aimed at the robots clinging to the tank portion of Renaldo’s vehicle and drove them to the far side.

“Chuck, you all right?” she sent. “You’re kind of quiet out there.”

“As good as can be expected,” Chuck said. “I’ve taken a hit to the side, but I’ve patched it up. Should be fine.”

She glanced at Gizmo’s feed. The robots that hung onto her own tanker were still firing with impunity at the convoy’s escorts.

She turned her attention to the overhead map and zoomed out a bit. The ruins were very close now.

She glanced at Will. “Can you have Gizmo rotate slightly to the left. Toward our destination?”

Gizmo’s video feed swiveled toward the destination. The jagged skeletons of skyscrapers promptly ate up the skies, but the outskirts were still another two minutes away.

She returned her gaze to the overhead map, and the robots marked as clinging to their tanker.

With her pistol, she cleared the jagged glass of the window beside her, then leaned her body slowly outside. She spotted a robot on top of the tanker, several meters away. It had its attention turned skyward.

She fired, bringing it down.

The other robots weren’t in view from her current position.

She pulled back inside and glanced at Will.

“Swap with me,” she said.

Will shook his head. “I got this.” He opened his window and leaned outside in turn, firing.

Rhea glanced at the overhead map, and saw another red dot turn black on the tanker as a robot was eliminated.

“I can’t see the other two from my current angle,” Will said.

“Neither can I.” She glanced at the shattered pane beside her. “I think I’m going to get out there.”

She holstered the weapon and grabbed the edges of the window.

“Is that safe?” Will asked.

“No,” she replied. “But I’ll keep moving.”

“I’ll go with you,” Horatio said.

She rested a hand on the robot’s lap. “No. Stay here. Cover me.”

She pulled her hood low, not wanting to be identified when she was out there: if the mayor knew she was among them, she, his archenemy, the attack might become decidedly more deadly.

She hauled herself through the window and swung her body acrobatically onto the rooftop. She withdrew her pistol.

Around her, the convoy drones weaved to and fro, darting in and out between the enemy units. The pickup trucks continued to fire as well, providing a diversion—without them, Rhea would’ve been shot down the instant she emerged on the roof.

Remaining crouched, she rose slightly so that she could peer past the edges of the tank portion behind her. She could see the remaining two robots, clinging near the aft portion of the steel cylinder. One of them was aiming at the surrounding pickups, the other…

She ducked, and a plasma bolt from that one shot past her head.

Aware of how exposed and vulnerable she was for every second she remained out there, she holstered the weapon and quickly lowered herself onto the deck in front of the fifth wheel coupling, in the narrow gap between the rear of the cab and the front of the trailer, and then pulled herself beneath the undercarriage. The gimbaled wheels bounced on either side of her.

She glanced at the forward section and confirmed that there were no rocks or other hazards in their path that would rudely rip her from the undercarriage, then made her way backward. She moved quickly, knowing that the situation could change in a heartbeat.

She reached the rear section and pulled herself onto the aft bumper. She climbed the rungs there, until she reached the top. She withdrew her pistol and slowly aimed it past the topmost edge.

The robot that had fired at her was still aiming at the cabin. But it must have spotted her, because it quickly flung its arms toward her…

Rhea fired, bringing it down. Gripping the pistol between her teeth, she quickly climbed higher, and as the second robot came into view, she ripped the weapon out of her mouth and brought it to bear.

The movement attracted the target’s attention, and it spun around to face her, but it was too late: Rhea fired and terminated the robot.

She glanced at the tankers on both sides and confirmed that none of the other robots were in sight, then holstered the weapon and scrambled back down.

She pulled herself below the undercarriage. She heard a loud buzzing coming from behind a moment later. Looking over her shoulder, she realized an enemy drone had descended to her level.

Its weapon turrets swiveled toward her…

8

Before Rhea could withdraw her pistol and fire, one of the escorting pickup trucks shot down the drone. She exhaled in relief.

“Thank you, whoever did that,” she transmitted.

“Better get inside here quick,” Will sent. “We’re entering the city. And the terrain is slightly more… technical.”

The sound profile changed, with nearby buildings reflecting the noise of the passing vehicles.

The loose brick from a rubble pile struck her underside. Another loose rebar slammed into her shoulder, and nearly ripped her from the undercarriage. She increased her pace and reached the deck. She pulled herself onto it, and then swung onto the ledge beneath the door.

Horatio opened it and helped her inside.

An enemy drone swooped down toward her, and Rhea slammed the door behind her. The enemy quadcopter adjusted its position, centering itself over the triangular portion, but Horatio was ready and fired the twin rifle barrels affixed to his forearm, taking it down.

She glanced at the overhead map. Enemies were marked as red dots, courtesy of the active sensing capabilities of the convoy members. Their dots froze whenever moving behind obstacles, indicating the last known positions. Meanwhile, the semis were marked in green, and the escorting technicals and drones in blue; the positions of the friendlies updated in realtime, regardless of whether they passed behind buildings, thanks to the common network the machines utilized for communications. She was shocked by how few escorts seemed to remain intact out there.

A quick glance at Gizmo’s feed confirmed her fears. There were maybe a score of technicals left, and a dozen drones.

With less escorts to protect the tankers, the enemy drones doubled their attacks, swooping down at the cabins with increased alacrity. Some of them also concentrated their fire on the tires, apparently not understanding that the wheels were run flats.

“So who was it that said coming to the city would provide us with the cover we needed?” Will said, firing at another drone through a crack in his window.

“When we reach the parking garage, we’ll lose them,” she said, unleashing her pistol at another drone on the passenger side.

“Assuming it’s still there,” Will countered.

“It’s there,” Rhea said. “The scouts passed this way only yesterday.”

An advance party had scouted these ruins the day before to confirm the accuracy of the crowdsourced map data the Wardenites had on the place—data uploaded to the Net by salvagers, wreckage tourists and the like. The scouts verified that the garage was present, and that the tankers could fit. The advance team had continued on to the next Net-enabled city in order to report their findings—Rhea had specifically told them not to return to Rust Town right away, to avoid having any satellites flag their behavior as suspicious.

Once inside the garage, Rhea and the others planned to abandon the tankers and lose their pursuers on foot: a stairwell in the garage led to a pedway system that was still intact, one that wound its way underneath the city from building to building.

In theory, the Aradne forces would give up shortly after losing them. They only really wanted the water, after all—especially if Rhea could keep her identity hidden. The forces would deploy a few of the smaller hunter-killers and combat robots, leaving them behind to search for the escapees, but that was something Rhea and the others could readily handle. The majority of the forces would return, escorting the captured tankers back to Aradne.

At least, that was the hope.

“Who knows,” Horatio said, firing past Rhea at a drone. “The building that harbors the garage could have collapsed since yesterday.”

“With the state this city is in, wouldn’t surprise me!” Will quipped.

Rhea fired at yet another incoming drone, and it dropped from view. She glanced at her overhead map. The route to the parking garage was plotted as a green line between the different skyscrapers; the AIs responsible for steering the semis were following it to a T.

She took down another drone, and a moment of respite followed.

She used the interlude to glance at Gizmo’s feed, wanting to get an inventory of how many still fought for her. There weren’t very many escorts left at all: a few quadcopters, a handful of pickups struggling across the debris. Gizmo had survived by keeping well back, but now that they were in the city, the drone kept closer by strategically employing the buildings for cover. Indeed, Gizmo darted behind a broken skyscraper as she watched, blocking the convoy from view. Just when she was about to use the drone to check on the enemy positions…

She returned her attention to the real world, puzzled why the adversaries weren’t continuing to throw everything they had at the semis. Past her damaged window, she could see the ruined husks of buildings reaching for the sky, their tips broken and jagged. She turned her gaze forward, and through the boreholes that marred the protective covering of the main windshield, she studied the street ahead: the debris that scattered the route seemed to be increasing in frequency. In moments, the ruins of collapsed skyscrapers blocked the road to such an extent that the semis were forced to travel in single file—only a tiny aisle remained clear down the center of the street. That aisle quickly narrowed, and not even the super-gimbaled shocks could prevent the cabin from tilting sideways as the rightmost wheels had to drive over the collapse. Cement dust lingered in the air, as if another large vehicle had already passed this way ahead of them, or…

“I don’t recall the streets appearing so congested in the data,” Will said. “See, the crowdsourced map is wrong already.”

“The map data isn’t wrong,” Rhea said, gazing skyward past the triangular gap in her window. “The drones are attacking the buildings.”

The brief respite in attacks was because the enemy drones had all swooped upward: they were concentrating their fire on the skyscrapers ahead, collapsing them in an effort to block the convoy’s path.

As she watched, a big building fell directly in front of the semis. Dust filled the street, and the view outside the exposed portions of the windows became completely black. The cabin’s internal lights activated.

“Switch to LIDAR!” Rhea ordered.

“Won’t make much difference in this,” Will told her.

He was right. There were too many particles for the individual photons to scatter upon, and she got no readings.

“Echolocation,” Horatio said.

Chirps echoed from the exterior of the semi via a series of strategically spaced speakers, which fed the resultant data to the HUDs of Rhea and her companions. She could see the debris and the buildings around her once again.

Using that data as a guide, the AI operating the semi realized the way forward was completely blocked, and reversed course. However, it soon got stuck when it ran over a cement block that elevated the undercarriage, lifting the back right wheels completely off the ground. The cabin tilt became even worse.

“Damn AI pathfinding!” Will took over the steering and tried to move forward in an effort to dislodge the vehicle, but the tanker wouldn’t move.

“Chuck, we’re going to need you to ram us,” Rhea said. “We’re stuck.”

“On it,” Chuck sent. His tanker was behind theirs, while Renaldo had the rear.

Three drones appeared outside on the echolocation band, coming in from the direction of the windshield, and the left and right windows. Thuds on the roof told her that more combat robots had dropped down onto them. Apparently the enemy was using echolocation, too.

Rhea fired through the gap in the passenger side window, but the drone swerved left and right randomly, making it very difficult to target. She was forced to duck beneath the window entirely and crouched into the small alcove at the base of her seat to avoid being shot.

Horatio slid forward, out of its line of sight as well; the robot aimed a rifle barrel through a borehole in the windshield and fired. “Got one.”

Will had the same problem as Rhea and was unable to eliminate the randomly swerving drone on his side. He was forced to close the shielded driver-side window entirely, lest he be struck, and also had to crouch into the alcove beneath the steering wheel thanks to all the boreholes the plasma attacks had drilled into that pane and its protective sheet.

A robotic forearm shoved through the gap in Rhea’s window and reached toward where she hid beneath.

No, that arm wasn’t reaching—it was aiming twin muzzles at her head.

Rhea instinctively shoved that forearm toward her seat; the muzzles fired and ripped right through the cushion.

And then the whole vehicle jerked forward with such force that Rhea slammed into the glove compartment, and the robotic arm was wrenched outside. The super-gimbals wouldn’t help all that much when something as big as another semi rammed them.

A glance at the feed from Chuck’s vehicle told her that all their wheels were back on the ground.

“We’ve been knocked free!” Rhea announced. “Chuck, get out of our way!”

“Already backing up!” Chuck replied.

Will sat up and took control of the wheel; he turned it right, either to avoid plowing into Chuck, or getting snagged on the same concrete block. And then he pressed down on the accelerator. Hard.

Once again Rhea was shoved forward. She glanced at her overhead map: the red dots of the three remaining robots that were attached to the cabin roof moved forward as the enemy robots, apparently unready for the change in momentum, tumbled off.

She pulled herself into her seat and began firing as several drones pursued them. She relied on the semi’s echolocation to highlight the targets in the dark.

In seconds the cabin leveled out as the trailer returned to the aisle they had passed through before. Though he was driving in a straight line, Will had to keep adjusting the wheel to prevent the back end from fishtailing too far to the left or right.

Horatio aimed his built-in rifle barrel at different perforations in the windshield to target different enemy drones. Meanwhile, Rhea continued to fire past the triangular opening in the passenger window. She timed her attacks to follow Horatio’s and ducked after each shot. A police drone had swung into her line of fire, and though it didn’t swerve to the left and right like the previous attackers, she was having difficulty putting it down, thanks to its large size. At least it kept most of the other drones at bay.

The air outside began to brighten as the semis retreated from the all-encompassing debris cloud.

When that cloud had cleared enough for Rhea to begin seeing the surrounding street and buildings once more, Will slammed on the brakes and switched to the forward gear. He immediately turned onto a side street.

“Tankers, with me!” Will transmitted.

Rhea glanced at the overhead map and confirmed that Chuck and Renaldo were following. Well, their AIs were, anyway—she doubted the pair had taken the wheel like Will.

While the protective metal sheet that covered the windshield was peeled back slightly on the driver’s side, and the rest riddled with boreholes, there weren’t really enough gaps in it for Will to see properly; the fact that he kept his driver side window completely closed indicated to Rhea that he was driving the semi from a third-person perspective, using Gizmo to guide him. He probably used his overhead map to a degree as well, which would be updating in real-time courtesy of the active sensors on the tankers.

A glance at that overhead map told her there were no technicals left, nor combat drones. They’d all been shot down. Only a couple of scouting drones remained: like Gizmo, they’d kept their distance.

The enemy drones came on with renewed fervency; they split their attacks between the passenger area and the hood. Rhea and Horatio struggled to keep the enemy back and found themselves on the defensive more often than not. Once Will had put the tanker back on course to the garage, even he had to relinquish control of the vehicle to duck behind the driver-side alcove—the attacks were simply becoming too much.

Rhea crouched there, next to Horatio, in front of her seat; beside her, enemy bolts tore into the cushions in a ceaseless barrage, keeping her pinned. The semi’s hood was no doubt facing a similar assault, and she wondered how much more of it the engine block could take. She glanced at the overhead map. The three tankers still had another kilometer to the garage.

“Give the order to crash the tankers into the closest building!” Will said. “It’s the only way!”

“We’re only a kilometer from our target!” Rhea said. “We’ll make it!”

“The engine status is red,” Will said. “A few more hits, and it’s gone.”

He shared the engine damage report screen, and she viewed it on her HUD. He was right.

She swallowed.

I can’t believe we have to give up now, when we’re so close!

She was about to give the order to crash the tankers into the closest building, when the strangest thing happened.

The attacks ceased.

“They’re pulling away,” Will said. He tentatively lifted his head past cover.

Rhea did likewise and gazed at the empty street past the window.

She accessed Gizmo’s feed.

Most of the drones had swerved away; only a few remained behind to shadow the three tankers.

Will rotated Gizmo to the left, toward the retreating drones.

And then she suddenly understood why the security forces had abandoned them for the time being.

Bioweapons had emerged from the rubble of the surrounding skyscrapers, where apparently, they’d been slumbering.

Tasins.

9

Rhea stared at the creatures on Gizmo’s feed. She had never encountered a Tasin in real life. The last one she had met was virtual, while she trained with Bardain.

The Tasin. A creature with four barbed tusks protruding from its anvil-like head, beneath the armored plates that protected its insectile eyes. Its mouth was a large, toothless sucker, coated in acid strong enough to melt through the hardest steel in a matter of seconds. Long antennae drooped from its head, constantly swaying across the ground in front of it. The body was avian, covered in green, chlorophyll-pigmented feathers, yet wingless.

Four legs poked from its underbelly, spaced like those of a mammal; the top portions were thick and muscular, while the bottom sections were composed mostly of tough tendons and bones, so relatively thin in comparison that they could never be confused for anything other than avian in nature. The bottom portions of those legs ended in feet whose half-moon talons were bigger than scythes.

An elephant’s strength. A fly’s nearly three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision. The antennae of ants, whose sense of smell was unmatched by any animal. A bird’s metabolism and speed. It had the best parts of every species that formed it.

The Tasins lunged at the enemy units, ripping some of them out of the sky. She saw a large police drone swallowed by a leaping bioweapon, and a gunship unexpectedly snatched from behind by the acid-dripping sucker of another. The central portion of the latter craft melted away almost instantly, and the two pieces of the gunship crashed to the ground, exploding.

However, those were about the extent of the casualties: most of the Aradne forces had moved well beyond the range of the creatures. That didn’t stop them from moving temptingly closer, pulling back again whenever a Tasin lunged.

“They’re trying to keep the Tasins away from the tankers,” Will said.

Rhea nodded.

She could appreciate what the security forces were doing… if those bioweapons reached them, it was doubtful Aradne would ever recover the water. Still, given how many machines had been lost already, she had to wonder whether the water was really worth it. Perhaps the loss was justified to the mayor of Aradne. A public relations victory, to show the lowly denizens of Rust Town that if they tried to steal any water from the great city they camped outside, Aradne would simply take it back again.

Not all of the Tasins were distracted by the enemy drones. Some continued down the street, drawn by the noise of the tankers, or perhaps their “smell.” With their massive feet the Tasins crushed all debris underfoot and broke away portions of any skyscrapers they rubbed against. Acid dripped from their mouths and carved fresh runnels into the asphalt below.

“Get to the garage!” Rhea shouted.

Will took control of the tanker and stepped on the accelerator.

He recklessly drove over debris, at such a speed that not even the super-gimbals could hide the jolt from the riders. The other two tankers kept pace close behind.

Rhea observed that the route ahead was crisscrossed with runnels similar to the kind the Tasins were forming behind them at that very moment. Those thin trenches had been present throughout the city since the convoy’s arrival, but she hadn’t paid much attention to them until now. In fact, she hadn’t really noticed them. Not surprising, given that she’d been slightly occupied.

The advance scouting party had mentioned the runnels, but since there were no other signs of Tasin infestation, they’d concluded the creatures had abandoned the place a long time ago.

Seems they were wrong.

She leaned out the window and noted the five enemy drones that had stayed behind to shadow their passage. She pulled herself back in before any of them could fire at her.

“Horatio, can their eyes in the sky see us currently?” Rhea asked.

“Checking the Sat Displacement Map,” the robot answered. That was a satellite position calculator; it computed the positions of the spy satellites every hour of every day, something the Wardenites had hooked them up with. “Negative. Their two closest satellites are near the northern horizon. The skyscrapers are completely occluding our passage at the moment. The drones are their only eyes.”

“Let’s take them out,” Rhea said. “Chuck, Renaldo, target the pursuing drones.”

She leaned out the passenger side and aimed at one of the drones. It was a tricky shot, given the distance. But plasma bolts traveled almost as fast as projectiles, which meant the drones would have little time to react before they were destroyed. And it wouldn’t take much to down a drone either—she only needed to damage one of the rotors.

She squeezed the trigger.

The drone plunged.

She ducked inside before any of the other drones could return fire. She glanced at Gizmo’s feed to get an update on the latest positions, waited a moment, then leaned out once more, and fired at the next drone. Got it.

With the help of Renaldo and Chuck, she took down the remaining craft in less than twenty seconds.

“They’ll be sending in more drones to look for us,” Horatio said.

“We’ll be inside the garage before then,” Rhea countered.

She hoped.

Will turned onto the road that led to the garage. It was free of bioweapons and enemy drones.

“I was starting to worry we wouldn’t make it,” Will said.

“We’re not inside yet,” Rhea told him.

Will nodded. “Horatio, quit jinxing us!”

The robot swung that featureless head toward him. “What? You’re the one who’s jinxing us!”

“I knew I could get a rise out of you,” Will said.

Horatio sat back. “You make me want to disable my emotional subroutines.”

“I have that effect on robots,” Will quipped.

He drove onto the far left side of the street, past the three lanes reserved for incoming traffic, and weaved between the debris. As the garage came up on the right, he slammed on the brakes and turned the wheel hard right. The semi moaned as its right wheels threatened to lift off the ground, but the vehicle made the turn mostly without issue. The backend fishtailed slightly, but when the wheels caught on debris the trailer portion promptly straightened.

Will stepped on the accelerator and proceeded directly toward the dark garage entrance ahead. The door had long since fallen off its hinges, and the semi plowed straight over it. As the advance party had reported, the opening was big enough to fit the semi and its cargo, but just barely. Rhea could hear the grinding of metal-on-metal as the top portion of the tank scraped against the lower edge of the entrance.

“Not much clearance there,” Will commented.

The sound repeated, more softly, as the two pursuing tankers followed. According to the sensor data shared by the other vehicles, no combat robots remained attached to the trailer portions. But if there had been such robots, they would have been scraped off by the tight confines of that opening.

There were no lamps on inside. Will activated the vehicle’s headlamps, and two cones of illumination lit the way forward. LIDAR filled the dark spaces on either side with wireframes representing former parking stalls. The rusted-out frames of the occasional vehicle appeared on that LIDAR—all the intact vehicles would have been looted for parts by salvagers long since.

Will came to a halt. “Out!”

Rhea opened the door and leaped down. She raced for the door to the stairwell, which was only visible as a rectangular wireframe on the LIDAR ahead.

Horatio and Will joined her, along with Chuck and Renaldo.

“Talk about the ride of the century!” Renaldo said. “I don’t think I’ve had this much excitement since… well, the bioweapon attack on Rust Town!”

“At least you did something this time out, Stick Arms,” Chuck said. “Rather than hide inside your house and grovel. Though I suppose ducking behind the wheel of an AI driven semi is about the same.”

“Hey, you were hiding in a semi, too!” Renaldo said.

“At least I fought back,” Chuck said.

“Bro, if I didn’t fight back, I wouldn’t be here right now,” Renaldo told him.

Rhea reached the stairwell, but heard a strange sound, so she raised a hand and stopped. “Wait. Do you hear that?”

A distant keening filled the air, growing in pitch.

“Bombers!” Will said.

Eyes widening, Rhea kicked in the door and leaped through. The others barreled inside after her.

Thanks to the LIDAR, she saw that the steps leading down to the next floor were blocked by a collapse. However, there was another exit directly ahead, where a door sat askew its hinges. Beyond it, the rectangular corridor of the pedway system beckoned.

She approached that doorway, but as she stepped through, the cement floor shook, and she heard a terrible bang.

The rooftop directly ahead caved in, sealing off the pedway system.

“Crap,” Rhea said, backing away.

“So much for that part of the plan,” Will commented. “Time for the fallback point?”

“I’m not sure it’s a good idea to go deeper at the moment…” Rhea said. “I just want to get out of here!”

She spun around. The floor continued shaking; bangs and thuds of varying volumes filled the air.

“They’re really pounding the daylights out of the city, aren’t they?” Chuck said.

Rhea hurried to the stairwell entrance. Fearful of a collapse, she wanted to rush into the open and make her way outside the building that very instant. But leaving the garage was the worst thing she could do right now. Out in the open, those bombs would make mincemeat of her and her companions. And if not the bombs, then the bioweapons. Sure, it was possible the rest of the garage would collapse, but at least they had a chance while they were still inside. Out there, only death awaited at the moment.

Giving in to his fear, Renaldo tried to rush past her, but she latched onto his shoulder and hauled him back. “Stay here!”

“At least we should take shelter in the semis!” Renaldo insisted.

But she gripped him firmly. Something wouldn’t let her set foot into that garage. Call it instinct.

The headlamps were still active on the semis, illuminating the floor and ceiling in front of the vehicles, and casting the surrounding area in a dim light. As she watched the roof shake, she thought about what was happening. Either those bombers had been present all this time and were simply holding off on deploying their bombs so as to not risk damaging the water tankers, or they had only just arrived. Whatever the case, the mayor had taken a calculated risk, hoping that the garage would protect the tankers from the bombs dropping nearby. He was right, it did.

But it didn’t stop the bioweapons from breaking inside to seek cover.

She heard a strange slurping sound to her left. Glancing that way, she saw the entrance enlarge as a Tasin melted through with its sucker, sweeping that disgusting mouth in a circular pattern. The creature slammed into the surface occasionally, pressing the sucker hard into the closest edge, where it remained for several seconds, the acid eating a dome shape into the concrete, until the creature could push itself backward and continue the circular motion—Rhea had the impression it was struggling against what must be a press of Tasins behind it.

Sure enough, when the creature had made an opening big enough for its body, the bioweapon was unceremoniously shoved forward and stumbled inside on those stilt-like, avian feet, its giant claws clattering on the cement floor. More bioweapons frantically flooded inside after it, trying to escape the carpet bomb slaughter. More than a few of them were squealing, though the most frantic cries came from one that was on fire, and another missing a foreleg.

Renaldo slipped from her grasp, slinking deeper into the stairwell. Rhea retreated slightly, too, but kept close enough to the entrance to continue watching. Will, Horatio and Chuck crowded behind her, peering past her shoulder.

As more and more of the creatures shoved inside, pieces of the entrance broke away, enlarging it further, until almost two bioweapons could squeeze inside at the same time. But then the flow subsided. Rhea counted twenty-one of the creatures crammed into the front portion of the garage.

Now that they were out of the death zone, most of the bioweapons calmed, despite the fact the roof continued to shake, and that some among them still squealed; their antennae began feeling about, and they branched out, some approaching the stairwell. For a moment Rhea feared they were coming for her and her companions, but when the Tasins discovered the tankers, the bioweapons all began squealing with glee. The four-legged creatures rapidly surrounded all three tanks, and promptly began perforating them with their suckers to get at the water. They fought amongst each other for access, squeezing between one another until every last square meter was covered, with the bioweapons pressing their mouths to the steel surface and melting through to drink.

The Tasin that was on fire still shrieked off to one side, but then it promptly collapsed. Its carcass burned silently in one corner. The others seemed not to notice, busy as they were sapping the tanks.

The roof stopped shaking. The bombing run was over, at least for now.

Remind me why we thought stealing water from Aradne was a good idea? Will commented over their mental line.

We’re not really going to go out there, are we? Renaldo asked over the same thought channel.

We can’t stay here, Rhea said. When they’re done with the tankers, they might rest for a few minutes, but as soon as they start moving again, they’ll find us. Those antennae can sense odorants at concentrations well below point one parts-per-billion.

The question is, do we head to the fallback point? Will sent. Or do we abandon this place entirely, and head back to the entrance.

We’ll have to sneak past them, if we attempt to return to the entrance, Horatio transmitted over the mental line. Even if we hug the walls of the garage, we’ll still pass within five meters of at least three Tasins. But if we travel to the fallback point, this is the closest we’ll get to them. For now.

We’re only fifteen meters away, Chuck sent.

Fifteen meters is better than five, Horatio countered.

But didn’t the Warden just say they’ll find us with those antennae of theirs? Renaldo sent. Retreating to the fallback is just as bad as staying here. Maybe worse, because we’ll only be trapping ourselves deeper in the garage.

Yes, but at least we’ll have a vehicle when we reach the fallback point, Horatio said. If they discover us now, we’re doomed. There’s no way to outrun them.

Maybe the Warden can pull a Rust Town for us, Chuck sent. And use that bladed weapon of hers to chop off all their heads. We’ll pull our weight, of course: Tasins don’t like it when you shoot them in the suckers, I hear.

While it’s true that their mouths are a known weakness, I’d rather avoid combat, if I can help it, she broadcast. If you’ll recall, I ended the battle of Rust Town in pieces.

She’s right, Renaldo transmitted. If we have to fight, there’s a good chance at least one of us won’t come out the other side.

And that would be you, of course, Stick Arms, Chuck sent.

Let’s say we go to the fallback point, and get the vehicle the advance party left us, Will said. What then?

We wait, Rhea said. When the Tasins come, they’ll likely be spread out in a long line, dispersed throughout the garage. We drive around them. If any get too close, we shoot them in the mouth. We keep going until we reach the exit.

And emerge straight into the arms of the waiting security forces? Will pressed. I lost contact with Gizmo when we entered the garage. Who knows what’s waiting for us out there?

Keeping an eye on the bioweapons, Rhea hastily explained her plan.

I don’t like it, but I suppose we don’t have much choice, Will sent.

I don’t want to go, Renaldo said. Can I stay?

Grow a pair, Chuck told him. You’ve come this far. Do you really want your life culminating in a coward’s death? Devoured by a Tasin beneath a stairwell in the middle of nowhere? You say you fought when you were cornered in the semi? Well, fight now, then. Otherwise I’ll never believe you. I’ll never let you live this down. Assuming you live at all.

In answer, Renaldo only quivered.

Will glanced at the creatures. Should we go before our friends here finish?

There were three creatures sitting on the sidelines—runts who had been unable to jostle for a place among any of the tankers. They sat between the vehicles, hoping for a turn.

The idle creatures in a group of otherwise occupied bioweapons were always the most dangerous. They would soon grow bored, and hunger would drive them to search for new prey. If it picked up the scent and found the humans, the fight wouldn’t necessarily be easy: a runt among bioweapons was still formidable, compared to a human. Or a cyborg. Also, the resulting commotion would attract the bigger creatures, and the jig would be up.

