Ghost of Mind Episode One (13 page)

‘
Leave her alone,’ John tried. But he could
hardly make his voice be heard; the effort of locking his boots in
place so his armor wasn't sucked towards the magnetic field of the
robot was taking all his energy.

The robot's grip tightened around the woman's
neck and it gave another scream as it brought its face close to her
own.

Somehow she was still alive, still fighting.
Though she had screamed in pain when the impediment field had
exploded over her, her legs still kicked and she had her hands
locked over the robot's giant fingers.

John had to do something. Anything. If he
didn't, the woman would die, then the robot would continue its
rampage.

‘
Get me a transport lock,’ John screamed
through his implant, contacting the Pegasus, as he stared on
helplessly at the dangling woman.

‘
John, we can't; the transporter is going
haywire every time we try to establish coordinates anywhere near
you,’ Parka replied. Her voice was trilling with exasperation and
fear. For a woman who usually took exploding stars and pirate wars
in her stride, it was a testament to how fraught and dangerous this
situation had become.

‘
Have to do . . .
something,’ John managed. As his armor threatened to lose lock on
the floor, he was using all of his concentration to stop it from
happening.

‘
We've contacted one of the heavy cruisers
in the system, they are redirecting. They've got mining transport
beams. We can use it to lock onto the robot and beam it into space.
Hopefully,’ Parka added under her breath. ‘Two minutes until they
are in range.’

Two minutes. The woman did not have two
minutes.

‘
Based on calculations, the security fields
down there will hold for that long, and the robot shouldn't be able
to make it up to one of the higher levels before then. Just hold
on, John,’ Parka gasped.

She didn't have that long.

‘
Let her go,’ he tried one last
time.

The robot would not.

Chapter 19

Alice

What had she done?
What had she done?
While she had succeeded in
creating a distraction, it would likely kill her.

Alice should never, never have re-energized
an Old Tech device without having first known what it could do.

As the robot's fingers tightened around her
throat, Alice stared up into its eyes.

It was harrowing. When it looked back, she
did not see violence or anger. She saw hunger. A deep, endless,
powerful hunger.

It needed energy to live. And she was the
last thing in the universe that could provide it.

For that reason it did not let its grip
tighten so far around her throat that it snapped her head off. Just
enough to lock her in place while it tried to suck her dry.

But Alice fought. Her eyes wide as she stared
back at it, she slowed down the transfer as much as she could.

Not all Old Tech devices would try to kill
Alice in an attempt to get at the energy they so desperately
needed; but when they were solider robots, like this guy was, then
it was only to be expected.

How she had not recognized that the
apparently innocuous box next to the elevators was a soldier robot,
Alice did not know.

But her mistake would cost her.

As the robot drained her energy, white and
blue lines spread up from her neck and chest. She knew they were
there. She could feel the cracks they formed. They travelled up
over her skin, sinking into her lips and chin, and if she let them,
they would sink all the way through her and she would crumble like
stone.

But Alice fought.

She kept her eyes open, never blinking or
shifting her gaze off the robot.

She understood its hunger. If the plight of
being the last of the Old Ones was bad, then the plight of being
Old Tech was worse. Built into their very being was a yearning for
only one special type of energy. Nothing else would do.

It shifted her backwards, shaking her to the
side, not enough to break her body, but maybe the robot reasoned
that she needed encouragement to give up her energy.

The seconds ticked by, drew into minutes.

The robot did not release its hold. It never
tightened it either, it just waited. Waited for Alice to give up
what she had.

It was when she was close to finally
succumbing that she saw the light.

It sliced right through the wall to her left.
Bright and white, it was a powerful transport beam.

She had time enough to widen her eyes.

The beam locked onto the robot, encasing its
body in the blistering hot energy and starting to break down its
molecules within a fraction of a second.

But the light did not stop there, it
travelled through and touched her too.

Alice had been through a lot today. Too
much.

And it was about to get worse.

The robot gave a roar, twisting its head to
the side, chunks of its face disappearing as the transport beam
broke up its constituent parts.

It didn't lose its grip on her throat
though.

‘
Tell them they have to isolate the robot
only, the robot only,’ someone screamed, voice flickering and
desperate.

Alice was not so far gone that she could not
tell it was John Doe.

The light moved and shifted through her, and
Alice felt it try to take hold.

The robot screamed again, its face falling
apart, chunks of it snapping over and disappearing up the tunnel of
light.

‘
Only the robot,’ John screamed
again.

The beam pushed through her. Alice, using her
last reserve of energy fought it all the way.

Because she knew what would happen next.

Just as before, when the beam from the
Pegasus had snatched hold of her, it began to latch hold of her
energy.

In half a second the white of the beam
suddenly doubled in strength, then it tripled.

Alice's eyes twisted wide. She saw the robot
finally disappear, the last chunk of its hand and foot breaking up
and shooting up the beam.

She had no control of her body, no purchase
on the ground, yet the beam held her in place, her limbs spreading
wide as she fought to stop it from breaking her down.

There was a shifting moment of intensity as
the light of the beam wavered, then it snapped to a color beyond
the spectrum of visible light any soft-race could hope to see.

And Alice was transported away.

Chapter 20

John Doe

‘
No,’ John screamed, his voice echoing and
pitching through the room. With the robot gone, the magnetic pull
that had been sucking him towards it had ended, and John took
several shuddering steps forward.

She was gone. He'd told them only to lock
onto the robot and transport it away, but they hadn't listened.

He's lost control of his face, the muscles
slack, his mouth a thin open line.

‘
Pegasus,’ he said in a voice that rang
hollow, ‘report.’

