Gaz slipped through the crowd with the two word message from Alaya burned into her mind. Not one of these people possessed the kind of weapons, defenses, or general cyberware which might have posed a danger to Gaz. She could have torn through them on her way to Alaya. Ten years ago she would have. But that would have upset the young woman.
And Gaz loved her.
Incredible, mind-bending fear surged through Gaz’s cortex. Code fragments scrolled over her inner displays and tried to deal with the anxiety Alaya’a message had produced. The whole matter was further complicated by the fact of Gaz’s hypnotic bond with Alaya. Not only did she love her, but she was subliminally conditioned to protect her.
Barrison at the security desk gave Gaz the hour off without even checking her schedule. Gaz had missed less than ten minutes of her shift in six months, she had more than enough time saved up for a major illness, not that she was likely to contract anything more dangerous than the nanites swimming in her blood.
Around her images flashed through the periphery of her conscious as Gaz turned her mental focus to reach Nissa’s place and Alaya. Vendors hawked questionable meat products under tarps designed to keep the water off themselves and their wares. In places, the lights flickered as the proximity of moisture to electronics tested the station’s infrastructure at every turn.
People filled the place. Each one of them strained Gaz’s neural systems. Her internal security systems were configured to treat other people as potential threats. And that was all Gaz could see as she pressed herself between them. The meat in her skull assured her the people were just other mere humans going about their business while the metal measured, examined, and otherwise scanned every passerby for weapons, implants, or anything which might endanger her or Alaya.
With so many systems engaged and red-lined, Gaz needed almost ten full seconds to process recognition. And it only took so little time because this particular individual was close to the top of her list of targets.
Kowal. It had been almost nine years since she’d seen the engineer. So much raw and wonder life since then, Gaz was frankly shocked at the volume of fury which rose in her breast upon sight of the engineer. The things he’d done to Gaz were dark, sure. But he’d ruined Alaya’s life. While using Gaz to do it.
Flesh overrode mechanics for an instant. Gaz stopped and stared at Kowal. It wasn’t a good idea, someone like Kowal could have several internal coprocessors running matches for attention or observation.
More important than that: Alaya was in trouble.
Gaz tore herself away from Kowal, but not before she surreptitiously fired a remote controlled microprobe at the engineer. His EM field must have been at low power or even off because the signal to her probe did not so much as blip when it attached. It unleashed a spectrum of chemical, radioactive, and digital trackers onto the man along with an expensive magical trace Gaz had picked up when they were sheltering in place under Janice’s protections. Gaz possessed three more such probes, all ear marked for specific individuals among the Mal-wares gang.
Alaya would be ecstatic when she found out. Assuming she was alive.
Running and shoving would have created a scene, caused the lanes to clog up, and gotten her on the very security list she’d been monitoring until a few minutes ago. It still took more self control than it should have to keep from leaning over the milling people, crawl up the metal scaffolding, and skitter toward Alaya like a spider. The carry on effects of such a choice… Gaz amused herself by creating a rendering of her imagination to keep from fretting over Alaya.
Left to her own devices, Gaz would have stayed at Alaya’s side nonstop. But sec was the one job Gaz could get with very few questions asked and it was the one job Alaya wouldn’t… for almost mirror-complimentary reasons. It also paid the most and provided the best access Gaz could hope for. Too bad it took her away from Alaya and too bad Alaya had insisted. If they paid off their dock penalties along with their other expenses, they could get slightly better accommodations and Alaya would be out from under the thumb of the local gangsters.
The crowd finally did thin out around the dock area. Traffic into and out of the station was paltry compared to its long-term population and the docks were fitted for a great deal more capacity than they ever had to accept these days. Scale-wise, Bahl-Mau IV was a lower-mid tier station, mostly residential now, large number of indentures but almost as many freedmen and criminals. It’s location on a well-traveled criminal nexus made it a popular haunt for the unsavory. One woman collected all of the grift from those unsavory types, indentures, and anyone else who ventured into Bahl-Mau IV. Her name was simply “Nissa.”
