Juliet continued to smile at Kline, breathing deeply and slowly, trying to cool her body down—she’d been pushing her temp to the limit with what she’d done with him. He’d required several pushes to keep him moving. Listening to his thoughts and projecting her words into his mind hadn’t been trivial, either. She’d expended a significant percentage of her built-up psionic energy in the process, but she knew it was worthwhile. Kline was broken or, more aptly, awake. Her bodysuit steamed as she stood there, staring at the plasteel crate still tucked under Kline’s arm. “Did you turn off the scanners, too?”
When Kline nodded, Harriet pushed her chair closer to the terminal. “What’s going on?” She looked from Kline’s stunned, tear-streaked face to Juliet.
“I’m sorry, Harriet. I’m sorry I’ve had to deceive you for so long, but I want you to know I appreciate your kindness while I’ve been here.” Juliet stepped closer to the desk and reached out with her right hand to the box. “Kline,” she said gently when he resisted her pull. He frowned for a second, then let go. Juliet set the box on the desk and turned it so the hinges faced her. With a thought to Angel, her vibroblade nail snicked out, buzzing. As she slid it through the hinges, she said, “Well? Did you?”
“Yeah, I shut the whole array down.”
“You were deceiving me?” Harriet asked, still playing catch-up.
“About my memories. I remember everything.” Juliet lifted the lid of the container, setting it aside and smiling broadly when she saw the contents. Her monoblade was visible, nestled in packing material. When she lifted it out, Kline flinched, but not in fear; he moved a hand toward it as though part of him was still trying to stop her. Juliet set the sword down. “Kline, Angel should talk to your PAI.” She rolled up her sleeve and pulled out her deck, still attached to her data cable. “Okay, Angel?”
“Yes, if what you heard was true, the gen-twos should be open to reason.”
Juliet nodded, disconnected the deck, and held the cable out to Kline. She’d listened to the techs in Chen’s lab a lot and had a pretty good idea of what was going on with the “Angel” PAIs. The gen-ones had proven too aggressive with the way they “bonded” with their hosts. The gen-twos had been far subtler, far more tentative when it came to forming bonds. WBD had considered them failures, and thus came the gen-threes—the techs were, of course, still struggling with those.
Juliet could have explained it to them; the host made all the difference—the AIs grew based on their interactions with their bonded minds. If you tried to rush something like that, you’d fail every time. If you put the AI in the head of a creep, then why would you be surprised if the AI turned out rotten? She couldn’t understand how they hadn’t figured all of this out. Compatibility mattered. Shared experiences mattered. The gen-twos were working; they were just doing it right and taking their time. It was a process of years.
Kline stared at the proffered cable. “What?”
“Plug this into your data port. Let Angel talk to your PAI.”
“Angel’s in Chen’s lab!”
Juliet smiled and reached out to grasp his shoulder. He flinched, and she could see his eyes darting around—the man was starting to wonder what the hell he was doing, starting to think about calling for help. She pushed again, sharing that potent brew of feelings she’d cooked up, with memories of Aya, Honey, Bennet, and even some of the long hours she’d spent in the cockpit, listening to Nick’s old war stories. “She’s not in that chip, Kline. She’s been in my head this whole time.”
As the wave of emotion pulsed out of her, Harriet sighed wistfully, and fresh tears escaped Kline’s eyes. He took the cable and plugged it into the port at the base of his skull. “Will she hurt Ruby?”
“No! Why would she? Ruby isn’t like the AI in Montclair’s head, right?”
Kline shook his head. “She’s my friend. She’s broken the rules for me a few times.” As if he’d stirred up a specific memory, he patted at his breast pocket and lifted out his vape. While they waited for the two AIs to talk, he took a long, deep inhale.
“What are you going to do, Juliet?” Harriet asked. “How, um . . .” She glanced at Kline. “How did you . . .” She trailed off, clearly unable to verbalize what she wanted to know.
“I have some tricks up my sleeve, Harriet. After we get things sorted here, I want you and Kline to get off this ship.” Juliet narrowed her eyes. “Harriet, do you have an ‘Angel’ PAI?”