The closest of the three unoccupied bioweapons was the Tasin missing a foreleg. Keeping an eye on that one, Rhea slowly crept past the stairwell opening. She flattened her body against the adjacent wall and edged forward. The others followed, similarly hugging the wall and advancing crabwise beside her, forming a chain of nervous humanity.

She glanced over her shoulder and was relieved to find Renaldo following on drag. She hated the thought of having to go back for him. Because she would have.

The light from the headlamps only reached so far, and soon Rhea was in complete darkness. She kept her LIDAR operating, and it outlined the dimensions of the parking garage ahead with white polygons. The Tasins were none-the-wiser: they couldn’t detect LIDAR, unlike say the Aradne security forces.

She reached a bend and followed it. In seconds the Tasins were out of view. She continued, and when everyone was past the bend, she glanced at the silhouettes of her companions, who appeared outlined in blue on her HUD, thanks to their link. From their body language, she could sense relief. Renaldo had slumped visibly.

Don’t get too relaxed, Rhea said. We’re not out of this yet.

She led the way through the empty stalls, past the occasional, looted shells of vehicles. She glanced over her shoulder often, leaning forward to gaze past her companions. There was never any sign of pursuing Tasins.

The concrete floor sloped downward, eventually leading to another bend. When she took it, even she couldn’t help but feel more relaxed, as they continued to put more distance between themselves and the creatures. A part of her hoped they’d find an alternate exit somewhere here, something that wasn’t on the map, a path that the bombing had opened up, perhaps leading to the basement of another building. She knew it was wishful thinking.

They attempted to check the stairwell here, hoping for a shortcut, but the door wouldn’t even open; seemed the roof had collapsed on the other side.

You know, I thought stairwells were supposed to be designed to be the last things to collapse, Chuck commented. So that people would have an escape route in case, you know, there were problems.

Seems someone ignored that design rule, Will sent.

Rhea quickened her pace as she continued down the sloping ramp. She zig-zagged from one side of the parking garage to the other, descending two more floors until she reached the fourth and final level. As expected, there were no alternate exits. No escapes. But at least they had found what they had come for.

Ahead, parked in the middle of the ramp, was an SUV in pristine condition. In addition to scouting, the advance team had dropped off three vehicles at strategic fallback points across the city. The fourth level of the parking garage was one of them.

Rhea was a bit relieved to find the vehicle where it was expected, and not already stolen. But of course, it wouldn’t be; salvagers didn’t pass this way with all that much frequency. Not even the Aradne security forces would have known about it: the advance team had taken advantage of blind spots in the satellite coverage to strategically deploy the vehicle right under their noses.

No, she was more worried about another betrayal among her men than anything else, but it looked like the daily scans had been successful in preventing another Anderson incident.

Will approached the driver side door. “Just so you know, I’m overriding self-driving mode.”

Rhea nodded. “I trust you more than whatever AI is installed.”

“Shouldn’t we switch to mental communication?” Renaldo said softly. He cringed as if at the loudness of his own words.

“Their hearing isn’t that sensitive,” Horatio said.

Will entered and took the wheel. Horatio sat in the front passenger side, and Rhea squeezed in beside the robot. Chuck and Renaldo piled into the back seats. Everyone shut their doors as quietly as possible: this usually involved closing the door until the latch clicked, and then pulling hard to seal it the rest of the way.

“So, what now?” Chuck asked.

“We wait for the bioweapons to come,” Rhea replied.

10

Rhea stared out into the darkness, at the LIDAR-illuminated fourth floor of the parking garage.

Chuck thrummed his fingers on the back of her seat.

She turned around and told him: “Can you stop that?”

Chuck stopped.

When she turned forward again, the thrumming resumed.

Will glanced at her. From the blue silhouette of his face, she could tell he was smiling.

Rhea growled, and the thrumming instantly ceased.

“Probably a good thing you stopped,” Renaldo said. “You wouldn’t like to see the Warden angry.”

“No,” Chuck agreed. “I apologize, Warden. I guess I’ve become… too familiar with you. And I’m not sure that’s a good thing.” He glanced at Will. “I used to believe she was infallible. Unbeatable. She’s still the Warden. A good leader, and brave, but I know now she makes mistakes like the rest of us. She gets afraid, like all of us. That’s one of the drawbacks of hanging out with one’s hero too long, I guess. As I once said, familiarity breeds contempt. Don’t get me wrong—it’s not quite contempt I feel. I still respect the hell out of her. I’ll still follow her to the gates of hell, at least I think I will, but I do so no longer in utter awe of her. That’s why I’m not afraid to thrum my fingers a bit, to playfully annoy her. Because I know she’s not so different from me.”

“Okay, just to be clear, you say you still respect her?” Will asked. “That means you’ll obey her—and my—commands? Otherwise you’re of no use to us.”

“Yes, I will obey her,” Chuck said coldly. “Not you.”

Will snorted, then returned his gaze to the fore. “Better hope my pistol doesn’t accidentally go off in your back one of these days.”

“And you better hope the same, Salvager,” Chuck said.

“Enough you two,” Rhea said. “We need to work together. Save the pissing contests for when we’re back in Rust Town.”

That seemed to diffuse the situation, at least somewhat. Everyone remained quiet, at least for the next minute.

“You sure none of the satellites saw us go in here?” Renaldo asked into the silence.

“None,” Horatio said.

“Their forces will arrive eventually,” Chuck said. “They know our general neighborhood after all, thanks to the drones we shot down.”

“They’ll be conducting a building to building search, no doubt,” Will said. “But it could take them all day. Which is too bad. They’d make a tasty treat for the bioweapons. And a good distraction for us.”

“Maybe they’ll go away,” Renaldo said.

“Who, the bioweapons?” Chuck asked. “No. They’ll come.”

Renaldo swallowed. “I used to think I’d be safe with the Warden, no matter what happened. That she’d protect me, because I was one of her most loyal followers. Now I’m not so sure.”

Those words hurt, and Rhea bit down an angry response, saying instead: “I will protect you.”

“I know you plan to,” Renaldo told her. “And that you’ll do your darnedest to protect us all. But like Chuck said, I also know you’re not infallible now, and though you might try to save me, you could fail, despite your best intentions.”

“One of the drawbacks of hanging with your hero overlong,” Chuck repeated.

“But you already should have known I wasn’t infallible,” Rhea said. “All of you saw me fall to the bioweapons in Rust Town. It was live streamed across the world. I failed then.”

“Not really,” Renaldo said. “Because you rallied us all to fight back. You succeeded. And no one really believed you could actually die. Especially considering how quick your recovery was. Sure, we had to pay for a new body, but your mind, your beautiful mind… I don’t know. I guess I thought your mind would always survive, no matter what happened. Protected by your cyborg body.”

“You wanted to know what the real Warden was like,” Will said over his shoulder. “Well, now you know. Ignorance is bliss, huh? Welcome to the inner circle. There’s no going back from this. She’s human, just like the rest of you. A legend, perhaps, yet human all the same. And she can die like anyone else.”

“I suppose so,” Chuck said. “Actually, I’m glad I could see this side of her. The human side. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. And I have no regrets about getting to know you as well, Salvager, along with your robot Horatio. It’s been the experience of a lifetime. I have no regrets. If I die here, I’ll still feel I’ve lived fully. I wanted you to know that. All of you. Going down, fighting side-by-side with the famous Warden of Rust Town and her stalwart companions? Can’t do any better than that.”

“Is that your way of apologizing for your earlier attitude?” Will asked.

“I suppose it is,” Chuck replied.

“Well, I’m sorry for saying I might accidentally shoot you in the back,” Will said. “I’d never do that. You can ask Rhea—the Warden—here. I’m not like that.”

“He’s not,” Rhea agreed. “He’s saved me more times than I can count. I wouldn’t be here, if it wasn’t for him.”

“No, I believe him,” Chuck said.

“Just to clarify,” Horatio said into the silence that followed. “I’m not ‘his’ robot. I’m ‘a’ robot. I operate of my own free will. Will is my friend, not my master.”

“Sure thing, Faceless,” Chuck said.

Again, quietude descended, and the occupants stared tensely into the dark of the parking garage. They waited for bioweapons to appear on the LIDAR.

“Should’ve brought along some portable adhoc cams,” Will said. “So we could have eyes around the bend.”

“It wouldn’t make much of a difference…” Horatio said.

“Do you think Miles made it?” Renaldo blurted.

Rhea glanced over her shoulder at the Wardenite’s blue silhouette. “He made it. His entire team did. Without a doubt.”

The semis had secretly carried several vehicles stowed inside their tanks. Essentially mini tankers, these vehicles had debarked upon reaching the pipeline, using the canopy draped between the tractor trailers and the pipeline for cover.

While the larger tankers loaded water, the smaller vehicles filled their own reservoirs. When they had all topped up, they took advantage of an inherent design flaw in the transport system—the pipeline had been elevated off the ground by the architects in order to protect it from attack by bioweapons. So, when Rhea and her companions departed, the remaining Wardenites, led by Miles, simply steered their smaller vehicles underneath that gap between the pipeline and the ground, and retreated.

The maneuver effectively hid Miles and his team from view of the satellites in orbit. In theory, they’d be able to travel all the way to Rust Town undetected, simply by following the pipeline. There were motion sensors installed underneath the pipes, but the Wardenites, via their city contacts, had bribed a few employees at the monitoring station to look the other way. Hopefully, those employees lived up to their word.

When Miles and his team reached the walls of Aradne, the vehicles would swerve out from beneath their cover and into the ruins surrounding the wall, and then make their final dash to Rust Town in the open. Hackers from the slums were working on bypassing Aradne’s external camera feeds, and hopefully they’d be done by the time Miles arrived so his final lap could be hidden from the authorities.

However even if the cameras remained operational, and the security forces scrambled, likely more than a few of the water transports would make it to Rust Town intact. Especially considering that the Wardenites planned a riot to coincide with the arrival of the vehicles. That, and much of Aradne security was currently deployed above Rhea’s present location.

Once inside the settlement, the transports would quickly be hidden; then water would be doled out to the neediest residents in the coming week. It was a relatively simple plan. And it would work.

“So at least we’re not going to die for nothing then,” Renaldo said. “Though I just wish our deaths would buy Rust Town more than a week’s worth of water.”

“You’re not going to die,” she told him. “You said you felt safe with me? You are safe. I’ll never let anyone harm you.”

Renaldo nodded slowly. “But when you talked about failing in Rust Town, you reminded me that you couldn’t save everyone in the slums when the bioweapons attacked. You tried, but you’re not a superhero.”

“No,” she agreed. “I’m not. Far from it. Of course I couldn’t save everyone in the slums. But we’re not in the slums right now, and I don’t have an entire settlement to protect. Just three men, and a robot.”

“I can protect myself,” Horatio said.

“And I,” Will said.

“Me, too,” Chuck added.

Renaldo remained silent.

“Even so,” Rhea told them. “I’ll do my best to protect all of you. Giving my life to do so, if need-be.”

“No,” Chuck said. “That’s not how this works. We’re the ones who are going to give our lives for you, Warden. Especially now that we know how vulnerable you are. As Renaldo mentioned, no one ever really believed you could actually die, especially not on a ‘simple’ diversionary mission like this one. We were all wrong. I guess we didn’t realize how close you came in Rust Town. No one did. You were still the Warden to us then, the Legend, not the Cyborg. If anyone survives this, it has to be you. Always you. I’m at peace with dying, if it means you live.”

“I’m touched,” she said. “But your protection isn’t needed or wanted.” She didn’t want to lose yet another Wardenite. Anderson’s death was more than enough, thank you.

Chuck didn’t answer.

“Do you understand me, Wardenite?” she asked.

“I understand,” Chuck replied, sounding halfhearted.

“I hope you don’t do anything stupid,” she said softly.

She gazed into the darkness, at the LIDAR wireframes overlaying her vision—white polygons outlining the bend, and the walls, floor and ceiling beside it. Hard, straight lines. Surreal in a way. Like a world empty of all color and surfaces and containing only pale edges.

She heard a faint clattering. CLICK CLACK. CLICK CLACK. Talons scraping across cement.

“They’re here,” Renaldo whispered.

Rhea stared at the bend. Nothing appeared. That clattering simply grew in volume, until soon she could hear distinct rattles within it, overlapping, as of several sources spread out in a line. The occasional moaning of metal permeated the din—likely the shells of looted vehicles being torn apart.

Finally, something appeared around the bend. A long, bent stalk, like a fishing rod, felt along the ground. Another appeared. Antennae.

These were followed by the thin, top-heavy stalk of an avian foot. Tipped by talons, upon contact with the concrete it produced a fresh rattle, one that rose above the general background clatter. Another foot appeared, followed by that armored, plated head, and that toothless, sucker of a mouth. The feathered body came next, so that soon the entire Tasin was in view.

One of the larger specimens, the creature seemed to be crouching, but its upper body still brushed against the cement roof. While it was big, there was still more than enough clearance on the left and right sides for the SUV to pass. The trick was not getting struck by those powerful legs as they did so, because other than the occasional pillar or dismantled vehicle, there was nothing the SUV could use for cover.

Rhea withdrew her pistol.

You didn’t always need cover, not when you packed a sting.

Chuck and Renaldo produced their own weapons, as did Will. Horatio deployed the rifle barrels beneath his forearms.

Give the word, Will sent over the mental channel.

Not yet, Rhea said.

Another Tasin appeared behind the first, then a third. Each creature seemed to respect the space of the bioweapon before it: they kept an entire body-length of separation between them.

Say the word… Will sent.

Not yet, Rhea replied.

The two Tasins that followed the first spread out, with the second moving toward the left side of the aisle, while the third took the right side. Those feelers felt along the walls, pillars, and floor, searching. They were blind in the dark, following only the scent left by Rhea and the others. A scent that would be growing stronger the closer the creatures came.

Can they smell us with the windows closed? Renaldo asked over the mental link.

Our scent lingers outside, Horatio replied. Plus, the vehicle has a weak scent, too.

The third Tasin paused when it encountered the wreckage of a vehicle and began to rip it apart with its forelegs. Good. The racket would cover the minimal noise produced by the SUV’s passage.

The lead Tasin approached on a direct path to the SUV, no doubt driven by the ever- growing smell. Those antennae followed along the ground eagerly, with a seeming certainty that Rhea found unnerving. It increased its pace.

Two more Tasins appeared around the bend behind the other three.

Dude…. Will sent.

Hold, Rhea returned.

11

Rhea continued to wait.

The tense seconds ticked past as the creatures approached, and when the lead Tasin was three car lengths away, she finally transmitted: Go.

The vehicle started silently. Will pressed gently on the pedal, turning as he did so in order to steer around the Tasin. As the vehicle was electric, the only noise it generated was the passage of the tires on the cement. But because it moved so slowly, even that sound was nearly inaudible. Turning the wheel seemed to produce the loudest noise at the moment, as the grooves in the tire rubbed against the cement, but the sound was mostly masked by the din the third Tasin produced as it continued to dissect the wreckage it had discovered.

Nonetheless, the lead Tasin froze. It felt around uncertainly with its antennae, swiveling toward the SUV, attracted not just by the sound, but the scent as well no doubt.

Rhea kept her finger on the window control, ready to lower it at a moment’s notice and blast away. She pressed the muzzle of her pistol against the glass itself, prepared to fire straight through the pane itself if necessary.

But Will drove right past before those antennae could touch the vehicle.

One Tasin evaded.

Rhea glanced at the right-side mirror. The Tasin had spun completely around and followed the SUV’s path precisely; but it still seemed uncertain, moving as if it didn’t know that the source of the scent trail was directly in front of it.

Will drove along the righthand side of the aisle, close to the wall. He crossed over the parking lanes, but there were no vehicles ahead, so he advanced without issue. He squeezed the SUV between a pillar and the wall, being careful not to scrape either.

The second Tasin resided on the far side of the aisle, where it searched along the wall there, while the third was directly ahead. As Will passed the second, he altered course, turning the steering wheel slowly to make as little noise as possible, until he was driving in the center of the parking garage again. The second creature must have sensed the sound, despite the racket produced by the third, because it swiveled its antennae toward the vehicle. One of them almost touched the SUV, and Will momentarily accelerated.

Rhea glanced over her shoulder to peer through the rear window. Both Tasins were now pursuing.

This isn’t working, Renaldo sent.

It is, Rhea countered. If it wasn’t, they’d be chasing us down. Instead, they’re moving slowly. Confused.

Will steered between the next few creatures, all of whom turned to pursue as the SUV passed. Rhea wondered why none of them had yet communicated the strangeness they were sensing to their brethren ahead, or at the very least screeching a warning to be on the lookout. Instead they remained completely silent, acting independently.

Will rounded the bend, squeezing past yet another Tasin. The clearance was very poor: the vehicle very nearly touched the talons of the creature. And as it spun around, Rhea was sure the bioweapon was going to snatch them up. But instead, those antennae merely felt the empty space vacated by the vehicle, and the party drove on untouched.

There were more looted vehicles blocking the parking lanes here, and Will had to very selectively choose his course, lest he hem himself in between the bioweapons and the car frames.

He drove the SUV along the leftmost wall. A car blocked the way. He was forced to turn into the center aisle, but a Tasin was waiting there, so he continued on into the rightmost parking lanes. Unfortunately, there was also a vehicle squatting in their path directly ahead. He couldn’t turn back into the center aisle, because they were driving past the bioweapon at that very moment; the Tasin was turning toward them, feeling with its antennae.

There was no way the SUV could travel between the legs of the bioweapon and skirt beneath its underbelly: because the creature crouched so low, there simply wasn’t enough clearance. The vehicle would only ram into its side.

Will made the split decision to floor it, which Rhea would have done herself. He crashed into the wreckage, sending it careening to one side and out of the way.

The Tasin started screeching frantically. It scrambled forward as fast as it was able in the tight confines, and nearly latched onto the SUV. Will stepped on the accelerator and the tires squealed as he drove into the center aisle.

More Tasins shrieked ahead.

Rhea opened the passenger-side window as Will swerved past the first creature. The next one lunged for them, but Rhea fired at the wireframe mouth with her pistol. The creature screamed and instantly recoiled.

With ancillary support from Rhea, Will pushed the SUV past two more bioweapons like that, dodging those bird-like feet and the talons that tipped them. But then ahead, three creatures stood abreast, blocking the way forward entirely. Their antennae waved energetically as they searched the air in front of them, and their suckers dripped acid eagerly.

“High beams,” Rhea said.

The SUV’s high beams lit up the parking garage, but the creatures held their ground in the blinding light ahead.

“Don’t be afraid to use your pistols,” Rhea said over her shoulder.

Will slowed down, and she used the opportunity to lean out her window. She lined up her pistol with the mouth of the Tasin on the right and squeezed the trigger. Her shot hit its mark.

The creature screamed, backing away, and she targeted the middle bioweapon in the same manner. It, too, backed up, shrieking.

“Take that, Sucker Faces!” Chuck said.

Behind her, Chuck was opening fire at the Tasins in pursuit, buying the slowed-down SUV much needed time.

Rhea continued firing at the three Tasins ahead; Horatio opened the sunroof and joined her. Under their combined attacks, the creatures slinked away; the bioweapon retreat was staggered, and a small gap opened up between them.

“Kind of tight…” Will said when he noticed the opening.

“Now or never!” Rhea said.

Will accelerated, squeezing into the gap between two of the Tasins. The claws of the injured creatures attempted to snatch them up, but the bioweapons couldn’t get a grip and merely jostled the SUV about. One of those talons came dangerously close to cutting off Rhea’s arm at the elbow, and she swung inside, moving away from the window. The claw caught on the interior roof of the SUV near the window and tore away a piece before passing outside.

Close one.

Horatio and the others had pulled inside as well, and they kept low as more claws came in for another pass.

And then the SUV was through; the three creatures receded behind them.

There was only one more Tasin waiting ahead.

Rhea leaned out once more and began firing early, forcing the creature backward. It retreated against one wall, giving Will all the room he needed to pass by.

Chuck and Renaldo continued shooting at the pursuing Tasins behind them. Horatio joined them, firing through the sunroof.

Will took the next bend. Rhea swung her upper body out the window so that she was ready to attack if more bioweapons awaited, but the way forward—as illuminated by the headlamps and LIDAR—proved completely clear.

Will slammed down on the accelerator and Rhea jerked backwards.

“I miss gimbaled wheels!” Chuck shouted.

The Tasins rounded the bend behind them, squealing in pursuit. Rhea joined Horatio, Chuck and Renaldo in firing at the pursuers; thanks to the painful stings bestowed by the pistols, the creatures quickly fell behind.

Will slowed down as he reached the next turn. On the other side there was a clear path all the way to the enlarged exit on the far side of the garage, and Will slammed on the accelerator, jerking the occupants anew. Rhea didn’t mind. She just wanted to get out of there.

The angry Tasins continued to shriek behind them, just out of view past the previous bend. As soon as those in the forefront rounded it, they were met with facefuls of pistol fire, courtesy of Rhea and her companions.

The SUV reached the opening and drove up the ramp, literally leaping from the exit. Broad daylight surrounded them, negating the need for LIDAR, and she shut off her overlay.

Will slammed on the brakes as the vehicle touched down. He didn’t stop completely, but slowed to a near crawl, swerving to the left. He drove up the pedestrian ramp that led to the skyscraper’s main entrance.

Meanwhile Rhea scanned the streets and surrounding buildings, searching for signs of Aradne security forces, or other Tasins. All she saw were a bunch of dead bioweapons strewn across the road. Or parts of bioweapons, anyway. That, and a whole lot of blast craters.

“Are we really sure we want to leave the vehicle?” Renaldo asked.

Rhea ignored the question.

Will halted next to the building’s main entrance. None of the bioweapons had yet emerged from the parking garage. Good.

The five occupants piled from the left-hand side of the vehicle at a crouch, using the SUV as screen in case there were some Aradne security forces watching nearby that she hadn’t noticed. They entered the broken revolving doors set amid the floor-to-ceiling windows.

The SUV’s AI took over at that point and backed up, swerving in front of the parking garage as programmed, and noisily driving away. Even from inside the building, Rhea could hear the wildly honking horn, and the tires squealing as it swerved around the debris, bodies, and blast craters inflicted by the bombing.

The bioweapons appeared shortly; past the windows, she saw them dash into the street from the garage and pursue the vehicle.

Rhea and the others ran deeper into the building’s concourse. Rubble was strewn across the floor in places, much of it broken glass from the floor-to-ceiling windows lining the facade. As she sprinted, she scanned the skies beyond, still searching for signs of Aradne security, but didn’t spot any drones or other airborne vehicles. The enemy forces had likely lost Rhea and the others in the confusion of the bioweapon attack and didn’t know their precise position at the moment. The SUV would soon attract their attention of course, and lead the Aradne forces to the area, which meant it behooved Rhea and the others to get out of sight of those windows as quickly as possible.

While climbing an inactive escalator with the others, she glanced over her shoulder one last time, past the glass to the street beyond, and watched the SUV turn into a side street, vanishing from view. The creatures followed.

The plan was for the vehicle to lead the Tasins to the far side of town. It was possible the bioweapons would outrun the SUV, depending on the obstacles and extent of debris in the vehicle’s path, or interference from the Aradne security forces, but the hope was that once the Tasins destroyed it, they weren’t smart enough to return to the building to pick up the scent of Rhea and the others again.

That the creatures had blindly dashed outside in pursuit of the noisy target, apparently having forgotten the painful bombing that led them into hiding in the first place, was a good sign.

She hurried forward, turning into a dead-end hallway lined with elevators. A stairwell provided foot access to the upper levels.

She immediately shoved open the stairwell door. Beyond, it was clear of debris. She glanced at Chuck. “There you go. Designed to resist collapse.”

“At least some of the architects were paying attention,” Chuck agreed.

Rhea raced up the steps three at a time, zigging and zagging up the different flights, passing a new level every four seconds.

After seven floors, she reached an area where the roof was ripped away and could proceed no further. She turned around to find only Horatio behind her. The others were nowhere in sight. A quick glance at her overhead map told her they were still a few levels down.

Rhea retreated to the floor below and waited next to the door, labeled “six.”

The remaining members of the party arrived. Renaldo and Chuck were panting, and even Will seemed winded. Sometimes Rhea forgot that she was different from other human beings…

Horatio of course remained just as unaffected by the sprint as she did.

She leaned against the wall next to the door, giving the humans time to recover.

“Don’t stop on our account,” Will said sarcastically as he gasped for air. “You’re not killing us or anything…”

“Actually, the flights end after this,” Rhea said. “The top portion of the building has fallen away.”

Will frowned. “Oh.”

“That doesn’t bode well for the stability of the rest of the building…” Renaldo said between gasps.

“It’s not going to collapse, Stick Arms,” Chuck said. The muscular man seemed the most tired of them all, no doubt thanks to all the extra weight he had to lug around. While his body fat was extremely low, muscles like that weren’t light. “Well, maybe the floor might give out under you in particular, but the rest of us are safe.”

“So very reassuring…” Renaldo said.

When they had caught their breath, Rhea opened the stairwell door beside her and entered a small hallway, a mirror image to the one they’d left behind below, with two elevators on either side. A pair of double doors blocked access to what was presumably an office area—this building was from a time when people actually went to work in office buildings.

She went to the doors. No handles.

“Manual overrides should exist somewhere in the walls,” Chuck said. “Otherwise, how else would the occupants get out during a power failure? There should be hidden panels here somewhere. You can—”

Rhea punched into the steel door above the lock, bending the metal inward. She did it again, and again, until she bent the locking latch; the final strike caused the doors to slam open.

“You can do that, too…” Chuck said.

She was right about it being an office area. She stepped into a realm of desks and cubicles that could have been a time capsule of the twentieth century.

“I’ve got Giz again,” Will said. “I’m having him perch on the top of a nearby building to keep an eye out for security forces.”

Rhea nodded; glad the drone had made it.

As she stepped forward, she heard the high-pitched buzz of rotors, coming from beyond a broken window. She ducked behind a desk for cover, and the others likewise found suitable hiding places beside her.

She tapped into Gizmo’s feed, but it promptly cut out, no doubt to avoid detection. She did catch a glimpse of several security drones traveling between the buildings.

She carefully peered past the edge of her hiding place, toward the closest window, and saw the drones swiftly pass by a moment later. Thankfully none of them stopped, and the lot of them continued east at speed, no doubt intending to investigate the retreating SUV.

When the security forces were gone, she waited several moments until Gizmo’s feed kicked back in. The drone was scanning the four horizons, but there was nothing more out there.

When she was satisfied that no more Aradne drones were coming, she stood.

“I had you in my sniper sites so many times,” a familiar voice came from the far side of the room, near one of the broken windows.

Rhea dropped immediately and withdrew her pistol.

“Yet you keep moving,” the voice continued. “Forcing me to come close with you to finish the job. I suppose it’s only fitting. I want you to look in my eyes when you meet your end. I want you to beg for a mercy that will never come.”

She aimed her pistol past the edge of the desk until she spotted the source of the voice.

Wearing a thick, black robe with the hood raised, the Scorpion stood next to a broken window. His long, metallic tail was curled toward her. The tip was no longer equipped with a blade, but instead it was glowing, as if preparing to fire.

12

Rhea ducked again. A bright flash filled the room, and a large circular hole appeared in the desk above her.

Beside her, Chuck looked like he was about to stand to return fire.

“Don’t leave cover!” Rhea told the man. “He’s a cyborg. He’ll mow you down with his energy weapon before you can react! Leave him to me!”

“And me,” Horatio said.

Rhea glanced at the robot and nodded.

She flattened herself on the ground. Above her, another blow ate into the desk, almost disintegrating it entirely.

Rhea low-crawled, moving behind the dividing partition of a nearby cubicle. Beside her, an aisle provided a route between the desks and cubicles, but it was in plain view of the Scorpion. Instead, she used her pistol to melt gaps in the partitions in front of her, making her own path.

Across from her, Horatio mirrored her course, following along on the other side of the aisle, also drilling holes as necessary into the dividers that blocked the advance.

She glanced at Gizmo’s feed in the upper right of her vision: Will had repositioned the drone to give a better view of the building, and she could see the Scorpion still lingering next to the same broken window. He moved away as she watched, vanishing from view.

Rhea resisted the urge to bring the drone closer, as it wouldn’t take much for the Scorpion to shoot it down.