Thirteen teams, four in-house defense robots rated for munitions which should have been illegal on the station, and then there was McRory. He reminded Gaz of Jaree the bruiser. Holovids rarely captured battle at the small scale correctly. Jaree and Gaz would have been evenly matched from a technological perspective. From her time with the pirates, she knew his technical specifications in full. They’d never purged her memory, hard or wet, so she possessed a font of dangerous details she could use against them. But when it came to Jaree, he matched Gaz bit for bit. Fair to assume their skill levels were not evenly matched, Jaree clearly trained and had a lifetime’s worth of experience over her. Even that wasn’t as significant as their mass and size.
In a one-on-one fight, Gaz would have to trust to luck and the thinnest margins against Jaree. She would have to assume the same for Nissa’s number two: McRory. Dade McRory, to be specific, but no one called him that. It was always McRory. Based on her visual assessment, he was larger than Jaree. And her scans had revealed a similar composition to herself and Jaree. In short, McRory was the most dangerous single person aboard the station, with Gaz a close second. Closing that gap would be a simple matter of taking McRory by surprising and landing a decisive blow before he reacted.
Several dozen routes. Gaz had stopped collecting them when she was satisfied she could retrieve Alaya no matter where they were keeping her. Route 7 took her under the structure and through a series of drone service tunnels.
Easy.
Morphic nanites began to dissolve the rigid elements of Gaz’s body. Musculature, much of it made from the same morphic nanites destabilized at the same time. Gaz literally fell into a puddle of herself. Off in shadow, no one would notice the transformation. She moved up to the service plenum access and opened the panel by extruding an adapter and twisting the bolts off. Neither Jaree nor McRory could do this.
Gaz knew the name of her manufacturer: Etiolon Inc. And she knew they were long, long gone as a corporation entity. MilCas had frozen their assets and proceeded to strip the company of their digital holdings as well as financial. No one complained when they did. Gaz knew the name of the cyberware developer who headed up her design team: Yamani bin Hasef. She also knew when he’d died, while in MilCas custody. And by spacing. They were not happy with him. Doing something impossible like this with her body emphasized Gaz’s alien nature and the cutting edge technology and magic which had gone into her design. All of those secrets were lost with the destruction of the company who’d built her.
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Outside of protecting Alaya, Gaz had no purpose, no reason for her existence. At least she didn’t have to assassinate innocents anymore. A coproc already had the passing drones scanned into her memory. She adapted her form to match them and flew into the feed using adaptive hands to simulate flight; there was no way for her to build a suspensor.
From the service vents, Gaz diverted to section security. Nissa’s portion of the station had been segregated from the rest when it was built. At the time it had ether been a redundancy feature or had been intended an a independent section of the station. Regardless, there was no way to breach Nissa’s security other than by going onsite like this and tapping directly into the source.
No one in the office took notice of a maintenance drone crawling across the floor. They really should have noticed. Gaz waddled over to a comm port and inserted her link. From here, she could have vented all of the air out of the section or even just shut off life support and slagged the controls so there was no easy way to turn them back on. This was a really vulnerable little area. Not that most people could just walk through like this. Still.
Gaz found Alaya sitting having tea with Nissa and let out a soft beep of satisfaction. Nissa was unusually direct for a gangster underboss, so if she were intending to kill Alaya, she would have started on the torture already. This had been Gaz’s entire basis for haste the way here, the source of her panic. Her metal case shook from relief, if she couldn’t cry she could at least express herself like this.
While she was here, might as well pay herself forward. Gaz dropped an autonomous drone in the comm port and gave it order to squirt back to a comm buoy Gaz left out far enough no one would mess with it.
“Hey, this service drone is acting funny.” One of the human security operators finally managed to wake up and do his job.
Not the best time to discover diligence and responsibility. At least not the best time for Gaz. She kept shaking, since the drone wouldn’t be able to understand human speech. The guard approached with his starched blue uniform and head cowl.
“Just thump and see if it stops.” The other guard called out lazily from the other terminal.
Every single processor, every single ounce of neural matter comprising Gaz’s mind kicked into high energy mode. All of them were united as a mass in trying to plot and think her way out of this. The other guard picked up a spanner and thwacked Gaz with it. She froze and emitted a beep she hoped sounded like an “all clear.”
A room such as this, a central surveillance and security nexus, would have its own security and monitoring team, usually a 1-2 person crew. The question wasn’t just would the guard looming over Gaz buy it, but would the other two guards buy it?