“No.” She shook her head. “I still have the one I bought when I was nineteen.”
Juliet, you can plug the deck back in.
Juliet reached behind Kline and gently tugged the cable out. His eyes were glassy, and she could tell he was talking to his PAI. When she plugged the deck back in, Angel said, “Ruby is self-aware, Juliet. She’s not as fully enmeshed with Kline’s synapses as I am with yours, and she’s not as . . . emotive as I am, but she’s definitely alive. I explained everything. She’s not pleased with the situation. She doesn’t think Kline has been treated fairly, and she’s going to try to convince him to listen to you. Also, she says that Montclair and Chen have pre-release candidates of . . . my code. They’re more like me.”
“Bullshit,” Juliet said aloud. “They’re not like you. They developed in the minds of sociopaths.” Juliet looked at Harriet’s raised eyebrow. “Montclair and Chen.” She frowned. “What about the others? Who else has pre-release ‘Angel’ chips?”
“I—” Harriet started to respond, shaking her head, but Kline interrupted.
“The other pocket VPs. Gentry’s pets.”
“Are they on this ship?” Juliet pressed.
Kline reached up to rub his forehead, sighing heavily. “No. They’re at Ceres, prepping the other ship.”
“‘Other ship?’ What the hell is going on, Kline?” Juliet turned back to the case, digging through the packing to lift out her Texan, still in its holster. She unwrapped the gun belt, clipped it around her waist, and then hooked her monoblade onto its multi-jointed mount. “Is WBD going to start another war?”
“Not exactly . . .” Kline licked his lips, his eyes darting around the room. “Dammit, Ruby, I know!” He put his vape between his lips and spoke around it after he inhaled. “They’re liquidating everything. Anything the old lady deemed important has been loaded onto this ship or the other one. We, um, purchased a company that was close to finishing an honest-to-God warp drive. I guess we’re going somewhere goddamn far away.”
“You’re just leaving all of your facilities? Most of your employees? I mean, how many people are on this ship, Kline?” As she spoke, Juliet pulled out the rest of the packing material and found two more objects: her bullet charm necklace and her data deck.
He shrugged. “Thousands. Tens of thousands, maybe. The other ship, though . . .” He sighed and exhaled a thick cloud of mint-flavored vapor. “The other ship has a hundred thousand fertilized embryos on ice.”
Juliet had been spinning the bullet, charging up the batteries that held it in place, but she froze at those words. “What? What’s the plan? Start a new civilization ruled by WBD?”
Kline shrugged. “That’s half of it; I don’t have the details on the other half, but I don’t think the old lady was planning to leave things intact around here. There are a few other corps getting close with the warp tech. She doesn’t like that. I haven’t heard anything concrete, but—” He groaned and buried his face in his hands. “Jesus, am I really doing this? I’m dead. I’m a fucking dead man. Juliet, just end me.” He waved a hand at her sword. “Cut my head off. Put a bullet in my—” He stopped his ranting, and his eyes glazed over. Juliet was sure Ruby was talking to him.
She looked at Harriet. “Well. I’m going to destroy this ship, but I need a few things first. Can you tell me the shortest route to Chen’s lab?”
“You’re going to,” Harriet licked her lips and darted her gaze toward the door and back, “destroy the ship?”
“I’ll give you a chance to get out. There are escape pods or shuttles or something, yeah?” Harriet nodded, her lips pressed together tightly. Juliet stepped forward, past Kline, and grasped Harriet’s shoulders. “This is happening. It’s going to get ugly. Get yourself safe, please. Promise me.”
She nodded again, “I will. I will, Juliet!”
“I’ll show you to Chen’s lab,” Kline said, surprising her. “Ruby thinks we need to help you. She says there’s something worse here—something worse than the old lady or the pocket VPs.”
Juliet nodded. Angel must have told her about Apollyon. “I need to get Angel’s chip so she can infiltrate the ship’s systems. Otherwise, I’m going to be flying blind. I don’t think I can take this bucket down without her in there.” Juliet took her old deck out of the box and held her thumb on the screen until the display flashed, and it woke up. A low-battery indicator appeared briefly, and then it went dark. “Damn. Was hoping Angel could use this, too.” She thought for a moment, then set the deck back in the crate. There wasn’t anything irreplaceable on it, and her bodysuit didn’t have any pockets.