Ahead of her, holes began to appear in different partitions as her adversary began firing randomly into the different cubicles around him, creating viewports as he searched for her.

Rhea rolled to the side when one appeared directly ahead.

“There you are!” The Scorpion said.

She retreated rapidly, retracing her steps until she had placed two more desks between herself and the Scorpion.

She glanced at the overhead map. Horatio remained on the left side of the aisle, three meters ahead of her. The Scorpion showed up as a red dot on that map, which indicated his last known position.

Horatio, she sent on the mental channel. Can you give some kind of diversion? Without dying?

Thanks for the vote of confidence, Horatio replied sarcastically. And yes, I can.

She waited.

Several moments passed. More holes appeared in the surrounding desks. She was about to press Horatio again, when she heard her voice coming from across the room.

“Hey Scorpion,” Horatio said, mimicking the pitch and timbre of her voice exactly. The robot had added a seductive quality to it. “Whatcha doing over there, Big Boy?”

Rhea smiled; holding her pistol before her, she stood up.

Except it hadn’t been Horatio mimicking her, but the Scorpion.

That tail swung its aim toward her.

Rhea dove to the side, and a steam of plasma cut through the desks beside her. The energy beam struck the nearby window as well, cutting through the glass. The wind gusted in from outside, swinging the blinds.

“Ugh!” the Scorpion said.

She risked a glance past the edge of the closest desk. The Scorpion was holding his chest, where apparently Horatio had scored a blow. As she watched, the robot ducked from view inside what looked like a kitchen.

The Scorpion fired at the entrance to that area, striking the doorframe.

Rhea aimed her pistol at the tail and squeezed the trigger.

The energy bolts struck, tearing into the weapon at the tip.

The Scorpion spun toward her, and she ducked once more. But no more holes appeared around her. Had she knocked the weapon out of commission?

She spared a tentative glance past the top of her cover.

The Scorpion was stalking toward her. His smoldering tail trailed behind him.

Apparently, she had scored a deactivating blow after all.

She released several more shots, targeting her foe’s power cell. She burned holes into the robes, but otherwise her shots seemed to have no effect on the cyborg whatsoever. It continued toward her without stopping. She stood up, and that tail swung forward, thwacking the weapon from her grasp.

She leaped backward, landing on top of a nearby desk, and activating the X2-59. Sparks of plasma shot up and down the weapon.

“Try that again,” Rhea said.

The cyborg stopped. That aristocratic face grinned with amusement, and he lowered his hood. The skin that covered his face ended on the sides of his head, where metal took over.

More plasma bolts fired at the Scorpion, courtesy of her friends. They came from all directions. He raised an arm to shield his face, then leaped toward the window. His tail shot out; Rhea leaped backward, slicing down with her X2-59, but the tail was aimed for her feet, and she missed it.

The hard metal appendage wrapped around the ankle of her right foot and pulled her out the window as the Scorpion jumped.

She descended, the building passing in a blur beside her. She vaguely noticed several Tasins lurking on the street below, huddling against the walls of the building, keeping a low profile. They were watching the unfolding scene with interest.

Rhea sliced down with her X2-59, aiming at the tail, but at that moment the Scorpion grabbed onto a protruding ledge and swung inside another level three floors down.

She struck the tail with her electrolaser-enhanced blade: the appendage was rather thin near the tip, and her blade easily penetrated, setting her loose. She went rolling away across the floor, righted herself, and scrambled to her feet.

The Scorpion stood towering before her, three meters away, his head scraping the roof.

“I see you’ve been upgraded since the last we met,” the robed man said, nodding at her body. Her clothing was tight-fitting, so he would have seen the outline of her new, thicker limbs and torso.

He doffed the robes, revealing a metallic body twice as wide as an ordinary human’s: he was so much bigger than he had ever been before. He had holes in the surface of his chest where the energy bolts had hit, revealing melted circuitry within, but he obviously had multiple backup systems, because he seemed entirely unharmed by the damage. His tail swayed back and forth behind him, hardly affected by the small section she’d amputated as well. “I’ve been upgraded, too, little girl.”

“Why are you hunting me?” she said. “What have I ever done to you?”

“It’s not personal,” the Scorpion said. “You simply have a high price on your head.” Small panels in his forearms slid back and rifle barrels deployed. He kept his hands pointed downward. For now.

“Are you employed by Veil as well?” she asked.

The Scorpion blinked but did not answer.

“Well, I’m not so little anymore!” she lunged forward.

Instantly those arms shot up. Rhea was expecting that, and she was already twisting her body to the side. Time seemed to slow as she retracted the blade and leaped to the side, landing behind a desk. Her feet slipped on a rug as she landed, and she slid forward. Grabbing onto one of the legs of the desk, she swung outward, and shoved off the floor at almost the same time, landing on her feet to the left of the Scorpion.

He wasn’t facing her, but that tail was already incoming. Retreating, she started to deploy the X2-59, but the stump on the tip of that tail struck her in the chest almost immediately, and she slammed into a metal beam that acted as a window support behind her. The beam bent inward beneath the blow, and the panes on either side shattered. She dropped, stunned, to the floor.

Horatio broke through the glass of another window and opened fire at the Scorpion. He targeted one of the rifles, scoring a hit. The Scorpion roared, turning toward Horatio and swinging that tail. The terrible appendage struck, batting the robot outside. Horatio was flung all the way across the street: the robot traveled in an arc, descending two stories, and crashing into a window on the opposite building. Momentum carried Horatio inside, and the robot vanished from view, leaving behind only shattered glass.

The Scorpion swung back toward Rhea, but she was already leaping at him.

She could have attempted to amputate the arm that wielded the remaining weapon, but she didn’t want to risk it; the armored metal was thick there, almost as thick as the base of his tail, and might prove stronger than her blade. Last thing she needed was the X2-59 becoming firmly lodged after cutting only halfway through.

So instead she struck across with her blade and targeted the point where the protruding rifle connected with the arm. She struck and severed the barrel.

The Scorpion flung his arm outward before she could bring the blade in for another blow, and connected with her chest, sending her across the room. She struck a wall and left a big dent in the surface before crumpling to the floor.

Before she could get up, the Scorpion landed on her, apparently having jumped from his last position, and pinned her with his feet and tail. With one hand, he grabbed the arm that wielded the X2-59 by the wrist. With the other, he latched onto the shoulder of the same arm.

He crushed his fingers together, crumpling her shoulder, and she screamed in pain. Then he bent the arm far back with his other hand, and tore it clean away, leaving behind only the empty sleeve of her uniform. She felt no more pain. She felt… nothing.

My arm, I’ve lost my arm.

He tossed the arm aside, along with the bladed weapon its fingers yet held in a death-grip.

Rhea struggled to push herself up with her free arm, but she was firmly pinned. She bashed her palm against his steel calves, tried to squeeze the fingers around the armored plates, to no avail.

The Scorpion chuckled. “Look at you. Struggling like a worm. This is the hero of Rust Town? The legendary Warden? I’m sorely disappointed. You fought so much better the last time we battled. Beginner’s luck, I suppose. Good-bye then, little girl.”

The Scorpion raised the tail, aiming the blunt end at her face. He slammed it down.

Rhea swung her arm at the tail, slamming it in the side with her fist; the blow was enough to steer it off course, and the tip smashed into the floor beside her.

“Interesting,” the Scorpion said. “You still have some fight left in you. Good.”

He stepped forward, crushing her body with his weight. Leaving one foot planted in the center of her body, he slammed the other down toward her face.

But she intercepted it with her hand, catching the foot. She slowed it down, but still wasn’t able to keep it off her face. The top of her hand pressed into her cheek, hard; the combined strength of her hand and arm was the only thing keeping her metal skull from collapsing beneath her opponent’s weight at the moment.

“Do I have to rip off your other arm?” the Scorpion asked. “Fine.”

He reached beneath his foot with one hand and grabbed her wrist. He pulled, attempting to rip her hand out from under him, but she knew the movement had put him off balance. She twisted her head and body to the side, shoving her hand out quickly. The sudden movement slid his foot outward, causing it to slip off her face and hit the wall; the rest of him quickly came tumbling down upon her.

But Rhea was already moving, and she rolled clear before he could pin her with his falling body. She scrambled to her feet and raced to the window.

“You little…” The Scorpion was already on his feet behind her. She kept an eye on him and was prepared when he leaped again.

He flew across the room. She waited until the last moment, then slid out of the way, letting him crash into the floor-to-ceiling window beside her. She spun her body at the same time, adding in a roundhouse kick that she instinctively knew. She hit his back above the tail quite hard, adding to his forward momentum.

He burst outside and tried to grab onto the sill with his longest appendage, but was too late, and plunged helplessly down toward the street below. He landed among the lurking bioweapons, who instantly perked up at this treat tossed into their midst.

The Scorpion fled, dodging between those deadly, stilt-like feet. One of the Tasins dripped acid onto him, and he screamed, increasing his pace. He leaped forward, bounding across the debris, until he reached a nearby skyscraper. He started to climb, but then plasma shots smashed into his hands: Horatio was firing at him from the windows of the adjacent building.

The Scorpion shouted in pain and let go of the building. He landed among the Tasins, and somehow avoided being chopped to bits. He fled down the street, rounding a bend with the creatures in hot pursuit.

The door behind Rhea kicked open, and she started.

“Prepare to die, Cyborg Monkey!”

She was never so happy to hear Will’s voice in her life.

She turned around. Will was standing there, pistol in hand.

When she met his eyes, she smiled wanly, and collapsed.

13

Rhea hit the ground hard and crumpled.

“Rhea!” Will rushed her. “Are you all right?” He held her in his arms and lifted her upper body.

“Yes,” she said. “You’re a bit late, but I’m fine. If a little tired.” She glanced at the stump of her right shoulder. “My X2-59…”

“What about your arm?” Will asked.

“What about it?” she said in retort.

“You seem more concerned about the loss of your weapon, than your arm,” he said.

To that, she merely shrugged.

She noticed Renaldo and Chuck standing at the entrance; the pair warily scanned the surroundings with their pistols.

“Did you see what happened to it?” Will asked, glancing at the rubble.

“My arm?” she said. “He tossed it aside. Should be around here somewhere.”

“There,” Chuck said. He stepped over to a broken desk and retrieved her dismembered limb. The X2-59 was still attached to the wrist, though it had retracted when the arm was pulled loose.

He tossed it to Will, who promptly shoved it into his pack. “I’ll work on it later, when we have more time.” He switched to the comm. “Horatio, you there?”

“I am,” the robot replied.

Rhea heard a distinct buzzing coming from beyond the broken windows.

Will pulled her behind a desk and ducked. Renaldo and Chuck also took cover.

She instinctively glanced at Gizmo’s feed. The drone had perched on a nearby rooftop and had a good view of the street beyond. But the feed promptly cut out before she could spot anything.

The buzzing increased in volume, and then receded again. Will peered past the edge of the desk.

“Aradne security drones,” he whispered.

She nodded. They would be investigating the bioweapons that chased the Scorpion. And perhaps the Scorpion himself, if he didn’t take cover soon. She doubted the Aradne forces would drop more of their expensive bombs, not now, considering the water was already lost.

“Just an FYI, but the forces have surrounded a building three blocks to the east of here,” Horatio transmitted.

“Searching for the tankers…” Rhea said.

Will nodded. “Sweeping the neighborhood, moving from building to building, like we guessed they would. We can’t stay here.”

“No,” she agreed. She instinctively pulled her hood low with her remaining hand. “Horatio, status on their eyes in the sky?”

“They have three spy satellites midway up the northern horizon,” Horatio transmitted. “Giving them a partial view of the street. I’d suggest hugging the southernmost walls of the skyscrapers during our retreat, as those areas are completely occluded to them. The Aradne forces also have drones patrolling the neighborhood… I’m retrieving their positions from Gizmo now and aggregating the data feed with that of the satellites: I’ll highlight the ‘go’ and ‘no-go’ areas on the map.”

She received a share request and accepted. On her overhead map, swathes of green appeared, rotating to follow the enemy scouts, and the distant satellites. The rest of the map was painted red. Like Horatio promised, there were sections on the southern sides of each skyscraper marked in green. Those sections slowly grew thinner as she watched, as the spy satellites made their way up the horizon.

“We don’t have much time,” Rhea said. She highlighted a mid-rise structure on the map, three streets away in a different neighborhood. It would give them a good view of this building, so they’d be able to plan their next move in case the security forces didn’t depart after discovering the empty tankers. “Let’s rendezvous with Horatio here.”

She stood up.

“Got this for you.” Will handed her the pistol she’d lost on the sixth floor when the Scorpion had knocked it from her grasp.

She nodded and grabbed it with her left hand. It felt unwieldy in her fingers. “Thanks. I’m not sure I’ll be of much use with it. I’ve been practicing right-handed. Or with both hands. Left hand only? Probably going to miss.”

“Doesn’t your mind-machine interface offer muscle memory mirroring?” Will asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “That’s the first I’ve ever heard of it.”

“Some cyborgs can flip a switch and mirror the muscle memory they learned for one side of the body, to the other,” he told her. “Saves a ton on learning.”

She pressed her lips together. “Interesting. I’ll have to search my menus for it.”

She retreated with Will, Renaldo and Chuck to the stairwell, and began the climb down.

While she descended, she absentmindedly browsed through the menus on her HUD, searching for a muscle memory mirroring option, but didn’t find one. Her aim was just going to have to suck for the next little while.

“Who the heck was that Monkey dude?” Renaldo said.

“Will didn’t tell you?” she asked.

“No,” the Wardenite replied. “He said to ask you.”

She sighed. “Someone who hunts me. The Scorpion, he calls himself. I suspect he’s in the employ of Veil.”

“Veil again,” Chuck said. “He’s never going to leave you alone, is he?”

“Seems not,” Rhea agreed. “At least until I can confront Veil myself and have a little talk with him. Convince him that it’s not in his best interests to send assassins after me.”

“Yeah, we all want to have that talk I think,” Chuck said, caressing his pistol. He and Anderson had been close.

When they reached the bottom of the stairwell, Rhea carefully peered past the stairwell door, searching for bioweapons or Aradne forces, but the second floor of the concourse proved empty.

Keeping the pistol held in hand, she emerged. Chuck took point and led them to the escalator at a crouch. He peered over the railing, searching the lower level for signs of enemy activity. He gave Will the “all clear” sign with his thumb and forefinger, then the two of them strode down the escalator.

Rhea remained on the upper floor with Renaldo; she was prepared to lay down covering fire, if necessary.

Will and Chuck fanned out.

Rhea glanced at her overhead map to get an update on Horatio’s position. The robot was crossing the street outside and approaching the red zone at that very moment.

She gazed past the floor-to-ceiling windows of the first floor and searched for Horatio out there. According to the map, he should have been right in front of her, but all she saw was the carcass of a beheaded Tasin. The asphalt around the creature was littered with feathers; the chlorophyll pigmentation had faded so that the plumes were all black. Its stalk-like legs were flopped to one side, the claws curling skyward.

“How are you doing out there, Horatio?” Rhea sent.

Movement drew her eyes to the base of the corpse, where a robot, diminutive-looking in comparison to the bioweapon, emerged from underneath the feathers. It was Horatio, moving at a low crawl. As Horatio entered the “no-go” zone that was exposed to the spy satellites, the robot slid underneath the upheaved asphalt next to a blast crater. There were enough carcasses and debris littering the route to give Horatio ample cover, all the way to the building.

“Doing fine,” Horatio transmitted. “I’ll meet you on the south side. Go.”

The concourse had two exits, one that opened on the north side of the building, toward Horatio, and another on the south.

“It’s clear down here,” Chuck transmitted a moment later.

She glanced at Renaldo, and the pair double-timed down the escalator and headed toward Will and Chuck, who were waiting near the south entrance. Will kept his pistol trained on the northern exit and its windows, while Chuck covered the southern exit.

Will went out first and vanished from view as he crept along the southern wall. “Clear out here.”

Rhea and the others followed. They made their way to the western edge of the building, which bordered the street. Bioweapon carcasses were scattered across it. Part of that street fell into the “no-go” zone; she had intended to use the debris, like Horatio, to cross it, but she noticed the bioweapons had carved a runnel across the road here at some point, one that had partially collapsed: the asphalt formed an overhang all along its length.

“That’s perfect,” Rhea said.

Will nodded. “But slightly dangerous.”

Rhea glanced at the overhead map and watched as the green zone slowly contracted as the satellites continued their orbit. Their current position would soon be exposed.

“Horatio, we’re waiting,” she said.

“Coming,” Horatio sent.

Movement drew her eye upward, and she raised her pistol: but it was only Gizmo, skirting the gap between buildings. The drone promptly landed on the adjacent rooftop, obviously not wanting to remain exposed overlong. The craft was too small to be detected by the satellites, but enemy drones could still spot it.

“I’m here,” Horatio sent.

Glancing over her shoulder, she saw the robot emerging from the south exit at a sprint.

Will promptly crawled into the runnel, sliding underneath the overhang. Rhea and the others followed. Horatio brought up the rear.

The surface below her formed a half cylinder, and was smooth on one side, like a culvert without the corrugations, but completely jagged in the area immediately beneath the overhang. The whole runnel was also very shallow. She only had to lift her head a short distance to touch the overhang. Will and Chuck had it worse; their heads and elbows constantly scraped against the protruding asphalt as they advanced. Because of that, Rhea was a bit worried they’d end up collapsing a section, but so far, the structure held up.

The jagged asphalt underneath her dug into her clothing, and occasionally a section snagged, forcing her to pause and undo it. After a few times of that she stopped bothering with it, and just let her clothing rip.

She was well aware as she crawled into the “no-go” zone. It was almost surreal, knowing that all it would take to raise the alarm was a subtle shift to the left, to the part of the runnel the overhang didn’t cover.

At one point during the crawl, the protruding asphalt directly above her shifted slightly, and asphalt particles fell onto her. For a moment she thought the entire section was going to collapse, and she quickened her pace.

Glancing over her shoulder, she was relieved to see it had not. “Watch that section,” she transmitted to Renaldo and Horatio.

As she neared the far side of the street, Will passed underneath a particular low section of overhang.

“It’s drooping,” Will transmitted. “Watch yourself, Chuck.”

Chuck kept his body flattened as he crawled beneath that overhang, but his head and back still rubbed against it, Rhea noticed.

The instant he was past, the asphalt collapsed behind him, forming a short gap in the runnel.

Chuck glanced over his shoulder. “Oh no. Warden… I…”

“It’s not a problem,” Rhea said. “Horatio, what are the chances of the satellites picking us up, if each of us is visible only for a few moments?”

“Low,” Horatio admitted. “Given the resolution requirements. But there’s still a chance.”

“I was afraid of that,” Rhea said. She frowned, considering the gap. Then she crawled to it and ripped the cape free from her wardrobe.

She pointed her pistol at the edge of the overhang before the gap and dialed the power output way down. She fired twice, slightly melting the asphalt at each spot, and then quickly pressed the edges of the cape to the surface. As the asphalt dried, the fabric became glued. She released it, and to her satisfaction, it remained attached.

“Chuck, catch,” she said, tossing the other end of the cape to him.

Chuck grabbed it, and then copied her example: he reduced the intensity of his pistol and fired it at the intact portion of the overhang on his side, then glued the cape to the molten areas, forming a roof over the gap.

“Let’s go,” Rhea said.

She crawled beneath the cape, being careful not to touch it, knowing it would be all too easy to rip away. The debris underneath her was even rockier than usual, thanks to the fresh collapse, but she made it across without issue. As did Renaldo and Horatio.

“There’s still a chance the satellites might notice the collapse, and the replacement fabric we erected,” Horatio sent.

“Yeah, what kind of a chance, point one percent?” Rhea asked.

“About that,” Horatio replied.

“I can live with those odds,” she said.

They reach the far side of the street and emerged from the tunnel next to the adjacent building, whose south side was still in the green. They hurried forward, making their way to the target building, and keeping within that green zone the whole way.

No scouts came to investigate.

They reached the target building and entered through a gaping hole in one wall. They found an unblocked stairwell and took it to the rooftop. The superstructures allowed the group to low crawl to one of the far walls, and when they reached it, they found a portion of the wall had broken off, giving them an unobstructed view of the partially collapsed skyscraper they had left behind.

Gizmo assumed a position on the rooftop of the opposite building while Rhea and the others hunkered down on the south sides of the various superstructures, so as to keep hidden from the passing satellites.

Rhea propped up against a gooseneck vent and settled in for the long wait. Will crawled to her side and produced her dismembered arm.

“Could you use a hand?” he quipped.

14

An hour went by without much fanfare.

In the first ten minutes of the second hour, the enemy scouts, moving from structure to structure, finally explored the parking garage, and after fifteen minutes of frenetic activity, with craft seemingly coming in from all sides of the ruined city, things calmed down.

Most of the drones landed on the rooftops immediately adjacent to the parking garage, and there kept watch; the remainder vanished inside the garage itself.

Will worked on reattaching her arm the whole time. It took him the full hour and required that he utilize his pistol as a makeshift soldering iron at certain points, but he succeeded. He was a skilled salvager after all, a man capable of reviving a near-death cyborg, rebooting her mind-machine interface, and installing a new body—so reattaching an arm with substandard equipment should have been nothing to him. And indeed, it was.

Some portions of the arm near the shoulder joint were still bent out of shape, and the key servomotors there had suffered some damage, so she couldn’t move it through the usual range of motion, but it sufficed for now. At least she had the X2-59 back. That was most important to her, strangely enough.

When Will finished working on her arm, he helped her don her camo top once more. The long sleeve slid over the limb, hiding the dents and scratches in the metal. She lowered her hood and gazed out into the street once more, waiting.

A half hour passed with no further observable activity at the parking garage.

“Wonder what they’re doing in there?” Chuck sent. He was seated on the south side of a small rooftop utility box, two meters from her gooseneck vent. While he could have easily spoken to her normally from that distance, he utilized the comm in order to keep his voice volume way down. Probably wasn’t necessary, but an over-abundance of caution was never a bad thing.

“Forensics,” Horatio transmitted from another vent beside her, this one rectangular.

“Maybe they’re trying to decide if we’ve been devoured or not,” Renaldo broadcast. He was lying against the wall that enclosed the rooftop itself, near the gap that gave a clear view of the parking garage.

“Oh, they’ve already concluded we’re dead, no doubt,” Will sent. He sat beneath a gooseneck vent directly across from Rhea. “They’re just staying to recover as much tech and materials as they can from the tankers. Anything to keep it out of the hands of us honest salvagers, after all. Because there certainly won’t be any water left. Not after those Tasins finished with the tanks.”

Will looked at her, as if expecting her to add to the conversation, but she ignored him, and instead returned her gaze to the gap in the wall, and the parking garage beyond.

She found her eyes involuntarily drifting toward the distant horizon. Toward Aradne. The city that had caused her so much grief. The city that had tried to extinguish an entire settlement. She doubted justice would ever come to those responsible. The city council. The mayor.

Unless I take justice into my own hands.

No. She wasn’t a vigilante. She had enough people trying to kill her as it was. Last thing she needed was to put herself on some international Most Wanted list.

Will low-crawled to her side and propped himself up against the same gooseneck vent.

She glanced at him for a moment, then returned her gaze to the distant horizon.

“What’s up?” Will said softly. “You’re awfully quiet.”

She sighed, holding her eyes to the horizon. “What am I? Why are people trying to kill me? Is it because I’m not human? Because I’m a cyborg? Or is it something else? Something I did in my past life. Something… unforgivable.”

“Only Veil knows the reason why,” Will said.

She finally looked at him. “The Scorpion told me there’s a price on my head.”

Will pursed his lips and nodded. “Set by Veil?”

She looked away. “It wasn’t clear.”

“If there’s a price…” Will began.

“Then there could be more than one assassin trying to kill me,” Rhea said.

“Yeah,” Will agreed. “Not something that, uh, most people would want.”

“We know Anderson was employed by Veil,” she said. “But The Scorpion could be working for someone else.”

“Maybe he’s an independent bounty hunter,” Will told her. “Someone posted your bounty, and he’s just one of the many applicants for the job. Veil could be another.”

Rhea had nothing to add to that. It was all speculation at this point.

“Bounty hunting is a profession almost as popular as salvager,” Will said.

“Salvaging isn’t very popular…” Rhea told him.

“My point exactly,” Will said. “Most bounties I’ve seen have been for the heads of bandits. Well, not necessarily the heads… ‘dead or alive’ seems to be a common word choice I’ve seen on the digital postings. So it’s not a job for the weak of heart. You have to be willing to kill, since I guarantee you most bandits aren’t going to let you capture them alive. That’s one of the reasons why the profession never appealed to me.”

“You have access to these digital postings you mention?” she asked. “You’ve seen my name there?”

“Not exactly,” Will said. “I haven’t checked in a long while.”

“You’ll have to show me how, sometime,” Rhea told him. She paused. “You’d think the authorities would have caught up with me by now if I was wanted for crimes. I haven’t always had my public profile disabled, or my comm node programmed to ignore third party connection requests…” It was technically illegal to do either while inside a settlement or city, but that hadn’t stopped certain slum residents.

“You’d think the authorities would have, yes,” Will agreed. “Except you’re forgetting that we assigned you a new ID when we rebooted your brain. Giving you a clean slate. There’s only two ways to do that: wipe a mind clean or transfer it into a new mind-machine interface.”

“It’s too bad we couldn’t retrieve my old ID,” she said.

Will looked away.

She wanted to ask him to reveal what he knew, to tell her what the mark she once wore on her forehead meant, but she knew he never would. It troubled her, because it made her believe the mark must have represented something really terrible, for him to clam up like that, let alone sand it away on sight.

She sighed, and Will rested a hand on her shoulder. It felt good. Not in the way that a lover’s hand might feel, but comforting, like an old friend’s.

“Do you think Aradne will ever restore the settlement’s water supply?” she asked.

“We already know they will,” Will replied. “But the real question is, how many dehydration deaths on the part of the slums will it take?”

“Exactly what I want to avoid,” Rhea told him. “We lost enough lives when the bioweapons attacked the settlement. Such a despicable act. It almost makes me want to…”

“What, take justice into your own hands?” Will asked.

She smiled, shaking her head. “You know me too well. It’s a terrible thought, isn’t it?”

“It is,” Will told her sternly, dropping his hand. “Don’t let it cross your mind again. Because even if you’re successful, you’re only dooming yourself to a lifetime of running. Killing a public official is a crime punishable by death.”

“Who says I want to kill him?” she said. “Just rough him up a little.”

Will frowned, then laughed. He turned away, shaking his head, and gazed into the street below. He seemed to be scanning the buildings. “You think he’s close-by? The Scorpion?”

“He’s out there, somewhere,” Rhea said. “Close or far. If he’s close, he’s watching us no doubt.”

“Let him watch,” Will said. “He can watch all he wants. As long as he doesn’t attack.”

“If he finds a weapon, he’ll use it,” she said. “You remember his first words to me? ‘I had you in my sniper sites so many times.’ Words that send a chill down my back just recalling them.”

“You have to keep in mind, he’s probably trying to avoid the Aradne security forces, just like us,” Will said. “When the security forces set up shop in the Outlands, the first thing they do is quarantine the area. No one is allowed in or out. Not salvagers. And certainly not assassins.”

“Maybe he’s in league with them,” Renaldo said, coming up beside Will at a crawl. He leaned against the same gooseneck vent. “How’s it hanging? You guys looked like you were having an interesting conversation off the channel.”

“A private conversation,” Will said.

“I doubt The Scorpion is in league with the city,” Rhea told the Wardenite. “Assassins operate outside the law. And… well actually, you know what? I take it back. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the security forces were helping him, considering the Aradne city council tried to destroy Rust Town. The mayor and his merry men aren’t afraid to skirt the law.”

“No, they’re not,” Will agreed.

The three fell silent. Chuck shifted nearby, grimacing as if in pain.

“How’s your side?” Rhea asked over the comm, recalling that he’d taken a hit during the run to the parking garage.

Renaldo crossed his arms. “That’s right, talk to him, now that I’ve only just come to your side.”

“I’m fine,” Chuck transmitted. “Told you earlier, patched it up.”

Rhea gave Renaldo an annoyed glance, then crawled across the rooftop, staying to the south side of the intervening pipes and vents until she reached the utility box that harbored Chuck.

She straightened and reached for his shirt, but he recoiled.

“Let me take a look,” she insisted.

“It’s not necessary,” Chuck said.

She glared at him. “You’re going to turn down your Warden?”

