Urle woke up screaming.

“Calm down!” he heard someone saying. “Fuckin calm down ya!”

Restraints held him, but his body was pulling so hard against them that he’d nearly ripped them from the bed.

He . . . wasn’t dead. At least he didn’t think so. He checked his sensors and saw that there were no alarms for his intracranial pressure.

“Wh-what happened?” he asked.

“You wake unexpected,” Madspark said, sounding sullen and angry. “Ops done, no bad. You patched up to walk and the chems be out you shortly. I want you gone fast whence you can walk.”

Urle felt it was odd for the man to be angry with him – if he woke up, that meant Madspark had done something wrong.

He did not reply, though the man was watching him carefully. His internal alarms were still going off, and the sudden awakening of his organic mind was making it hard to comprehend what they were saying.

FOREIGN DATA DETECTED

FOREIGN DATA RUN EXECUTED – SECURITY COMPROMISED

EXTERNAL DATA BREACH ATTEMPTED

EXTERNAL DATA ACCESS INHIBITED

INTERNAL DATA STORAGE SECURE

HOSTILE ACTIVITY DETECTED

ACTIVATING PROGRAM ‘WETMEATWAKEUP’

TIME TO GO BACK TO WORK CHAMP

What?

He tried to fathom the meaning. He’d found ghost data . . . of death. His own death. Or someone else’s? Could it have been-

“What you experience?” Madspark said, seeming concerned suddenly, leaning in with some kind of device.

It sent alarm thrills through him, and he reached up, shoving the man’s hand back. What he’d just seen and felt was a blur to him, and despite having just lived it, he could hardly remember it. The ghost data was being purged, a good security measure at most times, but he actually didn’t want that now.

“I saw . . . someone’s memory,” he said. “They were dying.”

“Who do the killin?” Madspark asked.

Urle paused.

“I didn’t say they were murdered.”

The man grimaced, then lunged.

Urle raised both arms, grabbing for Madspark’s hand, stopping him just before-

He had the same shock spike. Urle recognized it, his scanners identifying it as the exact weapon that had killed the man in the memory.

The ghost memories flashed, and he almost lost control of the man’s arm.

He was stronger than Madspark, his parts better, but his system was not running at full capacity, and he couldn’t control himself as well as he normally might. The man had considerable weight on him as well, using it to press him back onto the bed, and the knife ever closer to his face.

The point was approaching his eye, and Urle felt panic well up inside him, just like in the memory, his mouth opened but he could only make a strangled gargle, fighting as hard as he was-

And then Madspark flew back. Surprise widened his eyes as he was thrown, crashing into a table and flipping over onto the floor.

Kell stared at Urle, his face as stoic as always.

“Are you all right?” he asked calmly.

“N-no,” Urle panted. “The store owner, he- he’s trying to kill-“

The man was back up and lunged at Kell now, who turned to meet him.

Just in time for Madspark to drive the shock spike into his skull.

Madspark did not laugh or seem pleased with his work, but his eyes went to Urle, already moving onto his next task with computer efficiency, and Urle knew that he was not up to fighting the man again. He was even more fatigued, and despite what the man had said he knew that the chems were not clearing up. If anything the man had drugged him more.

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Then Kell reached up, serenely, grasping the spike by the handle, and pulling it out of his head.

Madspark’s eyes jerked back to him, and alarm flashed over his face.

Moving even faster than the aug, Kell’s hands flew up, grasping onto each side of Madspark’s head.

“Agh!” the man bit out, grabbing Kell’s hands, trying to pull them free, his arm servos straining until smoke began to pour from them.

But Kell seemed to not even notice. He gave a sharp, upward jerk, and the man’s head visibly jumped up, his spine breaking and his neck stretching horribly.

Kell frowned, looking slightly troubled. Then he jerked again and the man’s entire head ripped off his neck.

Blood and oil splattered across the wall, and Urle stared in shock as Madspark’s body fell to the floor, twitching.

Kell still held the head calmly, watching the body. He deliberately placed his foot onto the chest of the man, and pressed it down. Metal, flesh, and bone yielded like butter, his entire chest caving in.

Kell dropped the head and turned back to Urle.

“Are you all right?” he repeated.

----------------------------------------

It took Urle a few minutes to gather himself.

He’d told Kell what he’d experienced, even though he truly wanted to just delete all memory of it. To think he had the last moments of a dying man in his head was . . . it felt horrible to think of just getting rid of it, as if he was destroying the last memory of the victim . . .