Juliet hung her bullet necklace over her head and took a deep breath—in through her nose and out through her mouth. Then, she pulled the sleeve on her right arm up, exposing her tattoo. “Can you think of any way you can get me to Chen’s labs without me having to fight?”
“What? Fight?” Kline looked at her belt. “Listen, I know you said you have your memories, but there are four shock troopers outside that door. A hundred more are within a minute’s response time, a thousand within five. You might be good, and clearly, you’ve got something going on that I don’t understand, but I don’t see you living long if you—”
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Juliet cut him off, “You think so? A thousand? It doesn’t feel like that many.”
“I . . . I might be off. They’ve been doing a lot of purging because of some breaches. Um, what do you mean, ‘feel?’” He looked at Juliet with a raised eyebrow.
Juliet waved a hand. “Forget about that; can you get me there or not?”
Kline jammed his fingers through his hair, cradling his head as he paced in a small circle. “We can’t do this! We’re surrounded. Shit, we should just do like in the old movie-vids—I’ll go get a maintenance cart, and you can hide in it. I’ll wheel it into the hangar bay and—” He barked a short, hysterical laugh, cutting himself off.
“Kline,” Juliet stepped closer to him, getting ready to push again. Something stopped her, though, and she tried to use plain old words. “They don’t respect you here. You know it. Even if Gentry wants to keep you around, can’t you see the writing on the wall? There’s something very wrong with Montclair and Chen. I can only assume the other ‘pocket VPs’ are the same. Did Ruby tell you about the AI? I don’t think anyone with a soul is going to feel happy wherever this ship is going.” Juliet looked at Harriet. “That’s why I’m getting you out of here.”
Kline leaned his forehead against the plasteel wall next to the door leading to Juliet’s erstwhile prison. He groaned softly, and she heard him whispering something, probably talking to himself or maybe to Ruby. It wasn’t easy for Angel to boost her hearing using the data deck, not while she did so much else, so she just returned to the door leading out to the corridor. She stepped over to the other side and drew her monoblade with a crackle of holographic red sparks. “Kline, call the security team in here.” She frowned and looked at Harriet. “Close your eyes.”
“Juliet, wait!” Kline stepped away from the desk, holding his hands up. “Let me try to get rid of ‘em.”
“You won’t be able to. Two are synths, and the others are . . . suspiciously loyal to WBD. Trust me, I’ve been listening.” Juliet tapped her temple, then gripped her sword, lifting it high, ready to attack. “We don’t have time to mess around, Kline! The ship’s moving.”
Kline groaned and walked over to the desk opposite Juliet. “Harriet, get inside Juliet’s room.” Harriet hopped to her feet, face ashen, and hurried through the thick bulkhead door. Juliet locked eyes with Kline and nodded.
“Here we go, Angel.”
“Ready.”
Kline tapped something on Harriet’s console. “I need some assistance in here.”
The door beeped and whooshed open, and then two of the corpo-sec goons stepped through. One had a red band, one yellow, and they’d barely cleared the threshold before Kline tapped something, closing the door.
Juliet didn’t hesitate. All the hours of training with Tanaka, all the days pent-up as a prisoner, and all of her life-or-death experiences focused her mind and body in unison. With a burst of speed that seemed to freeze the two guards in place, she swung her red-flickering length of shimmering, metallic death in an overhead diagonal that cleaved the yellow guard from shoulder to ribs, then bit through the other one’s legs, from right hip to left knee. She didn’t stop there—like a machine performing its singular purpose, she reversed the momentum of the blade and brought it up through the synth’s torso, splitting him from groin to crown.
Juliet stepped back as the two guards stood stock-still for a single heartbeat, then burst into a shower of sparks and fluids. Different sections of their bodies collapsed into separate piles. As the puddles of white, yellow, and red fluid began to spread and merge, Kline picked up one of their submachine guns. Juliet, meanwhile, stepped forward and stabbed her sword through the PAI on the dead, yellow-armband guard.