With a sigh, Chuck raised his shirt. A crooked bandage covered his ribcage; it was secured with medical tape wrapped haphazardly around the torso. The rushed nature of the application wasn’t surprising, given that he’d completed it while under attack by drones.

“Do you still have your kit?” Rhea asked him.

They had all carried first aid kits in the cargo pockets of their pants for the mission.

“No,” Chuck replied. “Left it in the semi.”

Rhea nodded. She still had her own kit and intended to change his bandage.

Rhea unwound the tape, preparing herself for the worst. When she had removed the last of it, the bandage remained affixed to the wound. She started to slowly peel it away when Will sent: “Careful.”

She stopped, giving Will a curious glance.

“It’s probably glued there by dried blood,” Will explained. “You peel it off, you reopen the wound.”

“Could be the wound is already open,” Renaldo sent. “And the plasma itself is acting as the glue.”

“Are you a medic?” Will asked.

“No,” Renaldo admitted.

“Then shut up,” Will sent.

“But neither are you!” Renaldo complained.

Will growled over the comm.

Rhea hesitated, then made up her mind. It was probably for the best if she let an experienced medical practitioner examine the wound. Changing the bandage might be a bad idea, especially if all she did was reopen the wound. She didn’t notice a smell of any kind after all, so that was a good sign at least.

She pressed the upper edge of the bandage back into place, then rewrapped the tape much more neatly around Chuck’s torso.

When it was done, Chuck lowered his shirt.

“A drone did that?” she asked him, transmitting over the comm so that the rest of the team could hear.

“Uh huh,” he replied. “Glancing glow from a plasma blast.”

“You’re sure it was just a glancing blow?” she pressed.

“I don’t think he’d be alive right now if it was a direct hit,” Will sent.

She nodded. “You’re probably right.” She rested a hand on Chuck’s knee. “You’re going to have to book some quality time with a rejuvenist when we get back. After the doctor finishes properly patching you up.”

“Maybe I want to keep the scar,” Chuck said. “To remind me.”

She smiled. “Hey, whatever makes you happy, my friend.”

She low-crawled back to her previous position, since it had a better view of the parking garage three streets away and propped up against the gooseneck vent once more.

Another half hour passed. Then drones began to emerge en masse from the parking garage. Each of them carried a payload of some kind. She zoomed in: it looked like Will was right about what the drones had been doing in there, because those payloads appeared to be the most valuable parts salvaged from the semis.

“Guess we won’t be able to retrieve any useable components for your damaged arm servos,” Will sent.

“That’s fine,” Rhea told him.

The rest of the drone fleet took flight from the surrounding rooftops, and just like that they departed west, their numbers swarming away across the sky.

“They’re not leaving any forces behind at all?” Renaldo transmitted. “That’s strange.”

“Not really,” Will said.

“They decided we were killed by the bioweapons?” Chuck asked.

“Or they don’t care anymore,” Will said. “They only wanted the water. And figure the bioweapons can have us. It’s not worth the cost to extend their operation.”

“We have to assume they left at least some hunter killers behind,” Rhea said. “Perhaps even a predator drone.” Those were drones that flew at high altitudes, out of earshot, but still capable of raining down death.

“Predators have their own visual targeting system,” Will said. “If we don’t know where it is, we don’t know which areas are safe for travel.”

“If Gizmo isn’t able to detect this drone, it’s safe to assume it’s flying far too high for proper visual identification,” Horatio said. “It will be relying on the spy satellites for targeting data.”

“But is it truly safe to make such an assumption?” Renaldo asked.

“Maybe, maybe not,” Rhea said. “But it’s one we’re going to make. Unless you’d prefer to stay here, hiding inside this Tasin-infested city for the rest of your life?”

“Well no, but I just thought we could wait it out,” Renaldo said. “Like a few weeks or something, until we’re sure the predator has gone.”

“We don’t have enough food and water to last for more than a few days,” Will reminded the man.

“What if there’s a smaller hunter killer still hidden somewhere in the city?” Renaldo pressed. “Watching the streets from the window of a building, waiting to strike?”

“There could be, which is why we’re going to have to be very careful when we advance,” Rhea said. “With Gizmo clearing the route beforehand. Plus, if we travel at night, we force the enemy to use LIDAR to locate us.” She was assuming of course that the thermal masking clothing they wore would be operating correctly. “So we’ll have at least some advance warning of an attack.”

“Unless they decide not to use LIDAR,” Renaldo said.

“Then they won’t see us,” Rhea said. “But we’ll still see them. Hunter killers have a distinctive thermal signature.”

That answer seemed to satisfy Renaldo. For now. Though she knew there was tech out there that could almost completely mask a hunter killer on the thermal band. It was expensive, but still available; whether or not Aradne employed such tech, she couldn’t say. Either way, she decided not to share that bit with Renaldo. Especially considering that she wasn’t sure why she knew about it in the first place.

Rhea kept her eyes on the swarm. Soon the retreating drones had passed beyond the ruins and into the Outlands proper; the craft continued to recede into the distance, their dots barely discernible on the horizon.

“And so, we’re left alone once more,” Rhea mused softly over the comm. “With only bioweapons and hunter killers for company. Along with a certain scorpion-tailed cyborg.”

“Scorpion?” Will transmitted. “You mean monkey. And he isn’t the only cyborg with a sting.”

“No,” Rhea agreed. She touched the pistol at her hips, and then the X2-59 wristband. “He is not.”

15

Rhea decided to hunker down until nightfall before moving, because Tasins were most active during the day, and slept at night. However, even though all of the drones were now gone, the city was deceptively quiet down there.

“Where do you think they’re all hiding?” Will asked when he noticed her gazing at the carcasses on the streets.

“The bioweapons?” she replied. “I don’t know. My guess is the smell of their rotting brethren is keeping them underground.”

“I’m surprised they’re not feeding on the bodies,” Renaldo said.

Chuck scratched his chin. “I heard most bioweapons aren’t cannibals. They try to avoid eating within the same species. For the most part.”

“That’s not what I heard,” Renaldo said. “The mothers routinely eat their babies, especially when food is scarce. Among all bioweapons. Tasins included.”

“How horrible,” Rhea said.

“Uh huh,” Renaldo agreed. “Speaking of food, does anyone have a fat pill to spare?”

Rhea reached into her pocket.

“No, Warden, I got this,” Chuck said. He tossed Renaldo a small pill. “Enjoy, Stick Arms.”

Renaldo swallowed it, and then took a swig from his canteen. His hunger temporarily sated, he appeared thoughtful. “I remember growing up in the slums with my brothers and sisters. We often talked about the adventures we’d have in the Outlands. We were going to be explorers, you see. It was a way for us to imagine a life outside the slums. A life where we’d live on the gourmet meals we saw livestreamed from Aradne. Meals of turkey, chicken, pasta, and gravy.” He sighed. “I never found that life. The closest I’ve ever had to a gourmet meal was a burger picked up from a vendor in the slums, for the price of ten creds, or almost an entire month’s wages. I’ve always had to subsist on food pills.” He glanced at Rhea. “You know, I was hoping we’d be able to make a difference for the people of Rust Town, you and I. Doing stuff like procuring actual meals for the settlement. But if fetching a week’s supply of water was this hard, I can’t imagine what it would be like to do anything more.”

“I’m not worried about procuring actual meals,” Rhea said. “Especially considering that most of Aradne subsists on food pills just like the denizens of Rust Town. Except the ultra-rich, of course. But that’s another matter. Right now, I’m focusing on what the population needs to survive. They have a profusion of food pills. That leaves only water.”

“What are we going to do when the water tanks dry up after a week?” Chuck asked. “Make another run?”

“We’ve already decided Aradne security won’t fall for the same trick twice,” Will replied.

Rhea realized everyone was looking at her, awaiting her response. She sighed.

“I don’t have all the answers,” she said. “I guess we’ll just have to deal with that when it comes. So many things could change between now and next week. Maybe we’ll have negotiated a water pact with the city. Or maybe we’ll find another way to get water. Anyway, first of all we should really focus on leaving these ruins alive.”

“Probably a good idea,” Will agreed.

The lot of them remained mostly silent for the rest of that day. They rested, recovering from the earlier tense moments. Gizmo kept an eye out, watching the northern and western approaches to the building, while Chuck and Horatio observed the southern and eastern sides, respectively.

Rhea didn’t let Will launch the drone into the air: she didn’t want to alert any enemy drones that might be watching unseen nearby. And of course, there was still the unknown threat the Scorpion posed.

The latter cyborg made no further appearances that day. Whether it was because he was too far away, or too severely wounded after his run-in with the bioweapons, Rhea didn’t know. But either way, she was glad not to have to fight again that day.

Night eventually fell. Horatio reported that the spy satellites passing overhead were near the southern horizon now, so that meant the team would have to stick to the northern side of the buildings. The green and red zones on the overhead map updated accordingly.

These satellites utilized infrared cameras to see at night, so in theory, with the clothing Rhea and the others had, they wouldn’t have to worry about being spotted. But nonetheless Rhea didn’t want to take the risk and informed her companions that they would continue to avoid the red zones.

“I can agree with that,” Will said. “I’ve heard that some of the spy satellites can fire focused beams of LIDAR onto areas up to five hundred meters in diameter on the surface.”

“No, that’s impossible,” Chuck said. “The tech for that is years away.”

“Actually, it’s been available for quite a while,” Horatio said.

That news only further cemented Rhea’s mind on the matter. “We stay within the green zones.”

Chuck took point, and led the way to the street below, hugging the northern side of the buildings where the green zones were prevalent. Will followed, with Rhea in the middle, and Renaldo and Horatio bringing up the rear. She wouldn’t let the party members walk too close together and insisted on a three-meter separation between each of them as they made their way along the building walls.

While LIDAR would give away any enemies, it would also betray their own positions. Which is why Will sent Gizmo silently forward, well ahead of the rest of the party, and the drone released bursts at strategic intervals, transmitting the LIDAR data to Rhea and the others to see by so that their positions wouldn’t be revealed. They also kept their own communications nodes dialed way down, just enough to remain in contact with each other if they were forced to take cover.

Rhea would have preferred not to use any LIDAR at all, and simply rely instead upon the preexisting maps to the ruins, but that wasn’t possible, considering how much the streets had changed after the Aradne bombing runs, not to mention the drone attacks on the buildings. Plus, there was also a chance they’d wander in the dark onto a street occupied by sleeping Tasins: if they wakened one of the bioweapons while in their midst, that would be the end of the team. Actually, even without LIDAR, that wouldn’t happen: the feathered creatures would show up on the thermal band in the darkness. The living ones, anyway.

With the information Gizmo relayed, they weaved around house-sized blast craters that marred the sidewalks in front of some of the buildings and circumnavigated any carcasses. Even without being able to see the latter, the smell would have given them away.

The thermal masking clothing hid the party members on the infrared band, but it did require that they wore their hoods pulled quite low—which wouldn’t actually interfere with their vision, considering how dark it was. Rhea tightened hers at that very moment.

She did keep an eye on the buildings around her. Or their wireframes on the LIDAR, anyway. Just in case any enemies out there showed up on the thermal band.

Chuck led them toward the second fallback point, which was several neighborhoods away, near the outskirts of the ruins. Some kind of theater complex whose entrance had collapsed, making the inside completely invisible to the satellites above.

When they arrived, they found the complex still intact. Within, Gizmo reported that the SUV the advance team had parked there remained untouched.

“How do we know Aradne’s drones didn’t boobytrap it?” Renaldo asked.

“Because they never even got close to this area,” Will replied. “They were too busy searching the neighborhood where the tankers were last spotted.”

“You don’t know that for sure,” Renaldo said. “There could have been some drones out there we didn’t see. Scouting the city. Exploring all the places they saw the advance team go.”

“Except the advance team would have been very careful to take advantage of lapses in the satellite coverage,” Will reminded him. “Leveraging the ever-changing blind spots to leave the SUVs in entirely different neighborhoods than where the team was last spotted.”

That answer seemed to satisfy Renaldo, because he kept his mouth shut.

“I’ll handle the activation, just in case,” Horatio said.

The robot went into the theater complex alone and when he was close enough, he remotely started the SUV. Then he had it drive toward the entrance.

Though it seemed obvious that it wasn’t boobytrapped, Rhea had everyone keep their distance.

“All right,” Rhea told Horatio when the robot returned. “Send it on its way.”

She paused a moment to watch the self-driving SUV proceed down the street. It navigated the rubble, moving as quietly as possible and keeping its headlights turned off, acting for all the world like it carried passengers. The vehicle didn’t even release any LIDAR bursts, instead relying upon the map data Gizmo had collected.

As it navigated the streets, the vehicle purposely kept close to the northern sides of the buildings, staying within the green zone. It would be another minute before it finally entered the red zone on its way out of the city.

While she waited, Rhea decided to reposition for a better view. A mid-rise building had collapsed next to the theater complex, forming a ramp of sorts to the rooftop of the latter building. She led the group up the ruins of the collapse and onto the roof of the theater complex; staying low, she positioned on the far side, so that she had a good view of the autonomous vehicle as it continued past the different buildings toward the Outlands.

The SUV entered the red zone shortly. Now, although it was driving in “stealth” mode, the vehicle had no thermal masking whatsoever, and as such would definitely show up on infrared cameras.

She waited, watching expectantly. The seconds ticked past, but nothing happened.

“Guess it’s safe after all,” Chuck muttered.

And then the vehicle exploded.

“Spoke too soon,” Chuck said.

“They kept a predator drone in the area,” Horatio said.

“That’s the only explanation,” Rhea agreed. “They wanted to kill the instigators responsible for stealing water from the pipeline.”

“It’s definitely using the spy satellites for its targeting data,” Horatio said. “Otherwise, we would have been dead hours ago.”

“So what now?” Renaldo asked. “What does this mean for us? We can’t leave this city?”

“Not yet,” Rhea said. “We wait for the advance team to return this way.”

“What’s to stop this predator from bombing the convoy, too, when we emerge with them?” Renaldo pressed. “As a precaution?”

“Nothing,” Rhea said. “But they can’t be certain we’ll be a part of it. You have to understand: the advance team is going to time their entry to coincide with the hour when the streets are most screened from the spy satellites by the buildings. As far as they’ll know, the convoy was just passing through, and didn’t collect any passengers.”

“She’s right,” Horatio said. “And besides, to destroy a convoy without direct evidence is a violation of the Outland Doctrine. They could be sued by the Civilians Rights Guild.”

“And we’re supposed to hope that’ll be a deterrent?” Renaldo asked.

“Given how much money the Guild has made in the past from such suits,” Horatio replied. “Very much so. Such a suit could bankrupt the city.”

“Oh,” Renaldo said. “Okay. But… this predator might be carrying combat robots with it. You know, units they can deploy to stop our convoy and initiate a search?”

“There’s no point in stopping the convoy,” Rhea said. “They didn’t record our IDs at any time during the fight, so they won’t be able to prove any of us are hitching a ride. And we’ll reactivate our public profiles of course when we rejoin the team, so Aradne security can’t say we’re hiding our identities.” Well, she wouldn’t reactivate her own profile, since it was associated with the Warden, but she didn’t want to mention that lest she give Renaldo yet something else to latch onto in his litany of objections.

“You’re forgetting someone, though,” Renaldo said. “The Scorpion. There’s nothing to stop him from attacking…”

“We’ll deal with him if and when the time comes.” Rhea’s left hand instinctively caressed the X2-59 strapped to her opposite wrist.

Those words silenced Renaldo, or perhaps it was the act of touching her X2-59—maybe he thought she was personally threatening him. Oh well, as long as he remained quiet, it didn’t matter.

Guided by the LIDAR bursts Gizmo released at strategic intervals, they made their way through the dark toward the third fallback point. Chuck took point, as before, and hugged the northern walls of the buildings, staying within the ‘go’ zones. They deviated from those walls to swerve around debris and carcasses in their path, being careful to remain in the green. They had to pause at one point when a building terminated onto a street that was marked in red. They could have backtracked, but according to the overhead map, the swath of red was slowly being overtaken by green, and the way would open up again shortly.

So they waited, and after a half hour, the street became green, courtesy of the ever- changing positions of the spy satellites.

During the trek, Rhea routinely searched the wireframes of the surrounding buildings, looking for any aberrations on the thermal band. She saw nothing. If the Scorpion or any other enemy drones were out there, they were keeping themselves well hidden.

Gizmo was also actively scanning for thermal signatures in between LIDAR bursts, so that when Will called a halt, she suspected what he was going to report.

“Got a bogey,” Will said. “Sitting in the fourth-floor window of a building ahead.”

“Hunter killer?” Rhea asked.

“Looks like it,” Will replied. “According to the thermals.”

That answered the question about whether or not Aradne could afford thermal masking tech for its drones…

“Horatio and I got this,” Will continued. “Stay here.”

“No,” Rhea said. “I—”

He turned toward her. “Trust me. We got this.”

“Let them go,” Chuck said. “It’s better if we don’t risk everyone’s life.”

“You mean risk my life,” Rhea said. “The life of your precious ‘Warden.’”

Chuck didn’t answer her.

“We’ll be fine,” Will said. “Horatio, let’s go.”

And with that, the blue silhouettes of both continued forward, leaving the others behind.

She sighed. She should have never agreed to the silly title of “Warden.” She knew that eventually it would lead to situations like this, where others would risk their lives for her, based solely on her perceived value. She should’ve nipped the name in the bud when the citizens of Rust Town began using it. But instead she’d actively encouraged it and look at what it had gotten her. Her two best friends were risking their lives to take out a powerful sentinel drone.

Will and Horatio dropped from comm range, their blue icons freezing on the overhead map as they entered an alleyway in the green zone.

The tense minutes passed.

“We have to back them up,” she told Chuck. “Cover them.”

Chuck shook the blue silhouette of his head. “Let them work, Warden.”

She clenched her jaw and spun away.

The seconds turned into minutes, and Rhea’s worry only grew with each moment.

Finally, at the fifteen-minute mark, she couldn’t take it anymore. She was about to go looking for them when their blue dots updated on the overhead map. And then the blue outlines of Will and Horatio stepped in to view from the alleyway ahead.

“And that’s one less hunter killer to haunt these parts,” Will transmitted. She noticed his backpack had a much larger silhouette than before he’d left.

“You paused to salvage parts?” she said. “I was worried sick!”

“Of course we paused,” Will said. “I’m a salvager. I’m not going to leave behind perfectly good components. It’s just too bad that Horatio fried so many of them.”

“Hey, we both agreed we wanted to take it down in a single shot,” Horatio said. “And that’s what I did.”

“No, I did it,” Will said. “You just added unnecessary collateral damage.”

“You’re using the phrase incorrectly,” Horatio said. “Besides, my damage was necessary.”

“If you say so,” Will said.

“Can we go?” Rhea glanced at Chuck, who nodded and took the lead once more.

Gizmo reported no further thermal signatures along the route, and neither Rhea nor any of the others spotted anything on the infrared band. It was completely quiet out there, as far as they could tell.

The drone did report a street full of sleeping Tasins at one point, and the team was careful to take a roundabout route past them. They plotted a course that kept them within the green zone of course.

Finally, they reached the partially collapsed overpass that was their target. Perfectly shielded from the view of the spy satellites, the third and final SUV squatted underneath the intact corner portion of that concrete bridge.

They hadn’t come to ride the vehicle, or to use it as bait like the second one. No, they came here only because it served as a waypoint for the advance team.

They had three hours before said team was scheduled to pass through the ruins on the return trip to Rust Town.

They hunkered down underneath that overpass, hiding in the corner near the SUV, hidden from the spy satellites, and hopefully other watchers.

They ate their food pills and sipped from their canteens. They were all too weary to talk and spent the remaining three hours resting further. Rhea had been unable to sleep earlier, but now it came quickly, and her mind shut off. Will, Chuck and Renaldo also probably slept, she didn’t know. It was up to them. She knew Horatio and Gizmo would be standing guard, either way.

And so it was that she awoke at the three-hour mark, courtesy of the internal alarm she’d set, and was greeted by the sight of seven SUVs driving into view across the rubble. She saw them on the thermal band in the darkness. The fact their headlamps remained inactive wouldn’t be considered suspicious to the satellites, not with the profusion of bioweapons roaming these lands.

“Good timing,” Horatio said. “I was just going to wake you.”

Rhea nodded. Beside her, the silhouettes of Will, Chuck and Renaldo were rubbing their eyes.

The SUVs were indicated in blue on her overhead map. When she zoomed in on that map, she could see the individual dots of the friendly occupants, who had positional sharing active. Because Rhea and her companions had the intensity of their comm nodes dialed way back, the newcomers wouldn’t detect her own position until they were much closer.

A moment later, she knew they had when she received a join request for the encrypted comm channel. She accepted.

“Warden,” a voice said. “It’s good to see you guys. Glad everyone on your team made it through intact. Any problems?” She recognized the voice of one of the original Rust Town Wardenites.

“None we couldn’t handle, McGraw,” Rhea replied. “Any news from Miles yet?”

“Yes,” McGraw replied.

Rhea tensed, hoping against hope that all of this hadn’t been for nothing.

“His team made it to Rust Town intact,” McGraw finished. “No casualties. Every last drop of water was delivered, and safely stored.”

She slumped in relief and gave Will a hug.

“So it wasn’t all for nothing,” she murmured against his shoulder.

“We’ve bought the residents of the slums another week,” Will agreed.

“Nothing like seeing a plan successfully come to fruition,” Horatio commented. “Yay.”

Rhea let go of Will and glared at the robot’s silhouette. “Why does it sound like you’re being sarcastic?”

“I suppose I am, to a degree,” Horatio replied. “My innate response to most things human is sarcasm, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

The seven SUVs parked under the intact section of the overpass, and men armed with rifles emerged from each of them. They were outlined in blue on her HUD, and surrounded Rhea and the others, keeping their backs to them and scanning the surroundings with their weapons.

“Look at these guys,” Will commented softly. “Think they’re a crack military team or something.”

“Well, I for one appreciate the effort,” Rhea said, knowing that her words would make at least some of those men beam.

Two of the Wardenites parted near Rhea, and McGraw’s silhouette stepped between them to address her.

“So, what are you orders?” McGraw asked.

“We go with you,” she replied. “And then continue to Rust Town. The settlement isn’t in the clear just yet.”

“What about this SUV?” McGraw nodded at the abandoned SUV parked beneath the overpass. “Do we take it with us?”

“No,” Rhea said. “The spy satellites will be paying far closer attention to you this time out, than they did on your initial drive here.”

“Assuming they realize we’re the same convoy,” McGraw said. “Which is doubtful.”

“True enough,” Rhea told him. “But they’ll still be paying attention. So we leave the SUV.”

“Another sacrifice for the cause,” McGraw said approvingly.

“Not really,” Rhea told him. “We’ll send a team back to retrieve it at some point.” She glanced at Renaldo.

“I’ll see that it gets done,” Renaldo said, falling smoothly back into his leadership role among the Wardenites.

McGraw led her to the SUV parked in the middle of the convoy and opened the sliding door.

“I assume your team would like to stay together?” He beckoned at the two rows of empty double seats, which was easily enough to fit six team members.

“Appreciate it,” Rhea said, piling inside. She slid all the way to the window. Horatio piled in next to her, followed by Will. Chuck and Renaldo took the back seat.

McGraw sat behind the wheel, and another Wardenite took the passenger seat.

The other men loaded into their SUVs, and then the convoy set out once more, traveling in single file through the streets. McGraw wasn’t driving, Rhea noted. Not that she expected him to.

She kept an eye on the overhead map and quickly realized the convoy was traveling mostly on the sidewalks to the north of the buildings, staying within the green zone for as long as possible. She held her breath when the vehicles finally moved out into the open, exposing themselves to the watching spy satellites—and the predator circling far overhead.

She remembered it had taken several seconds before the predator had terminated the self-driving SUV she’d sent into the streets earlier, so she didn’t rest easy when nothing happened. Everyone in the vehicle remained absolutely silent: she could feel the palpable tension in the air. She wondered if she should have ordered one of the SUVs to tentatively travel outside the green zone first, but that would have been viewed as suspicious by the satellites, and the predator. After all, the occupants of these vehicles weren’t supposed to know that an SUV had been destroyed here only a short while earlier, and any behavior that suggested otherwise would’ve been considered suspect.

Gizmo followed along dutifully, keeping pace in the dark.

“I want Gizmo to hold off on sending out any LIDAR bursts,” Rhea told Will. “Let’s keep the drone on the down-low for the time being. Observe for thermal signatures.”

“You got it,” Will said.

The SUVs kept their headlights turned off, again mostly to avoid attracting the attention of bioweapons. It would have no effect on the satellites’ ability to see them, considering the vehicles were readily visible on the thermal band.

The seconds turned into minutes, and still nothing happened. Even so, that did nothing to mitigate the tension she felt. Even when they had left the ruins behind, and were well into the Outlands, Rhea still didn’t feel entirely at ease. Although admittedly, she did feel better with each passing moment.

The vehicle had gimbaled wheels, but they weren’t super-gimbaled, so she still experienced the occasional jolt as the SUV hit a depression or bounced off a small hump.

“Gizmo is reporting a series of drones coming from the direction of the ruins,” Will announced, ratcheting up the tension once more.

She glanced at her overhead map and saw seven red dots emerging from random locations among the crumbled skyscrapers. They were all converging on the convoy.

“Hunter killers?” Rhea asked.

“Some of them,” Will replied.

“What do we do?” McGraw said.

“Have the drones made any demands?” Rhea told him. “Or any communication requests at all?”

“Negative,” he said.

“Then keep driving,” she told him. She glanced at her companions. “Turn on your public profiles.”

“What about yours?” Renaldo said.

“Mine stays off.” Rhea’s public profile would be recognized as belonging to the Warden. So instead, she unbuckled her seatbelt and slid into the small alcove between her seat and the seat in front of it and ducked below the window. She turned off her comm node completely. “I hide.”

“Horatio, what are the chances these drones will be able to penetrate the walls of the SUV with their scanners, and detect her hiding there?” Will asked.

“Moderate to high,” Horatio said. “Unless…”

Horatio repositioned himself, as did Rhea.

“I hope that works…” Chuck said.

The drones reached the convoy and adjusted their speeds so that they followed along on either side of the trailing SUV. Then they moved forward as a group, one vehicle at a time, no doubt scanning the occupants as they did so, and recording the identities of every passenger via the public profiles and IDs.

The drones flew alongside Rhea’s SUV. Horatio was seated above her; she’d positioned herself so that her torso and arms rested on his thighs, while her own thighs blended with his lower legs. Her knees were bent, so that her calves flowed away from his feet. To an external scan, it would look like Horatio was a single robot with really thick legs and extra-long feet.

The drones hovered outside for longer than they had any of the previous SUVs. Rhea held her breath, certain she’d been discovered.

But then the drones moved on a moment later.

The flying machines reached the front of the convoy shortly, made their last scan, and then departed toward the city.

Everyone remained quiet inside the SUV. If she was human, she would have been sweating bullets.

Rhea waited for the predator attack, but it never came.

After five minutes had passed, she finally let out a sigh of relief, then she slid off of Horatio, who pushed over. She hauled herself back into her seat and reactivated her comm node.

“We did it,” Renaldo said, laughing and breaking out into tears of joy. She couldn’t see those tears in the dark, but she heard them—there was a tremble in his voice, one that could’ve only been caused by a quivering lip. “We did it.”

Yes, they had.

She flopped back into her seat and reached across Horatio to hold Will’s hand. He held her hand right back and squeezed.

16

Rhea kept an eye out for bioweapons but saw nothing on the dark horizons. Gizmo would have seen any incoming creatures before she did, of course, but she liked the certainty that watching with her own eyes gave her.

Beside her, Will had swapped seats with Horatio. Under the light of a small lamp he wore strapped to his head, he worked on hammering the dents out of her arm with a diminutive mallet. He’d replaced some of the damaged servomotors with parts salvaged from the hunter killer, and he was attempting to restore the limb’s normal range of motion. A portion of her upper arm was still catching on the overhanging rim of the shoulder socket when she tried to rotate it, and Will was concentrating on that section now.

“You know, there are some who say the universe is a grand experiment,” Renaldo said while Will worked. “The rules for atoms assigned arbitrarily by the creators, to see what would happen. These creators prepared a vast tapestry of atomic building blocks, a stew of protons and electrons, which joined with one another to form hydrogen atoms strewn throughout space. Despite the vastness, these hydrogen atoms still gathered, because of the gravity that had also been assigned arbitrarily, and formed large masses called suns.