He had to do something.

Sitting on the operating table, he knew they should not dawdle here, but his legs were still not as under his command as he would have liked.

Seeing the head casually ripped off someone – even if that person had just been trying to murder him – was almost as shocking as the attempted murder itself. The amount of force required to rip an aug’s head off his reinforced spine . . .

Neither of those things were quite as bad as reliving the memory of actually being murdered, though.

The only reason he himself had survived was that he was a better coder than Madspark. The man wasn’t just a murderer; reviewing the logs in his system, Urle saw that the man had taken the opportunity while inside his head to try and download all of his data. He probably had figured out who he was, and the data of the Executive Commander of the Craton would have been worth a mountain of credits to many people.

But Urle’s internal security was something he’d worked extremely hard on. As soon as the man began to tamper in sensitive areas he tripped the security wake-up protocol. If not for that, then Madspark probably would have seen the data Urle had received and killed him on the table when he was helpless . . .

“You say that the man tried to access data in your head via electronics,” Kell said.

“That’s right. But before he did that I got the ghost data . . .”

“The part seems to be a source of trouble, then,” Kell noted. “Would you like me to remove it?” He reached up towards Urle’s head.

“No! No.” Urle put his own hand up. While he’d considered taking it out, it was not an easy operation to do on yourself. He could probably deal with it, however unpleasant it might be, but Kell’s method would surely be fatal.

Isolating the new equipment in a virtual sub-environment, he probed it cautiously. There was foreign data there, that someone – the victim – had set at the last minute to be dumped into whoever got the part.

Wanting his killer to be found.

Looking at Madspark’s head on the floor, Urle saw that Kell had crushed his access ports. Unless Urle wanted to carry the head back to the ship, there was no way to get at his data.

He considered trying that, but it was . . . well, besides horrifying, far too dangerous if they were caught. He couldn’t even be sure the data would still be intact.

He noticed, too, that Kell’s hands had no marks on them. He’d crushed and ripped an aug’s head off and had suffered no injury.

“Someone else may come in here soon,” Kell noted. “Unless you wish to be connected to this, I suggest we leave.”

“I’ll have to scrub all data from here and on the server,” Urle noted. “Though maybe I should keep it as evidence . . .”

Kell seemed disinterested in that, instead kneeling down and looking at the head. “You said that this man had killed someone else to acquire the part you bought.”

“Yeah.”

“Why would he do that when you could find this out?”

“I imagine he scrubbed it,” Urle replied, getting up carefully from the table. “But the previous owner pulled some pretty fancy tricks to hide the data until it was input into someone else.”

“Endangering that person,” Kell noted.

“I doubt while he was being murdered he thought much about that. He just wanted justice,” Urle said.

Kell snorted in derision.

Urle continued. “But if someone’s chopping augs, it’s not likely to be just this store owner involved. There’s probably a network.”

“He would know,” Kell said, nodding at the head.

“I can’t connect to it with his head in its . . . damaged state,” Urle said carefully. “And we can’t get it back to the ship to extract the data . . .”

Kell looked up at him. “You are saying there is a device in his head that has the data?”

“Yeah, but-“

Kell grabbed the head in both hands, digging his fingers in. With a terrible sound, he ripped the man’s skull open.

Urle gasped, stumbling back, as Kell offered up the head.

“Fiscing dark, Kell!” he yelled. “You can’t just rip people’s heads open!”

Kell frowned. “You wanted the data. Which part is it?”

“We can’t just-“

“Which part is it?” Kell repeated. His voice and tone were exactly the same. Robotic, almost, and Urle found himself chilled in a new way. There was absolutely no concern, no empathy, not even resignation at having to perform such dirty work.

“That one,” Urle said, his voice pale.

Steam was rising still from the exposed brain, blood and oil running and mingling from multiple places. Kell plunged his fingers in and ripped out the tiny storage drive.

Urle gestured for him to put it on the operating table. Kell put it down, then stared at him.

Feeling compelled to do something to at least make the desecration not entirely meaningless, he connected to the shop’s system and took control of the medical suite.

He did not want to connect to it directly, there was a decent chance of booby traps against such brute-force intrusions. But he knew enough tricks to use the man’s own systems to fool those if he used the medical systems.

“Keep watch for any customers,” Urle told Kell.

Kell nodded, and stepped out into the main store area.