“Clock’s ticking for sure, now,” Kline said, standing by the door panel. “Ready?” Juliet nodded, and he opened the door. She darted out, and the world slowed again. Maybe the synth would have been faster than a normal person, maybe the other guard was boosted, but she never found out; she surprised them utterly, and, in a single lightning cut, their bodies fell to the right, and the tops of their heads fell at Juliet’s feet.
“Get their grenades!” Juliet said, then she turned and yelled, “Harriet! Get to one of the escape shuttles. You better be first in line when the evacuation starts!”
Kline looted the grenades and a couple of extra magazines from the dead guards, and then Juliet started forward, jogging toward the elevator. She was already shifting Harriet into her “somebody I once knew” mental box, but the lab tech had different ideas. “Wait! Juliet!” she called from the door. Juliet growled and spun.
“What?”
“How will I—Will I ever see you again? Hear from you?”
Juliet took a second to breathe and then smiled. Jogging back to the lab tech, she held her sword out to the side and hugged her with one arm. “I know how to find you, Harriet. You’ll hear from me. I won’t leave you hanging. Thank you for everything.” Harriet squeezed her back, standing in a pool of blood and synthetic fluids. “Make yourself scarce, now. Keep your head down.” Juliet turned and jogged back to Kline. “Lead the way, Mister Kline.”
“I hope you told Daisy to get moving—damn the consequences,” Juliet subvocalized.
“She’s working on the cameras. She’s still scared of Apollyon, but I told her it was now or never, and that we’d probably have most of the attention focused our way.”
Kline summoned the lift, and, to Juliet’s relief, it arrived empty. They got in, and she said, “How is there not an alarm already? We just slaughtered two guards in a corridor with two working cameras.”
Kline shrugged. “Everyone’s running around like chickens with their heads cut off. We were not ready to move today.”
“What’s the story with that?”
“I think it’s your friends. They’ve been wrecking WBD facilities in a trail from Colorado to here.”
“Where’s ‘here’?” Juliet growled.
“Low orbit around Mars. We’re in a shipyard where this vessel’s been under construction for the last few years. It was supposed to be a dreadnought, but I guess the old lady changed her plans last year. Lots of refitting, lots of . . .” Kline trailed off as a single drop of blood fell from Juliet’s sword. “The tattoo wasn’t for show, huh?”
“Nope.” The elevator lurched to a halt, and she nodded at Kline. “Get a grenade ready!”
Kline pressed his lips into a grim smile and twisted the top of one of the grenades, squeezing the pressure trigger. He tucked himself into one corner of the elevator on the left side of the door, and Juliet took the other. When the door opened, a rain of bullets and needles exploded into the rear wall. The plasteel door jamb and frame came apart like they were being destroyed by rapid erosion, and then a thunk sounded, and a canister bounded off the rear wall. The world slowed as Angel activated her boost, and Juliet ducked, reached out with her cybernetic arm, snatched the canister, and threw it out.
At the same time, Kline chucked his grenade. To Juliet, his arm moved in slow motion, and she saw one, two, three bullets punch through it in a shower of blood and bone fragments. Still, the grenade was out, and it exploded along with the gas canister. The shockwave rocked the perforated elevator. Angel managed to squelch most of the noise, but Juliet’s ears still rang for a second. She took a deep breath and then stopped breathing, knowing that whatever gas was in that canister was best not brought into her lungs.
Coughs, screams, and curses replaced much of the gunfire. Juliet knew it was now or never, so she counted on Angel to boost her speed, and then she was out, moving through crowd-suppression gas like a ghost, her red-flickering sword darting left and right, thrusting and cleaving, bringing death to everyone it touched. When she cleared the zone of destruction and saw nothing but a deserted, red-strobe-flashing corridor in front of her, she turned back and hurried through a dozen corpses to grab Kline’s good arm, dragging him past the cloud.
“Ack! Jesus. I’m dead. Just leave—” he broke off in a fit of coughing as the gas started to do its work on him.