“The creators sat back and watched as the thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen in these suns produced helium as a byproduct, making the latter the second most abundant element in the universe. Other elements were created by that same fusion, the so-called heavy metals, and these in turn were spat out when the stars swelled to the supermassive and exhausted their fuel sources—without thermonuclear fusion to sustain them, they collapsed under their own weight. New stars formed from the resultant expelled gasses, but so did planets, courtesy of these heavy metals, and hence we have the universe as we see it today. The grand experiment is still running, of which that accident known as life is merely a small part. The creators must be thoroughly enjoying themselves.”

“What’s your point?” Will said, still gently hammering his mallet into her shoulder.

“No point,” Renaldo said. “Other than to prove the absurdity of existence. Everything we perceive as reality would change drastically with only the merest revision to physical law. A tweak to the gravitational constant. Dropping a few decimal places in Plank’s constant. Adjusting the speed of light.”

“Yeah well, that’s fairly obvious,” Will said. “Reality is based on the physical laws that undermine it. Change those, and you forge a completely new reality, one inhabited by vastly different forms of life. Assuming life forms at all. Try playing some of the more out-there MMORPGs, like Machine World, and you’ll see what I mean.”

“Can you imagine if those who created reality grew bored?” Renaldo said, ignoring Will’s comments. “They need merely wave their hands, or whatever equivalents they might have, and the particles that form all of us would fall apart, rearranging into new lattices, as dictated by the changed physical laws. We would become… less than dust.”

“Yeah, you go ahead and imagine that, Stick Arms,” Chuck said. “Meanwhile, I’ll keep my mind fixed on the real world, and what’s possible, rather than the ludicrously impossible. We’re not some frail, flimsy creatures subject to the whims of all-powerful creators.”

“Aren’t we?” Renaldo said.

Will hammered a few more times, then withdrew the small mallet. “Try now.” He slid away, as did Horatio, giving her room.

Keeping her arm bent at the elbow, Rhea held it out to one side and experimentally rotated it. She was able to bring the arm through its entire previous range of motion. She straightened the arm and repeated the revolutions: the range remained the same.

She lowered her arm and smiled at Will. “You did it. Thank you.”

“Not a problem,” Will said. “Told you these extra spare parts would come in handy.”

He shoved his tools back into his pack and slipped the lamp from his head.

He paused.

The lamp was still on, the cone of light reflecting from the ceiling, allowing her to see the shock that registered on his face.

“What is it?” she said.

He immediately deactivated the lamp.

“Gizmo is picking up a low flying aircraft on fast approach,” Will said.

“It’s registering on the SUV LIDAR,” McGraw confirmed. “It’s on a direct intercept course. We have about a minute until it reaches us.”

“A bomber?” Rhea asked.

“Negative,” McGraw said. “It’s small. I’d say a personal flyer. Might be equipped with some plasma turrets, or maybe a laser.”

Rhea heard a sonic boom as the vessel passed only a few meters above them. Dust and rock lifted from the landscape and pebbled the windows and hull of the SUV.

The craft continued away toward the west, according to the red dot on the overhead map, as recorded by Gizmo and the SUVs.

“Something’s on the vehicle in front of us!” McGraw said.

Rhea withdrew her pistol. Beside her, Will likewise retrieved his weapon, and the rifle barrels attached to the underside of Horatio’s forearms also deployed. Everyone else in the vehicle similarly armed themselves.

McGraw activated the headlamps, illuminating what looked like a man punching into the roof of the vehicle directly in front of them. Rhea thought it was the Scorpion at first, but this man had no tail. Assuming it was a man: she could see only the sheen of a metallic body and limbs at the moment. The face wasn’t visible at all, because of the angle. It could have been a combat robot, but then again, what combat robots had four arms? There was also a large pack on the back with two nozzles protruding from its underside.

Rhea pointed her pistol toward the windshield and prepared to open fire.

The attacker glanced toward Rhea, and a pair of lights abruptly flared, sending a blinding stream of light her way.

By the time her own eyes autogated to reduce the intensity, the light had vanished; as had the man on the SUV’s roof.

A loud clang came from directly above.

“He’s leaped onto our vehicle!” McGraw shouted.

More clangs erupted in rapid succession, and several indentations appeared on the inside of the roof, shaped like human fists. Rhea and the others aimed their weapons upward…

One of those fists penetrated, and the steel fingers unfolded and began to peel back the roof material. More fingers appeared as another hand joined in.

Rhea’s current angle didn’t allow her to properly fire through that hole, but Will and Horatio had at it.

Those hands withdrew as if stung, which they had been.

Rhea could’ve fired directly up and into the roof, but the intervening material would’ve absorbed most of the impact. So instead she aimed at the window beside her, preparing for an attack from that quarter.

She piped Gizmo’s feed into the upper right of her vision; the drone had activated LIDAR, and Rhea could see the attacker crawling across the roof toward her window. She had a thought.

Smiling wickedly, she holstered the pistol, unbuckled her seatbelt, then stood up until her head crowded up against the low ceiling. Then she shoved her right arm upward. Using Gizmo’s LIDAR to guide her, she formed a fist and deployed the X2-59 as she impacted the metal. The plasma-sheathed blade burst forth, perforating the roof and traveling into the space beyond. She could feel the vibration of impact as the blade penetrated the body of her foe.

A blood-curdling scream filled the air.

Definitely not a robot.

“The flyer is returning!” Will shouted.

Suddenly Rhea was airborne. A terrible shattering sound filled the air. She retracted the X2-59 and was ripped from the ceiling. The vehicle and her friends were a blur around her. Something struck her. The roof. No, the floor. No, Horatio’s arm.

She slammed onto the roof of the SUV and was pulled to the side, sliding into the door opposite her seat. Above her, Will and Horatio were still buckled in, as was everyone else in the SUV.

She glanced at her window and saw it had broken; in fact, the entire left side of the SUV had crumpled. She was probably lucky to be alive.

She realized the flyer had struck the vehicle and sent it somersaulting into the air; the SUV had landed upside-down and finally ground to a halt.

“Everyone all right?” she asked.

“We’re fine,” Will said, opening his seatbelt and dropping to the rooftop. The others fell one by one as they similarly released their belts.

Rhea peered through the windshield. The other SUVs were turning back.

But then another SUV was rammed by the flyer and sent hurtling away.

Rhea kicked out the window beside her and crawled outside.

She had crawled halfway when two thick hands wrapped around her neck. She had the impression they were trying to twist her head off.

Those hands hauled her upward, lifting her out of the SUV.

She slammed her right arm upward, deploying the X2-59, and partially slicing through one of those hands.

Both hands released her, and she realized she had been carried into the air—she dropped several meters, hitting the rocky ground hard.

She rolled to her feet, activating her LIDAR. She saw the wireframe representation of the four-armed attacker above her, hovering. He withdrew what looked like holstered pistols.

Rhea dashed forward and retracted the blade to begin a complicated series of acrobatics meant to evade the coming energy blasts. They were movements from her previous life, replayed from a muscle memory she didn’t know she had. Around her, the air lit up as the glowing plasma bolts ripped into the ground.

She kept her eyes on Gizmo’s feed, using the drone to guide herself beneath and behind her attacker.

She landed, drawing her pistol as she spun around, and firing at her foe.

The plasma bolts lit up the night sky in turn, and her attacker dodged them using that jetpack of his. He returned fire, forcing Rhea to leap behind a nearby boulder for cover.

More fire came from the direction of the SUV as Will and the Wardenites opened fire. More plasma bolts came in from the other vehicles as the rest of the convoy joined in.

Via Gizmo’s feed, she watched as her attacker landed on the opposite side of the boulder and took cover.

Once more Rhea couldn’t resist a wicked grin.

She holstered her pistol and clambered up the side of the boulder, using her strong fingers to press fresh handholds, and when she was on top, she moved at a crouch to the edge, like a crab, and then leaped, somersaulting.

As she rotated in midair, she deployed the X2-59 and sliced down.

Her attacker tried to dodge, but was too late, and the blade dug into the jetpack.

The thing activated, perhaps of its own accord, sending her attacker skidding away across the terrain. Rhea was dragged along with him, since her X2-59 was lodged in the pack.

She finally managed to tear the blade free, and landed rolling on the rocky ground.

When she came to a halt, she stood up on one knee, and aimed at her receding opponent. But then something hit her in the side, hard, and she was lifted into the air.

The flyer had rammed her.

Her body had contorted, folding over the round tip of the craft. The pistol had been torn from her grasp by the severity of the impact.

Her right side was operational, but her left side seemed completely dead, the servos damaged beyond mobility. More than anything she wanted to shove herself away from the flyer. She wanted to get away from it. But she knew she couldn’t, not while she was airborne: the fall would only cause more damage.

You must mask your emotions in battle.

It wasn’t her voice, but the voice of someone she didn’t know. A memory.

With her working side, she pulled her body onto the upper edge of the craft. She started to drag herself along the outer shell, intending to find the cockpit, or the power center.

But before she got very far, the flyer reversed course rapidly and turned upside down, dumping her. She fell.

She hit hard. According to her accelerometer, she’d traveled eight meters. It felt like more.

She tried to get up, but the fall apparently caused her to lose all functionality in her already damaged right leg, so that now both the left and right were disabled. The only working limb was her right arm, which she used to crawl along the rock, worming her way forward. She could see the remaining SUVs in the distance, on the thermal band.

But apparently they didn’t know where she was, because they were fanning out in a search pattern.

So close.

Yet so far.

She glanced at her overhead map. All the dots had frozen. Had her comm node taken damage, too?

She amped up the range of her comm node to the maximum. The dots remained frozen.

“Guys, I’m here!”

Nothing.

She amplified her voice, and her next words echoed across the rocks: “Guys, I’m here!”

They certainly heard her, because the vehicles stopped. She was relieved when they started toward her.

But then she heard laughter behind her.

“They’re not going to reach you in time.” It was a deep, terrible voice. One she had never heard before.

“Please,” Rhea said. “I just want to be left alone.”

“We all want that.” She felt hard hands wrap around her neck. They squeezed and twisted.

Rhea clenched her jaw, cording her neck muscles. She knew it wasn’t going to be enough to save her. Hypoxia warnings flashed across her HUD.

She swung her right arm upward, intending to deploy the X2-59, but a thick boot struck her forearm, and slammed her wrist into the ground.

“Oh no you don’t,” her attacker said. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to kill you. I intend to bring your brain in. Just relax and remain calm. Let the process unfold naturally. Disable the pain. Or better yet, shut down your brain entirely.”

Rhea continued to grit her teeth, struggling against the terrible rotations of those large hands. He was going to rip her head right off, and there was nothing she could do about it.

A flash came from the side, and her adversary released her.

“Let her go!” Chuck’s voice.

“Get down!” she heard Will say. The words were meant for Chuck, she thought.

Another flash came from above, sourced from her attacker.

“Chuck!” Renaldo said.

More flashes erupted from all sides. She heard the sound of energy bolts ripping into metallic skin.

And then her opponent dropped to the ground beside her.

Headlamps activated in a circle around her, courtesy of the SUVs that had driven up. They illuminated the metal chassis of her opponent, a chassis that was currently smoking. One of her attacker’s four arms had melted away entirely.

She saw his features for the first time. Like the Scorpion, he had a human face plastered onto a metal skull. But otherwise, she didn’t recognize him.

His lips were curled into a rictus of pain, and the bags underneath his left eye spasmed. A red froth formed around his mouth.

“I want to see her,” came a weak voice. Chuck’s.

She tried to push herself up but could not.

A moment later Horatio and Will carried Chuck into view. They lowered him in front of Rhea, so that he was lying down across from her.

“Hey,” Chuck said.

Rhea was too horrified to answer. He had been shot up very badly. It was obvious he wasn’t going to survive.

She couldn’t help the tears that formed then. “Chuck. I’m sorry. I couldn’t protect you. I failed again.”

“No,” Chuck said, smiling. “You didn’t fail. You succeeded. You let me do my job. You let me die with dignity. This is what I wanted. To protect you. This is what I’ve always wanted. It’s been an honor. Thank you, for everything.”

“No,” she said, reaching out to cup his face in her palm. Her tears flowed freely. “The honor has been mine. Thank you.”

Chuck gave her one last weak smile, then closed his eyes forevermore.

Growling, she turned her head toward her attacker, who yet lay on the ground on the other side of her. Filled with renewed strength, she dragged her body toward him with her working hand.

Will went to her, and tried to help her up, but she shoved him away. “Don’t touch me!”

She reached her disabled adversary and began punching his face repeatedly. Dents appeared in that soft skin, and plasma erupted, but no actual blood.

Her attacker suddenly started laughing, which only made her pound his head all the harder.

She abruptly pulled her arm back, and was about to deploy the X2-59, when she heard Will’s voice.

“Don’t,” Will said. “Not until he answers a few questions.”

Her foe had stopped laughing then. His face was a pulp by that point, barely recognizable above the metal it was laid upon.

“You work for Veil?” Rhea said.

Her attacker chuckled through the gore. “Veil, no. I wouldn’t work for that bitch! I’m an independent.” Frothy liquid trickled from his mouth as he spoke.

“Who hired you?” she asked. “Or who posted the bounty on my head?”

The man seemed puzzled. “Don’t you know? Did you think that crossing him would have no repercussions?”

“Crossing who?” she said.

The man opened his mouth, but no words came. All that emerged was that pinkish plasma, backlit by the SUV headlamps.

“Crossing who?” she repeated.

From the way his head bobbed back and forth, she thought he was laughing, though no sound came. Finally, when he spoke again, his words sounded robotic, as if his voice synthesizer was malfunctioning.

“You’re going to die a horrible death, Warden,” the man said. “My only regret is that I won’t be around to see it. This is what I get for showing you mercy, I suppose.”

“Mercy?” Rhea said. “You call this mercy? Killing my closest friends and followers?”

She activated the X2-59, and the blade slammed into his metal skull.

17

Rhea gathered the men for a full post-battle report.

Two other members of the party had suffered severe injuries in the attack, thanks to the flyer ramming their SUVs, but thankfully no one else had died. The team couldn’t actually find that flyer, though they scanned all four horizons; Horatio speculated it had some kind of return-to-home program that executed once it lost contact with its owner. Will corroborated that via Gizmo—the drone had last spotted the vehicle heading away to the west, at speed.

Three of the SUVs were too badly damaged to continue. With the help of the Wardenites, Horatio and Will quickly salvaged a few of the more valuable parts from these vehicles, and then the group crowded into the remaining SUVs and set out for Rust Town once more.

The Wardenites had turned down the back seats in one of the vehicles, forming an expanded storage section for Rhea. They had laid her body flat on those seats, and Will joined her. Spread out beside him were the spare parts he needed to repair her, salvaged from the latest cyborg, the SUVs, and the earlier hunter killer. For example, he’d detached all four arms from the attacker, and they sat in a pile beside him. He was removing circuitry from one of those arms at that very moment. He wore the usual headlamp on his forehead to illuminate his work in the night.

In the middle seats in front of her, Horatio was squeezed in beside Renaldo and three other Wardenites.

Will set down his mini screwdriver and pulled the circuit from the arm. Then he turned his attention on her own arm. He frowned.

“Going to have to straighten these pieces before I can open your arm.” He retrieved his mallet and began hammering.

“I’m in your hands again, Salvager,” Rhea told Will as he worked.

He nodded absently.

“Seems like I always find myself damaged after every fight,” Rhea said. “I guess I should take a hint from the universe. I’m not meant for this kind of work.”

“Mmm,” he said, setting down the mallet. He pulled, and after a few tries, opened a panel in her arm. “No, I think it’s your calling.”

He used his mini screwdriver to remove a circuit from her arm. He showed it to her. It was broken almost in half. “This is why you can’t move your arm. Well, that and the servomotors.” He set aside the broken chip and retrieved the one he had taken from the cyborg’s arm. “What would you do without me?”

She smiled sadly. “I don’t know. Now that you bring it up… you’re always there to repair me, no matter how many times I mess up. I worry that someday, you won’t be.”

He gave her a comforting grin in return. Or tried to. “I’ll always be here for you.”

From his voice, she sensed that even he didn’t believe the lie.

She thought of Chuck, who was being conveyed in the storage area of one of the other vehicles. They were going to return his body to his parents. Rhea didn’t know how she was going to break the news to them.

“I miss him,” Renaldo said from the middle seats.

“We all do,” Rhea told him.

“He was the best of us,” the Wardenite said.

She nodded. “He certainly was.”

“He’ll never get to see another sunrise,” Renaldo said. “Never get to see his mom and dad again. Never get to love.”

Rhea glanced at Will and lowered her voice. “I should have never approved this mission.”

“If you hadn’t, the slums would be out of water right about now,” Will said.

“At the very least I shouldn’t have come along,” she said. “Bringing these assassins with me.”

“You couldn’t have known they’d follow you,” he insisted.

“But I had an inkling,” she said. “The Scorpion had followed me into the Outlands once before. After Anderson’s attack, I should have realized the same thing might happen again, and I should’ve stayed well away. But I came. Putting you all at risk.”

“Look,” Will said. “We were well aware of the risks when we signed up to be part of the diversionary force. We knew death was more than possible, if not from bioweapons, then the Aradne security forces. Adding assassins to the mix didn’t change much. In fact, we were safer when the assassins attacked because they concentrated on you. Chuck made a mistake. He stood up when he should have remained in cover. You can’t blame yourself. Besides, as Chuck told you, he wanted this. It was an honor for him to serve you.”

She turned her head aside, letting him work. She knew Will was right. It wasn’t her fault. Yet it still hurt, just as Bardain’s death hurt. And Anderson’s.

I won’t let grief rule me. I cannot.

“You’re a Karnator, right?” Rhea said. “Do you believe he’s already returned?”

“I do,” Will said. “Perhaps in a different galaxy. Hopefully as something sentient, but if not, he still exists. So that’s why you need not grieve.”

She sighed. “The problem with the Karnator theory is, well, it’s a little sad. Sure, in your theory, we get another chance at life. But it means we’ll never see those we lost again. Ever. According to you, if I die, I’ll be reborn as something else, with no memory of this life. I’ll never see you again. Never see Chuck.”

Will nodded. “That’s the price we pay for the chance of life. Would you rather cease to exist, and descend into nothingness? Besides, who knows, you might just meet him again, you just won’t realize it. He could be the seedling you plant in your arbor. Or the neighbor’s newborn. Or the bioweapon you meet on the field of battle.”

Rhea shook her head. “None of that is really comforting. Especially the latter.”

Will nodded. “You already know what it’s like to be reborn anyway.”

She stared into his eyes. “Yes. And it’s an experience I’d rather not do again.”

“Fair enough,” Will said. “By the way, I don’t want you to feel like you have to stay awake while I work on you. Catch some Zs, if you feel so inclined.”

On that note, she closed her eyes.

* * *

The convoy reached the ruins bordering Rust Town shortly before dawn.

Rhea had slept the whole time, surprisingly enough. Or maybe it wasn’t so surprising—all that fighting, not to mention the damage she’d taken, had exhausted her.

She awoke to discover Will had repaired most of her upper body. One leg was also partially working. She was able to sit up as the convoy approached the settlement, and Will continued to work on her damaged legs afterward.

The ruins were bumpier than the plains beyond, which was probably what had wakened her, considering the number of times she was being jolted in her seat. The wheels were only gimbaled, after all, unlike the super-gimbaled versions the tankers had sported.

A robot sentry watching from the ruins nodded as the vehicles passed.

Between the ruined buildings to the right, she could see the rebuilt Texas barriers; there were even a few rotting Hydra heads still impaled on flagpoles outside those concrete walls.

The convoy turned inward, toward the settlement; ahead, the gap in the Texas barriers that formed the southern entrance awaited.

The robots on duty let them pass without issue. The settlement council had assigned a new sheriff, a man sympathetic to the Wardenites, and he’d advised the sentries to watch for these SUVs. The old sheriff, whose name was Astor, had deserted to Aradne: he had been complicit in the bioweapon attack against the settlement, having recalled all robots and other defenses from the perimeter ahead of the Hydra arrival. Astor deserved jail time, but instead probably lived in a luxury penthouse courtesy of the Aradne city council.

As soon as she had a network signal on her HUD, she glanced at Renaldo.

“Prepare a message for Chuck’s parents,” she told the Wardenite. “Send them our deepest condolences. And… and whatever else you want to say.”

She felt ashamed for not having the courage to visit his parents in person, and even more-so for making someone else decide what to tell them, but she truly didn’t know how to handle it. She had no idea what to say, knowing that the wrong words would only compound their grief. She thought it was better to leave it to someone who had known him better. Then again, Renaldo and Chuck had only really met for the first time after joining her Wardenites.

She shook her head, forcing the guilt away. I don’t have time to deal with it.

She actually did, but she wasn’t going to admit it to herself.

The convoy threaded through the city. The people had gathered along the rebuilt streets to welcome them, and they threw confetti into the air in between shouts of “Warden! Warden!”

“They love you,” Will said.

“For now,” she told him. “But give it a week. Let’s see how much they love me when their latest water supply runs dry.”

They stopped outside a compound surrounded by more Texas barriers. These barriers were topped with laser turrets in places, and two well-armed robots watched the main entrance.

“What’s this?” she asked McGraw.

“Welcome to your new headquarters,” McGraw said. “The Wardenites decided you needed somewhere a little more secure. Considering what happened in the Outlands, I agree.”

Will and Horatio helped her debark, as she still couldn’t walk on her own.

The robots at the entrance let them pass without issue. Well, they did make Will and Horatio, and the other Wardenites accompanying them, submit to scans.

“All newcomers are scanned for chips upon arrival,” Renaldo explained while one of the robots ran a hand over his head. “This is the new policy, according to Miles. He says he’s continuing to scan everyone each morning and night as well.”

“Good,” Rhea said. “But that policy should probably extend to me. We don’t want me to fall under the control of someone else, after all.” She nodded at the robot. “Scan me.”

When it was done, Will and Horatio led her inside, where a sprawling series of cargo containers stretched across the compound. Some were stacked high, others descended deep underground—she knew, because the open trenches the latter resided in were being filled as she watched.

“I’ve been talking to the architects,” Renaldo said, following behind. “They’ve prepared a Faraday cage around your quarters. This one is equipped with a deactivation switch, remotely accessible from within your bedroom only, so you don’t have to go in and out of your room to access the Net anymore.”

“Perfect,” Rhea said as she entered the closest cargo container.

“It’s located three floors underground, by the way,” Renaldo said. “More of a bunker. So you’re less exposed to, say, an unexpected plasma attack from the city walls.”

“I don’t think an attack like that is entirely unexpected at this point,” Rhea said. “Aradne city council doesn’t exactly like me.”

“You think they know you were part of the water heist?” Renaldo pressed.

“No,” Rhea said. “Well, I mean I’m sure they suspect. But they don’t know for sure.”

They approached the hole in the floor that led to her quarters. She could see the rungs in the wall leading down to the next level.

“Hm,” she said. “Let’s set up shop here for now. Those rungs don’t look like something I’d want to attempt until my legs are fully up and running. Besides, I can access the Net here. And catch up on the latest.”

Will and Horatio helped her sit down, then Horatio stood guard while Renaldo went to supervise the Wardenites as they completed construction on the new HQ.

She learned from the live stream summaries that the city wasn’t very happy about her water run. The Aradne city council was threatening to launch a class action suit against the residents of the slums, but the threat was empty, because they knew the people of Rust Town had no real money. It would affect the crime lords of the slums, of course, but that was about it.

Also, Aradne was no closer to bowing to the demands that it share its supply with the settlement. If anything, the fresh supply of water had only further hampered negotiations: Aradne city council was pissed off, and meanwhile their Rust Town counterparts were less inclined to compromise, given the lack of desperation. Then again, even if the mission had failed and people had been dying of dehydration in the streets, Rhea highly doubted that both sides would have come to an agreement already. The Aradne council would want to let them suffer a bit, so that when Rust Town finally returned to the bargaining table, its representatives would agree to anything.

While he worked, Will showed Rhea where to find the digital postings for bounties on the Aradne Sheriff’s Office website. There were no listings matching her description.

“If someone wanted to post a bounty for the ‘Warden,’ they’d want to be circumspect about it,” Rhea said. “I doubt they’d post it to a public site. Let alone the Sheriff’s Office. Doing so would only cause outrage among my fans.”

“Well, at least we know it’s an illegal bounty,” Will said. “That means if we can ever track down this Veil, we can press charges and prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law.”

“There will be no charges.” Rhea glanced at her X2-59 and raised her wrist so Will could see the retracted weapon. “This is the only law Veil will ever know.”

* * *

Rhea spent the next half hour in that spartan room, and when Will completed the repairs to her legs, she climbed down the rungs to the basement level to investigate her new quarters. Will and Horatio joined her.

There was an empty cargo container at the bottom, next to her bedroom, just like the previous design.

“So, this is the bunker they prepared for you,” Will said. “Cozy, if somewhat lacking in the essentials.”

“She is a cyborg,” Horatio told him. “What she considers ‘essential’ is likely vastly different from what you had in mind.”

“Keep reminding me…” Rhea commented, unable to hide the annoyance from her voice.

She entered the bedroom and closed the door behind her; the network icon faded from her HUD, a sign that the Faraday cage was installed and working.

She surveyed her surroundings. Most of the space was taken up by the bed, a sprawling, luxurious thing with a quilted coverlet and silk blankets. Like before, she also had a nightstand, and clothes closet available.

She immediately added some virtual decorations to make it more homey. The first was an augmented reality painting, which a fan had uploaded to one of the image sharing sites shortly after the defeat of the Hydras. She placed it on the wall next to her bed. It depicted her standing victorious atop a pile of dead bioweapons in the ruins of Rust Town. Electricity ran up and down the X2-59 strapped to her wrist, and the blade was pointed at the golden walls of Aradne as if implying that city was next on the ‘to conquer’ list.

Some might think it vain to display such a portrait in one’s bedroom, but it reminded her of the bravery she was capable of when she reached deep inside herself. If ever she should experience some self-doubt, all she need do was look at that painting and belief in herself would be restored. She almost considered programming her HUD to overlay it onto every wall wherever she went, but there was such a phenomenon as too much of a good thing: oversaturating the painting would take it from the realm of the inspiring to the distracting, or even worse, she would stop paying attention to it entirely, and its inspirational effect would be lost.

The second virtual augmentation she applied came in the form of a window. This she placed on the opposite wall. It displayed a portal onto a beach locked in eternal sunset. The golden rays of the sun cast the waves and sand in lovely shades of orange, while red and purple clouds streaked the horizon. She didn’t quite know what drew her to this landscape, but when she randomly saw the video while browsing one day, she’d fallen in love with it, and knew she had to make it part of her home.

“You have that look,” Will said.

“What look?” she asked distractedly.

“The look of someone who’s just added a virtual augmentation to her walls,” Will replied. “You seem… at peace.”

She nodded. “It’s the look of someone who’s come home.”

“When can I see them?” Will asked.

“You ask every time,” Horatio complained.

“Not every time,” Will said. “This is like… the second time I’ve asked.” He returned his attention to Rhea. “So? Set them as public?”

“Not today,” Rhea replied. “Maybe I never will. I have to have some privacy, you know. Some things that are for me alone.”

“Okay,” Will told her. “But when you come down to my quarters and start asking about my virtual decorations, don’t expect me to share.”

“That’s fair,” she said.

With her enhanced hearing, she heard a clanging sound from without, slowly growing in volume: the noises overlapped, as if multiple people were descending the rungs. A glance at her overhead map revealed nothing—the Faraday cage was blocking communications with the outside world.

She searched the nearby network interfaces and found the remote interface Renaldo had told her about, which was accessible only from within the Faraday cage. She connected using her default credentials and disabled the cage. The network signal returned on her HUD, and two dots promptly appeared on her overhead map, labelled “Miles” and “Brinks.”

The clangs became deeper in tone as the boots touched the floor outside, and a moment later a knock came at the door. She accessed the closest external security camera and confirmed it was indeed the two Wardenites who stood outside. She reenabled the Faraday cage and the video connection vanished.

She nodded at Horatio and the robot opened the door.

Miles and Brinks entered. “Warden!” The two were opposites in height, with Miles towering over the diminutive Brinks; so much so that the latter almost seemed like a child in comparison. A thickset child.

Horatio went to them and scanned each of their heads with his palm. “Excuse me, but I hope you don’t mind if I double check…”

“Not at all,” Miles said. The albino turned his head toward Horatio to make the scanning easier for the robot.