Protocol in a glitch like this would be to run a standard scan, record the drone’s serial, and flag it for service. Would they do that?
“Seems okay. Let’s get back to the game.” The other guard jogged over to his terminal and spoke as if to another set of people. Gaz finished her “job” and teetered away, back into the stream of drones, this time going back where she entered. In the time it took her to reach the service access, she’d listened to enough of the guard’s game to realize they were playing against another security team with the stakes free time. Were they playing games with the same people who were supposed to watch their feed?
Gaz entered the service tunnels and an alarm triggered. The drone she’d left in the connection received a massive overload, tripping its internal breakers and disconnecting it from the hardline. It was an otherwise silent alarm, not intended for humans.
Among the drones, the results were immediate and dire. Gaz had noted the basic onboard tools each service drone had possessed, planning to use them on the humans to defend herself as a last resort. They only have been effective if the humans let her get close enough to apply her tools.
But those drones… they began sending sec challenges to each other. A challenge Gaz did not know how to answer. Not right then, she’d need time to decode the challenge and response from the other drones. Time she did not have.
They fell on her with their laser cutters and drills at once. It was a rather sophisticated system which raised a key question to Gaz, as she fled from the drones for her safety: why not just leave the challenge and response protocol on all of the time? It would eliminate the chance someone like her could sneak in and do what she had. Several potential reasons occurred as Gaz expanded her mass from where it was stored and began to fight back. Though the drones were both well made and durable, they did not hold up under Gaz’s crushing force and a simple turn about from her weapons.
The drones who approached, she took apart. In the course of doing so, she collected a few of the suspensor engines for later study and use. When they all stopped and skittered away from her, Gaz formed into the shape of a small fox and darted away. A human-shaped arm exploded through the metal wall and into the shaft where Gaz has been standing. The fist on the end had long red wiry hairs on it, each of which Gaz’s sensors identified as sensors and small-scale projectile weapons.
Identification occurred at the same time the wires fired sections of themselves at her, propelled along by little flame streams. At least they weren’t guided after firing.
Gaz knocked them out of the air with her paws, crushing the bits under her feet before sprinting away. Once again, she’d jumped with almost preternatural timing. Another first plunged into the wall, way too far away for a human torso, or anything on the scale of a human torso. Interesting mystery for later review, right then she dashed out of the path of more hair-rockets and skidded down the shaft toward the exit.
Her fox shape was compromised so Gaz began the melting and re-forming process as she reached the vent exit. Not a moment too soon as the exit shut a grate over her, through which she continued to flow in her mostly liquid form.
A third arm smashed into the vent. This time Gaz was already out of sight in the shadow before it appeared. Birds, especially the digital variety, had been one of the most common creatures aboard a space craft, and were even more common aboard stations. Old mining lore about canaries had ignited the trend, studies about animal companionship and social movements had kept the flame alive.
Gaz launched herself into the air in the form of a dove, the smallest form she could normally attain. It had taken months of simulation and actual training to coordinate her processors and flesh sufficiently to fly while using her senses. Every microsecond paid off as Gaz flitted out of the tunnel to merge with the other bird roosting among exposed girders and splashing around rusty pools.
The security team within Nissa’s spread out in a very professional ring. Most people in the crowd wouldn’t have known there were twenty cyborgs more than capable of slaughtering them within arm’s reach. Twenty-one counting Gaz, which still evoked a sense of regret after all of these years.
It would have been a mercy to forget just one face or to fail to account for just one soul. Nine-hundred seventy-one people. A prime number. Though there was no rational justification for her prejudice, Gaz felt wrong about killing a prime number of people, more wrong than she might feel if it were one digit higher or lower.
Strange.
She had time to contemplate up here. While those teams scoured the concourse for her, Gaz needed to remain innocuous and bird-like. If she’d been forced to kill those two security guards back there, Gaz would not have hesitated. The way she saw the world, the moment you picked up a weapon or had one installed, you ceased to be innocent. Too bad the Mal-wares had never consulted Gaz on her targets. One of the last she’d killed was the worst. A secret only she and a trio of others held. Killing those three would fulfill Gaz’s purpose in life. And it would protect the darkest, most heinous act she’d ever performed.
Killing the father of the woman she loved.