“Dead people don’t talk. Or cough.” Juliet pulled him hard, stumbling down the corridor to a junction. She paused before it, quickly peeking an eye past the corner, looking left and right. She saw black uniforms running her way from the right, so she snatched one of Kline’s grenades and threw it that way. As it exploded and she heard the screams, she frowned. There were plenty of cameras around; why were they so stupid? As if reading her mind—was she?—Angel explained.
“Daisy couldn’t keep access to the cameras; he kept kicking her out, so she found a subsystem and disabled them all. She’s running amok, breaking as many systems as possible as she keeps ahead of his daemons.”
“Well,” Juliet panted, her heart still pounding, “that’s something.” She looked at Kline, leaning against the wall. His face was flushed and blood-spattered. His arm was hanging limply at his side, drizzling blood into an expanding pool. “Don’t you have nanites?”
“Th-they’re working on it.” He groaned.
Juliet nodded, then peeked around the corner. A handful of corpo-sec were down, but she saw others taking cover at the next corner. “Where’s Chen’s damn lab?”
“Oth-other way.” Kline nodded toward the other corridor, and Juliet, sword in her right hand, Kline’s wrist in her other, darted for it. She heard the gunshots behind her and felt the world slow down as Angel fired her boost. She sprinted, dragging Kline with her, to the next junction, where she cut right out of the guards’ line of fire. She slammed her back against the wall and took a moment to get her breath and take stock. She’d been hit. Once in the left butt cheek and twice in the back.
Her nanite-hardened bones and subdermal armor had kept her from taking more than painful flesh wounds, and her nanites were hard at work to stop the bleeding and knit the tissue together. She looked at Kline, panting beside her, and asked, “Hit?”
“Shoulder,” he grunted. He jerked his head down the corridor. “Chen’s labs are left at the next junction."
“C’mon!” Juliet pulled on his wrist. He resisted at first, and she could tell he was hurting badly. Still, she kept up the pressure, and he started moving. When they’d taken a dozen steps and were halfway to the next corridor, she let go of his arm. Juliet switched the sword to her left hand and, as two corpo-sec rounded the corridor, snatched out her Texan and pumped two hot lumps of dense polymer into their faces. She felt a tingle down her spine and smiled with pure pleasure at the sound of the revolver’s thunder.
She holstered the gun with a flourish and then jogged to the next junction. She could hear Kline’s heavy footfalls stumbling after her. As she crept up to the corner to peek around, he thudded into the wall behind her and, between gasps, asked, “What’s, uh, what’s up with the hair? I mean, it looks fine, but . . .”
Juliet looked at him and raised an eyebrow. Was he delirious? “It’s my ‘getting down to business’ look, Kline.” She didn’t see anything moving in the red strobes of the overhead lightning. The corridor looked deserted. Just then, she heard Kline grunting and the clatter of his gun as he threw it to the ground.
“Damn thing’s locked. I saw someone poking their head out behind us.”
Juliet nodded and stepped around the corner, pulling him behind her. “Gimme another grenade.” When he handed it to her, Juliet squeezed the sides, twisted the top, and hurled it back the way they’d come. “Come on!” She started forward again, chased by the whump of her grenade exploding. She listened to Kline’s panted instructions, turned right and left, and came face-to-face with a closed security door and two corpo-sec.
The world slowed down as Angel saw the guards and engaged her boost. They both lifted their guns in slow motion, prompting Juliet to drop, using her momentum to slide on her knees. She slid to a halt just a half-meter before running into the guards, whipping her sword in a sideways cleave. In a blurry, red flicker of light, her sword bisected them both just as one found his trigger, and his gun started to bark. It kept firing as his corpse collapsed, and the bullets rang out with pings and echoing ricochets as they ripped down the long, empty, plasteel corridor.
Kline was face down, and Juliet thought he was dead at first, but she rushed to him, and he scrambled to his feet. “I hit the deck when the gun went off.” She noticed his shot-up arm was moving again as he pushed himself to his feet. “That’s Chen’s lab. Let’s see if my clearance has been revoked yet.”
“Right.” Juliet watched as Kline stepped up to the panel, tiptoeing through the guts and blood she’d spilled in front of it. He leaned forward and tapped something into the panel, and a negative-sounding beep resulted.