After a moment Horatio stepped back, apparently satisfied.

“Shut the door, please,” Rhea told the Wardenites.

Miles closed it behind him.

Rhea looked the pair up and down. “How was the return drive? Any issues?”

“None,” Miles replied. “We triggered zero motion sensors while traveling beneath the pipeline. Or if we did trigger them, the city employees we bribed looked the other way. When we reached Aradne and began skirting the city wall, hackers from Rust Town were able to shut down the video cameras. It was the smoothest operation you could expect. None of the Aradne security forces intercepted us anywhere along the route.”

“I just wish ours had been so smooth,” Will said.

“Renaldo told us about Chuck,” Brinks said, lowering his gaze. “Such terrible news. That could have been any one of us.”

“It hurt,” Rhea agreed.

“Two assassins came after you?” Miles asked.

“That’s right,” she told him.

Miles frowned. “Veil has been busy, it seems.”

“Tell me you have news from DragonHunter,” Rhea said.

Miles nodded. “Actually, we do. He visited us in person this morning. Apparently, yesterday Veil contacted him to perform a Denial of Service attack against a competitor. DragonHunter ran a trace during the call.”

“So he knows where Veil is?” she asked.

“Yes,” Miles answered.

She bit her lower lip impatiently. “So, tell me.”

“He says he’ll only reveal it to the Warden in person,” the albino explained.

“All right, well, can we summon him then?” she said. “Oh wait, let me guess; you’ve held him again. He’s already here.”

“Good guess,” Miles said. “We’ll bring him down.”

The pair vanished.

“This should be interesting,” Will said.

Miles and Brinks returned a few minutes later with DragonHunter. Rhea deactivated her sense of smell when the smallest whiff of him reached her.

With his cloak full of holes, and his long beard covered in dirt, the lanky hacker looked as disheveled as ever. And extremely paranoid: his eyes darted to the left and right, as if DragonHunter was expecting some assailant to jump out at him at any time.

Horatio scanned him outside the room, then they let him in. As in their last meeting, to allay his fears she closed the door to activate the Faraday cage, shut down the internal security camera, and instructed everyone to disable recording on their local AR devices.

When that was done, she gazed into the AR goggles that covered his eyes, and said, pointedly: “You know where Veil is?”

DragonHunter smiled proudly. “I do, Warden. Or at least, where he was, when he contacted me yesterday.”

“Tell me,” she said.

“You must understand, Veil’s cybersecurity staff obfuscated the data well,” DragonHunter said. “But it didn’t matter, because you see, I had poisoned the DNS servers of most of the local service providers in Aradne via a zero-day exploit, so that all hostnames resolved to IP addresses of my choice. I mostly routed traffic to the expected IP addresses, except known obfuscation servers, which I sent directly to me. Before I forwarded these latter packets on to the real obfuscation servers, I logged the data, along with the originating IPs. Now, a lot of people use obfuscation servers, so you won’t believe how many packets that actually is… I’m not looking forward to my bandwidth bill next month. In any case, there was so much of it that I had to write a custom AI-driven filtering routine, comparing the final data I received to the data logged by my server, to sort out the packets I wanted.”

“Great,” Rhea said. “I can appreciate that it was a lot of work. But please, where did Veil connect from?”

“The IP matches up to a wireless access point in the parliament area,” DragonHunter said. “Specifically, the lower floors of city hall.”

“Can you send me the location on the map?” she said.

“Well, I suppose,” DragonHunter said. “But only because you’re the Warden.”

She received a share request and bounced it off Horatio.

Check this for viruses, please, she sent the robot over a private mental channel. Last thing she needed was some hacker messing with her remote interface.

Happy to be the guinea pig, Horatio replied. A moment later: Seems safe. Transmitting the coordinates your way.

She received them, and forwarded the data on to Will, Miles and Brinks.

She applied the coordinates to her overhead map, which recentered on the Aradne parliament compound. Most of the map regions in that area contained only outlines of the building exteriors, since the blueprints weren’t available to the public. And while the interior of the city hall was partially mapped, the area where the flashing icon appeared was completely blank. Because of the position, she knew it was in some sort of basement.

“What’s the range of this access point?” she asked.

“To use it, Veil, or his agent, would have to have been within two hundred meters,” DragonHunter said.

Rhea tapped her chin. “If I get close enough to whoever contacted you, will you be able to identify them?”

“I’d have to hack the access point first,” DragonHunter said. “And find out the unique ID of whoever was using it at the time Veil called me. But yes.”

She tapped her lips. “Wouldn’t you also be able to run a reverse lookup on that ID against the public profile database?”

“Yes,” DragonHunter replied. “Assuming Veil, or his agent, actually has a public profile.”

“Probably not, huh?” she said. “But we have to try. How long would it take to hack the access point, so we could get that unique ID?”

“I’ll need physical access, unfortunately,” DragonHunter explained.

Rhea nodded. “Could you prepare a dongle of some kind, so someone else could deliver your hacking payload?”

DragonHunter pursed his lips. “Actually, yeah.”

“All right then,” Rhea said. “When you have this dongle ready, give it to me.” She glanced at Will and Horatio.

“You’re not really planning what I think you’re planning…” Will said.

She smiled sweetly. “I believe so. I’m going to personally delivery the payload.”

“You can’t,” Will said.

“It’s only a matter of time before Veil strikes again,” Rhea told her closest friend. “I say we take the battle to Veil. Hit first, while we still can.”

“We still don’t know who posted your original bounty,” Will said.

“No,” Rhea agreed. “But I’m hoping we’ll find that out from Veil. I can be very persuasive when I want to be.”

“That didn’t work so well when you interrogated the last assassin,” Will commented.

“Let’s just say, I wasn’t in the proper mood.” Her body had taken a terrible beating, and Chuck had just died. No, she hadn’t been in the mood at all.

“Even if you get Veil’s ID, it’s very doubtful he has a public profile,” Will said.

“But at least we’ll have the ID,” Rhea said. “We can leave behind a security camera near the access point. Trigger it to activate when someone with that ID walks by.”

“You’ll never get inside city hall,” Will pressed. “Let alone the parliament area. The compound is too well guarded.”

She glanced at DragonHunter. “I have the greatest hacker of all time at my side to help me. Don’t I?”

DragonHunter shivered with either fear, or excitement. Rhea couldn’t tell which. Maybe both.

“You have my help,” DragonHunter agreed. A long strand of spittle erupted from his lips as he spoke; it formed a trembling, sickly white string that reached to his bearded chin.

She returned her gaze to Will. “See? What could go wrong?”

18

The next day, Rhea partook in the daily riot at the main gates. Her comm node was disabled, so that her ID and public profile weren’t readable, and she wore her hood low. This allowed her to conceal her identity not just from the Aradne security forces, but from her fellow slum residents.

DragonHunter operated from a secure location nearby. However, Will and Horatio were among the rioters, as were several of her Wardenites. They helped drive the crowd into a seething frenzy, so that when DragonHunter finally hacked the gate controls and opened the sliding metal door, the rioters were more than ready to rush the waiting robots.

Except Aradne security had mechs waiting this time, instead of the previous chain of combat robots.

But the lead rioters didn’t even hesitate when they saw the mechanical monstrosities. The crowd simply rushed straight at the mechs, which promptly began scooping people up for arrest. But there were too many rioters, and several members began to slip past.

Rhea was one of them. She squeezed between the legs of a mech. It tried to swat her backward, as its hands already carried three other rioters; she was unarmed, like everyone else, and the only option she had was to dodge that slap. She dove forward and rolled across the pavement; when she got up, she joined the other rioters on the other side who sprinted into Aradne.

The crowd fanned out, and robots began to arrest those individuals who were on the outer extremities.

“Muster!” Will said through a loudspeaker. “They can’t arrest us if we stick together and protest peacefully! To me!”

Those who ignored Will were promptly arrested; a man and a woman swung bats into the windows of a nearby building, and a mech scooped them up by the scruffs of the necks and hauled them away.

Will waited as the crowd gathered to him, then he handed the loudspeaker to Renaldo, who led the group forward. He started a chant.

“Mayor Grandas, give us back our water!”

Will, meanwhile, joined Horatio at Rhea’s side, as did the other Wardenites who were in on the plan.

Rhea carried a small sack at her hips. It wouldn’t register as a weapon to the robot scans, as within were several magnetized disks containing seemly innocuous circuitry. DragonHunter had designed that circuitry to interfere with local comm nodes, allowing her to sever objects of her choice from contact with the central AI in charge of the city, simply by attaching one of the disks. DragonHunter called them CommNixers. They wouldn’t work on the bigger comm nodes of larger units such as mechs and shuttles, but smaller combat robots and devices were fair game.

Along the crowd’s route, mechanical monstrosities gathered on the sidelines, watching but not intervening. Residents also observed from the balconies of apartments that bordered the road. Armed drones followed along overhead, below any civilian drones in the area. Gizmo was up there somewhere as well.

When the throng was halfway to the parliament area, Renaldo swung them to the right, taking an avenue that led directly to the water supply towers. The city’s robots were taken by surprise: evidently, they had been expecting the crowd to march to city hall once again. The security forces were forced to scramble as they relocated from the previous route.

Rhea grinned. They probably wouldn’t pull the entirety of their forces from the parliament area, but enough would be gone now for her to sneak past. At least, she hoped so.

She paused above a manhole. Will and the other Wardenites gathered around her, blocking her from the watching eyes of the robots. She quickly attached one of the disks DragonHunter had given her, disabling the manhole’s sensors. Then she tore it open and slipped inside.

“Good luck,” Will told her above the chanting crowd.

She nodded, then lowered the manhole cover on top of her, and blackness descended.

The stench hadn’t been too bad up until that point, but as soon as the manhole cover settled into place, it really hit her, and she was forced to dial her olfactory sensitivity way down.

She activated her LIDAR, and white wireframes overlaid the darkness, forming a cylindrical tunnel. She climbed down the rungs along its side.

There were sensors placed in the sewers to prevent unauthorized exploration, sensors that would activate well before Rhea was able to sever them with her disks. DragonHunter had been tasked with disabling them. She’d soon find out if he had succeeded.

She reached the bottom of the descent. The vertical tunnel joined up with a larger horizontal crosspiece, and Rhea swung onto the small ledge near the middle. That ledge would allow her to advance without stepping into the sewage that resided in the center of the passage. Its surface was represented as a layer of green polygons against the white of the tunnel.

She followed the marked route through those twisting and turning passageways.

At one point she paused, because a pair of turrets watched from the ceiling, guarding the way forward. She was relying on DragonHunter to disable these as well.

Swallowing, she stepped forward.

As she got closer, those turrets swung toward her menacingly. Tracking her.

She froze.

The seconds ticked past. When nothing happened, she took a tentative step forward. Then another. A third.

Still the turrets did not fire.

She continued forward, and finally passed beyond their range of fire. She slumped, allowing herself a quick moment of respite, then straightened to continue forward once more.

She reached the destination manhole shortly. She climbed the rungs that led to the surface, attached a CommNixer to the manhole cover, and then turned it and lifted. She opened it only a crack, then pivoted in place, one hand firmly gripping the upper rungs as she cleared the area all around her.

DragonHunter knew her full route of course, and if he had successfully hacked the cameras in the area, he would be watching her though them right now. Meanwhile, a fake feed would be furnished to the central AI, a looping video depicting an empty street. And if DragonHunter hadn’t succeeded, she would be arrested.

Or killed.

She slid the manhole cover aside and hauled herself out. She stood about half a block away from city hall, and well within the parliament area. The compound was empty around her.

She carefully replaced the manhole cover and jogged toward the outskirts of the pyramid that formed city hall. No robots came rushing at her, nor any energy bolts.

A good sign.

Still, it was slightly frustrating: DragonHunter could remotely hack the software that managed the cameras, and yet he was unable to penetrate the access point she needed. Well, she supposed she should be happy the cameras were vulnerable at all, otherwise she’d have no way of reaching her target.

Actually, that wasn’t entirely true. Another option was to wear a special reflective suit, one that would confuse the cameras into believing she was one of the patrolling robots. However, the central AI would send troops to investigate why this particular robot deviated from its patrol route. Yes, bypassing the cameras was the best option.

She reached the edge of the pyramid and peered past. Two robots guarded a small side entrance not far from her.

She pulled herself onto the sloping wall of the pyramid. The metallic surface was etched with small vertical channels, perhaps originally designed to carry rain; whatever their purpose, they allowed her good handholds for her climb.

While DragonHunter might be handling any nearby cameras, there was still a chance that a passing robot patrol would spot her, which is why she tried to keep her body as close to the surface as possible.

After ascending the equivalent of two stories, she found the skylight she was looking for. The glass pane began a short way inside the rectangular recess that harbored it.

She bent over, lowered her upper body to the glass, and pressed her face close. The boardroom inside was empty.

She pulled herself back up, set her hands down on either side of the recess for support, and let her legs dangle above the glass. She kicked hard several times in a row. The glass was shatterproof, but each time she hit it, she weakened the surrounding supports, until they broke away entirely. Each subsequent kick caused the pane to descend a few centimeters, until finally she’d shoved it through the recess entirely, and it plunged, landing on the boardroom table with a loud thud.

She swung her legs back up and let her upper body hang through the opening. She gazed at the entrance, watching it very carefully, ready to withdraw at a moment’s notice.

If she had triggered a silent alarm, robots would come bounding through that door any moment now. Any moment.

But none came.

Still she waited.

After two full minutes passed, she concluded that DragonHunter had successfully disabled the motion sensors. She imagining the hacker scolding her: “Come on Warden, how could you doubt my prowess?”

She swung her legs down and lowered herself inside, dropping to the table. She landed softly on the glass.

She leaped onto the carpeted floor next to the table and made her way toward the door at a crouch.

She placed one of the CommNixers on the door and then tried the handle. Locked.

She crushed that handle in her fingers, and then opened the door.

The walkway beyond would have more cameras of course, but she had to trust that DragonHunter had them handled. She peered past the door, confirming that there were no patrols of any kind out there, then headed out.

She hugged the wall, staying away from the walkway railing, which overlooked the main concourse of the building. Overhead, the interior walls sloped upward to an apex, matching the exterior shape of the pyramid. Rectangular frames interrupted that slope at intervals, marking the walkways of subsequent levels.

Rhea reached a stairwell, placed a CommNixer, and opened the door without issue. She continued down three flights to the basement. She ignored the camera domes that watched her from the top of each flight.

At the bottom she placed another CommNixer, but the door was locked, so she had to crush the handle once more.

She opened the door and peered past; after confirming that the way was clear, she emerged. She replaced the broken pieces, carefully attaching the two sides. The handles drooped slightly, seemingly ready to fall apart at any moment; she waited, ready to catch the pieces, but they remained in place.

She closed the door slowly, being careful not to knock the broken handles loose, and then stepped back after shutting it to examine her handiwork. She nodded to herself. Even though the handle drooped, it would pass a cursory inspection.

She continued toward her destination. The blank overhead map filled out as she explored the hallway.

She passed several doors, some of which were probably storage closets. As she approached a bend, she heard the clang of metal feet coming from beyond.

A patrol.

She quickly retreated. None of the doors had handles; she tried shoving them anyway, but they didn’t give.

Finally, she reached a door with a handle. It was locked. She placed a CommNixer, then broke off the handle and opened the door.

It was a storage closet. She entered, then partially closed the door behind her. She replaced the broken handle, holding it in place from the opposite side; from the front, it looked completely intact.

She attached another CommNixer to the back of the door, retrieved the disk she’d attached to the front, then shut the door.

She waited, listening. As that clanging grew in volume, she thought of the broken stairwell handle. She had told herself it would pass a cursory inspection, but as she thought of how much it drooped, she was no longer quite so sure.

She tightened her grip on the handle just in front of her; the clanging peaked in volume as the patrolling robots passed the storage closet, and then the noise receded once more. She waited several moments, with those footfalls sounding steadily, though more softly, with each passing moment… if the robots had spotted the broken stairwell handle, she would have expected the footfalls to have paused by now. But they did not.

The footsteps continued fading in volume until she could no longer hear them.

She waited another minute. She was somewhat worried that it was a ruse, and that the robots had left one of their number behind to deal with her while the others advanced merely to set her at ease.

She tentatively opened the closet a crack. There was no one there.

Of course there wasn’t. Robots didn’t plan their attacks like that. If they had discovered her, they would have opened the door straightaway.

You need to relax. Stop overthinking. You can do this.

She left the closet. Because of the way the handle had cracked, its pieces wouldn’t balance on the door by themselves, so she tossed the broken parts inside and simply shut the door.

She continued forward. When she reached the bend, she peered past, and confirmed that no robots were waiting. She hurried underneath the camera dome in the ceiling and tried not to imagine what would happen to her if DragonHunter failed to hack any of the devices.

She reached a T intersection at the end of the hallway. Directly above that intersection was the access point: a small, square-shaped object attached to the ceiling.

She retrieved the dongle from her pocket, carefully peered past both branches of the T intersection, and then stepped underneath the access point. She attached the male part of the dongle to the female connector and watched as blue lights began to flash on the tip. She waited several moments, and when the device turned green, she removed it.

The hijacking software was installed. Assuming it worked, at that very moment DragonHunter would be downloading the unique IDs of everyone who had interfaced with the access point over the last few days, along with their timestamps.

She retrieved the wireless security camera she had stowed away in one of her pockets and attached it to the ceiling next to the other device. She turned it on. The small camera would connect to the Net via the closest access point—in this case, the compromised device next to it. Once the camera received the appropriate ID from DragonHunter, it would store it, and go offline. It would activate when the holder of that ID walked past, transmitting the video undetected to DragonHunter and her team. After that, they could use facial recognition databases to find out who the person really was. Hopefully.

Now that the hacker was theoretically in control of the access point, it meant she could connect to the Net without alerting the central AI.

But if DragonHunter’s dongle software had failed…

She decided not to risk it.

Then again, if the dongle had failed, then the security camera would have already triggered an “unidentified device” alarm.

As she made her way back the way she had come, she decided she might as well connect. DragonHunter might need her to go back and apply the dongle again or something.

Rhea activated her comm node and signed into the Net via the compromised access point. She pulled up DragonHunter’s name in her contact list and initiated a call.

“Did you get the ID?” she asked when he picked up.

“I did,” DragonHunter replied. “The camera is loaded and good to go. By the way, there was no match in the public profile database.”

“Figures,” Rhea said.

“Do you need the ID?” DragonHunter asked. “In case you want to perform any local lookups?”

“I don’t—” she began, but then received the share request a moment later. She reluctantly accepted. She didn’t really intend to search for the owner of that ID while she was here—at the moment all she wanted to do was get out.

“I’m going incognito again,” she said.

“Wait, watch yourself,” he sent. “There are two robots around the bend ahead. You might want to backtrack.”

“How close are they?” she asked.

“Seven meters,” he replied. “Looks like they’ve stopped to examine something.”

She approached the bend that led back to the stairwell, and carefully peered past.

Two robots were examining the broken closet handle.

She ducked immediately.

A sudden clanging came from around the bend, as of metal feet on the hard floor. Growing in volume.

The robots were approaching her.

Had they seen her?

Well, either way, there wasn’t time to retreat. Based on the pace of those footfalls, the robots would be here in seconds.

She disabled her comm node. There was nothing DragonHunter could do for her now and hearing his voice in her head during the coming fight would only distract her.

She retrieved two CommNixers from her sack.

When she thought the robots were steps away from the bend, she vaulted around it. She tossed the two CommNixers in rapid succession, and the magnetic mounts attached to the heads of each robot, cutting off their communications.

They raised the rifles built into their forearms, but Rhea was already lifting her leg in a spin kick. Her foot struck the closest robot in the chest—she targeted the region above the power cell. The machine went flying into the wall, leaving a big dent.

But Rhea hardly noticed; she was already threading toward the next machine. She twisted her body as it opened fire: the shots missed, slamming into the wall instead. She wrapped her hands around the rifle barrels and turned the ends upward before her opponent could fire again, effectively disabling the weapons.

Muscle memory guided her through a series of deadly martial art moves, but the robot countered them all perfectly. She tried the same spin kick, but it grabbed her by the leg and used her momentum to swing her around, ramming her into the wall. She left a big hole as she dropped to the floor.

Before she could get up, the robot was on her. It slammed its fists into her torso, targeting the lower right of her torso—where cyborgs, like robots, usually carried their power cells. But what the machine didn’t know was that hers was in a nonstandard location.

She pounded its head with her elbows and raised her knees, trying to shuck off her foe. The robot realized punching her torso was futile, so it shifted its body upward. She tried to slide out from underneath it, but the robot was quick and matched her movements. It pinned her chest with its knees, then wrapped its hands around her neck and squeezed.

Smiling grimly, she slid her fists between its wrists and shoved outward. Didn’t work: the robot was too strong.

Beside her, the second robot was starting to stir—while her kick had left a nice dent in its chest, the armor had apparently saved its power cell. She had caused a temporary spike of some kind, though, as evidenced by its sluggish recovery.

She grabbed the second robot’s forearm and lifted the intact rifle barrel to her current opponent’s head. She threaded her other hand around the arms of the robot that choked her and wrapped her fingers around the barrel, holding it in place. Then, with the arm closest to the second machine freed up again, she slammed her fist down, smashing it into the power cell area of the still-recovering robot.

The armor was already damaged from her kick, so she expected it to cave readily, but the area proved surprisingly resilient.

An alert sounded on her HUD.

Warning. Brain hypoxia imminent. Warning.

She lifted her hand and brought her fist down again. Again. Still nothing.

Warning.

She felt dizzy, and knew she only had a few more moments of consciousness left.

She released another three blows in rapid succession, and finally managed to collapse the area above the power cell. Sparks erupted from the second robot, and it spasmed.

Come on, fire your weapon. Fire!

She tugged on the rifle with her other hand, trying to spur a response.

There—finally the convulsing robot fired. Plasma ripped into the first robot’s head, and it released her.

She rolled away before the first robot realized it was merely blinded; she kept her grip on the second robot’s forearm the whole time. She landed on top of the second machine and slammed her fist into the power cell area one last time. A final burst of sparks erupted, and then the damaged robot ceased all movements.

Rhea pulled herself off it. The first robot lunged at her but missed, landing on the second robot instead. She scrambled to her feet, stumbling away from the blinded robot, and turned toward the stairwell.

She froze.

Ahead of her, several more combat robots awaited outside the stairwell, apparently having arrived from upstairs. They all had their rifles pointed at her.

It seemed her two opponents had managed to get off a signal before she attached the CommNixers.

Too bad.

She raised her hands in surrender.

19

The security robots escorted Rhea through the corridors of city hall. They had bound her wrists behind her back, and one robot followed along on either side, their polycarbonate hands threaded through the crook of her elbows and tightly gripping her arms.

Despite all her upgrades, and her enhanced strength, she couldn’t break through her binds. She had tried several times, but eventually had been forced to concede defeat.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked.

The robots didn’t reply.

She activated her comm node, since there was no point in maintaining radio silence anymore. She tried to connect to the compromised access point but was already too far away and had to accept a closer one. She wasn’t sure she’d actually be allowed to log on to the Net through it, but a moment later she received the confirmation.

She highlighted the names of Will and DragonHunter in her contact list and initiated a mental call. Both parties connected at almost the same time.

How goes it? Will asked.

Didn’t DragonHunter tell you yet? she sent over the encrypted mental channel. I’ve been captured.

What? Will sent. No, he did not! Where are they taking you?

I don’t know, she replied. I’m still in city hall, for now. We’ll see how long that lasts.

It’s my fault, DragonHunter transmitted. I should have been able to protect you. Or at least given you an earlier warning about those robots. I wish I could have found a way to disable them.

It’s not your fault, Rhea sent.

I should have gone with you, Will sent.

You can’t always protect me, Rhea sent. If you were with me, you would’ve only been captured too.

Well, I’m coming to get you, Will said. Me and Horatio. And any other Wardenites that want to help. DragonHunter still has control of the cameras.

She passed another group of armed robots on patrol. They were searching the different rooms, as if on the lookout for intruders.

I wouldn’t advise it, she told him. They’ve heightened the patrols, as far as I can tell. They’ll be expecting a rescue attempt. You’ll be captured, too.

I never was one to follow advice, he replied.

Rhea knew she couldn’t stop him, so she didn’t say anything more. She could disable location sharing or turn off her comm node entirely, but that wouldn’t stop him. If Will did plan to rescue her, she might as well make his job as easy as possible.

I probably won’t have control of the cameras for much longer, DragonHunter said. The central AI will be wondering why she didn’t show up on any of the feeds until after the attack. And why those two robots suddenly vanished from the cameras as they rounded the bend… that’s right, I did my best to hide you during the fight.

That could explain why the second patrol found her. The CommNixers might have successfully blocked the communications of the first two robots after all, and the central AI had sent a patrol to investigate the malfunctioning cameras.

There you go, Will, Rhea sent. Stay away. Without control of the cameras, there’s no way you’ll reach me.

Come hell or high water, I’m going, Will replied.

No, she sent. It won’t help anyone if you get captured, too. If you truly care about me, stay back. I’ll find a way to get out of here. Somehow.

He didn’t answer.

Will?

At first, she thought he’d hung up on her, but then she glanced at the upper right of her HUD: she’d been disconnected from the network. The access point was blocking her.

Convenient.

Now that she’d turned her comm node back online, she took the opportunity to scan the IDs of every robot that passed by. None of them matched up with the ID DragonHunter had sent.

The robots loaded her inside a glass-walled lift and the doors shut. Through the glass, she could see the compound spread out behind her.

The lift traveled at a diagonal angle along the outer surface of the pyramid, following its slope. Each time the floor number incremented on the digital display, a soft ding sounded.

When the display read fifteen, the lift halted. There was still a significant portion of the pyramid remaining above her, but the usable space available would diminish with each successive level, so she figured she was probably close to the top floor.

The doors opened and the robots escorted Rhea into a narrow hallway. The doors on either side were unlabeled. She had augmented reality popups enabled on her HUD, but no overlays appeared, which told her she didn’t have the access rights necessary to view them. Then again, it was also possible there weren’t any overlays, and these doors remained unlabeled not just in the physical realm, but the virtual.

Ahead, a pair of double doors opened.

She was taken into a sprawling room. A carpet, intricately embroidered with an eagle, lay spread out in front of a large cherrywood desk. Its four legs were veritable pillars, and abstract patterns were carved into the wood. Curios rested on the desk, including a steel cube floating on one corner above a magnetic plate, the tri-pronged skull of a dinosaur or bioweapon, and finally a pair of rhinoceros beetles held in the same glass cage. A partition had been placed among the foliage in that cage, keeping the horned beetles separated.

The mayor sat beside that desk, his hands held in front of his chest, the fingers splayed and touching, forming a steeple. He wore an expensive-looking black suit, which fit him perfectly. A collar bar gave his tie a perceptible lift at the top, making his chest seem more prominent. He had a well-trimmed black beard, and his hair was cropped short, though combed backward, which served only to emphasize his widow’s peak. His features were smooth—too smooth in fact to be anything other than a result of rejuvenetics: no eye bags, crow’s feet, not even smile lines.

A poster on the wall behind him read: “To err is human. To really eff things up takes a cyborg.”

Her gaze was drawn to the floor-to-ceiling windows to her right, which offered a view of a white sand beach, similar to the one she had in her own memories, except the sun sat in the middle of the afternoon sky, and the waves lapping against shore were minimal.

The window was a dead giveaway that the room was augmented. Rhea momentarily disabled her augmented reality overlays and sure enough the room became a tiny, nondescript cubicle, with the mayor seated behind a small desk. The suit remained, but there was nothing on the desk, and the walls were windowless. Featureless.

She reenabled overlays and the beach scene returned, along with the remaining virtual decorations. It was interesting that the mayor would share them publicly. Then again, he was a public figure, accustomed to sharing his life with strangers.

“Where is that?” Rhea asked, staring at the beach that wasn’t really there.

The mayor glanced at the floor-to-ceiling glass. “That was a place on Ganymede.”

“What?” she said. “Impossible. I’ve seen pictures. The moon is nothing like that.”

“Not anymore, perhaps,” Mayor Grandas said. “But in its heyday, Ganymede was quite the terraformed world. The Ganymedeans augmented the weak magnetosphere with a superconducting ring network in orbit, protecting it from Jupiter’s radiation belts. They built habitable domes across the surface, melting portions of the seas inside them. If you look closely at the horizon, you can see the outline of the dome. And the distant ice that hems in the ocean.”