He'd known the plan; lock onto the robot and
beam it into space.

It hadn’t worked like that. They’d taken her
too.

The woman would have gone with it. She would
be dead. There would be no possibility of a comeback this time; the
void of space would have killed her in an instant, sucking the air
from her lungs.

Wincing and bringing his armor-covered wrist
up to his head, John let it drop over his face and rest against his
nose.

‘
They lost control of the beam. Some kind
of feedback. Sorry, John, they couldn’t separate their signals,’
Parka said in a low, respectful voice.

Sorry, yeah, sorry, John thought as he let
out a fluctuating breath, staring up at the ceiling above.

He'd lost another one. Another person in this
universe he'd failed to save.

‘
Confirm that the robot is far enough away
from the planet that it won't get sucked into the gravity field,’
John said, voice as controlled as he could make it.

‘
Hold on, synching with the Aratova now.
You can talk directly to them,’ Parka said.

There was a hum, a click, and then John
straightened up.

He knew the captain of the Union Heavy
Cruiser Aratova. A human woman who had a reputation for being the
toughest out there and always getting the job done. John had a lot
of respect for Captain Chan.

‘
Commander, we lost control of that beam,
what the hell happened down there?’ Chan snapped.

John took the opportunity to look around the
room, his eyebrows dropped low over his eyes. What had happened was
a nightmare. An Old Tech device had woken up out of the blue and
tried to trash the place.

Stiffening his jaw and shaking his head,
John cleared his throat. ‘We don't know the source of the feedback.
It might have been the robot itself. Can you confirm that it
rematerialized out of orbit?’

‘
That's what I'm trying to say. We lost
control of it entirely. We have no idea where it went. The beam
redirected itself. It fried our systems too. We lost all bio
records on that robot. We have nothing.’

John's face paled, his shoulders sagging.
Then he stopped. ‘Use your long-range scanners to—’

‘
Of course we are scanning the planet; you
don't need to tell me how to do my job,
Commander
,’ Chan's voice resounded on that word.

It was a smack down, and a well-deserved
one. But John was kind of under a lot of stress here. ‘Are they on
the planet?’ he asked, knowing full well the scan would take at
least five more minutes to complete.

‘
I will tell you as soon as we get a lock.
That is if it did materialize on the planet. Just before we lost
hold of the transport beam, it registered an energy level off the
charts. With that much power it could have transported right out of
the system.’

John's nose crumpled at that, his neck
feeling cold. If it had been anyone other than Captain Chan saying
that, John would have figured they were joking. Chan, however,
would never crack a joke while on duty.

‘
How—’ he began.

‘
We have no idea. I'll look after things up
here, you get Block Prime sorted. I'll report when I have
anything.’

‘
Look for the woman,’ John added before
Chan could cut the feed. ‘The transport beam locked onto them both.
Wherever the robot landed, she'll be
there . . . ’ John trailed off. He knew he
should add something, try to clarify, but he couldn't find the
words to do it.

‘
Will do, Chan out.’

John stood there for a cold, silent moment,
then turned to survey the damage. And damage there was.

Sparks were flying out of the consoles the
robot had damaged, and the floor had buckled and broken in several
sections.

No one was hurt though, and the security
fields around the critical systems had held.

The woman in the hood had not been so lucky
though.

John picked his way forward. Leaning down, he
grabbed up a scrap of fabric. He recognized it. It was off her
tunic.

Shaking his head he let it drop form his
fingers. It fluttered to the floor as he waded into the mess before
him.

He had not forgotten his duty as a commander
of the Union Forces.

Chapter 21

Alice

Alice had never been transported before;
she'd avoided it her whole life.

And now, as she lay on her back staring up at
the sky above her, she could appreciate how awesome that plan had
been.

Because transporting hurt. It burned. It
ripped. She had never felt anything like it.

She forced another bare breath, her chest
hardly moving. She had nothing left. Nothing at all.

She was just fortunate she hadn't landed on
the barren snow-covered wasteland of the planet below. The cold and
cutting wind would have killed her in an instant.

But in a moment of rare luck, Alice had
rematerialized inside a hanger bay. As she lay on her back, her
arms spread wide, her legs at an odd angle, her head shifted to the
side, she stared up at the smart-glass ceiling above her with one
eye.

Right at the end, when the transporter beam
had surged in power, something had happened to Alice.

She'd connected to it.

Whatever concentration she'd had left, she'd
used to control it. Snapping it away from its source, she’d forced
herself to rematerialize.

And fortunately for her she hadn't popped up
in space or head-first in some bulkhead.

As for the robot, it hadn't been so
lucky.

Shifting her head barely, she could see the
remnants of it.

It had appeared two meters to her left, right
inside a chunk of patronium ore that had been unloaded off the
hulking mining transport that took up the whole hangar bay around
her.

Alice had read about what happened when a
transport beam mistakenly made an object rematerialize inside
something else.

Not pretty. Those were the only two words
that could describe it.

Chunks of metal and sparks still played and
twitched around the room. But the robot would not be able to
re-make itself; Alice knew enough about the technology of her own
kind to know when one of their devices was down.

If the robot had not rematerialized in
something as heavy and dense as patronium ore, it might have been
able to right itself.

That was the second piece of luck Alice had
gotten today.

The third was that this hangar bay was empty.
There were no workers scurrying around, not even any maintenance
bots. The whole place was dark save for the light filtering in from
the smart-glass above. Maybe the workers had gone off duty for the
day, or maybe the whole place had been shut down for a quarantine
sweep. It didn't matter. All Alice cared about was that right now
she was alone.