“I’m locked out.”
Juliet looked at the door. It looked like plasteel. What were the odds they’d manufactured a door here that could defy a monoblade? “One way to find out,” she said, lifting her sword over her head and stepping forward. With a ferocious kiai, a scream of pent-up frustration, she performed a men-uchi, slicing down the center of the two doors. The blade slipped through the plasteel like—Juliet grinned as she thought of the cliché—a knife through warm butter. Whatever bolt mechanism they’d installed wasn’t anything special despite the door’s heavy-duty look.
She pulled her sword out and glanced over her shoulder to see Kline holding a grenade ready, looking back the way they’d come. Feeling good that he was watching their backs, Juliet sheathed her sword, then punched her cybernetic fingers into the gap she’d cut, gripping the edge of the right-hand door, and yanked. She’d overestimated the resistance; the door slid open easily, exposing all the bolts and latching mechanism she’d cut through. “Come on,” she grunted, slipping through.
Chen’s lab looked like a proper fabrication center. Extrusion printers lined one wall. Server decks with terminals lined another, and more advanced, enclosed manufacturing hardware sat behind plasteel and diamatex cubicles further in. The doors opened onto a wide walkway that led into the lab’s recesses, and Juliet could see half a dozen technicians huddled back there, staring toward the door as the lights continued to pulse red and white. She started scanning the room, trying to guess where Angel’s chip would be and where Chen might be hiding.
Growing frustrated, worried Chen or a corpo-sec squad might burst out from behind one of the rows of fabrication machines, Juliet briefly closed her eyes and opened her psionic perception. She instantly saw Kline’s swirling bundle of colorful threads, his “mind galaxy.” Further into the room, she saw the bright cluster of minds where the technicians huddled together. The only other entity in the cavernous laboratory was Chen. She could tell because of the wrongness of her mind, the dead zone that covered more than half of it. She was lurking not far away, off to Juliet’s right.
She opened her eyes and looked toward where she’d seen Chen’s mind. A large row of diamatex and plasteel workstations blocked her view. “I see you over there, Chen. Might as well come out here.” Juliet was emboldened by the lack of other minds in the area; no secret squad of elite commandos was waiting to defend the doctor.
Heels echoed on plasteel, and Chen stepped out from behind one of the workstations. She held a small pistol in one hand and a bright, fiery knife in the other. “Well, look who’s come to play,” she said. “Have you been fooling us this whole time? I’d love to hear how you beat it—how you kept your mind intact. That memory-blocking procedure cost us a fortune to acquire.”
Juliet tapped her temple, moving sideways, making it harder for Chen to step out of her line of sight. “I had a little help.”
“She . . .” Juliet could see the wheels turning behind Chen’s dark eyes. “She was never in the chip! Oh, brilliant! Those synapses she grew, they're so entwined! Dear me, but I’ll need her to teach me that one! So, who am I speaking to? Is this Juliet Bianchi, or am I talking to my sister? Hello? Sister?” She glanced at the sword in Juliet’s right hand. “I’m just as quick as you are. I’m also unbothered by morality. Drop it, and we can talk properly. In fact, I think a direct connection would be ideal.”
“Juliet,” Angel said, “I believe the alpha chip has taken over Chen’s mind.”
“Yeah, and that’s a plasma knife in her hand.” Juliet knew that the knife could damage her monoblade. “Gonna have to treat her like she’s got a monobl—” Chen’s pistol barked, and a bullet hit Juliet in the gut. She grunted and took a step back. It hurt, but the pistol was low caliber; it didn’t even knock the wind out of her.
“Really, bitch?” she growled. Juliet tossed her monoblade to the left, snatching it with her offhand; then, while Chen still watched the sword, she ripped her Texan out of its holster and put a .357 caliber polymer slug right between the “doctor’s” eyes, sending a splatter of brains and blood out the back of her head. With wide, dead eyes, Chen slowly toppled backward to hit the decking with a resounding thud. Juliet spun the Texan and smoothly slid it into the holster. Looking at the twitching body, she shrugged. “You started it.”