She gazed at the horizon, and indeed saw a strange dark line floating just above the surface. And barely visible below it was a white line—the ice, presumably.

“All that is gone now, of course,” the mayor said. “The ring network was destroyed in the war. As were most of the domes. The Europans have been trying to construct a new network. Their progress has been slow, to say the least.”

She returned her attention to him, and casually scanned the mayor’s ID.

Her eyes widened. It was a match with what DragonHunter had sent her.

“You’re Veil?” she said.

He stared at her, seeming confused. Then he glanced at the robots. “Everyone leave, except you two.”

Most of the robots departed, save for the two that held their hands firmly between the crooks of Rhea’s elbows. The door shut behind the others when they were gone.

“For the next five minutes, I want your archival devices and memory storage nodes disabled,” Grandas told the two robots.

“Yes, mayor,” the robots said in unison.

That meant whatever happened in the next five minutes wouldn’t be recorded, either locally, or remotely, effectively wiping the coming moments from the memories of both machines. However, the fact Grandas didn’t ask Rhea to similarly disable her own recording device was troubling.

“Well then,” the mayor said. “So that’s what you’ve been up to. I was wondering why you’d be stupid enough to sneak into city hall. Good job.”

“So, you are Veil,” she pressed.

“No,” the mayor replied.

“Well, it doesn’t change anything,” she said. “Veil or her agent, you’re scum either way. You sent bioweapons to destroy Rust Town. You and your council.”

“It was necessary, I’m afraid,” the mayor said. “We were doing it for your own good. We wanted to end your lives quickly, mercifully, rather than forcing you to suffer, like you will now. You have to understand, we don’t have the water to share. The oceans are running dry. At the current rate, the supply will last for maybe three years. But if we share with you, with Rust Town, we have only another year left. You slum residents are notorious for the amount of water you waste. You use antiquated reclaimers, and your recycling systems are so out-of-date that when one breaks down, there’s nobody alive around who knows how to fix it.”

“Then ration our water,” she said. “Give us at least a limited supply. Or help us upgrade the reclaimers. Don’t cut us off entirely.”

“It will take a year to finish any such upgrades,” the mayor said. “By then the reclaimers won’t be of any use.” He shook his head. “You don’t understand, we didn’t want to do this. But we had no choice.” He lowered his hands. “Do you know why we used designer bioweapons rather than gassing the residents?”

“Because gassing would be too obvious?” Rhea said. “This way, you can say it was a terrible tragedy. A random act of nature.”

“Wrong,” the mayor said. “We wanted a selective weapon. You see, we planned to spare everyone under the age of five. We would have invited these children to live in Aradne with us in the aftermath of the attack. We are not so cruel as you make us out to be.”

“How generous of you…” Rhea said. “Except, I saw those bioweapons crush lean-tos indiscriminately out there. Children under five were probably under more than a few of those rooftops.”

The mayor crossed his arms. “It wasn’t a foolproof system. But anyway, that plan is ruined, thanks to your interference. We have to deal with these riots of yours. And the resulting drop in public opinion among city residents.”

“The riots will stop when you restore our water, and your approval ratings will jump back to normal,” Rhea said. “The slums and the city will work together in the year remaining to us. We’ll find a way to endure. And while you’re at it, let the population know how dire the situation is. Stop shadow-banning videos on the streaming sites whenever someone mentions how low the ocean levels are. The urgency might help spur innovation.”

The mayor didn’t answer.

“You’re not going to restore the water supply, are you?” Rhea said. “Not until we’re dying in the streets.”

“You don’t understand,” Grandas told her. “We want you to die in the streets.”

“You’re a sick individual,” she said.

The mayor sighed. “I do what needs to be done. The public won’t elect me to another term in office, but it doesn’t matter. At the rate things are going, this is my last term anyway. There will be no Aradne in three years.”

“Work with us,” Rhea tried again. “Together we can find a way.”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry. If you want to save the people of the slums, the best you can do for them is organize caravans to other cities and settlements.”

“If Aradne won’t take them in, what makes you think other cities will?” she asked.

“There are still cities to the north that welcome people,” Grandas replied. “Relocate the residents of Rust Town now, while you still can.”

“And risk attacks by bandits?” she said. “Or bioweapons?” She gave him a grim smile. “You mentioned ‘north’ on purpose, so we’d pass through the territory of Veil’s Black Hands. Nicely done.”

The mayor merely stared at her.

Rhea closed her eyes. He really wasn’t going to help them. He wanted the people of Rust Town to leave. Or die.

She decided she might as well ask him another question while she had his attention. “Why is Veil hunting me?”

Grandas smiled. “Well. That’s something you should ask Veil yourself.”

“All right, open up a channel, and I will,” Rhea said.

She was expecting either to receive a holographic share request, or to be refused, but then the mayor’s aspect changed entirely. He leaned to the side slightly, casually, and his thumb and index fingers closed together, as if he was holding something between them. One of his eyes drooped.

When he spoke, it was with an odd accent. “So, you’ve come to me at last.”

Rhea stiffened. “Veil. You’ve chipped him.”

Veil shrugged. He lifted the empty thumb and forefinger to his mouth, then puckered and inhaled.

“If you’re pulling the strings, then get him to restore water to Rust Town,” Rhea said. “Let us ration it, like I mentioned a moment ago.”

Veil lowered his hand and exhaled, blowing air to one side. “After all those I sent after you, you go and deliver yourself to me directly. I should have saved myself the trouble. Though I suppose it was the very act of sending my minions that conveyed you to me.”

“Let us ration the water,” Rhea tried again.

“But I’m profiting too much from the sales of water on the black market to allow such a thing,” Veil interrupted.

“Is that what this is about?” Rhea said. “Profits?”

“It is now,” Veil replied. “Even originally it was, I admit. I pressed for the destruction of Rust Town, because I was the one who brokered the deal with the bioweapon company. I took a nice cut.”

“Scourge of the North…” Rhea said.

“That’s my name,” Veil agreed.

“Scorpion is yours, isn’t he?” Rhea asked.

“Very good,” Veil replied.

“Who else have you sent?” she said. “Have you planted more spies among my Wardenites?”

“I prefer to keep such information to myself,” Veil said. “Proprietary, you know.”

“Why are you hunting me?” Rhea pressed.

“It’s not personal,” Veil said. “It’s just that the bounty on your head is too high to ignore. When I bring you in, my accounts will balloon with credits.”

“Who set this bounty?” she pressed. “What’s the price?”

Veil seemed amused. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It does to me,” she said.

“Your former master set the bounty,” Veil told her.

“And who is that?” she pressed.

Veil thrummed his fingers, as if considering whether or not to tell her. He seemed to come to a decision after taking a puff from that invisible cigarette of his.

“You’re wanted dead or alive,” Veil said. “I suppose I’ll deliver you alive, so you can find out. But I’ll need you much more malleable than you are. Yes. I’ll deliver you to your master chipped.”

“No!” A sudden fear filled Rhea, the emotion coming on far stronger than she might have expected, and she struggled against her binds anew, but couldn’t break free. Her captors squeezed their merciless fingers tighter around her elbows until she ceased her efforts.

“Please!” Rhea begged. “Anything but that. Please don’t chip me. I’ll do whatever you want.”

“Indeed you will, very soon,” Veil taunted. “However, I can offer you one other option. And that is the delivery of your lifeless brain in a plastic bag. Is that what you prefer?”

Rhea didn’t answer.

“I thought not,” Veil said. “Mind jacked it is.”

20

Rhea was taken to the lower levels.

Apparently Veil, or the mayor, had installed the necessary facilities for surgically implanting a mind-hijacking chip somewhere in the very basement of city hall.

She was taken to a room and lowered face down on an operating table. Straps were secured over her ankles and her neck. A third strap was meant to be slid over her hips, but the robots didn’t apply it, as her hands remained secured behind her back, and apparently they felt that was good enough.

Most of the security robots departed then, save for two that remained behind to stand guard.

A medical robot approached. It looked nothing like a combat robot, and instead was more of a cart on treads, with a circular section at the top radiating three limbs. One of those appendages carried a gamma scalpel—a device vaguely reminiscent of a magnifying glass. She had heard of them once before, while reading about chipping: the flat, round rim was capable of producing two hundred beams of relatively low intensity gamma radiation, courtesy of several cobalt-60 sources; those beams could be focused down to a point as small as one millimeter, concentrating the radiation on the target without damaging the surrounding tissue. The beams penetrated bone and other intervening tissue, making them quite useful for operating on the brain. The gamma scalpel would probably be used to attach the chip to her neurons once it was installed.

A second limb held a laser drill, which would be employed to open up her metal cranium in preparation for the insertion. How the robot planned to handle the fluid leakage that would result from opening her cyborg skull, she didn’t know. Then again, maybe it planned to rely on gravity for that—the incision was likely going to be on the back of her head, which would explain why she had been forced to lie face down.

Her eyes alighted upon the third and final limb, which carried a tiny, thumbnail-sized microchip.

She shivered uncontrollably when she saw that.

Going to lose control of my body. Of everything!

The drill moved out of view behind her head, and she felt a sharp pain as the laser activated. The sickly stench of burnt plastic filled the air as her artificial skin and hair melted beneath it. Her brain case just below the area was likely liquefying as well.

Filled with despair, she strove to break her binds. Useless.

She gave up. Just like that. For the first time in her life.

It was liberating, somehow: surrendering.

Maybe this was for the best. She wouldn’t have to worry about making decisions anymore. Someone else would live her life. Well, not always. The mayor seemed to have some control over his actions. Rhea would have some, too. Assuming she was allowed to live after being presented to whoever had set the bounty.

And then, without warning, her binds opened.

DragonHunter!

Rhea slammed her arm upward, rotating the shoulder joint through an angle an ordinary human would have found impossible. Her hand struck the laser drill, and she grabbed it, tearing it from her head and breaking it away from the medical robot. The drill remained active, so she slid the tip through the strap at her neck, cutting it.

One of the security robots rushed her.

She sat up, and swung the drill into the robot’s torso, targeting the region above the power cell. The laser-tipped weapon penetrated deep into the armor; sparks of electricity traveled across the robot’s surface, and the machine collapsed.

The second robot came at her from the other side. This one had deployed the rifle barrels under its forearms, so Rhea twisted herself off the table, sliding her feet out of the straps that wrapped her lower legs.

She landed on the floor, and rolled under the table, just as the robot leaped over it and fired downward.

The robot landed, and Rhea slid her legs outward in a sweep kick, tripping the machine. She positioned the laser drill underneath the falling robot so that its torso smashed into the device when it hit the floor. Blue bolts sparked from the impact zone, and its body convulsed for several seconds before becoming still.

She smiled as she withdrew her hand, and the drill. Power cells. What a great vulnerability.

She got up, and tore the gamma scalpel from the medical robot’s second limb, figuring the device might prove useful at some point. She left behind the mind-hijacking chip. She didn’t want to touch the latter with a seven-meter pole.

She pocketed the scalpel and backed away from the medical robot, well aware that it might try to ram her.

“Stay back,” she warned the medical robot, waving the laser drill menacingly.

The remaining limb lifted, as if in surrender, and the robot retreated a pace.

She continued to back away; she glanced at the other instruments laid out on a table nearby, implements meant to be attached to the limbs of the medical robot, but none of them caught her eye.

When she was sure the robot wasn’t going to follow her, she turned toward the door.

She tried to connect to the Net again but as usual the closest access point denied her. She disabled augmented reality overlays to avoid AR spam: last thing she needed was a bunch of aberrant pixels filling her vision and blinding her at a critical moment.

There was no handle on the door, and no obvious means of opening it.

Frowning, she held the laser drill to the door. She shoved it forward, and easily perforated the surface; while the material was relatively thin, it would take too long to cut through. But she had no plans of doing so.

With her free hand she shoved a finger into the hole she’d made and curled the digit toward her in a come-hither gesture. Pulling hard, she ripped a section free. She continued peeling back sections until she could fit her entire hand through the door. Setting down the laser drill, she used both hands to rapidly tear a breach big enough to fit her entire body.

She scooped up the drill and ducked, sliding one foot through the horizontal gap she’d made, then the other.

When she was through, she stood up.

More security robots rushed around the bend to her right.

There was a T intersection almost immediately to her left. She took it.

Plasma bolts tore into the wall behind her.

She raced forward, taking another bend. She glanced at her overhead map. She was in an unmapped region of the basement, but it filled out as she went. She quickly reached the area she had mapped herself; ahead, the stairwell and elevators awaited.

The inward-sloping elevator doors were closer than the stairwells. One of them opened, and two robots emerged.

She seemed to catch them by surprise—apparently DragonHunter still had control of the security cameras. She slammed the drill into the torso of the first, and as electricity sparked across its chest, she shoved the spasming body at the second robot, knocking it down.

She entered the now empty elevator and hit the button for the fifteenth floor. She ducked behind the doorframe as the second robot opened fire; plasma bolts tore into the glass far wall of the lift. The sloping doors closed; red hot circles appeared near the center of the metal as her opponent continued to attack. But those circles faded in color as the elevator ascended.

The elevator emerged from the basement area, and the dark walls fell away around her as she entered the glass shaft that sloped up the sides of the pyramid. She glanced at the compound spread out behind her, worried that she was in the sights of robots, mechs, or enemy drones, but there were none that she could see, at least not yet.

There was another glass shaft to the left, not far from her, which traveled up the sloping surface of the pyramid like this one. It was currently empty.

DING. DING.

She watched the digital display update as the lift continued upward floor by floor.

She didn’t know what she was doing. She should be fleeing instead of heading to the fifteenth floor. But something impelled her upward. She wanted to continue her little talk with the mayor. Still, what did she hope to accomplish with a laser drill as a weapon?

Well, whatever the case, she couldn’t use this lift. The central AI controlled the elevator, and most likely would be halting it any moment now, so that security robots could rush inside and grab her.

She wasn’t going to allow it.

She slammed her fist into the emergency stop button, hoping it would override any control the AI had, and was pleased when the lift stopped halfway between the fifth and sixth floor.

She turned toward the far wall. The basement robot had done a good job of poking holes through the glass with its plasma bolts. A few well-placed kicks, and the brittle material surrounding it shattered. That left only the external glass shell she had to deal with.

She deactivated the laser drill to pocket it, then she smashed her fists into the translucent material of the shaft. It quickly became obvious that the glass was a lot thicker than it looked. Even with the laser drill, it would take her a long time to cut through.

Glancing at the ceiling, she saw the outline of what must have been a maintenance panel. She leaped up, and punched a fist into it, bending the metal far inward. Good. It was malleable.

She jumped again, this time crunching her fingers into the material to form a handhold. She hung on, and with her other hand did the same thing, but this time she pulled downward. She kept repeating that until she had torn several small holes, which she promptly enlarged. She peeled the sections back, forming a crawlspace, then hauled herself through.

The whole thing took about sixty seconds.

She proceeded up the shaft at a crouch. She had kept track of the spacing between each floor below, and she multiplied that by the remaining levels to fifteen, to estimate the distance she had to go.

Another glass elevator descended inside the second translucent shaft beside her. Combat robots were crowded within. When that elevator reached her level, it changed course, mirroring her ascent, with the unspoken promise that the robots would unload when she did.

She heard a thud come from ahead. A pistol had landed on the glass shaft ahead of her and was sliding down its sloping surface. Curious, she paused, and followed its descent with her eyes. When it was almost above her, a plasma drill tore a circular hole into the glass; the drill cut off, and the pistol slid through, falling into the shaft.

She dashed forward and scooped it out of the air.

She glanced up; narrowing her eyes, she saw a drone hovering overhead, so far away that it appeared only as a faint dot. The geofence was supposed to prevent drones from even flying over the parliament area, but apparently DragonHunter had a way to circumvent even that. He would have had to fly very high, however, to avoid being shot down immediately. No doubt security drones had been scrambled to intercept it.

She fired a test shot to confirm the pistol still worked after the fall, then continued upward. It wasn’t an X2-59, but it would do.

She gazed at the sprawling compound behind her. There was still nothing on the ground, but in the air, she saw several incoming craft. About half of them were headed skyward, toward the intruding drone. The rest seemed to be coming straight toward her.

She wondered if the enemy drones would open fire and damage the glass shaft.

Her question was answered a moment later as plasma bolts slammed into its surface. The glass offered some protection, reducing the intensity of the bolts that passed inside. She began randomly zigzagging as she advanced to decrease her chances of getting shot. So far, the robots mirroring her route in the shaft next to her own had yet to open fire. She wasn’t certain how long that would remain to be the case.

She knew she couldn’t stay here: she was too exposed. She targeted the next elevator door in front of her and fired at it as she clambered up the slope. She continued to zigzag, adjusting her aim to compensate. The door was sloped itself, making it a smaller target, so repeatedly hitting the same spot wasn’t easy.

Three floors past it, another elevator door opened. Security robots appeared; their weapons aimed down at her.

She reached the door she was firing at. By then she’d formed a gaping hole in the center, its edges white hot. She immediately leaped through.

Behind her, the air lit up as plasma bolts from the robots joined the attack from the drones.

The elevator next to hers dinged to announce the arrival of the combat robots crowded within. The doors opened, and she caught a glimpse of metal and polycarbonate limbs.

Rhea fired at the doorknob of the stairwell—just in case it was locked. She shoved her body into the door, breaking it open, and plunged inside as plasma fire broke out behind her. She raced up the stairs; the zig-zagging flights sloped diagonally, matching the exterior shape of the pyramid.

She aimed behind her as she ran, and when one of the pursuing robots came into view, she fired, scoring a hit. Return fire came, and she ducked, continuing upward.

The stairwell doors were labelled here, so she didn’t have to keep track of the number of floors remaining to the fifteenth anymore.

When she reached it, she paused, uncertain what she would find on the other side. She was conscious of the robots still rapidly making their way up the stairs behind her. She could hear their footfalls, rising ever in volume.

She tried the handle. Surprisingly, it was unlocked.

She opened the door a crack. The narrow hallway beyond was empty.

Strange.

Was DragonHunter helping her in some way?

No. It was a trap.

She realized there was zero chance the mayor remained in his office. The security forces would have evacuated him to a bunker or other safe room the moment she escaped, or shortly thereafter, when it became clear what her destination was. They would have taken the stairs, or some service elevator that wasn’t exposed on the exterior.

There were probably security robots hidden behind all the innocuous seeming doors of the hall ahead, with only more of the machines waiting for her inside the mayor’s office.

What was I thinking? Why did I rush headlong into this? Recklessly, like some hotheaded young recruit.

She wasn’t sure where that latter idea came from, but there was some truth to it.

Yes, he’s in a bunker.

A strange image filled her mind, accompanying that latter word. Padded walls. A triple locked steel door. Two robots guarding it.

There was a bunker in the basement.

How did I know that?

She slammed the door shut and swung around. She leaped down the entire flight of stairs. Past the next bend, three robots were clambering up toward her.

She dove at the feet of the first, knocking it over as it opened fire.

The two of them slammed into the second and third robots, bringing them all down. She fired randomly into them as she descended; before hitting the floor of the next flight, she grabbed onto the handrail beside her, wrenching free of the tangled mess.

She continued firing at them, targeting the power cell regions as best she could, and then switched her aim up to the door handle.

She scrambled to her feet and took a running leap over the pile of robots. More of the machines were coming up the stairs, and fired at her, but she hit the door and passed through. She landed rolling on the ground.

She got up, firing at the inward-sloping elevator doors beside her. She took a leap before she had melted through the white-hot metal, and when she struck, it collapsed. The hot steel wrapped around her feet, and she had to shuck off the pieces when she landed inside the sloped shaft beyond.

She slid down the same glass tube she had been in before, carried by gravity; the upper surface of the shaft was pockmarked with holes from the drone attacks. Those craft were still out there, and when she emerged, they immediately swooped down upon her position and began firing anew.

She made an easy target, since her slide was steady and predicable, so she began running instead, randomly swerving to the left and right as she did so.

A sloping elevator door opened directly in her path. She leaped over it as robots emerged and fired down into them.

She continued shooting over her shoulder, keeping them pinned. She repeatedly glanced forward, keeping an eye on the shaft in front of her. The drones rammed plasma beams into the shaft around her.

Ahead, the elevator blocked access past the sixth floor. She swung in through the open roof panel anyway, since she wasn’t going to stay put in that shaft.

To her surprise, it immediately descended.

DragonHunter.

The drones concentrated their attacks on the elevator. Holes appeared, and she was forced to constantly dodge. Well, dodge wasn’t really the word: more like randomly move, as she didn’t dare remain in the same spot.

The elevator stopped on the fifth floor and dinged.

The doors opened.

She spun around, expecting to be greeted by security robots, but the hallway beyond was empty.

Thank you, DragonHunter.

She leaped outside before the drones made charbroiled steak out of her and shot out the handle of the stairwell door located to her right. She kicked in the door and began racing down the stairs.

So far, there were no enemy units in sight. They would be regrouping, perhaps making their way to the basement— they would’ve realized her intended target by then.

She encountered no resistance to the basement level. The basement door remained unlocked, courtesy of the previous time she passed this way. The CommNixer was still in place.

She paused for a moment before passing through.

What if I’m wrong about the bunker?

Well, it was too late now. She was committed.

She emerged and hurried through the twisting halls. She paused before each bend or intersection to carefully peer past, but so far, the place remained empty. Apparently, she’d beaten all the robots down here.

She reached the bend that led to her destination.

She ducked, quietly flattening herself upon the ground. Then she leaned past and let off two quick shots, targeting the pair of robots in the power cells. Both collapsed.

There was also a deadly laser turret hidden in the roof—again, she wasn’t sure why she knew that. So, she adjusted her aim higher and fired.

The hidden panel opened, and the turret tried to deploy, but it was too late: her energy bolts made short work of it.

She scrambled to her feet as she heard footsteps rapidly bearing down from behind and raced toward the door. She leaped over the wreckage of the turrets and robots and studied the three-way locking mechanism as she ran.

She didn’t have time to shoot through the thick steel with her pistol, not when the arrival of more robots was imminent, so instead she retrieved the gamma scalpel. Instinctively, she knew it was the perfect device for picking locks such as these. Or rather, dissolving the latching mechanisms.

She adjusted the convergence depth, beam width, and intensity of the scalpel and held it to the door in just the right spot to disintegrate the first lock. She activated the scalpel and heard a loud pop. She repeated the process on the remaining two locks, and then shoved her shoulder into the door. It ceded, opening inward.

She continued pushing for a few moments, as the door was thick and heavy. When there was enough room for her to fit, she squeezed past the thick, padded walls and door and entered the bunker.

Inside the narrow hallway beyond were several more doors.

Behind her, she thought the foremost robots had arrived, as the approaching footsteps had suddenly increased in volume.

She didn’t bother to close the door behind her, but instead made her way forward. Since the thick door wasn’t completely open, she moved to the far side, where she would be out of view of her approaching attackers.

She headed for the far side of the hall, drawn by the only pair of double doors embedded in the corridor. She quickly transitioned into a sprint.

She opened fire as she ran, not wanting to risk being locked out, not when she was so close. She drilled a hole the size of her chest into the doors, and when she reached them, she crouched at the edge, peering past with her weapon. She scanned the cube-like interior. The room was empty, save for a desk.

Either Mayor Grandas hadn’t come to the bunker. Or he was in a different room.

Behind her, it sounded like the rising footsteps had reached the bunker entrance, because they stopped suddenly. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw the tip of a rifle barrel protrude past the edge of the thick door as a robot approached, weapon first.

She fired at that rifle, scoring a hit. The weapon immediately withdrew.

She reached through the hole she’d made and unlocked the doors. She ducked inside, zigzagging. Plasma fire ate through the air on either flank, forcing her to leap behind the desk. She toppled it for cover.

Energy bolts slammed into the desk itself, eating partially through it. The wood wasn’t going to hold up for very long under the assault, especially not when more combat robots continued to arrive all the time, joining in the attack.

As that deadly fire continued to rain down upon her hiding place, she decided she might as well try the next room. There was no point in staying here until the robots destroyed her.

The individual rooms within the bunker would likely have thin walls, with the majority of the armor and padding placed at the entrance.

She checked her map: the bunker was blank save for the areas she had explored, but she could see where the hallway doors were placed, which allowed her to pick the wall most likely to have an adjacent room behind it.

She opened fire at her chosen wall; it was made of hastily poured concrete, and she drilled through readily enough. She did have to occasionally reposition as pieces of the desk beside her crumbled away; she would pause to return fire, shooting randomly over the top of the desk before continuing her assault upon the wall.

When she was through, she took a moment to survey the next room through the gap. It contained a lone desk like this one but was otherwise empty. Well, if the mayor had really been somewhere in the bunker, but in a different room, he would have been evacuated by now. Too bad.

Well, either way, she wasn’t going to give up without a fight.

She fired randomly from cover a few times to force her enemies back and was about to roll into the adjacent room when something caught her eye below.

An outline in the concrete floor.

As if there was a trapdoor.

Cocking her head slightly, she pressed along the edges of that outline, until she found a surface that depressed. The outline folded upward, forcing her to one side.

Still using the remnants of the desk for cover, she peered into the opening.

A ladder led down into darkness.

With a shrug, she slid the pistol into her belt and pulled herself into the opening, head- first, and climbed down. She hooked the top parts of her feet onto the rungs and gripped the sides of the ladder with her hands, slowly descending.

Light came from another opening below. She could see a concrete floor, and part of a wall.

When she reached the edge, she paused to withdraw her pistol, and then peered past to get a better view.

She saw a security robot standing next to the mayor in the otherwise empty room.

The robot had the rifle barrels underneath its forearms aimed at the opening.

Rhea managed to squeeze off a shot before it returned fire.

She pulled back but heard a loud clang—she looked down in time to watch the robot crumple into view. It didn’t get up: she must have gotten a lucky shot in.

She started to peer around the edge of the opening again, but shots erupted, forcing her back. The mayor obviously had a pistol of his own.

Above her, the bunker was completely quiet. She knew she didn’t have much time until the other combat robots reached her. The mayor had probably communicated what was happening already.

She considered her options. She was a cyborg, with a reaction time far faster than a human’s. The advantage was hers, here.

She knew then what she was going to do.

She slid her feet forward, unhooking them from the rungs above her, and plunged into the room.

She kept the pistol aimed in front of her as she dropped.

The mayor came into view. He had retreated to one corner and held a pistol aloft; Rhea targeted his weapon the instant she saw it, and as she fell, she fired once, striking the pistol in the center.

Grandas shouted in pain, dropping the weapon as it melted away.

She twisted, tucking in her legs to hit the ground rolling, and then clambered to her feet beside him, next to the fallen security robot.

“Have them back down!” Rhea commanded, shoving the pistol into his cheek. “Now!”

The mayor shrugged, seemingly unafraid. “Fine. But it won’t do you any good. You’re never getting out of here. City Council doesn’t negotiate with terrorists or hostage takers.”

“Then I guess you’re screwed too, huh?” She pulled him forward roughly, away from the wall, and slid behind him. Now that he could no longer see her, she had a strange thought. On a whim, she secured the pistol to her belt and instead fetched the gamma scalpel.

She frowned, staring at the medical device, then instinctively set the convergence depth, beam width, and intensity via the dials. She held the tip to his head, pressing it into his skull at a very specific location.

“Don’t move,” she said.

Her finger hesitated on the trigger.

What if I’m wrong?

A robot dropped into the room via the opening beside her.

Rhea activated the scalpel.

The mayor stiffened, then collapsed.

“Hands up!” the robot ordered.

Rhea dropped the scalpel and raised her hands in surrender. She was surprised the robot hadn’t mowed her down where she stood. No doubt the mayor had told the machines to come inside, but he must have specifically ordered them not to harm her. That would make sense, considering he had no idea what she had been trying to do.

The machine stepped forward, making room for another to land inside.

A third dropped behind that one.

While the others kept Rhea covered with their rifles, the first robot rushed forward. It knelt and scanned the mayor by moving one hand across his head and torso. The machine looked at her. “What did you do to him?”

“Nothing,” she lied. “He just fainted.”

The robot glanced at the scalpel she had dropped, then announced: “Take her away.”

They disarmed her and forced her to climb from the chamber. She glanced at the mayor one last time before she left, wondering if she had succeeded.

Well, either way, she supposed she’d have a lot of time to think about it.

21

Rhea saw Will, Horatio, Miles and Brinks waiting for her in the confinement area in the basement of city hall.

Will stood up as she approached the glass door. When it opened, for a moment she thought Will was going to hurl himself past, but then the robots shoved her inside and the door sealed behind her.

“What are you doing here?” Rhea asked.

“We were trying to rescue you,” Will explained.

“Good job,” she said. “Now we’re all going to prison.”

Will shrugged. “At least you won’t lack for company.”

Miles shook his head. “They’re not going to put us in the same cells.”

“Well, we’ll hang out in the yard then,” Will said.

“You obviously have some outdated notions of what prison life is like,” Miles told him.

Rhea took a seat between Miles and Brinks. “I’d thank you for coming. Except I specifically said not to.”

Miles crossed his arms. “You’re our Warden. We weren’t going to abandon you.”

“I’m surprised Renaldo didn’t try to come with you,” she said.

“He wanted to, but I insisted he stay behind,” Miles said. “I told him he’d already risked his life enough when he accompanied you the first time, and that someone needed to stay behind to keep the demonstrators under control. He protested weakly, but I could tell he was relieved.”

Rhea nodded. “Anything that involves fighting or confrontation, well, let’s just say it isn’t his strong suit. Although, he can certainly bite, when you back him into a corner.” She studied the cell. “Where do you humans relieve yourselves?”

Brinks pointed at the partition in the corner of the big cell. “There’s a toilet behind that.”

“Why do you ask?” Will taunted. “Have you picked up an attachment we don’t know about?”

“Curiosity,” Rhea replied.

“How did you escape after the robots captured you?” Will asked.

“Well, first they took me to see the mayor,” she said. “Did I tell you he was mind jacked?”

“What?” Horatio said. “By who?”

“Veil,” Rhea replied.

“No way!” Brinks said. “Though I guess that explains a lot.”

“Yes,” Rhea agreed.

“Why did he want to see you?” Miles asked.

“Mostly to brag, I think,” Rhea replied. “Or Veil did, anyway.”

“I don’t suppose you managed to convince him to restore the water?” Miles pressed.

“No,” she told the albino.

“So how did you escape?” Will said again.

“Well, I have DragonHunter to thank for that,” she said. “You see, Veil sent me to the basement to get chipped. If DragonHunter hadn’t opened my binds, and then delivered a pistol to me, I wouldn’t be here right now.”

“DragonHunter opened your binds during the fight?” Will said, seeming confused. “And gave you a pistol?”

“That’s right,” Rhea said. “He opened the binds remotely, of course. And when I was scrambling up the elevator shaft that runs along the exterior of the pyramid, DragonHunter sent a drone to drill a hole through the glass. It delivered a pistol.”

“But that’s impossible,” Will countered.

She stared at him uncertainly. “How do you know?”

“He was giving me minute by minute updates,” Will said. “He lost all access to the cameras shortly after you were captured. He didn’t open your cuffs. And he didn’t send a drone. Believe me.”

“But if it wasn’t DragonHunter, then who helped me?” Rhea said.

“That, I have no idea,” Will replied.

Rhea couldn’t help the eerie tingling sensation she felt then, which crawled up her spine. Who else had been watching her, then? And was that person watching even now?

Her gaze drifted to the camera dome embedded in the ceiling just outside the cell.

A security robot approached the glass door.

“Get ready to rush it,” Will said under his breath.

But the machine stepped aside as the door slid open.

“You’re all free,” the robot announced.

“Free?” Will said, his brow furrowed. “On who’s orders?”

“By order of the mayor,” the robot replied. It turned toward Rhea. “He wants to see you.”

“What did you do to him?” Will asked.

“I removed his mind hijacking chip,” she replied casually.

“You’re just a bundle of surprises, aren’t you?” Will said.

She shrugged, shooting him a wry smile, then stepped out. She still had the eerie sensation that someone was watching her, and her eyes instinctively darted to the camera dome.

“Well, I’m going with you,” Will told her. “I want to hear what Grandas has to say for himself. Besides, someone has to watch your back.”

“I’m coming, too,” Miles said.

“We all are,” Brinks agreed.

“I guess I’ll be joining you as well,” Horatio added.

“His office is crowded…” Rhea warned.

Will grinned. “Guess we’ll all be getting up close and personal with each other.”

Soon, Rhea found herself in a glass elevator once more, traveling up the sloping exterior of the city hall with her companions. She traveled in the westernmost shaft this time, as the eastern was under repair: the lower portion of the latter bore faint signs of the earlier attack, with circular outlines marking where boreholes had once perforated the glass. As she neared the upper levels, she spotted the holes in the shaft that had yet to be filled in, along with the drones that were hard at work repairing them.

When the elevator dinged, the lot of them stepped into the narrow hallway, and advanced two abreast. Will walked beside Rhea, following the security robot. She glanced at him, and he gave her a reassuring smile.

So, she had been successful after all. It would have taken a mistake of less than a millimeter on her part, and she would have incinerated part of the mayor’s brain, instead of the chip. That she had known the exact depth and beam width to use, and the precise cranial point to apply the scalpel, told her she had done this before at least a few times in her past life. She wasn’t quite sure what to make of that. Given some of the memories she had, she doubted she was a neurosurgeon.

Two security robots stood guard in front of the double doors ahead. When the doors opened, the machines stepped aside to let them pass.

Rhea and her companions strode onto the eagle-embroidered carpet as they squeezed into the mayor’s office. The augmented reality overlays gave the impression of a room much bigger than it was, when in reality the party was hemmed into a small space near the entrance by the invisible walls of the real world.

The mayor sat behind the desk, debonair as always in his crisp, black suit. Beside him were two more security robots, hovering protectively upon either flank.

The virtual poster behind him had a new message scrawled upon it today: “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”

Rhea instinctively gazed at the virtual floor-to-ceiling window on her right, and the white sand beach beyond; she felt a deep longing inside.

When the mayor cleared his throat, Rhea reluctantly tore her eyes from the beach.

“Thank you.” The mayor folded his hands on his chest. “I’ve been Veil’s tool for three years now. Three years. You set me free from a prison that… trammeled my mind. I was a prisoner in my own body.”

She nodded slowly, then gestured toward the window. “Why haven’t you changed the decor?”

“This is the original decor,” Grandas said. “Veil let me keep it. Probably because it was one of the few things that grounded me. Helped me endure.” The mayor unfolded his hands. “I want to give you a medal for what you’ve done.”

“No thanks,” she told him.

The mayor raised an eyebrow. “You don’t want a medal?”

“No,” she said. “But I would appreciate it if you could get me unbanned from VidTube and the other big streaming sites. SubverseTube has a rather small audience.”

“I wish I could,” the mayor said. “But I don’t have any control over the policies of private companies. You’d have to go a bit higher up than me. I can try to petition them, if you think it would help, but they’ll probably ignore me.” He studied her a moment. “At least let me give you the key to the city.”

She sighed. “I don’t need or want it.”

“All right,” he said. “No key. But I’m still going to instruct the sentries to let you pass through the main gates without question every time. As long as you don’t bring a bunch of rioters with you, anyway.”

“Speaking of rioters, there is something else you can do for me…” Rhea said.

“The water supply?” Grandas asked.

“Good guess,” Rhea replied.

The mayor folded his hands over his suit once more. He squeezed his fingers so tightly together that the knuckles turned white. “It was Veil who made me veto the resolutions to restore the settlement’s water. I will convene an emergency meeting of the councilors when we’re done here, and I’ll rectify that. Water will be restored to Rust Town by this afternoon, if I can help it.”

“Is it true what you said earlier, while under Veil’s influence?” Rhea asked. “That we’ll only have a year’s supply if you share with the slums?”

“Afraid so,” Grandas answered. “We’re uh… in trouble.”

“Maybe the streaming sites should stop shadow-banning everyone who talks about the ocean levels,” Rhea said. “Like I told you earlier. You know, so more people are aware of the problem, and can help.”

“Again, I have no influence over the behavior of these private companies,” the mayor replied. “You have to go higher up in the government for that. And I’m not entirely sure that having more people aware of the problem would actually help. Do you really want people to start stockpiling water, hoarding it from everyone else? Panic will only cause the supply to dry up a whole lot sooner.”

“He does have a point,” Horatio said. “Humans are illogical, greedy creatures. If it becomes known that the worldwide supply of water is on the verge of collapse, people will indeed stockpile.”

“Government workers are already stockpiling supplies for themselves, no doubt,” Rhea said. “Especially those in the upper echelon.” She gazed into the mayor’s eyes. “You’re stocking up on water yourself, aren’t you?”

He lowered his gaze, relaxing his fingers. “Yes.”

“Well, at least you’re honest in private, if not public,” she told him.

“Maybe we should release footage of this encounter,” Miles said. “Show the people of Aradne what a two-faced liar their mayor is.”

“No,” Rhea said. “Assuming the footage wasn’t shadow-banned immediately, the mayor could just say it was a sophisticated deepfake.” She waited until the mayor looked at her once more, and then narrowed her eyes. “I do, however, want you to arrest the other city councilors who took part in planning the bioweapon attack against Rust Town.”

Grandas squeezed his interlocking fingers tighter once more, whitening the knuckles. “While I’m grateful for what you did, I’m not suddenly at your beck and call. I didn’t escape one master only to bow beneath another. Maybe you should’ve replaced my chip with one of your own if that’s what you wanted.”

“I’m sorry,” Rhea said. “I can see why you might bridle at even the mere hint that someone was trying to push you around, given what happened to you. I should’ve used more gentle phrasing. Let me try again: I’d appreciate it if you could bring justice to those involved with the murder of so many innocent civilians.”

Grandas sighed, setting his hands down on the desk. “You don’t understand the delicate political tightrope that is the council. We all have dirt on each other. If I try to expose them, they’ll bring out everything they have on me. And I’m talking about dirt predating Veil’s influence.”

“You’ll find a way to deal with it,” Rhea said. “Besides, you cast them as the murderers they are, any dirt they have on you will pale in comparison. Unless you’ve had people assassinated or something…”

“No, of course not,” he said a little quickly. “Well, when Veil had me, maybe. But anyway, it might prove difficult to arrest them without arresting myself, considering I was officially the ringleader of the plan.”

“Yes, but you weren’t yourself,” Rhea said.

“The hard part will be proving that.” Grandas pursed his lips. “I suppose I could submit to a mind scan. There will be evidence of the chip in my head. Broken up pieces. Assuming Veil doesn’t have me assassinated first. I’m going to have to increase my security. If you could penetrate, getting close enough to do what you did, then it’s not a stretch to imagine what someone with the funding of Veil could do.”

“I noticed the extra security robots you have.” She glanced at the pair that stood on either side of the mayor. “Probably a good idea. As long as you can ensure they never get hacked.”

“These particular robots have no comm nodes,” Grandas said. “And thus, can’t be hacked. At least not remotely.”

“Good plan,” she said.

“I can’t be hacked, either,” Horatio said. “I have several sandbox layers in between my comm node and my main systems. As soon as any sort of attack is detected, it is isolated and inoculated.”

“There are always ways, Robot,” the mayor said. “But admittedly, such an attack would be very difficult. But when it comes to my personal protection, I figure, it doesn’t hurt to exhibit an abundance of caution.”

“So you’re going to proceed with the arrests?” Rhea asked.

The mayor tilted his head. “I’ll try. But Rust Town will definitely be getting water back this afternoon. So, if there’s anything else you want to ask of me in return for what you did, now’s the time.”

She turned to go, but then paused. Glancing askance, she said: “There might be one thing. Do you know who I was?”

The mayor raised an eyebrow. “Who you were?”

“Yes,” she said. “In my past. Before I became the Warden.”

Grandas gave the others a curious glance, his eyes settling on Will.

“Don’t look at me,” Will said. “When we found her, her mind was wiped.”

“I had a mark…” Rhea said, touching her forehead. “But we sanded it away.”

The mayor nodded. “Ah.” His eyes darted to Will. “Even he knows what that mark means. You saw it before she sanded it?”

“He did it, but he refuses to tell me what it is,” Rhea said.

“For good reason.” The mayor sat back.

“Don’t tell her.” Will glanced nervously at Miles and Brinks. “It will serve only to confuse her.”

Grandas studied Rhea, and then sighed. “No. I owe her this much, for saving me.” He leaned forward, looking into Rhea’s eyes. “The mark you bore was a brand of sorts, to indicate your offworld status.”

“Offworld status?” she asked.

“Well, an offworld prisoner, to be precise,” he explained. “For you see, you bore the sickle and ax.” The virtual poster behind him transformed, displaying a sickle and ax crossed over one another.

Miles exhaled with a hiss.

The mayor glanced at him, and nodded. “All prisoners of Ganymede were thus branded.”

She stared at him in disbelief. “I’m from Ganymede.”

“Yes,” the mayor said. “You are a Ganymedean. Or you were.”

She glanced at Will. “Why wouldn’t you tell me?”

“Like I said,” he told her. “It would only confuse you.”

Her eyes drifted to Miles and Brinks, who were staring at her with anger in their eyes. Those looks hurt, coming from them.

“Why was I a prisoner?” she said, quickly turning back to the mayor. “What did I do? I need to know everything.”

“That I don’t know,” the mayor replied. “I only saw you once, at a dinner. You sat at the table of Khrusos.”

“Khrusos?” she said. “Is that the name of some crime lord?”

“No,” Grandas said. “Or perhaps yes, depending on your point of view. I’m talking about the Khrusos who is president of the United Settlements. A member of the High Council that rules Earth.”

“Why would I be sitting at his table?” she asked. “Me, a woman branded with the mark of a prisoner from Ganymede?”

“I honestly don’t know,” the mayor responded. “After the war, I’d heard rumors that the President kept prisoners from Ganymede in his palace for his personal entertainment. Considering how pretty you were, I assumed it must be something along those lines.”

“You didn’t see me any other time?” she said. “Maybe on a streaming site?”

“No,” Grandas said. “I never saw you again after that day. Until we met again.”

“But Veil knew me,” Rhea said. “She must have. The Scorpion works for her, you admitted it when we talked before. And the Scorpion called me Dagger. The Dagger of Khrusos. Does that mean anything to you?”

“I’m afraid not,” the mayor said. “You have to understand… though I was chipped for three years, all the memories I have when Veil was in control are fast fading. It’s like they’ve been ripped away along with the destruction of the chip. I mostly remember those times I was in control of my own body.”

“So, I guess that means you can’t tell me who set the bounty on my head?” she tried.

“No, I can’t tell you who placed any bounties,” Grandas said. “Nor where you may find Veil. I can’t even remember how I got chipped in the first place. I’m sorry, I’ve told you all I know.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Rhea said. “It’s more than I knew before. But I’m going to hold you to your promise to restore the water supply. If it’s not back on by this afternoon, we’ll be talking again.”

“I’m sure we will,” he agreed.

Rhea nodded. She gazed one last time at the floor-to-ceiling window, and at the virtual Ganymedean sea beyond, then departed with her companions.

She knew now what she must do.

22

Rhea stood inside the glass elevator with Will and the others and gazed out across the parliamentary compound as the lift descended.

“What’s on your mind?” Will asked. “Are you mad because I didn’t tell you about your mark?”

There was indeed something on her mind, but not that. She had meant to confront Will about it later, when she could pull him aside, but hearing his voice caused the anger bubbling inside her to boil over.

She turned toward him. “You lied to me.”

He gave her an uncertain look. “Just because I didn’t tell you what the mark meant, doesn’t—”

“You told me the army of Earth destroyed the Ganymedeans to the last man, woman, and cyborg,” she explained.

“Ah.” He held her angry gaze. “Well, when I said every last man, woman and cyborg, I meant generally speaking. Of course, there were bound to be a few who were missed. Taken prisoner here and there. But trust me, there wouldn’t have been many… they were probably mostly cyborgs like yourself, as ordinary humans would’ve had a very hard time surviving the final devastating attack launched by the militaries of Earth in retaliation for the Great Calming.” The Great Calming was the morning the people of Earth had awakened to find half their cities destroyed. “But it doesn’t change the fact that the moon, and everything you might have once known, is now gone.”

“I’m going back,” she announced.

He folded his arms. “That’s probably not a good idea.”

“I want to see it for myself,” she said. “I want to see what the people of this world did to my home.”

“Rhea, listen, there’s no atmosphere,” Will said. “Even a cyborg such as yourself can’t survive there, not without an environmental suit. Unless you can convince the Europans to let you enter one of their geodesic domes… living under an artificial sky, beneath an artificial sun. Is that really how you want to spend your days?”

“I’ve made up my mind,” she replied.

Her gaze drifted to Miles and Brinks, but they were studiously avoiding her eyes. “You hate me. For what I am.”

Miles gazed at the landscape beyond the glass. “No. I don’t. I admit I used to hate all Ganymedeans for what they’d done. For destroying half of Earth. I lost… much. But how can I hate a people that we eradicated in retaliation?” The albino at last met her eyes. “We killed them all. And yes, you are from Ganymede, and you represent what they did to us. But you can’t be held responsible for the crimes committed by your government or military. And besides, you’ve done so much for us. No, I don’t hate you. I love you.”

“As do I,” Brinks said. “You always will be our Warden, no matter what. I did feel betrayed at first, when the mayor revealed who you were. But I reminded myself you didn’t even know you were Ganymedean. Your mind was wiped. And like Miles said, you personally had nothing to do with the Great Calming. So no, I can’t blame you. There’s nothing Ganymedean left inside of you for me to blame. Or hate.”

“Good,” Rhea said. “Can I trust you two never to reveal what happened today? I need you to keep this a secret. Others, even among the Wardenites, might not take so kindly to the fact I’m a Ganymedean.”

“I will reveal it to no one,” Miles said. “Not even to the Wardenites.”

“Nor will I,” Brinks said.

Rhea smiled gratefully. “Thank you.”

“But what should we tell them, when they ask why you wish to journey to Ganymede?” Miles asked.

“Tell them…” Rhea paused. “Just say I need a vacation.”

The security robots escorted them to the edge of the parliament area, and then Rhea and her party were allowed to proceed on their own.

The streets proved relatively quiet: the demonstrators would’ve returned to Rust Town a long time ago. There were no combat robots or mechs lined up on either side of the street to observe their return. Of course not. She was welcomed by the mayor. Still, she knew she was being watched: there were too many cameras recording from the sidelines for her not to be.

The people here didn’t live all that differently from those in Rust Town. Sure, they might reside in towering skyscrapers and apartment buildings versus the cargo containers and lean-tos of the slums, but they mostly stayed home all day. Delivery drones filled the skies, as well as land-based couriers. The occasional humans she saw out and about barely seemed aware of the outside world, their eyes defocused as they talked quietly to themselves—video conferencing a friend or family member, or perhaps playing some online game that used the real world as a backdrop.

She passed through the gates in the city wall and made her way back to her home base in the slums. She and her companions were scanned for chips at the Texas barriers, and then allowed inside. She made her way down to her quarters for some peace and quiet.

A few hours passed.

She kept the Faraday cage deactivated, so that when Renaldo tapped in, she received the call immediately.

“Check out the trending section of any streaming site,” the Wardenite said.

She did so.

Rust Town had its water supply restored. She noticed that despite all the coverage, which often focused on the slum residents cheering in the streets, there was no mention that the taps would run for only a year.

They’re celebrating prematurely.

But she supposed that, given the uncertainty of the past few weeks since the Hydra attack, a celebration wasn’t uncalled for.

The mayor also announced an investigation into the aforementioned attack. To his credit, he revealed some among the city council were among the suspects. He probably wouldn’t investigate all of those who were involved, for political reasons, but at least some justice would be dealt if he succeeded.

Will visited her shortly after the news broke. “Did you hear? The water’s back on. You did it.”

She smiled wanly. “Looking back, it seems like it was such a hard fight.”

“Wasn’t easy,” he agreed.

“Well,” Rhea said. “The water’s back on. I can leave now.”

Will cocked an eyebrow. “You weren’t joking about Ganymede, were you?”

“No,” she said.

“And Veil?” he said.

“He can’t hunt me if I’m on another planet,” Rhea replied. “Or in this case, moon.”

“How can you be so sure?” Will pressed.

“I can’t,” she admitted. “But I have no more leads at the moment. If I knew where I could find him, I’d launch a preemptive strike. But I don’t. If I stay here, I’m a target anyway. One day, Veil might simply decide to stage a direct assault, led by the Black Hands, or the Scorpion, or whatever other minions he has at his disposal. Who knows, he might even drop a bomb. I put everyone at risk by staying. So no, my mind is made up.”

“What about Khrusos?” Will asked.

“What about him?” Rhea replied.

Will studied her. “You have no interest in his claim on you? Considering he’s the leader of the free world…”

“He has no ‘claim’ on me,” Rhea said. “If I was seated at his table, as the mayor described, it would have been as a guest.”

Will frowned. “If that’s true, why do you sound so doubtful? I think what the mayor said about Khrusos keeping Ganymede prisoners for personal entertainment is more in line with reality.”

“Perhaps one day I will seek the truth of this Khrusos,” she said. “For now, I only want to go home.”

Will shook his head. “Why do you insist on this? There’s nothing there. Forget Ganymede.”

“It’s where I’m from,” she said. “It calls to me. Maybe when I arrive, more memories will return.”

“Is that why you’re going?” he said. “Because you want to trigger some memories? Hire a therapist instead, or a hypnotist: you’ll save a ton of credits.”

When she didn’t answer, Will sighed. “All right. You’re adamant on leaving. Fine. So how are you planning on getting there?”

“Renaldo has arranged a ride for me,” Rhea said.

Will smirked. “Has he now?”

“Yes,” she explained. “He put out a call on my SubverseTube channel, and my followers reached out to friends and family across the world. We found someone within a few hours: a generous space trader who saw my exploits on VidTube before I was banned has agreed to let me hitch a ride aboard his transport at no cost. He’s headed to the Europan colony of Centaar on Ganymede.”

“I’m coming with you, of course,” Will said.

“You’ve done enough for me,” she told him. “You don’t need to come to Ganymede.”

“I don’t need to, no,” he said. “I want to. So, tell me, will this trader of yours make room for Horatio and me, or do we have to hire our own transport?”

Rhea smiled, feeling suddenly teary eyed. “He’ll make room. Oh, Will.” She gave him a fierce hug. “You’re too good to me.”

Will patted her on the back. His voice seemed hoarse, as if he was holding back strong emotions himself. “Someone’s got to watch your naive back up there, Dude.”

He pulled away and averted his gaze.

Rhea smiled. “You’re a good man.”

He nodded. After a moment, he recovered enough to look her in the eyes: “So. When do we leave?”

“Soon,” she replied. “But first, there’s something I have to do.”

* * *

Rhea perched on a beanbag near the entrance of the rebuilt lean-to where Chuck’s parents lived. Horatio sat cross-legged on the floor to her left, Will her right. Chuck’s parents resided across from her, on a repurposed coffee table that had been made into a couch of sorts.

“I know you received a message already about your son,” Rhea told them. “But I just wanted to come here in person to tell you how much his sacrifice meant to me, and to Rust Town. He was instrumental in restoring the water to this city. Without him, I would have died in the Outlands, killed by an assassin. But Chuck gave his life for me, distracting the assassin long enough for the rest of us to shoot him down.”

“What happened to this assassin?” the mother asked.

“Have you heard of an X2-59?” Rhea said.

The mother nodded.

“That’s what happened to the assassin,” Rhea finished.

There was no reaction from either of the parents to those words.

“I’m so sorry,” Rhea continued. “For sending you a missive. I was too afraid to visit you in person. Too afraid to face you, and your accusing eyes. But this is my punishment for failing him.”

“You didn’t fail him,” the father said. “You restored our city’s water. I heard the announcement from the mayor earlier, but everyone knows you’re the one who changed his mind. I don’t know what you said to the mayor but obviously you can be quite convincing. We’ll always be grateful for what you’ve done, not just for getting our water back, or for bringing us together before and after the bioweapon attack, but for allowing Chuck into your inner circle. Whenever he spoke of you, it was with the awe of someone who was so very thankful to be a part of something bigger than himself. You’ll always be welcome in our home. Chuck would have been very proud of what you’ve done for our city.”

Rhea smiled, her vision blurring with tears. “Thank you. I can’t tell you how much that means to me.”

She stayed a half hour longer, listening as his parents regaled her with stories about Chuck as a child and young man, and at last hugged both of them and left.

“That was really hard,” she told Will when the lean-to was well behind them.

“It always is,” Will replied.

“It’s a suitable punishment, though,” Rhea said. “A reminder of why I can’t ever let something like this happen again.”

Horatio wrapped his polycarbonate fingers around hers. “Sometimes, I’m very glad I’m not human.”

She smiled at the robot.

The three of them reached the walls of Aradne. A crowd of Wardenites and other fans had gathered at the gates to see her off. She interspersed among them, shaking hands, posing for selfies. And then, finally, she was passing through the gates. The sentry robots allowed her, Horatio and Will to enter without issue, just as the mayor had promised.

The paved streets beyond were relatively empty. Though she did find a few Aradne fans gathered outside the launch terminal, and when she arrived, she paused for a final few selfies.

Inside the terminal, a space shuttle awaited, its nose pointed skyward. It was aerodynamic, and somewhat airplane-like, with a pair of wings curving outward from the rear portion of the fuselage. It was attached to a large, cylindrical booster rocket that would fall away once the vehicle attained orbit.

Other passengers queued to board the vessel, and robots loaded crates into the hold: the latter held goods that would be conveyed to the various space stations and other vessels waiting in orbit, which the shuttle would visit in turn. The transport that Rhea and her companions would be joining was last on that list.

Their weapons had been conveyed to the craft ahead of time by security forces and had already been loaded into the designated storage compartments. Rhea checked the manifest when she arrived and confirmed her X2-59 was aboard.

While she waited in line, she received a call from Renaldo, Miles and Brinks.

“So, this is it, huh?” Renaldo’s hologram said. “I can’t say I won’t miss you.”

“We all will,” Miles agreed.

“I’m sure you’ll all be fine without me,” Rhea reassured them.

“It’s been an honor, Warden,” Renaldo said. “I hope to fight by your side again someday.”

“I think my fighting days are behind me,” she said, not really believing it.

“Well, either way, we all knew you’d leave someday,” Renaldo said. “When you had solved all of our problems, we expected you’d move on, to help solve the problems of other cities and peoples. Like the true hero you are. We didn’t dare think we could keep you all to ourselves.”

She smiled. “Well, I’m not sure I’m actually going to continue solving the problems of other people. I’ve got my own to work on. I’d like to think I’m retired, to be honest.”

“Oh, the Warden can never retire,” Renaldo said. “Even we know that.”

“Maybe,” Rhea said. “I guess we’ll see.”

“Enjoy your ‘vacation,’” Renaldo said.

Because of the way he emphasized “vacation,” she wondered if Miles and Brinks had told him the real reason she was going to Ganymede. She decided that most likely, they had not. They were loyal to her, those two.

The trio loaded into the vessel, donned the prerequisite spacesuits, and sat with the other passengers in the designated section. Their seats were all oriented vertically, so that they sat with their backs to the ground while waiting for launch.

When the shuttle reached orbit, and the trio finally loaded into their transport, after that it would be a few weeks to Ganymede.

She wasn’t particularly looking forward to the flight. She thought of an old proverb that went something along the lines of: “It’s the journey that counts, not the destination.” Well, in this case the reverse was entirely true.

She couldn’t wait to get to Ganymede.

She couldn’t wait to go home.

* * *

The shuttle that carried Rhea and her companions departed on time. It entered orbit, and moved among the space stations and waiting vessels, distributing its cargo of passengers and goods.

Nearby, a diamond-shaped craft kept close tabs on that shuttle. The craft was small, only capable of holding a single passenger. Designed for maximum stealth, it was equipped with specially designed fins that vented all heat in a single direction: the occupant kept those fins pointing out into deep space, masking his position from most in orbit.

After a few hours, the shuttle transferred Rhea to her waiting transport, and then the latter vessel left orbit.

The stealth craft gave the transport a good head start, and then pursued.

Soon, very soon, the occupant would be introducing himself.

Or rather, his sophisticated weaponry would.

* * *

BOOK 3: Rhea, Will and Horatio return to fight another day in Warden 3, available on Amazon at https://readerlinks.com/l/1054296

Or discover how Will and Horatio first met in the prequel novella, Salvage, available for free here: https://bookhip.com/WBMXLC

About the Author

USA Today bestselling author Isaac Hooke holds a degree in engineering physics, though his more unusual inventions remain fictive at this time. He is an avid hiker, cyclist, and photographer who sometimes resides in Edmonton, Alberta.

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